The United States Secret Service has reached out to the tech programming sector asking them for pitches on software packages that can detect sarcasm in social media.

US intelligence community realises that there is a huge gap between what people type and what they might possibly mean.

The successful bidder will need to present a solution with "the ability to detect sarcasm and false positives".
A spokesperson told the Washington Post newspaper, "Our objective is to automate our social media monitoring process. Twitter is what we analyse. This is real-time stream analysis. The ability to detect sarcasm and false positives is just one of 16 or 18 things we are looking at."

Sarcasm relies heavily on non-verbal communication and that factor is missing from most internet communications, which can lead to misunderstandings.

Last year, a Texas teenager was jailed for a misguided but sarcastic tweet in which he said, "Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts, lol jk".

The 19-year old was jailed on remand, unable to make the $500,000 bail.

Similar situations have happened in the UK, like Paul Chambers 'threatened' to blow up Robin Hood airport after a snowstorm flight delay and was arrested for making a terrorist threat.

They might want to watch this clip from The Simpsons before they employ any services... (H/T Rory Maguire)