Post: #1

Heads up everyone! Big Brother is watching you so make sure all your thoughts are politically correct.

http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-creati...n-twitter/

Quote:The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.

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 project stands to benefit both the research community and the public significantly,” the grant states. “Our data will be made available via [application programming interfaces] APIs and include information on meme propagation networks, statistical data, and relevant user and content features.”

“The open-source platform we develop will be made publicly available and will be extensible to ever more research areas as a greater preponderance of human activities are replicated online,” it continues. “Additionally, we will create a web service open to the public for monitoring trends, bursts, and suspicious memes.”

“This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate,” the grant said.

“Truthy,” which gets its name from Stephen Colbert, will catalog how information is spread on Twitter, including political campaigns.

“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,” according to the website.

“Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo 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.

Menczer, a professor of informatics and computer science at Indiana University, links to each of the organizations on his personal page from his bio at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.

The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use their tool in the future to report on other Twitter users.

“Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models,” the website adds. “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 project also seeks to discover why certain Internet memes go viral and others do not. Funding is not expected to expire until June 30, 2015.

Post: #2

"Subversive propaganda"
"Open debate"

Oh yeah.

It goes without saying that this will be applied in a very biased way. So here's what this is. The words "subversive propaganda" give it away. Liberals can now see the demographic end run. They know that within a decade, conservatives or anyone else not completely on board with the progressive agenda will be on the ropes demographically. They know by then democracy will just be a pantomime. If your opponent has no chance of winning an election, then it's all just theatre.

As such, they are looking beyond that point. When the open game is all sewn up, all that remains is to lock down those pesky subversives who refuse to play a rigged game. This, right here is another step along the road to a burgeoning police state.

The great irony, of course, is that once a police state is created and the intellectuals have served their roles as useful idiots, they're precisely the first group to get purged as they are a direct threat to the regime.

Post: #3

The thread title is misleading. It is not a database that is being created or maintained by the government; it is an academic "research project" that is receiving a modest (under $1mm) NSF grant, as do thousands of other projects. Very big difference.

I have no love for the academic pigs doing this and their agenda, but this is not "Big Brother" putting together lists of dissenters to be rounded up at a later date. Let's not get carried away.

Post: #4

The guy behind the project has responded to criticism:

http://cnets.indiana.edu/blog/2014/08/27...ut-truthy/

Post: #5

Quote:"diffusion of false and misleading ideas"

I bet they consider "Pay gap doesn't exist" as a misleading idea.

Post: #6

Quote:The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use their tool in the future to report on other Twitter users.

“Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models,” the website adds. “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!”