Really? They did that?

Some years ago I came across a few reports on conservative websites describing some Federal Government research about memes and messages on Twitter and the internet. The reported objective of the research was to identify, find and address false ideas and memes. The broader objective was cast in noble terms of improving public discourse, making civic emergency communications more effective, etc. The conservative commentary was very concerned about the free speech implications and government coercion.

At the time I discounted these reports. They showed up only on conservative sites. Academic research is easy to mock or distort beyond its actual purposes. I dismissed it most of all because it seemed so patently Big Brotherish that I felt sure no one would be doing something in the way that it was being presented in the articles; that either the commenters had grasped the wrong end of the stick or were deliberately misrepresenting it. There were other more credible threats to our civic culture. Further, the whole issue of memes, communication, truth, network effects, etc. is an interesting and budding field. It seemed entirely appropriate that there should be some research into how memes originate and propagate and the intersection between meme velocity and meme verity.

Well, it looks like I may have been wrong to gloss over the issue. Today's Free Beacon, a conservative news website, has a report that almost certainly is related to that earlier research of a few years ago, House Committee Demands Answers on Truthy Project by Elizabeth Harrington. It would appear that the original concerns were not fanciful and that indeed the research was used to suppress free speech.

The Truthy project, being conducted by researchers at Indiana University, is under investigation for targeting political commentary on Twitter. The project monitors “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” with a goal of one day being able to automatically detect false rumors on the social media platform.

The web service has been used to track tweets using hashtags such as #tcot (Top Conservatives on Twitter), and was successful in getting accounts associated with conservatives suspended, according to a 2012 book co-authored by the project’s lead researcher, Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science at Indiana University.

Menczer has also said that Truthy monitored tweets using #p2 (Progressive 2.0), but did not discuss any examples of getting liberal accounts suspended in his book.

[snip]

Smith’s letter references a publication co-written by Menczer which explains how the project was used to track tweets before the 2010-midterm elections.

In “Abuse of Social Media and Political Manipulation,” a chapter for the book The Death of the Internet, released in 2012, Menczer writes how his team successfully had Twitter accounts suspended.

“With the exploding popularity of online social networks and microblogging platforms, social media have become the turf on which battles of opinion are fought,” the chapter begins. “This section discusses a particularly insidious type of abuse of social media, aimed at manipulation of political discourse online.”

[snip]

“Whether by amazing coincidence or on purpose, it appears that several social media accounts highlighted by Truthy were subsequently terminated by the owners of the social media platforms, effectively muzzling the political free speech of the targeted individuals and groups,” he said. “In presenting and publishing the findings of their work, the Truthy research team proudly described how the web service targeted conservative social media messages. Their presentations featured examples of what they found to be online political speech ‘abuses’ by supporters of these groups.”

A spokesman for Indiana University said that they are “aware of the letter but have no comment.”

You have to believe that there is more to the story than is being presented but that appears increasingly unlikely. The National Science Foundation appears to have spent $1 million to fund research to target and suppress speech by conservative commentators. The parallels to the IRS targeting of conservative taxpayers and 501(c)(4) groups is quite striking and alarming.

In some respect, the more alarming issue is that the researchers saw nothing wrong with this and indeed made a point of publicizing their activities in a book about the project. It seems as if there is no awareness on their part that such assaults on free speech are abhorrent to most Americans on both sides of the political divide.