US Air Force Wants to Use AI Technology to Gather Intelligence From Social Media

To illustrate his position, he used the example of the MH17 plane crash. "When the Russians shot down the airliner, and we were searching for the smoking gun, we found it a month later -- on Facebook," the general said at an Air Force Association breakfast in Washington Wednesday, according to DefenseTech.com. Goldfein pointed the finger at Russia for the crash, as though the Netherlands have already made a conclusion as to who shot the Buk missile that brought the plane down (which they have not). "We found posted pictures on Russian blog sites that actually showed the activity, but it took us a month to figure that out," Goldfein said, leaning on social media as a source of reliable information, even though investigation of the MH17 catastrophe is still going on and it is hampered by "a great deal of disinformation and attempts to discredit the investigation," Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said in a statement earlier in July, according to France 24. Discussing a trip to the offices of the Bloomberg news agency, he reportedly asked a technician to perform a Twitter search on violent extremist activity over the last 48 hours, and the system actually mapped the relevant tweets on a map.