• Defense Department spent millions to research social networks
• Studies focused on Occupy and Middle East protests
• Projects also analysed memes, celebrities and disinformation

• Ben Quinn and James Ball | theguardian.com, Tuesday 8 July 2014 

The activities of users of Twitter and other social media services were recorded and analysed as part of a major project funded by the US military, in a program that covers ground similar to Facebook’s controversial experiment into how to control emotions by manipulating news feeds.

Research funded directly or indirectly by the US Department of Defense’s military research department, known as Darpa, has involved users of some of the internet’s largest destinations, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Kickstarter, for studies of social connections and how messages spread.

>> READ MORE AT THE GUARDIAN