The U.S. Army is taking on the mission to “defend” against “adversarial information campaigns.”
The Army awarded a $5 million contract to Dr. Nitin Agarwal, a professor of Information Science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He said that narratives on social media can be weaponized and present “insidious threats” that “need to be considered as modern weapons of cognitive hijacking.”
The examples given in Agarwal’s work include research showing how “YouTube’s algorithms can be manipulated to promote positive content about China while crushing negative news like human rights violations against Uyghur minorities in western China, or how the terrorist organization, Islamic State uses bots to recruit members and for propaganda campaigns.”
That is interesting because human rights violations against the Uyghurs is a U.S. narrative that has been debunked. Even the United Nations is unable to prove it. And who is using bots and fake online propaganda campaigns to sow discord in foreign governments? Oh yeah, the Pentagon does that.
The Army says that Argawal’s research will help them develop “training exercises… to enhance the U.S. workforce with skills in big data analytics, data management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence with applications in security.”
