Secret Two-Seat Variant Uses Additional Crewmember to Counter Anti-F-35 Social Media Posts.
Israel has unveiled their previously classified F-35F Nebekh Joint Social Media Fighter (JSMF). The new rear seat position in the two-seat F-35F Nebekh is occupied by the SMO or Social Media Officer. The modification is in response to threats to the F-35 in the social media space. Gen Hadir Uffani of the IDF told reporters, “The F-35’s primary threats exist in the social media space, so we have made a special variant of the Joint Strike Fighter to counter this threat in real-time.”
The SMO suite consists of integrated sensor fusion that monitors Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat for flamers leveling criticism against the Joint Strike Fighter program. When critical social media posts from internet know-it-alls and trolls are detected, the system can respond in real-time by assigning a massive arsenal of cat memes to interdict the threat. The cat memes are stored in a special, low-observable internal hard drive in the aircraft’s stealthy weapons’ bay.
“In one early operational deployment against an actual flamer from Menlo Park, California who had read a magazine article and several blog posts before leveling criticism against the program, the F-35F was able to deploy a series of precision guided Grumpy Cat memes with a high degree of effectiveness,” an unnamed source told TheAviationist.com.
There has been a downside to the program however. When the new AN/APG-345 SMMS (Social Media Monitoring System) was updated to the Block VII sensor fusion status, the aircraft began to monitor Tinder users. In an accidental case of collateral social media posting, a number of French Rafales started hitting on the F-35 for one night stands, apparently in adoration of the aircraft’s low-observable lines.
Another significant improvement to the new Israeli F-35F Nebekh Joint Social Media Fighter (JSMF) is the Integrated Selfie-Camera (ISC) update to the AN/AAQ-37(S) Electro-optical Distributed Selfie System. This helmet mounted selfie camera can produce Instagram and Snapchat images of flight crews with the actuation of a single touchscreen display. The advanced, integrated avionics also insert relevant hashtags to the selfies after automatically Photoshop-ing flight crews to look their best before auto-posting.
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There have been rumors that Israel was testing a new long-range Precision Guided Unfriending Munition (P-GUM) to launch targeted attacks on social media trolls, but Israel has declined to comment on this aspect of the program, citing security concerns.
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