According to CNBC, the Federal Reserve “is planning on monitoring what you say about it on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook”. Apparently we are not supposed to be alarmed though, because as the CNBC headline states, the Federal Reserve just “wants to be your Facebook friend”. In fact, the CNBC article says that anyone that feels threatened by the fact that the Federal Reserve will be monitoring what we say on Facebook and Twitter is just “paranoid”. Well, if it came out that Barack Obama was setting up a system that would identify “key bloggers” and monitor “billions of conversations” on the Internet to see what was being said about him, wouldn’t there be thousands of articles expressing outrage? Sure there would be. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be an independent central bank that is above politics. So why in the world would they need to perform “sentiment analysis” on what is being said about them on “Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube”? The Federal Reserve obviously intends to identify the negative things that are being said about it and the specific people that are saying those things. So is it really being “paranoid” to point out that all of this is more than a little bit creepy?
The other day, this story about the new “Social Media Monitoring Solution” that is being developed by the Federal Reserve was first broken by Zero Hedge. Then I wrote about this story on The Economic Collapse and a lot of other bloggers started writing about it too.
Well, it turns out that somebody must have hit a nerve or something. Just check out what CNBC had to say today….