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Fact check: Musk, Trump deceive about a Trump-era Pentagon contract for ‘social deception’ defense
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www.cnn.com
“President Donald Trump and ally Elon Musk are misleadingly depicting a Pentagon defense contract that was awarded during Trump’s first presidency.
The $9.1 million contract was awarded to Thomson Reuters Special Services, a company that provides “data-driven solutions” to the federal government and other clients, to work on defenses against “social engineering” cyberattacks, which use “social deception” tactics to trick humans.
In a Wednesday social media post that didn’t explain what the contract was actually for, Musk insinuated that the Reuters news agency, which has the same parent company as Thomson Reuters Special Services, was paid by the government to engage in deception.
And neither Musk nor Trump, who made a Thursday post amplifying Musk’s claim, noted that the contract began under Trump in 2018.
Asked for comment, Thomson Reuters Special Services chief executive Steve Rubley said in a Thursday statement to CNN that “recent public discourse” has “inaccurately represented the nature of the business between TRSS and the Department of Defense,” and has incorrectly conflated Reuters News with TRSS, a separate legal entity that has its own board of directors and “operates independently from Reuters News.”
… Musk has previously criticized the Reuters news agency over its coverage of his business ventures. He wrote on his X social media platform on Wednesday night: “Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US government for ‘large scale social deception’. That is literally what it says on the purchase order! They’re a total scam. Just wow.”
… detailed information about the contract has long been publicly available on the US government’s spending disclosure website.
… The nature of the contract was described, in the brief and vague manner typical of federal contract descriptions, as “ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD).”
… DARPA explained on its website that it was seeking to develop technology to “automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks” – attacks known as “social engineering” because they try to deceive or “engineer” humans into performing certain actions, like clicking on links to malicious software, divulging sensitive information or giving up money. …”