The US Navy is searching for to create an archive that can retailer no lower than 350 billion social media posts, as half of the army department’s “research efforts” into “modes of collective expression.”
The Department of the Navy has posted a solicitation asking contractors to bid on a project that might amass a staggering 350 billion social media posts courting from 2014 by 2016. The information can be taken from a single social media platform – however the solicitation doesn’t specify which one.
“We seek to acquire a large-scale global historical archive of social media data, providing the full text of all public social media posts, across all countries and languages covered by the social media platform,” the contract synopsis reads. The Navy stated that the archive can be utilized in “ongoing research efforts” into “the evolution of linguistic communities” and “emerging modes of collective expression, over time and across countries.”
The archive will draw from publicly out there social media posts and “no private communications or private user data” can be included within the database. However, all data should embrace the time and date at which every message was despatched and the general public consumer deal with related to the message. Additionally, every file within the archive should embrace all publicly out there meta-data, together with nation, language, hashtags, location, deal with, timestamp, and URLs, that have been related to the unique posting.
The information have to be collected from no less than 200 million distinctive customers in no less than 100 nations, with no single nation accounting for greater than 30 % of customers, the advert says
While the acknowledged intentions of the undertaking might sound benign, the US authorities has beforehand expressed curiosity in amassing social media information for extra eyebrow-raising purposes. Last 12 months, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a discover asking contractors to bid on a database that tracks 290,000 international information sources in over 100 languages. The contract additionally talked about the power to preserve tabs on “influencers,” main some reviews to speculate that the proposed database might be used to monitor journalists.