Media furor confronts NSF-funded study of social-media dynamics
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8075
“Truthy,” explains Indiana University’s webpage for “information diffusion research,” is a “project to study how memes spread on social media. A meme is a transmissible unit of information, such as a hashtag, phrase, or link.” Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert’s favorite word—truthiness—has been defined as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” Each side in the growing media controversy over the Truthy project cites Colbert and accuses the other of perpetrating truthiness.
Truthy project researchers have introduced their effort:
The focus of this research project is understanding how information propagates through complex socio-technical information networks. Leveraging large-scale public data from online social networking platforms, we are able to analyze and model the spread of information, from political discourse to market trends, from news to social movements, and from trending topics to scientific results, in unprecedented detail.
We study how popular sentiment, user influence, attention, social network structure, and other factors affect the manner in which information is disseminated. Additionally, an important goal of the Truthy project is to better understand how social media can be abused.
To rebut critics, the Indiana researchers have also asserted that their project is not “a political watchdog” or “a government probe of social media” or “an attempt to suppress free speech” or “a way to define ‘misinformation’” or “a partisan political effort” or “a database tracking hate speech.”
But some critics aren’t buying:
- • In the 22 October Washington Times opinion piece “The feds’ ‘truthy’ new chill on free speech,” Fox News analyst Andrew P. Napolitano , a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, charged that “when the feds get into the business of monitoring speech . . . it is a nightmare. [Truthy] is part of the Obama administration’s persistent efforts to monitor communication and scrutinize the expressions of opinions it hates and fears.”
- • Forbes.com published a commentary headlined “Most government-sponsored research is simply wasteful, but ‘Truthy’ is menacing to boot.” It charged that the research project “has a clear and chilling ideological slant” in that it “zooms in on tweets including hashtags like ‘teaparty’ and estimates the ‘partisanship’ of their senders.”
- • The Daily Caller alleged that “government wants to censor social media ” and that Truthy “seeks to mine Twitter data and categorize users’ politically related tweets into convenient government definitions .”
Under the headline “NSF has no business using taxpayer dollars to study political messages on Twitter,” House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) issued a press release placing Truthy alongside other allegedly “questionable NSF grants,” but asserting that “this one appears to be worse than a simple misuse of public funds.” The release announced that the committee is investigating Truthy.
The release also introduced three earlier media attacks on the project. At the Washington Free Beacon, the 25 August piece “Feds creating database to track ‘hate speech’ on Twitter” appears to have originated the public challenge. It included an accusation of political bias: “‘Truthy’ claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority.”
On 28 August, Fox News published “‘1984' in 2014? Fed gov’t funds ‘Truthy’ database to monitor hate speech, suspicious memes.” The posting contains a link to a sarcastic four-minute Fox News TV discussion of Truthy in which analyst Peter Johnson Jr., attacking the claimed nonpartisan nature of the project, offers examples of hashtags that the project classifies as far right, including #foxnews, #mediabias and #patriots. He contrasts those with hashtags that Truthy classifies as centrist, including #democrats and #dnc (for Democratic National Committee). At one point the energetically derisive Johnson conjectures that thanks to Truthy, this question could arise for a typical Twitter-using Fox viewer: “Are you an enemy of the state?”
Most prominently, though, Smith’s press release introduced Ajit Pai’s 18 October Washington Post op-ed , headlined in the paper version “A ‘truthy’ study: #wasteful #Orwellian.” Pai holds a Republican seat on the Federal Communications Commission. The political publication The Hill reported some context:
Earlier this year, Pai drew public attention to an FCC study of editorial decisions in newsrooms, which prompted a major backlash from people concerned about the government meddling with the freedom of the press. After the outrage, the FCC ended up killing the study. In his Washington Post op-ed, Pai wrote that the same principle in that case also applies with the Truthy project.
Here’s that principle-affirming passage from Pai’s op-ed:
Truthy’s entire premise is false. In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading or a political smear. Nor should the government be involved in any effort to squint for and squelch what is deemed to be “subversive propaganda.” Instead, the merits of a viewpoint should be determined by the public through robust debate. I had thought we had learned these lessons long ago.
