The federal government is spending nearly $1 million on a database designed to track “hate” and “misinformation” on Twitter, the Washington Free Beacon said.
The person running the project is Filippo Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University. According to the Free Beacon, Menczer “proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority.”
The web page for “Truthy,” which is the name of the database, says:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Truthy is a system to analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter. The Truthy system evaluates thousands of tweets an hour to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavors. The data and statistics provided by Truthy are designed to aid in the study of social epidemics: How do memes propagate through the Twittersphere? What causes a burst of popularity?
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!
What’s there not to like? An Obamabot is setting up a database to track “hate” and “misinformation” on Twitter…
What could possibly go wrong?
Related:
- Goodbye free speech: Mass. Dem. wants government to monitor speech for ‘hate’
- Sheila Jackson Lee to conservative bloggers: ‘Shut up!’
- Rep. Ed Markey: Republicans want to destroy the ‘whole wide world’
- Ad by Democrat Ed Markey shows automatic rifle firing at GOP opponent’s head
- Harvard student: Free speech hurts liberalism, must be stopped
- Do liberals really want a second civil war in America?
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