Truthy project at Indiana University analyzes Twitter traffic
to understand patterns of political discourse
The truth about Truthy has become a
scarce commodity.
Truthy is a 4-year-old academic study of how information spreads on Twitter. The work, by researchers at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, has been cited favorably in mainstream media reports about the broader phenom- enon of online memes—messages about ideas, issues, and events—and the role they can play in ev- erything from shaping protest movements to signaling out- breaks of disease. But recently the Indiana project fell afoul of another Internet phenom- enon—how some messages can spread even if they are not correct.
In the past few months, Truthy has become the target of wither- ing attacks from conservative bloggers and politicians. In particular, they have char- acterized a 4-year, $920,000 grant the sci- entists received in 2011 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an attempt by the U.S. government to monitor and restrict free speech. The attacks are “not simply a misunderstanding of our research,” says computer scientist Filippo Menczer, the principal investigator on the NSF grant. They are “a deliberate attempt to distort what we have done.”
scarce commodity.
Truthy is a 4-year-old academic study of how information spreads on Twitter. The work, by researchers at Indiana University (IU), Bloomington, has been cited favorably in mainstream media reports about the broader phenom- enon of online memes—messages about ideas, issues, and events—and the role they can play in ev- erything from shaping protest movements to signaling out- breaks of disease. But recently the Indiana project fell afoul of another Internet phenom- enon—how some messages can spread even if they are not correct.
In the past few months, Truthy has become the target of wither- ing attacks from conservative bloggers and politicians. In particular, they have char- acterized a 4-year, $920,000 grant the sci- entists received in 2011 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) as an attempt by the U.S. government to monitor and restrict free speech. The attacks are “not simply a misunderstanding of our research,” says computer scientist Filippo Menczer, the principal investigator on the NSF grant. They are “a deliberate attempt to distort what we have done.”
Menczer’s work, which is also supported
by the military’s Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency and by the private James
S. McDonnell Foundation, is rooted in the
growing field of complex, nonlinear feed-
back systems. “It has become a very hot topic
of research,” notes Menczer, who is the director of IU’s Center for Complex Networks and
Systems Research. The field includes studies
of natural systems such as planetary orbits
and climate—and also social ones, such as
the spread of information on Twitter. Twit-
ter itself has begun awarding grants to aca-
demics who want to study its daily torrent of
more than half a billion tweets.
Under the NSF grant, Menczer and his colleagues have studied Twitter messages to shed light on the nature of social dis- course. Some of their early work on U.S. po- litical debate, for example, found evidence of a growing polarization, in which people communicate mostly with those who hold similar views on any particular issue rather than trying to engage those who disagree with them. More recently, the researchers’ examination of the 2013 protests against the Turkish government found that the movement became more democratic over time, with a growing number of people shaping the direction of the protest. The re- searchers also hope to learn how to differ- entiate memes spread by real people from those broadcast by automated software, a technique used by some businesses and advocacy groups to create the illusion of a groundswell of public interest in an issue.
“The headlines are saying something
that is completely false and fabricated,”
Menczer told the Columbia Journalism Re-
view, which covered the flap in September.
“We are not defining hate speech. We are not
tracking people. We don’t have a database.”
New findings are posted regularly on the
project’s website and written up in regular
academic journals, he explained, and noth-
ing is being secretly funneled to a govern-
ment agency for some nefarious purpose.
The team’s current NSF grant ends next
summer, and Menczer isn’t sure if he’ll sub-
mit a new proposal to the agency. But if he
does, he predicts that “we will probably stay
away from anything to do with politics.” ■
Under the NSF grant, Menczer and his colleagues have studied Twitter messages to shed light on the nature of social dis- course. Some of their early work on U.S. po- litical debate, for example, found evidence of a growing polarization, in which people communicate mostly with those who hold similar views on any particular issue rather than trying to engage those who disagree with them. More recently, the researchers’ examination of the 2013 protests against the Turkish government found that the movement became more democratic over time, with a growing number of people shaping the direction of the protest. The re- searchers also hope to learn how to differ- entiate memes spread by real people from those broadcast by automated software, a technique used by some businesses and advocacy groups to create the illusion of a groundswell of public interest in an issue.
