The random political thoughts thread (Part Deux)

[Ghoulish Delight]

Anatomy of misinformation

A story has been going around about a recently released document through Freedom of Information. It's generally headlined something like, "List of words that will get you on a government watchlist if you tweet them: Includes 'pork', 'emergency', and 'snow'" [or some other combination of individually innocuous words]

I read the report.


1) The thrust of the document is guidelines for monitoring ALL media outlets for information that will help Homeland Security get a picture of a breaking news story (fire, weather event, terrorism, etc.). It's not at all about any sort of long term tracking, it's about getting information about now.

2) While it does talk a lot about monitoring social media, it's explicit in saying that the interest in social media is for a) stories tweeted by major media outlets or b) tweets from any source that then get picked up and distributed by major media outlets. The document does not concern itself with isolated individual tweets. They are looking for NEWS

3) Social media is not enough of a source on its own to raise interest. Only when there's corroboration through other more credible sources.

4) There's a whole section about NOT including "Personally Identifiable Information" in the reports. Hard to build a watch list without personally identifiable information.

Nice job internet, way to uncover NOTHING