Republican leader against #truthy project

[Mass]

Republicans against studying how myths are created. Who would have believed that

Frankly, McCarthy never fails to amaze me. Who would have thought the GOP leadership could have become less competent.

http://t.co/UXrHy6rOFF
...

The project is aimed at understanding how information spreads online. It samples real-time public tweets to identify and study trending topics, political and otherwise. An important area of interest for the project is "how social media can be abused."

Much of its early work explored the partisan differences in social media use and the spread of misinformation online, and has broadened since then

McCarthy's blog post, “#killingfreespeech,” on his leadership website echoes concerns from others like Republican Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai and House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who said his panel is investigating the grant.
...
But Republicans have taken particular issue with a portion of its 2011 grant abstract that proposes creating a service that "could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate."