Patrick Smith
My article is about how the pentagon started a challenge for
researchers to go on twitter and figure out which users are bots. The reason
for this is because there are billions of tweets a day and terrorists from the
Islamic State are using twitter to recruit.
Everyday
instagram, twitter, and Facebook receive billions of data and information and
are sent out for everyone to see. All this information could be very useful to
the government and law enforcement to help stop potential threats. If all this
information was combined with databases then it could be extremely helpful but
that is a challenge. If you could look somewhere that instead of picking up
some random people ranting about ISIS, you could actually pick out a specific thing
that could relate to something real.
Another
reason why this use of data is so important is because local law enforcement
uses this data as well to create spreadsheets of online postings. The hard part
comes into play now because even though all this data is in front of them, it
is still very difficult to create a picture out of it. Another promising
outcome is that the Department of Defense expects to have a system up and
running soon. The system would take in information and check through it all. It
would especially reach places that weren’t reachable before. The system is
called Information Volume and Velocity.
My final
thoughts on this program is that it has have results. Last year 125,000 users
were kicked off of twitter because they had been connected to terrorism and the
Islamic State. If they were right and did kick the right people off of twitter
that shows how data can be used in such a powerful way and to potentially stop
a terrorist from created a plan.
Throughout the
article it does a great job with laying out its ideas but could of pointed out
a little more to some parts. One of the things the article missed is that
sometimes people just mess around on Twitter, instagram, and Facebook and could
have misread some of the accounts or posts. Another thing that they didn’t
mention is what they are going to do after they shut down the accounts. What is
the next step because even if you stop them they can still go around and talk. My
last thing I think the article passed over is that the posts could be coded in
a way that a system that gathers data might run over it and not know.
This article deals with a very important issue that is facing the world today and that is terrorism. Terrorism is something that we all hope will come to an end. Although collecting data from twitter and Facebook accounts seems like it maybe the answer to stopping terrorism, how does one know that the information is not deliberate to send authorities in the wrong direction? They can be saying one thing and meaning something else. So the government may be putting their energy into collecting data for nothing. I also wonder if this will become a privacy or freedom of speech issue. Right now Apple is facing some challenges with the federal government about creating software to unlock terrorist, Farook’s phone. The CEO of Apple refuses to create new software creating a privacy debate. I believe in the modern world of technology these issues of privacy and freedom of speech need to be addressed and laws need to be created to keep everyone safe.
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