US DHS Compiling Database of Journalists and 'Media Influencers' | Hacker News Reader

US DHS Compiling Database of Journalists and 'Media Influencers'

forbes.com

44 pointsenduser7 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16777237

So - I realize this might be an unpopular opinion, and I'm certainly no fan of the current administration, but this is an extremely benign project.

I spent a couple of years running product at a social monitoring company, and these kinds of RFPs are pro forma for industry and especially the government.

Basically, they're looking for a clipping service that includes sentiment analysis and influencer scoring so that they can know who to reach out to and when a negative (or positive!) article is published. They will then collate these reports and hand them up to their management to assess the current state of perceptions of the DHS on projects and initiatives.

The software companies that do this all have a combo of crawlers, RSS readers, and purchased feeds of articles. Those articles get fed through a homegrown or third-party text processing system that extracts the author info, date of publication, and the keywords and sentiment of the article. Then there's a basic visualization system that lets you build reports.

Everyone does this. Every brand, government agency, trade publication, everyone. It's pretty standard. Reading through the RFP I can even guess who's going to compete, though I think no one is going to offer what they're looking for in total.

All this to say, this is a non-event.

> "Everyone else is doing it."

Around the world, there are many "smart" people making autonomous weapons systems, "anti-fraud systems" that are really psychometric profiles, trading systems that front-run their customers, fraudulent advertising and fraudulent ad metrics, etc. It's pretty standard.

Believe whatever it takes to help you sleep at night. No one can persuade you otherwise.

Well, I think you're missing the point. It's used by PR people to keep an eye out for news stories before they go viral, for spokespeople to read about themselves, and for market researchers to look smart by identifying trend pieces.

None of this software is smart enough to enable the sort of surveillance and oppression you are implying from your other examples. It's really 101-level stuff.

> Believe whatever it takes to help you sleep at night. No one can persuade you otherwise.

I don't even understand what this means. It's a searchable index of news, with some text analytics that you can get for dirt cheap from google or amazon.

> One aspect of the media coverage to be gathered is its "sentiment."

In other words, "here's a list of media sources that like us, and here's the ones that don't." Make of this what you will.

I'm a little surprised that the proposal would have to be operational within five days of being awarded. That means that there are companies that already have something like this operational. There is no way that you could create something like this from scratch within five days.

Hopefully this won't be abused to silence anyone that does not toe the party line. Whichever party that is. Now excuse me while I put on my tin-foil hat.

So, what literally every social media manager does

Reply on news.ycombinator.com