In mid-August 2012, the Internet edition Forbes published information on its website that the Kremlin began to monitor social networks using the Prism terminals installed in the offices of top government officials. Despite the assurances of Dmitry Medvedev, who met with the activists of United Russia, that the government is not interested in the opinion of users of social networks, the very fact of using such terminals testifies to the opposite.
The West already has experience in tracking the political moods of the active part of society through social networks. For example, in the United States, Twitter is a microblogging service that compares the number of positive and negative reviews about a particular election campaign participant with the total number of published entries. Every week, about two million records about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney are analyzed.
The developers of a system similar to the western one - the Prisma terminal - is the Mediologiya company. She argues that the development possibilities are quite high - in real time it is possible to process information coming simultaneously from 60 million sources. "Prism" is able to track the dynamics of changes over time in the number of positive or negative reviews for a particular event, taking into account the artificial cheating that occurs as a result of bot attacks.
The themes selected for statistical samples are manually configured. Information leaked from the Office of Internal Policy of the Presidential Administration claims that the terminal installed there allows tracking the progress of discussions on social networks and blogs on LiveJournal, Twitter, YouTube. A source in the presidential administration, which Forbes calls reliable, claims that blogging is taken very seriously, the terminal is installed directly in the office of the head of the department, Vyacheslav Volodin.
The developers' website claims that using the Prism terminal it is possible to monitor user activity and determine the degree of social media activity that can lead to an increase in political and social tension. The system monitors an increase in protest and extremist sentiments, discussions about price increases, housing problems, discussion of issues related to salaries and pensions, corruption, the level of medical care, etc.
This interest of the authorities in what worries Internet users, who are becoming more and more every year, of course, pleases. It remains only an open question to what extent they will be able to correctly use the information they receive, and to what extent the authorities will be ready to solve the problems posed by a part of the country's population using social networks.
