Where do we get these people?

This is pretty unbelievable. Government to Track ‘False, Misleading’ Ideas on Twitter by Jon Gabriel.

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

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.”

One G-man’s “social pollution” is another free man’s First Amendment right. The very term sounds like something out of a 1920s Italian fascist tract. And why is the federal government even deciding which ideas are “false and misleading,” let alone tracking them?

According to the project’s grant, the service “could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”

Chillingly Orwellian. And quintessentially bureaucratic. Have we indeed educated a population that fails to see the oxymoron of restricting false and misleading ideas in order to preserve open debate? Of course, this is from the same great institutional mind that gave us "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Is this misreporting by a conservative news site? Perhaps. But going to the links, it doesn't seem so. You can sort of see how this transitioned from a really intriguing idea to a really Orwellian one.

The project also seeks to discover why certain Internet memes go viral and others do not.

That's an interesting idea to research. But then seeking to utilize that knowledge on behalf of the government to control the political conversation? Time to bring back tar and feathering. I hope that outrage and mockery will put this particular genie back in the bottle.

As a side note - pretty witty conversation in the comments section including:

Frank Soto
NSF reading 1984:

“So do you think we could make this work?”

John Davey
Did they lift this thought police concept whole cloth from the end of 1982′s Pink Floyd The Wall?

♫There’s one in the spotlight, he don’t look right to me♫

Tuck
To paraphrase: The “dark night of fascism is always descending on the Republicans and yet lands only in the Democratic Party.”