Slashdot Mirror
The Science of Truthiness
E IS mC(Square) writes "Researchers at Indiana University have just launched Truthy.indiana.edu, which they humbly declare 'a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.' According to their FAQ, they define 'truthy' thus: 'A truthy meme relies on deceptive tactics to represent misinformation as fact. The Truthy system uses Truthy to refer to activities such as political smear campaigns, astroturfing, and other social pollution."
If you are interested in the truth and have the required attention span to analyse detailed information, you won't be using Twitter.
...which they humbly declare 'a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation...
Deceptive tactics, such as using data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing?
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm sure that I'm not the only one who thinks that it'll be overwhelmed by the political wheel in motion
This post is not true.
> ...leading up to the Nov. 2 elections
What's to uncover? Just look at anything published by or in support of any politician.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I am first! Truthtifully!
We're fucked.
All politicians and businessmen are full of bullshit.
'cos that's gonna be one huge dataload.
No sig today...
What is bad about it? In analogy to pollution, leading to climate change (not a catastrophy, beware), it just leads to social change, and is not change (equated with progress) just the thing we want?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
They have learned from Fox news not to use day long talking points. .coms, .orgs and faith based groups can flood any 'space'. ;)
Undercover, well funded efforts by governments,
A random set of users twisting and distorting, voting down and attacking.
They will then just drift back down, waiting for the next mission.
At best you expose 1 ip with a users who has x post over y months.
They are quickly back with a new ip and 'old' users name even if detected.
For best results shine light on their masters, infiltrate their funding and hidden support networks, link into their millionaires, billionaires or gov funded ops units.
They have to spin up links fast on any new issue, that needs a network
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What is bad about it? It just leads to social change (like climate change), and change (aka progress) is the thing we all want!
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I don't believe them.
Truthiness is truthy. The cake is a lie :)
Wow... I saw that when I went to UT. It was a cyborg heaven.
Eric
They have learned from Fox news not to use day long talking points. .coms, .orgs and faith based groups can flood any 'space'. ;)
Undercover, well funded efforts by governments,
A random set of users twisting and distorting, voting down and attacking.
They will then just drift back down, waiting for the next mission.
At best you expose 1 ip with a users who has x post over y months.
They are quickly back with a new ip and 'old' users name even if detected.
For best results shine light on their masters, infiltrate their funding and hidden support networks, link into their millionaires, billionaires or gov funded ops units.
They have to spin up links fast on any new issue, that needs a network
Colour revolutions did have strange automated bursts/injection points on web 2.0 sites and where noted.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Truthiness is truthy. The cake is a lie :). This site and Colbert guess what - have an agenda, and Colbert is super liberal
Really, this should be fun to watch, to see just how ridiculously one sided that they will be.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
OK. "Truthy", and "Truthiness" are terms coined by Steven Colbert (or one of his writers), so why don't I see him getting any acknowledgment?
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
There's one state college that will likely see a precipitous drop in Federal dollars combined with being publicly attacked by Obama along with Fox, the TEA Party, Americans for Prosperity, the BBB, 8/28, Glenn Beck, etc etc.
Progressives are nasty if you don't toe their Party line.
Problem is, they aren't any nicer even if you do.
...but this is just part of the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns
--
In the same sentence with "crowd sourced? Fail.
Look, I detest astroturfing as much as the next person who values "truth", but anyone who cares to look, can see lies and half-truths for what they are. Detecting them, then, is not the problem. The problem is that so many people can't, or won't.
So truth is a lie?
http://xkcd.com/246/
Not as fun as I thought being the first to post... reading /. community posts is way more interesting and less work then reading the article :'(
> a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool
Lost me right there...
The bastion of pure balance. I'm sure the truthiness meter will see no bias creep.
~
BINGO! What do I win?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
But how can anyone trust their results if they're gathering their data and posting their results via the internet? Everybody knows you can't trust anything you find on the internet, right?
Ignoring the inherent dangers of crowdsourcing - why are we supposed to believe that this site is more reliable, and has less bias than your average twitter channel?
I always find myself suspicious when people claim that they have some sort of uncontested claim on truth - politicians who start sentences with the words "believe me" spring to mind.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Is there any progress in the field of internet technology that isn't about twitter/failbook social data mining crowdsource analysis network social social social cloudsourcing?
