CHILL: Taxpayer-Funded Initiative Collected 600,000 Political Tweets in its ‘Database,’ Bragged About Having Conservative Twitter Accounts Suspended
Posted: November 10, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Barack Obama, Drudge Report, Indiana University, Lamar S. Smith, National Science Foundation, Space and Technology, The Washington Free Beacon, Truthiness, Twitter, United States House Committee on Science 2 Comments
Elizabeth Harrington reports: The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee sent a letter to the head of the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Monday, demanding answers about the origins of the nearly $1 million taxpayer-funded project to track “misinformation” on Twitter.
“The Committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech and to apply those standards through development of a website that targeted conservative political comments.”
The Truthy project, being conducted by researchers at Indiana University, is under investigation for targeting political commentary on Twitter. The project monitors “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” with a goal of one day being able to automatically detect false rumors on the social media platform.
“While some have argued that Truthy could be used to better understand things like disaster communication or to assist law enforcement, instead it appears Truthy focused on examples of ‘false and misleading ideas, hate speech, and subversive propaganda’ communicated by conservative groups.”
— — Chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) in a letter to NSF Director France Cordova.
The web service has been used to track tweets using hashtags such as #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), and was successful in getting accounts associated with conservatives suspended, according to a 2012 book co-authored by the project’s lead researcher, Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University. Read the rest of this entry »
The ‘Truthy’ Project: Federal Agency Wants to Study ‘Social Pollution’ by Analyzing Twitter
Posted: October 19, 2014 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Drudge Report, Federal Communications Commission, George Orwell, Indiana University, National Science Foundation, Stephen Colbert, Twitter, Washington Post 3 Comments
The NSF has already poured nearly $1 million into Truthy. To what end? Why is the federal government spending so much money on the study of your Twitter habits?
Ajit Pai
writes: If you take to Twitter to express your views on a hot-button issue, does the government have an interest in deciding whether you are spreading “misinformation’’?
“The concept seems to have come straight out of a George Orwell novel.”
If you tweet your support for a candidate in the November elections, should taxpayer money be used to monitor your speech and evaluate your “partisanship’’?
My guess is that most Americans would answer those questions with a resounding no. But the federal government seems to disagree. The National Science Foundation , a federal agency whose mission is to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity and welfare; and to secure the national defense,” is funding a project to collect and analyze your Twitter data.
Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central. (Joel Hawksley/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST)
The project is being developed by researchers at Indiana University, and its purported aim is to detect what they deem “social pollution” and to study what they call “social epidemics,” including how memes — ideas that
spread throughout pop culture — propagate. What types of social pollution are they targeting? “Political smears,” so-called “astroturfing” and other forms of “misinformation.”
“The federal government has no business spending your hard-earned money on a project to monitor political speech on Twitter.”
Named “Truthy,” after a term coined by TV host Stephen Colbert, the project claims to use a “sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex network models” to distinguish between memes that arise in an “organic manner” and those that are manipulated into being.
But there’s much more to the story. Focusing in particular on political speech, Truthy keeps track of which Twitter accounts are using hashtags such as #teaparty and #dems.
It estimates users’ “partisanship.” It invites feedback on whether specific Twitter users, such as the Drudge Report, are “truthy” or “spamming.” And it evaluates whether accounts are expressing “positive” or “negative” sentiments toward other users or memes. Read the rest of this entry »
And the Obama Administration Wants to Identify, Isolate, Harass, Audit, Wiretap, Investigate, and Imprison that Remaining 7%
Posted: May 6, 2014 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: American Journalist in a Digital Age, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Democrats, Indiana University, Information Age, journalism, Journalist, Professor 1 CommentPercentage of journalists identifying as Republican falls from 26 percent in 1971 to 7 percent in 2013
From “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” by professors Lars Willnat and David H. Weaver
A newly released study on American journalists in the digital age found that only 7.1 percent of journalists identified as Republicans in 2013, a sharp decline from 18 percent in 2002 and 25.7 percent in 1971. Read the rest of this entry »
