The story starts off saying that the work's being done by analysts:
> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies.
, so it sounds more like they've got some folks browsing social-media.
Granted, a lot of the post-scanning would seem better done by bots, and stuff like sentiment-analysis could help classify posts for human inspection, so they'd probably want to hire a few engineers, but why hundreds? And why 250-500 kUSD/yr for such mundane work?
"> The work involves having analysts trawl through social media sites to look for what the document describes as “inflammatory” postings and then sharing that information across government agencies."
This is useless and nobody should fear it. You should fear a set of teams of highly trained technologists. Thats not what we have here