To help it judge whether to take specific threats online seriously, the U.S. Secret Service has offered a contract for analytics software that can be used “to detect sarcasm and false positives” on Twitter and other social media.

Yahoo News U.K. reports:

It will also collect everything from the emotions of internet users to old Twitter messages.

Ed Donovan, spokesman for the Secret Service, emphasised that detecting sarcasm is just one of the features of the proposed software.

He said: “Our objective is to automate our social media monitoring process.

“The ability to detect sarcasm and false positives is just one of 16 or 18 things we are looking at.

“We are looking for the ability to quantify our social media outreach. We aren’t looking solely to detect sarcasm.”