BY MARCUS WEISGERBER
The U.S. military is using a new simulator to prepare intelligence analysts and public affairs officers for the social-media front of future wars.
A computer program by Cubic is helping to train these troops to sort through tweets, other social media posts, and real and fake news; figure out which posts might be pouring fuel on a local fire; and react to them. The simulator, called the Social Media Replication Toolkit System, is being incorporated into training and wargames by military units all the way up to combatant commands, company reps said at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual convention in Washington.
Previously, this type of training was done ad hoc, without simulated social networks, Cubic employees said. But the need for a better way to train for the online aspects of modern conflicts had been increasingly obvious, so the Defense Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, sent out a call to “develop this environment where you could create effects in social media and see how people respond,” said Bradley Feldmann, CEO and president of Cubic. “Before they were just kind of faking it, so we created this tool.”
http://www.defenseone.com/business/2017/10/new-social-media-simulator-helping-us-troops-train-hybrid-war/141643/?oref=d-river
