Your Tax Dollars Are Funding a Database of Political Tweets, ‘Misinformation’

The federal government is sponsoring a creepy
social media research project: The aim is to produce a database of
politically disfavored tweets, misinformation, and “other social
pollution.” The grant for the project—made by the National Science
Foundation to Indiana University—was discovered by The Washington
Free Beacon’s Elizabeth Harrington,
who writes:

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a
web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it
considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on
political activity online.

The “Truthy”
database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed
to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and
other social pollution.”

The university has received $919,917 so
far for the project.

The fact that the project is called Truthy—the word Stephen
Colbert used back in 2005 to lambaste Republicans’ distortions of
facts—is the first hint about its political leanings. The next
comes courtesy of the project’s explanation on its own
website:

We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears,
astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution. While the
vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven
by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered
by the shady
machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns. Truthy
uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social
network analysis, and complex networks models. To train our
algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to
flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on
the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!

The above passage reeks of a
people-who-disagree-with-me-are-liars perspective. What counts as a
political smear, and why do smears automatically count as social
pollution? What’s the difference between an organic and inorganic
meme? Is “forged grass-roots activity” just a synonym for “Koch
stuff”?

The grant’s
abstract claims that Truthy will “assist in the preservation of
open debate” by detecting “hate speech and subversive propaganda.”
Those seem like conflicting goals, even if pursued in a totally
apolitical way.

Do Americans really want the government to sponsor a website
that collects their Tweets and determines whether they are socially
harmful? Like it or not, taxpayers have already contributed nearly
$1 million to such a project.

If you Tweet this story, please watch your manners, get all you
facts straight, and don’t create any inorganic memes. Thanks.