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WaPo Op-Ed: The government wants to study ‘social pollution’ on Twitter
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/truthy-project-is-unworthy-of-tax-dollars/2014/10/17/a3274faa-531b-11e4-809b-8cc0a295c773_story.html
The government wants to study social pollution on Twitter
By Ajit Pai
October 17
Ajit Pai is a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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The government wants to study social pollution on Twitter
By Ajit Pai
October 17
Ajit Pai is a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
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? 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.
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.
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.
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WaPo Op-Ed: The government wants to study ‘social pollution’ on Twitter (Original Post)
proverbialwisdom
Oct 2014
OP
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)1. First. #first
bvf
(6,604 posts)2. Twitter already has the data.
Old op/ed below, and consider the source, but anyone who is alarmed by any of this is, IMHO, a bit naïve.
http://m.wsj.com/articles/SB121962391804567765?mobile=y
bemildred
(90,061 posts)3. The desperate search for a way to control the internet continues ... nt
Ampersand Unicode
(503 posts)4. Twitter IS social pollution.
There, I just saved the taxpayers billions of dollars.