It wasn’t the Reuters newsroom that worked on this contract, but a special investigative corporate subsidiary called Thomson Reuters Special Services. While the contract purports to develop defenses against sophisticated phishing attacks from adversaries, research documents from the project show that the contractors developed their own massive social media infrastructure using bots and fake personas.
“Our team has demonstrated the creation and management of a multi-virtual-persona social media interaction system,” one document notes. “Our dialog management framework was integrated with a set of services that managed synthetic social media accounts.”
In simple terms, this DARPA contract involved the development and deployment of technology to create and manage fake social media accounts at scale.
