The US Military studied how to manipulate social networks- The Guardian

Darpa spent millions of dollars trying to understand how to manipulate Twitter. The Guardian
Darpa, responsible for military research studied various aspects of social media including Occupy WallStreet and the Arab Spring. They also tried to understand how memes spread through Reddit, Twitter and Facebook.

My Comment:
This is fairly old news, but it's still worth posting. The U.S. Government is extremely interested in social network manipulation. Obviously, it's worth knowing how to ferment revolutions in other countries and to be able to predict and prevent them as well.

My concern is how much of this is observation and how much of it is manipulation. It's very hard to prove but in the past few years I've encountered more then a few "shills" and bots on various forums and comment sections. It's fairly obvious when a simple comment on a news article has more then 100 comments by two people that at least one of them is getting paid by the post, but most of the time it's way more subtle then that. Some of these are from private NGO's (non-government organizations) but I wonder how many of them are state backed? Glenn Greenwald indicated that the GCHQ in the UK did these kinds of things, so it is possible that the NSA or other government agencies are doing the same thing here.