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Database to Track 'Suspicious Memes' on Twitter

posted by n1 on Tuesday August 26 2014, @04:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the most-of-twitter-to-be-flagged dept.

PapayaSF writes:

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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  • (Score: 1) by khedoros on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:10PM

    by khedoros (2921) on Wednesday August 27 2014, @10:10PM (#86479)
    Pipedot's use of the content on their site doesn't provide a benefit to the community, as currently implemented.

    - If I comment on Soylentnews and someone replies on Pipedot, I'm not informed, and no discussion or dialog is created. I can't respond to something I can't hear.

    - Read the Pipedot About page. They're marketing themselves kind of like a Usenet client (a viewer of an underlying infrastructure). That would be a great justification for the site's behavior, if it were true.

    - Bad behavior sometimes needs spanked, not to destroy the actor, but to get them to behave better.

    Reworking a Slashdot-like engine is a good idea, and long overdue. It's admirable to modernize a tool that we use, and to provide another frontend interface to information. We should encourage that, because it's useful. But if I come to your website, copy the content verbatim, using your bandwidth and processing resources for my own goals, and without telling you, that's not acting in the public interest or in the interest of spreading information. That's pure self-interest. If Pipedot's staff wanted to promote freedom of information or multiple interfaces to a story database, then they should've contacted SoylentNews and set up a cross-site API for information transfer. That would be in the benefit of the community and freedom of information.