US Secret Service Wants Software to “Detect Sarcasm” on Social Media — Actually Posted a Work Order

Secret Service, 2005 Inaugural-Parade. (Photo by U.S. Department of Defense)

By Joe Silver
The US Secret Service, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the safety of current and former national leaders and their families, visiting heads of state, and others, posted a work order on Monday seeking the development of social media analytics software capable of detecting sarcasm online.

Seriously!

In addition to the “ability to detect sarcasm and false positives," the work order seeks the development of software with such alternative capabilities as “influencer identification,” “access to historical Twitter data,” the “ability to search online content in multiple languages,” “audience segmentation,” and “data visualization representations, [like] heat maps,” etc.

The agency hopes that such software would allow it to “synthesize large sets of social media data“ and “identify statistical pattern analysis.” Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the service, said the "objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyze. This is real live stream analysis… We are looking for the ability to quantify our social media reach. We aren’t looking solely to detect sarcasm,” reported The Washington Post.

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