Feds Pouring Money Into a Project to Create a Database to Track “Suspicious” Internet Memes
>The federal government spent $1 million to create an online database that will collect “suspicious” memes and track “misinformation.” The project, which is known as the “Truthy Database” is being funded by The National Science Foundation, but it seems as if the operation has some powerful political motivations.
>Ironically enough, the project takes its name from a term that was popularized by television personality, Stephen Colbert.
>The project will seek to understand how misinformation is spread online, but it will be up to a team of government-funded researchers at Indiana University to decide what type of political speech is true and which is false.
>According to the grant for the project, the operation will be open source and the database will be open to the public.
“The project stands to benefit both the research community and the public significantly. 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. 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…..
http://www.activistpost.com/2016/02/feds-pouring-money-into-a-project-to-create-a-database-to-track-suspicious-internet-memes.html?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link
>For the past four years, researchers at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing have been studying the ways in which information spreads on social media networks such as Twitter. This basic research project is federally funded, like a large percentage of university research across the country.
>The project, informally dubbed “Truthy,” makes use of complex computer models to analyze the sharing of information on social media to determine how popular sentiment, user influence, attention, social network structure, and other factors affect the manner in which information is disseminated. Additionally, an important goal of the Truthy project is to better understand how social media can be abused.
>Since 25 Aug 2014, when a first misleading article was posted on a conservative blog, the Truthy project has come under criticism from some, who have misrepresented its goals. Contrary to these claims, the target is the study of the structural patterns of information diffusion. For example, an email sent simultaneously to a million addresses is likely spam, even if we have no automatic way to determine whether its content is true or false. The assumption behind the Truthy effort is that an understanding of the spreading patterns may facilitate the identification of abuse, independent from the nature or political color of the communication.
>While the Truthy platform provides support to study the evolution of communication in all portions of the political spectrum, it is not informed by political partisanship. The machine learning algorithms used to identify suspicious patterns of information diffusion are entirely oblivious to the possibly political partisanship of the messages.
http://cnets.indiana.edu/blog/2014/08/27/the-truth-about-truthy/
Copypasta
This reeks of PC thought policing. Since they're the ones setting the standards by which a propagated idea is considered "true" or "false," they get to flag anything that doesn't fit the Progressive narrative as "misinformation." Infographics pointing out the nature of Muslims, Niggers, and Jews will be flagged as "hate speech." Holohoax info will be deemed "un-truthy."
Another thing they'll be able to do is determine which websites are responsible for the most influential memes and Internet campaigns. By charting the movement of a meme through social media over time, you can build a "propagation network" and discover its origins. The nature by which a meme propagates can identify whether it arose organically or through forcing.
For example, if a brand new meme starts on multiple sites at the same time, it is likely forced and there is a shady propaganda effort behind it.
Image boards were years ago identified as the breeding beds of the Internet's most pervasive memes, and became a central focus for various government agencies and NGOs ever since. These people recognize how powerful idea propagation can be, and they shill around these parts very, very hard.