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."

Comments

PR teams inject memes

[AHuxley]

They have learned from Fox news not to use day long talking points.
Undercover, well funded efforts by governments, .coms, .orgs and faith based groups can flood any 'space'.
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 ;)

Benchmarks?

[flyneye]

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.

 

Wow, bad news for Democrats!

[SuperKendall]

"'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....