Aussie military scour social media posts

Australia's military has paid data-mining companies more than a million dollars to access and analyse social media posts during the last four years.

A Defence spokeswoman told News Corp Australia the department took "into account many sources of information when planning and conducting operations, including social media".

The department's Joint Systems Division branch, which counts surveillance among its responsibilities, has paid Twitter mining firm Gnip $356,252 since 2015.

Defence has spent another $839,207 with analytics firm DataSift since 2014, as well as $105,052 with Geofeedia, which promises "special access" to data from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.