If there is, why is this all that makes it to slashdot these days?
This is not the first post. Honest.
"His name was James Damore."
So why are they calling misinformation "truthy"? Is this some sort of Steven Colbert reference?
The belief that none of us is smarter than all of us is not always true. For something like this I do not know if crowd-sourcing it is the way to go. Once 4chan gets a hold of it, that's it either way.
First?
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
If we're going to have a group of social scientists run a negative points scoring system it would be great to start out with them saying which views of the world are false and which are true. "Obama is a communist" or "Obama is a muslim" is no different from saying "Republicans are racist" or "Bush was uneducated". Although based on my existing prejudices and the examples they use I suspect they disagree.
If any political candidate has to resort to dirty tactics that should tell you as the potential employer everything they need to know about their character and the strength of their ideas, they must be pretty desperate and weak if thats really the best they can do
How many potential employees for any other prospective executive level job would say "hire me because your other interviewees are douchebags" and then proceed to spend 20 minutes burning 100$ bills telling you why they suck and 2 minutes on what they would do differently
would you employ them ? really ?
they would be lucky if i didnt kick their ass out of the building never mind them give them a job.
It's nice to see scientists ride the Colbert wave, but they must realize that once Twitter enters the equation, any validity their research might have had goes right out of the window.
This could be useful info. It'd be good to know the type of places where the memes turn up. A group of us were talking in Star Trek Online the other night trying to think up how to start:
Keanu (verb) ________, he said "Woah."
Keanu suddenly understood the 2-party system was borked and invented false issues to discuss that weren't important, he said "Woah."
Wow, this story has been up for nearly an hour and there's still no comments? Slashdotters are clearly deeply concerned with highlighting the dishonesty of politicians. Maybe because it's so hard to spot...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Just yet.
And what shall we use to benchmark this tool?
We have been constantly lied to by both Democrats and Republicans for around a century or so since Wilson and Roosevelt took us into this age of swinging socialism and declared the lie of democracy.
We are so gullible we have been talked out of rights and into atrocities without even the benefit of reflection of the wrongs done over long periods of time and lies so old no one recalls the truth.
Suddenly someone finds the "magic 8 ball" algorithm to divine cheese from crap in a world where people pay for imaginary items on Farmville? Let's get hold of ourselves a moment before we get too happy over an erstwhile National Enquirer story.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
They should license the Slashdot moderation system, which flawlessly identifies truth and legitimate opinion (which are highlighted to according to their objective worth) from lies, disinformation and trollery (which are cast down to the lower levels where the ACs dwell) and succesfully filters out any mocking sarcasm.
As much as this sounds interesting, I'm not sure how it can replace basic research that is (as far as I know) done on sites like FactCheck.org. Is it true or not? Is it mainly a tool to identify that which may not be the truth?
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
"Send us any fishy e-mails about Obamacare that you get," anyone?
Seems like a similar concept, only on Twitter, instead of e-mail.
I can't wait for the researchers to conclude that liberal tweets are 100% true, and conservative tweets are astroturfing. And that the users who are all astroturfers remind them of Nazis, too.
This is clearly biased toward democrats because they used Al-Gore-rithms.
If I'm the first person to write this, there's something wrong here this morning.
If i understand it correctly it sortof adds a layer of transparency to information on twitter, however either i'm dense or it's a bit tricky to understand what it really means.
What is truth? -- Pontius Pilate
is truthfulness.
...they could get these pirates raided and shut down.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...almost truth but not quite.
What has this world come to? Depends on what your definition of is is...
I call Bullshit!
SNOW POST!
"There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method" - Karl Pearson
First truth
Frist psot!
"Sophisticated" and "Twitter" in the same sentence.
Yep.
Do Colbert's comments count as "deceptive tactics and misinformation"? Satire might be rather difficult to account for without broadly categorizing based on the cited source, but a well designed data-mining tool should be able to handle it.
Wouldn't "Falsy memes" be a better name for misinformation?
"Sophistication" and "Twitter" in the same sentence.
Yep.
sounds childish even though it is an old word, and will therfore not be taken seriously by many people.
I think I counted every buzzword currently in use in TF summary - got to read the TFA - I might win the buzzwrod bingo :-)
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
You can't handle the Truthy!!!