This summer, Truthy itself fell under
scrutiny, starting with a 25 August piece
in The Washington Free Beacon, a con-
servative online news website. Its head-
line proclaimed that the U.S. government
is “Creating [a] Database to Track ‘Hate
Speech’ on Twitter.” Within days, several
conservative commentators jumped on the
anti-Truthy bandwagon. “So some bureau-
crat decides whether you are being hateful
or misinforming people—what could pos-
sibly go wrong?” a reporter for Fox News
asked sarcastically.
Elizabeth Harrington, who wrote the Free Beacon story, says she was just doing her job. “One of the areas that I cover is how government is spending taxpayers’ money, and I found this grant interesting,” she ex- plains. “The whole premise of the project struck me as questionable, and I hadn’t seen any other coverage of this aspect of the research.” Many of the critical stories quote selectively from a Truthy grant abstract on NSF’s website to argue that the research is an example of the Obama adminis- tration’s targeting of conserva- tives. The Free Beacon story, for example, says NSF “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 activ- ity online.” But those phrases actually apply to an online platform that the researchers created to give the public a chance to com- ment on anything being tweeted. The sci- entists weren’t deciding which tweets were “suspicious,” nor targeting any particular ideological position.
Elizabeth Harrington, who wrote the Free Beacon story, says she was just doing her job. “One of the areas that I cover is how government is spending taxpayers’ money, and I found this grant interesting,” she ex- plains. “The whole premise of the project struck me as questionable, and I hadn’t seen any other coverage of this aspect of the research.” Many of the critical stories quote selectively from a Truthy grant abstract on NSF’s website to argue that the research is an example of the Obama adminis- tration’s targeting of conserva- tives. The Free Beacon story, for example, says NSF “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 activ- ity online.” But those phrases actually apply to an online platform that the researchers created to give the public a chance to com- ment on anything being tweeted. The sci- entists weren’t deciding which tweets were “suspicious,” nor targeting any particular ideological position.
Even so, conservative commenters have
continued to pillory the work. A 17 October
op-ed in The Washington Post by Ajit Pai, one
of two Republicans on the five-member Fed-
eral Communications Commission, called
the project an attempt “to squint for and
squelch” political comments. “The federal
government has no business spending your
hard-earned money on a project to monitor
political speech on Twitter,” Pai asserted.
Senior Republican lawmakers are also suspicious of Truthy. Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chair of the science com- mittee in the U.S. House of Representa- tives, said he’s adding the grant to his list of questionable research projects that NSF has funded over the years (Science, 10 Octo- ber, p. 152). “[T]his one appears to be worse than a simple misuse of public funds,” Smith said in a 21 October press release.
Truthy takes its name from “truthiness,” a word satirist Stephen Colbert invented for his television show, The Colbert Report. In a 2006 interview, Colbert explained why he coined the word. “It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts,” Colbert noted. “But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty [that counts].”
Ironically, the NSF solicitation for the program that is funding Menczer’s team notes that the growth of social media may aggravate social conflict because it offers a common platform to “parties who may not know or trust each other.” Those conflicts can easily snowball online, the program so- licitation noted.
NSF officials warned Menczer that at- tempting to defend himself could backfire, he notes. “They said, ‘Be very careful. You don’t want to talk about politics. That’s not what you do.’ ” Even so, the Truthy research- ers have posted a running rebuttal on their website, including what the project is and isn’t, and Menczer says he’s willing to speak with those he views as “bona fide reporters who want to know about my work.”
Senior Republican lawmakers are also suspicious of Truthy. Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX), the chair of the science com- mittee in the U.S. House of Representa- tives, said he’s adding the grant to his list of questionable research projects that NSF has funded over the years (Science, 10 Octo- ber, p. 152). “[T]his one appears to be worse than a simple misuse of public funds,” Smith said in a 21 October press release.
Truthy takes its name from “truthiness,” a word satirist Stephen Colbert invented for his television show, The Colbert Report. In a 2006 interview, Colbert explained why he coined the word. “It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts,” Colbert noted. “But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty [that counts].”
Ironically, the NSF solicitation for the program that is funding Menczer’s team notes that the growth of social media may aggravate social conflict because it offers a common platform to “parties who may not know or trust each other.” Those conflicts can easily snowball online, the program so- licitation noted.
NSF officials warned Menczer that at- tempting to defend himself could backfire, he notes. “They said, ‘Be very careful. You don’t want to talk about politics. That’s not what you do.’ ” Even so, the Truthy research- ers have posted a running rebuttal on their website, including what the project is and isn’t, and Menczer says he’s willing to speak with those he views as “bona fide reporters who want to know about my work.”
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