The Pentagon wages psychological warfare and also wants to resist efforts of potential enemies to do the same thing. Social media play a big role in PSYOPS, so DARPA is developing tools to counter “adversary misinformation or deception campaigns” by monitoring the flow of information through Twitter.
The aim is to ferret out enemy PSYOPs efforts on social media, and then to derail those communications.
How people tweet says a lot about "the spread of sentiment or opinion through social media," DARPA officials say. Are Twitter users likely to be easily manipulated (based on how quickly and easily they retweet items), or are they influencers (based on how many people retweet what they say, and how quickly)?
