Feds are creating a database to spy on ‘Hate Speech’ on Twitter

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.

The federal government is sponsoring a creepy social media research project: The aim is to produce a database of politically disfavored tweets, misinformation, and "other social pollution." The grant for the project—made by the National Science Foundation to Indiana University—was discovered by The Washington Free Beacon's Elizabeth Harrington, who writes:

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 project stands to benefit both the research community and the public significantly,” the grant states. “Our data will be made available via [application programming interfaces] APIs and include information on meme propagation networks, statistical data, and relevant user and content features.”

We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution. While the vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns. Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models. To train our algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. You should click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!

Sure sounds like DHS is behind this, asking Americans to report on what you consider hate speech. Can you say "See Something, Say Something" DHS spies?

“The open-source platform we develop will be made publicly available and will be extensible to ever more research areas as a greater preponderance of human activities are replicated online,” it continues. “Additionally, we will create a web service open to the public for monitoring trends, bursts, and suspicious memes.”

“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,” the grant said.

“Truthy,” which gets its name from Stephen Colbert, will catalog how information is spread on Twitter, including political campaigns.

To eliminate speech that disputes our governments or politicians world view is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!!!  As Hans Bader explains:

It’s not the government’s role to rule to declare ideas “false or misleading.” Under the First Amendment, there’s “no such thing as a false idea,” according to the Supreme Court’s decision in Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. (1974). 

Moreover, “hate speech” is protected under the First Amendment, and even commonplace views about race or gender have been branded as “hate speech” by government officials. The Supreme Court has made clear over and over again that hate speech in public settings is protected by the First Amendment in decisions like (1) R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992); (2) Snyder v. Phelps (2011); and (3) Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992).

There is no question that Twitter & the internet, is replete with utter nonsense, wild and crazy ideas that range from the absurd to the ridiculous.  There is no question, that people who are thought-challenged believe some of this dumb stuff online, perhaps for no better reason than the persistent belief that if it wasn’t true, they wouldn’t be allowed to say so.

It’s your job, as reader, to discern real from false.  I know, it’s a lot of work, and many people are ill-prepared to parse content and logic to figure out what claims and arguments are sound.  Nobody said free speech was easy.

It’s bad enough that transient interest and identitarian groups have seized upon the idea, pandered to the unknowing public to promote their own flavor of hate. They hate all ideas that aren’t theirs.  But when the government sends nearly a cool mil to Indiana University to vet Twitter for politically unacceptable ideas, it’s no longer just a matter of challenging the teacups.

This First Amendment protection accords with the reality that politicians and their allies (such as judges they appointed or confirmed) will typically view speech critical of them as “false,” based on their own subjective, ideologically-based notions of what is “true” or “false.” “As aptly summarized by the Supreme Court,” in Thomas v. Collins, in the realm of political debate “‘every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the truth from the false for us.’”

Sure, it sucks when someone says something you find abhorrent or dangerously wrong.  Some people feel compelled to stay up all night because of it.

Distinguishing between truth and truthy is our job, like it or not.  Preventing the government from doing it for us is our job as well!
http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/25/your-tax-dollars-are-funding-a-database
http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-creating-database-to-track-hate-speech-on-twitter/
http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/08/27/the-truthy-shall-set-you-free/