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The National Science Foundation is funding the “Truthy” database, intended to detect “false and misleading ideas,” "political smears," and other "social pollution” in online political activity. Researchers at Indiana University have received $919,917 (so far) for this project. The resulting open-source platform will be made publicly available, including via a web service open to the public for "monitoring trends, bursts, and suspicious memes.”
According to the grant, “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate."
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Database to Track 'Suspicious Memes' on Twitter
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You can't have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too.
-- Ayn Rand
(Score: 3, Interesting) by etherscythe on Tuesday August 26 2014, @08:32PM
I'm thinking it's a bit more responsive version of Snopes. Seems like Snopes mostly does stuff you see in email and takes awhile to catch on to trends and stuff generally going "viral", whereas there is a staggering amount of misinformation in social media. If somebody had a URL shortener service compbined with a #debunk tag we might start to get a handle on the worst idiocy and slow its propagation. One can hope. I'd approve funding for this project, were it up to me.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 28 2014, @04:50AM
Maybe you are right. They talk a lot about automation but they also talk about crowdsourcing.
I guess the devil will be in the details.