Scrutiny of 'Truthy', a university project that studies trends on Twitter (2014)

> One study highlighted an attack on Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) when he was first running for his seat in 2010. It found that one social media campaign criticizing him for spending taxpayer money on dinners and fashion shows was largely the result of 10 Twitter bots.

This is an interesting finding. I think part of the broader question at hand in our society is that the relationships and communications are becoming world-readable, with significant consequences for shifting the flow of discourse.

I expect a strong correlation with authoritative overreach :-) But more seriously, the study of information flows to uncover information sharing networks is not new, that the networks want to protect themselves from being exposed is also not new. I don't agree with a lot of what Assange says but I do agree with him that conspiracies hate light, and what is more making it harder for them to communicate makes it harder for them to be effective.

This article talks about a research project studying the virality of propaganda in social media. The article paints a political picture, the only paper cited by the article (one of at least 30 published by the project) discovered that a viral social media attack/campaign against a democratic senator was the result of about 10 twitter bots. The article then cites the republican congressman who launched the investigation into this study.

No mention of the FBI, and the NSF provided funding but the project has made statements to the effect that the NSF is not involved, as listed in the article.

This title is very misleading...

from the article: ' “Truth about Truthy.” In a series of bullet points, the department said the project is not a "political watchdog, a government probe of social media, an attempt to suppress free speech, a way to define 'misinformation,' a partisan political effort, [or] a database tracking hate speech."

"There is a good dose of irony in a research project that studies the diffusion of misinformation becoming the target of such a powerful disinformation machine," the research department wrote. '

Good.

I don't know how effective it'll be, but after witnessing first-hand how successful government-sponsored social media manipulation have been in the last decade, I'm really glad that western world finally reacts to it and at least tries to do something about it.

Similarly to the irony mentioned in the article, many of the other comments here clearly commented without reading the actual article, which has caused misinformation to spread due to the misleading title.

I apologize, I read the FBI part in another article and I can't seem to corroborate the claim that the FBI is involved. As such I am editing the title. Apologies for the sensationalism.

Edit: it would seem I can no longer edit the title.

That's not the article's title and the article says nothing about the FBI. The title should be changed.

"NSF funds Indiana University study of social media misinformation" would be good. The actual title, "Five things to know about 'Truthy'", isn't helpful.

This could use a (2014) in the title.

They need to turn their sensors towards their own political parties and campaign advertising

And it's called Truthy, too? What - "Ministry of Truth" was trademarked?