‘War of weaponized influence’: U.S. spending millions to hunt down foreign tweets, memes
October 5, 2021 | District of Columbia
The U.S. government is building expensive tools to fight enemies that use tweets and memes instead of bullets and bombs. Instead of the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan, the battleground is on technological platforms such as Twitter, where the Defense Department’s research and development arm says America is fighting an “asymmetric, continual, war of weaponized influence narratives.”
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said it plans to spend $59.5 million in the next four years on researchers making algorithms and gathering content including tweets, memes, political ads and blog posts for the government’s Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) program…. (Excerpts from the Washington Times)
