Seems that social media creates a fantastic place to share thoughts, or plant ideas, create intense emotion, obviously a place to share that which moves us.
The militaries around the world have recognized that too.
And the military mind focuses on to take whatever advantage is possible, to "win".
Social media is LOW COST but high yield in swaying the minds of people. By moving on emotion.
Tools called data-mining BOTS (short for data-searching robots), go out on the net, and they gather up key phrases, or words, which people talk about.
Based on the "weight" (the weight is a mathematical value of posts read, or comments made), the BOT will learn. That is a form of artificial intelligence.
AI Networks can be created which will then respond with a personality..
If certain "do not talk about topics" are revealed by the people in social media, it is possible that one may notice, DERAILING will happen, so try to bury the key critical observation - such as "people are being manipulated, programmed, deceived"..
That is the preamble to the start of this thread - I'll start with an OLD article from 2011 from The Guardian (UK) - https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ocial-networks
It starts with US SPY OPERATIONS USING SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS.
It goes beyond spying, the program gets into using social media to plant ideas, to create a belief system where there may be some sense of "plausibility", and to play on people's emotion desires to be HEARD, to have a say, and of course "speak from the heart" (a big one in social programming).
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an "online persona management service" that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.
The project has been likened by web experts to China's attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.
Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities – known to users of social media as "sock puppets" – could also encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.