For all the U.S. military’s technical advantages over adversaries, it still struggles to counter disinformation. A new software tool to be developed for the U.S. Air Force and Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, may help change that.
“If you don’t compete in the information space, regardless of how good your operations are, your activities are, you will probably eat a shit sandwich of disinformation or false reporting later on,” Raymond “Tony” Thomas, a former SOCOM chief, said in an interview. “We certainly experienced that at the tactical level. That was the epiphany where we would have good raids, good strikes, etc. and the bad guys would spin it so fast that we would be eating collateral damage claims, etc. So the information space in that very tactical space is key.
It even “stretches to the strategic space,” said Thomas, meaning that disinformation can spread until it affects larger geopolitical realities.
Thomas now serves as an advisory board member for Primer, a company that on Thursday announced a Small Business Innovation Research contract to develop software over the next year to help analysts better—and much more quickly—survey the information landscape and hopefully detect false narratives that show up in the public space.
Primer’s neural network technology can scan large amounts of text and extract themes and other information based on the frequency and prominence of words and phrases. It’s the sort of thing that can be very useful if you have a lot of text you want to very quickly summarize in an accurate headline, a capability they demonstrate here. To train their headline-writing neural net, they used a corpus “of millions of publicly available document-title pairs: news articles and headlines” according to their paper on the subject.
