On behalf of Hoosiers everywhere, I apologize for my home state’s least-crappy public university.
Elizabeth Harrington, Washington Free Beacon:
Internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a public records request from Indiana University about “Truthy” reveal that the school monitored “hate tweets” and shunned media outlets critical of the project after details of the federally-funded study were made public last year.
Officials called a Free Beacon reporter a “faux journalist” for reporting on the taxpayer-funded project designed to root out “misinformation” and detect “hate speech” on Twitter. Truthy, which received almost $1 million in financing from the National Science Foundation (NSF), was responsible for suspending conservative Twitter accounts and removed part of its website that monitored political users, following the Free Beacon’s reporting…
Internal emails reveal the university’s initial reaction to the Free Beacon’s report on the project in August, which detailed Truthy’s goals to identify “false and misleading ideas” on Twitter and “detect hate speech and subversive propaganda.” The article also revealed head researcher Fil Menczer’s support for numerous progressive groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Greenpeace, and MoveOn.org.
Read the whole thing. It’s nauseating. These fascist creeps mutter amongst themselves about how to deal with an “ultra-right wing” website — that’d be the Beacon — that actually wants to know what they’re doing with taxpayer dollars. As you’d expect from an institution of higher learning, and a project that wants to tell other people how to think, ultimately they decide not to talk to the press.
They also monitor “hate speech” that seems to encompass just about anything they don’t like. Here’s one example:
The so-called “hate tweets,” provided in a screenshot by Tracey Theriault, a social media manager, were mostly from a single user, Jim Terwiliger (@datsneefa). He tweeted: “University of Indiana helping to create fascist #policestate #traitors,” “wow, your school is #fascist as hell,” and “so you guys have become #fascists and #terrorists now?”
Hostile speech? Sure. Hate speech? Why? Just because this guy actually knows what the word “fascist” means, and it hurts their feelings?
So they “monitored” him. On your dime.
Monitor this, jerks:
Take a long walk off a short pier, @truthyatindiana.
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) January 15, 2015
Hate speech, see? Now I’m on their watchlist. Just another day in Utopia.