Using Social Media For Propaganda

Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain for The Guardian:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

This might seem dangerous at first, but honestly, it looks clueless to me. Any user of social media worth his or her salt will know the difference between an artificial persona and a real flesh and bone and keyboard person, because social media approximates real life by building relationships of trust among people.

Of course there will always be the occasional buffoon, the kind that clicks on links in SPAM emails, but those are not the type of influencers that steer conversations in cyberspace anyway..