TIL: The Pentagon Is Building a Reddit Knockoff

Wired

For years, the military has struggled over what to do about social media. One response has been to create dull, Pentagon-controlled versions of popular websites Facebook and YouTube. Now the Pentagon is preparing to launch its own version of Reddit, in another small step in the military’s quest to strip the fun out of everything on the internet.

It’s called Eureka, and it’s supposed to be a rough analogue to the ginormous social news site where users vote on which content rises to the top — or which content falls to the bottom — of user-generated feeds. (Disclosure: Wired and Reddit are both owned by Advance Publications.) Though Eureka looks to be a much more restricted and focused variant. Instead of choosing to upvote or downvote, well, anything that’s not blatantly illegal, troops will vote on “ideas,” according to Lauren Biron of Defense News.

What kind of ideas rise to the top? Those that improve training, or solve the “problems that plague the military and hamper efficiency,” Biron reports.

“Seems like a perfect fit!” writes Reddit general manager Erik Martin in an e-mail. “The Reddit format and the military both love acronyms. I can actually imagine a decent military version of TIL (Today I Learned), IAMA (Ask Me Anything), and ELIF (Explain It Like I’m Five), but the military version of MLP (My Little Pony) gives me nightmares. I do have high hopes for RAOMRE (Random Acts of MRE),” he added.

Eureka will also be firewalled, which means you probably can’t get in, unless you’re in either a member of the reserve or active-duty military, a civilian defense worker, in the National Guard or are an eligible contractor. Same goes for the rest of milSuite: the set of Pentagon social media sites like its Facebook and YouTube variants. And milWiki, the Pentagon’s version of Wikipedia.

MilSuite also includes a news blog, and resources for storing knowledge “that might be lost during the drawdown of troops and eventual exodus of leadership.” The same thinking is going into Eureka, as upvoted Eureka posts work their way (in theory) into updated field manuals.

Think more of a teaching tool and resource database than an object of troops’ leisure time. Every upload to MilTube, formally known as TroopTube, is screened. The last time Danger Room checked in on it, the selection was ruthlessly tame. Brutal battlefield video uploaded by soldiers to YouTube and its shock-site counterpart, LiveLeak, are not allowed.

“It could be powerful if done right, but getting the critical mass of active engagement necessary to make something like this work is tough,” writes Martin. “For best results they should keep everything, or at the very least voting pseudo anonymous, otherwise you’ll have the same problems you have with offline politics and group dynamics. If they want to take a lesson from Reddit, they should make sure users can create their own subcommunities (subreddits) since that’s where the real innovation happens. Also, I hope they took advantage of our open source or something similar instead of paying some contractor a lot of money.”

But on the other hand, Eureka doesn’t sound that much different from Reddit’s unofficial military forums.

“Many of the visitors to /r/Navy use the site to ask questions about a variety of topics that pertain to their military life and career,” writes Anthony Genovese, a former Naval Academy cadet and moderator of Reddit’s Navy subforum. Genovese says he likes the idea behind Eureka, because an official site with support from the military “can really help these people get the correct information the fastest way possible.”

Top Social Media Websites Caught Censoring Controversial Content

Washington's Blog
Global Research

Censorship By Top Social Media Websites

Facebook pays low-wage foreign workers to delete certain content based upon a censorship list. For example, Facebook deletes accounts created by Palestinian resistance groups.

Digg was caught censoring stories which were controversial or too critical of the government. See this and this.

Now, even social media site Reddit – which helped launch the anti-Sopa Internet blackout and publicize GoDaddy’s slimy Sopa support – is doing the same thing.

As just one example, posts from this website are being censored by Reddit. Specifically, a friend of this site who has submitted stories to Reddit has received the following messages of rejection from a Reddit moderator named davidreiss666:

    from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

        WashingtonBlog is not something we consider a good source for r/Worldnews.

    from davidreiss666 via /r/worldnews/

    Please submit that story from an alternate domain. Thank you.

And another moderator named Maxion:

    from Maxion via /r/worldnews/

    I am sorry but this submission is not appropriate for this subreddit.

There are certainly also more open-minded moderators at Reddit. But a couple of censors can squash discussion on entire topics.

Why are they censoring?

Well, censorship is rampant in America ... and social media has grown so big that it has become a target as well.

In addition, as I pointed out last year [for ease of reading, we'll skip indentation]:

Wired reported on Friday:

    The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it.

    On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.

    This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. The Defense Department wants to deeply grok social media dynamics. So SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media, according to Darpa’s announcement.