The president’s Thursday morning social media tirade comes hours after DOGE chief Elon Musk peddled a misleading claim on X (formerly Twitter) that Reuters engaged in a “total scam,” sharing a post that alleged the news organization had been paid millions of dollars from the government for a “social engineering” program.
The agency also notes that ASED aims “to develop the core technology to enable the capability to automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks,” and if successful, the technology would do this by “actively detecting attacks, intervening in communications between users and potential attackers, and coordinating investigations into the source of the attacks.”.
After Elon Musk first pushed a misleading claim about Reuters, the president raged about the global news agency returning a contract that was awarded under his first administration.
DARPA adds: “More focused attacks attempt to elicit sensitive information, such as passwords or private information from organizations or steal things of value from particular individuals by earning unwarranted trust.”.
While the implication from Musk and Trump was that the Reuters news service was running a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Pentagon, the truth of the matter is far more benign.