I can't quite pin it down, but there is a joke about the "year of the linux desktop" meme in here somewhere.
who cares? I mean buzzwordtastic but seriously boring
It deleted all the comments for this. Tory(at least for the server I am on)
Monstar L
This is clearly astroturfing on behalf of the truth
I'd tell a UDP joke, but you may not get it. I'd tell a TCP joke, but I'd have to keep repeating it until you got it.
Why are they calling dishonesty "truthiness"?
go colbert!
But is it truly?
Do they declare which party THEY vote for ? Seems somehow relevant.
A truthy meme relies on deceptive tactics to represent misinformation as fact.
first posssst biaetch
There will be no market for this product. Nobody wants to listen to reason, and it does not sell advertising.
We want to hear that grandma will be put out of her home by the evil "OTHER" candidate.
We want to hear that the highways are riddled with drunks and unsafe cars.
We don't want to hear that grandma's income is actually quite safe, or that highway fatalities today kill fewer people than suicide.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Crowdsourcing may be great for evaluating the popularity of a particular statement but it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of any statement, ideology or belief. I cannot think of a worst way to evaluate the accuracy of any piece of data.
Tisha Hayes
How well will it determine half truths? Will a person voting something as truthy actually know if the tweet is the truth or will it simply be a vote for or against a political party? I feel it will be the later. Does it include SEIU memos along with Twitter feeds? How about Acorn memos? DNC news feeds?
From the FAQ, it says that it uses crowdsourcing to determine a tweets truthiness. So it's basically a competition between left-wing and right-wing truthiness voting.
The problem is that liberals use unions and political organizations to organize astro-turfing while conservatives seem to use word-of-mouth and social networking to a much larger degree.
I guess the best test will be the upcoming "Million Moderate March" on Oct. 30th.
I cannot see any indication that they have done anything to root out their own prejudgements and assumptions, or even to justify their inclusion. So like most politically-driven attempts at "science," this will doubtless just show the ideological conclusions reached by the creators of this tool (the tools behind the tool, if you will) before they even created it.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
That's not what truthiness is though. Truthiness is the purposefuly following of what one wants to be true, ignoring logic/reason.
There's varying degrees of truthiness involved. Some things that politicians say are complete rubbish and somethings are mostly correct.
Politicians == Evil Liars ~= Lawyer
This post is kind of a trifecta.
It is funny, it is on topic, and it is accurate (currently modded -1 Troll).
(It is a tad inflammatory but hey...)
The category of "mostly correct" is where the biggest, most destructive lies are.
Aren't there already sites out there that do this, much more effectively? Snopes.com and FactCheck.org are two that immediately come to mind.
I'm really having a hard time figuring out how this uncovers anything. How would it account for some actual event that causes a shift in the nature of associated tweets? It also seems like it might be subject to the old, persistent problem that if people repeat something enough eventually it's considered fact. And what's the benchmark for spotting astroturfing? Is it going to come down to cherry picking information? Anything someone doesn't agree with is dismissed as astroturfing. It also seems like this information, at least, currently is not presented in any meaningful manner that would allow anyone to take away anything useful.
All I see is Twitter usernames and tags. By what definition are those memes?
And how does this website "uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation"? There is no analysis at all. It's just another Twitter aggregator the world doesn't need.
....shit tastes good does not mean it does.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
It's only astroturfing if I disagree.
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
That's the site I'm gonna surf.
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
Tells me if it's astroturf.
If you need to get political explication,
Or to know whether it's data manipulation,
Or perhaps it is an outright prevarication,
There is just one page to fuel your outrage.
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
Not O'Reillyana, Beckistan,or Hannitone,
But Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
Truthy, Indiana,
The real spin-free zone.
My apologies for Hannitone, but once I'd thought of the last line I really needed to make the rhyme work.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
It's an arms race ...deceptive tactics and misinformation will just have to get better, as long as they are useful they will never go away.
EOM.
Twitter is not new (just a much worse implementation).
Signal to noise ratio about 0.
That isn't new ether. Twitter takes it to a new low.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some politicians are honest, some are liars, some are incompetent, some are just fucking nuts. If you say "who cares, they're all crooks" it just means that you're too damn lazy to do the research.
"...but anyone who cares to look, can see lies and half-truths for what they are."
I use to believe along those lines. I still get frustrated by people who spew out what I would consider obvious falsehoods. I catch myself doubting their sincerity or thinking that they simply haven't taken the time to research their beliefs.
