Government science project censored conservative Twitter accounts!

WASHINGTON (PNN) - December 1, 2014 - Members of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee have sent a letter to the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) demanding to know more about the beginnings of a $1 million taxpayer-funded project to track conservative “misinformation” on the Twitter social media site.

Known as “Truthy,” the project is being headed up by researchers at the University of Indiana, and it is currently under probe for alleged one-sided targeting of political commentary on Twitter.

The project monitors “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” with a goal of one day being able to automatically detect false rumors on the social media platform.

But what has raised suspicions, especially among conservatives, is the site’s inordinate tracking of conservative-related tweets and hash tags like #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter); the combination of such tracking combined with the site’s stated goals of examining hate speech and “false and misleading ideas” set off alarm bells.

The site was successful in getting accounts associated with conservatives suspended, at least according to a 2012 book co-written by the project’s lead researcher, Filippo Menczer, a professor of Infomatics and Computer Science at the university.

The project head also said Truthy was used to monitor tweets  that used #p2 (Progressive 2.0), but there was no discussion of liberal accounts getting suspended in his tome.

“The Committee and taxpayers deserve to know how NSF decided to award a large grant for a project that proposed to develop standards for online political speech and to apply those standards through development of a website that targeted conservative political comments,” committee chairman Lamar Smith (Texas) wrote in a letter to NSF Director France Cordova.

“While some have argued that Truthy could be used to better understand things like disaster communication or to assist (terrorist pig thug cops), instead it appears Truthy focused on examples of ‘false and misleading ideas, hate speech, and subversive propaganda’ communicated by conservative groups,” he wrote.

Smith wants to see the original application for the Indiana study, as well as “every internal and external e-mail, letter, memorandum, record, note, text message or other document” that was either sent or received by the NSF regarding Truthy since the study was launched in 2011.

In addition to requesting all correspondence and documentation, Smith’s letter goes on to reference a publication that was co-authored by Menczer, explaining how the project was used to keep track of tweets ahead of the 2010 midterm elections (in which the GOP retook control of the House and gained Senate seats).

Menczer, in a paper titled, Abuse of Social Media and Political Manipulation - a chapter for the book The Death of the Internet - wrote how he and his research team had managed to have some Twitter accounts shut down.

“With the exploding popularity of online social networks and microblogging platforms, social media have become the turf on which battles of opinion are fought,” begins the chapter. “This section discusses a particularly insidious type of abuse of social media, aimed at manipulation of political discourse online.”

The Truthy project tracked some 8 million tweets daily in the days and weeks ahead of the 2010 elections, storing 600,000 political tweets in a searchable database, though Menczer had previously claimed that Truthy did not have a database. That page of the Truthy website was subsequently deleted after an editorial by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, which warned that the project could wind up being misused.

Menczer claimed the site did not have a database in response to an initial report questioning the motives of the Truthy project.