As sure as the radio and telephone brought significant changes to military warfare, so too will social media. The Pentagon, aware of the fact, is offering US$42 million in funding to anyone who can develop an innovative use of social networking in strategic communication.

The Pentagon released a document outlining its goal; it wants approaches that “enable revolutionary advances in science, devices or systems”, the agency wrote in the document.

Part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) requirements is to be able to track and counter events that occur in the social media space.

“For example,” DARPA wrote, “in one case rumors about the location of a certain individual began to spread in social media space and calls for storming the rumored location reached a fever pitch.”

“By chance, responsible authorities were monitoring the social media, detected the crisis building, sent out effective messaging to dispel the rumors and averted a physical attack on the rumored location.”

DARPA said the Armed Forces must “eliminate” its current reliance on luck and “unsophisticated manual methods”. By that, it wants technology that uses information theory, graph analytics and natural language processing.

[via FBO]


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