There are people who are motivated to Astroturf. That's just a fact of life. The problem is that there is information overload. There is so much information pouring into our media that it all becomes white noise. How do people "look" even if they care to?
I don't have time to check everything out personally even if I knew how. I hear that such and such a bill introduced by congress will do this and that. How can I tell if it is true? Do you read and understand every proposed law? No one has time to do that. And the frightening part is that even the people in Congress don't have time to really understand what it is they are voting on.
So what can we do? I listen to the white noise and pick out parts that I believe to be true. Not really objective. Most people do this and what it ends up doing is re-enforcing what they already believe. People listen to sources that that tells them what they want to hear and declare it to be the truth.
I would be interested in knowing how you would go about detecting lies and half-truths. Is there really a VIABLE method to do this? By viable I mean a method that the average person can use that does not consume a large part of their lives. You really can't expect the average working person to spend eight hours a day at work and then every free moment debunking Astroturf.
"'A truthy meme relies on deceptive tactics to represent misinformation as fact. The Truthy system uses Truthy to refer to activities such as political smear campaigns, astroturfing, and other social pollution.""
So here of course they are talking about things like the claim Palin said "she could see Russia from her house" (said by Tina Fey playing her), or the notion that Tea Party protestors are racist when in fact they simply represent individuals wanting smaller government that spends less, or the notion that Obama is not a U.S. citizen despite having at least one parent who is so obviously he must be?
I look forward to what they discover with "science", which must be bipartisanly bad and in that way bad news for Democrats, used to having news flow on their side... but of course the discoveries would never be themselves a kind of astroturfing, unveiling only what they thought would help the right people....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For trying to even pretend it's remotely useful.
I tried it out by clicking on a few "memes", and apparently they are just collecting twitter posts with the same tags in them, and trying to correlate them in some way.
But in practice - wow, who knew that the most common tags would be 3-4 letters long, and mean something completely different to every person who uses them? That along with so many people indiscriminately using tags to try to get their posts noticed. Useless! (or truthy?)
The great thing about this research is that, no matter what you find, you can't be proven wrong.
It belongs in Idle.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I've been observing politicians for half a century. I was even actively involved in politics for a decade or so.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Their careful analysis has produced a tool whose only meme category is "Politics".
First time I've seen @justinbeiber and @akibablog as being political. For a chuckle, run @akibablog through Google Translate. There isn't enough context for it to translate short Japanese messages well.
Some politicians are honest
Name one. Extra credit if they hold an office at any level above "Municipal"/"Town council"
I completely agree. Truth is not a conservative strong point. I'm not saying that liberals don't exaggerate the truth too. I'm simply saying that liberal don't usually outright lie, or make up a meme and spread them. However, due to the close connection between religion and conservatism in America, conservatives are very good at spreading memes (for many of them, it's their job to spread religious memes).
I would say both Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Bernie Sanders are pretty honest about their politics. They probably hold their nose and vote for things at times but they'll tell you why they did it.
It's easy to be honest when you're insane.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Jesse Ventura. I get the impression that his honesty isn't really a moral principle, he just really doesn't care what people think of him, so he can't be bothered to deceive them.
Jesse is also a much better actor than Schwarzenegger. He should have gotten the lead role in "Predator".
Notice there is no "This is not bullshit" option. This tool can only accumulate complaints, so it is not rating the sources. A source might accumulate a hundred whiners over ten years, so it looks bad compared to others with few clicks, but there can't be ten thousand also rating it positively.
I'm sure all those signs they wave depicting Obama as a witchdoctor with a bone through his nose, or the ones emblazoned with "WHITE SLAVERY", or maybe all those comments about how Barack is a "thug" and Michelle is an "ape"
You say "all" like they are common.
I have yet to see one thing you mentioned at a Tea Party event.
Perhaps you will be the first to trigger the "bad meme" meter.
Like it or not, my friend, but the Tea Party movement was founded in ignorance
The only ignorance I see at work here is those against the Tea Party, apparently judging the whole group by a handful of photos they managed to find on a leftwing blog, instead of actually going to one and listening to speakers. At the one I attended the speakers were very intellectual, and in fact said things that at times made different parts of the audience boo and cheer. That is how a truly bipartisan movement works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley