The U.S. military operates 5,000 websites through its Defense Media Activity branch. Nafeez Ahmed reported in Motherboard on October 30, 2018, that “a series of research projects, patent filings, and policy changes indicate that the Pentagon wants to use social media surveillance to quell domestic insurrection and rebellion….The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don’t like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military’s role and influence on domestic intelligence.”
The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars finding patterns in posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and beyond to enable the prediction of major events. Ahmed further reports that “a Pentagon-funded report titled ‘Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the 2016 US Presidential Election’ was funded by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which is part of the US Army’s Research Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM).”
Ahmed continues: “The tool was originally developed under the Obama administration back in 2011 by the US Army Research Laboratory and US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Illinois, IBM, and Caterva (a social marketing company that in 2013 was folded into a subsidiary of giant US government IT contractor CSC). Past papers associated with the project show that the tool has been largely tested in foreign theaters like Haiti, Egypt, and Syria.
“The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is part of the ARL Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA), a consortium of three industrial research labs and 14 universities which receives multi-million-dollar support from the US Army Research Laboratory. Much of that research has been funded by the US government’s spy research organization, IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Government National Business Center.”
To show the extent of the collaboration between the Pentagon, universities and corporations, HRL, a main company involved in this domestic spying, is jointly owned by General Motors and Boeing.
The same technology being used against people in the U.S. was developed to interfere in the use of social media during the lead-up to and during elections of other countries, which the U.S. has been doing for decades.