Aim is to understand 'collective expression' and how ideas and movements spreadThe US military is preparing to analyse 350 billion social-media posts from around the world to help it track how popular movements evolve. Facebook’s primary platform has more than 1.2 billion daily active users and Twitter has more than 300 million monthly users. Printed on letter-size paper, 350 billion individual messages would make a stack about 16,000 kilometers high. The data can be used to train algorithms to understand “increasingly subtle shifts in cultural context”, he said. “We need to better understand how narratives are shaped and communities are formed online to defend ourselves against these campaigns,” he said.

Source: Bangkok Post May 25, 2019 09:45 UTC