The College Fix

The Washington Free Beacon reports that Indiana University has received nearly $1 million to develop a database that tracks so-called hate speech on Twitter.

The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.

The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.” The university has received $919,917 so far for the project.

The fact that the feds want to monitor alleged hate speech is bad enough. That the program was developed using taxpayer funds adds insult to injury. But it gets worse:

“Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority.

So, it was essentially developed by a hippie communist. And here’s the sucker punch:

The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use their tool in the future to report on other Twitter users.

“Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models,” the website adds. “To train our algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!”

America is no longer America. That’s how I feel when I read something like this. This is straight out of Stasi Germany. Informants, telling on their neighbors, to Big Brother, for alleged hate speech.

It’s sad and scary.

Read the full article. 

Jennifer Kabbany is editor of The College Fix ( @JenniferKabbany )

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