The Secret Service Wants To Buy Software That Detects Sarcasm On Twitter

(Source) — The US Secret Service is seeking a Twitter sarcasm detector. The agency has put out a work tender looking for a software system to analyse social media data. The software should have, among other things, the “ability to detect sarcasm and false positives”. A spokesman for the service said it currently used the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Twitter analytics and needed its own, adding: “We aren’t looking solely to detect sarcasm.” The Washington Post quoted Ed Donovan as saying: “Our objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyse. “This is real-time stream analysis. The ability to detect sarcasm and false positives is just one of 16 or 18 things we are looking at.”

I’ve seen this around for a few days but kept ignoring it because I figured it had to be fake. But now that the Washington Post is reporting about it and spokesmen are issuing statements, I guess it’s real? Always blows my mind when people don’t understand sarcasm. Like the other day on the Melo and Love blog I said that Boston is officially gonna be Lockdown Defense City, and people told me “Actually neither of them play defense you fucking moron.” How do people like that survive in the world? Do they just read the internet all day, get outraged, and lash out? And what was the last straw where the Secret Service decided they need this software? Did they storm into KFC’s apartment after one of the million times he said he was going to blow up Time Warner, only to find him eating donuts in his underwear and finally said “OK enough of getting tricked by bloggers, we need a new system.” The whole thing is just so weird. A billion dollar sarcasm detection system, yeah that’s what we need to spend our money on.

PS – That last sentence was sarcasm, in case the software isn’t up and running yet.