The Military Doesn't Want You to Quit Facebook and Twitter

Cornell University said the Facebook emotion study received no external funding, but it turns out that the university is currently receiving Defense Department money for some extremely similar-sounding research -- the analysis of social network posts for “sentiment,” i.e. how people are feeling, in the hopes of identifying social “tipping points.”

It’s the sort of work that the US military has been funding for years, most famously via the open-source indicators program, an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) program that looked at Twitter to predict social unrest.

Defense One recently caught up with Lt Gen Michael Flynn, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency who said the US military has “completely revamped” the way it collects intelligence around the existence of large, openly available data sources and especially social media like Facebook.

“The information that we’re able to extract form social media -- it’s giving us insights that frankly we never had before,” he said. In other words, the head of one of the biggest US military intelligence agencies needs you on Facebook.