Journalists of the online edition Forbes found out that the Internal Policy Department under the presidential administration began to track and monitor the social activity of Russians on the Internet using the Prism terminal. This system has already been installed in the office of the head of the Department, Vyacheslav Voloshin.
The developer of the terminal is the Medialogia company, its website says that the system is designed to track the activity of users of social systems and is capable of processing information flows from 60 million sources in real time. The themes of interest to the user can be any and are configured manually. In particular, the developers claim that the terminal is able to track the increase in the activity of users of social networks, which is fraught with an increase in social tension. Issues that the system can control include: extremism, participation in riots and unauthorized rallies, protest sentiments, discussion of price increases, utility tariffs, salaries and pensions, and the level of medical care.
Terminals "Prism" work on the basis of linguistic and semantic analysis of entries on forums and blogs. The system can track both individual blogs and social media accounts. The algorithms used make it possible to analyze and diagnose positive or negative sentiment of statements with an error of only 2-3%.
The user's monitor displays the most relevant and discussed news in social networks, they are represented by clusters of top stories. If you wish, you can find out from which blogs and posts this or that "hot" news or topic was compiled. For each scene, an assessment is given by the nature of the statements, while the monitor reflects both the number of positive and negative assessments. A list of their authors is also available. The dynamics of statements and assessments can be presented in the form of a graph.
But the system also has weak points, which are due to the specifics of network communication. Thus, the use of the notorious "Albany" language can make a record unsuitable for machine perception and subsequent analysis. The same applies to sarcastic, ironic and "quoted" statements, however, it is given, at times, not to every person to recognize them.