Now, I do understand the motivation behind this scheme, even though I disagree with it. To those who wish to shape the nation’s political dialogue, social media is dangerous. No longer can a cadre of elite gatekeepers pick and choose the ideas to which Americans will be exposed. But today’s democratization of political speech is a good thing. It brings into the arena countless Americans whose voices previously might have received inadequate or slanted exposure.
Pai’s next sentence supplied Smith’s press-release headline: “The federal government has no business spending your hard-earned money on a project to monitor political speech on Twitter.”
Other voices aren’t buying the criticism. A few have defended the Truthy project, amplifying what the researchers themselves have written on their periodically updated rebuttal webpage “The truth about Truthy.”
The Columbia Journalism Review had offered an analysis earlier, under the headline “How misinformation goes viral: a Truthy story: Conservative media’s reaction to an Indiana University project shows how shoddy information can quickly become an online narrative.” CJR declared that Fox News had promoted “a conspiratorial narrative that soon metastasized throughout social media and the conservative blogosphere,” spreading “the Orwellian gospel to nearly 3.5 million estimated viewers, not including those online.”
One CJR passage in particular merits quoting:
“We were completely blindsided,” said project leader Filippo Menczer, adding that CJR . . . was the first media outlet to speak with him. Menczer had just finalized plans with his research team to analyze how Monday’s story in the Washington Free Beacon—"patient zero” in contagion parlance—had become a viral meme in and of itself.
“It’s weird to do an analysis on something that’s happening to us,” he said.
By understanding the way this sort of information organically spreads across the network, researchers hope to be able to distinguish more inorganic patterns. They have recently analyzed “political astroturfing"—campaign or partisan groups tweeting under the guise of grassroots activity—reported on the digital evolution of Occupy Wall Street, created framework to differentiate between spontaneous and manufactured Twitter memes, and studied whether information goes viral by spreading between communities or within them. Such knowledge carries potentially huge implications as more political activity and social interactions move online.
Despite Truthy’s body of work, the headline atop the Free Beacon’s story . . . read, “Feds creating database to track ‘hate speech’ on Twitter.” The piece itself was less blunt in its conclusions on the project. But author Elizabeth Harrington made sure to highlight its Stephen Colbert-inspired name and Menczer’s previous support for liberal political groups—a fact he makes publicly available online. Harrington did not respond to a request for comment.
“The headlines are saying something that is completely false and fabricated,” Menczer said. “We are not defining hate speech. We are not tracking people. We don’t have a database.”
None of those facts stopped readers from spreading the story.
On 22 October, the Washington Post published “No, the National Science Foundation is not building an Orwellian surveillance nightmare” by George Washington University political scientist Henry Farrell . He wrote:
As it happens, I know quite a bit about the Truthy project . . it’s a very well-regarded academic research project without any ulterior political motive. Truthy is an NSF-funded project, run by computer scientists at Indiana University to study social diffusion on Twitter and the Internet. As anyone could figure out from a few moments of clicking around on the project’s web site, it is not an evil Orwellian exercise in Big Brother surveillance. The rumor that it is something scary seems to have started with a discredited and disingenuous article at the Daily [sic]Beacon.
Farrell quotes Menczer and his Truthy colleague Alessandro Flammini at length. They note that “observations about the underlying patterns of information diffusion could help the public to make better informed decisions about whether a message links to malware that could take over their computer, or discover whether their interlocutor is in reality an automatic ‘bot’ pre-programmed to disrupt debate.”
They also explain why they see all the ingredients of a misinformation campaign in the treatment they’ve been receiving:
A first wave of attacks in August was ignited by a story in the Washington Free Beacon. It made very misleading allegations, ignored our body of research and made no effort to verify the accuracy of the allegations by contacting any of the researchers. The story was then picked up as fact by many venues, including Fox News. The current, second wave of attacks, ignited by Pai’s op-ed in the Washington Post, also disregarded the clarifications we posted . . . and the debunking of the original story published in Columbia Journalism Review. Commissioner Pai did not contact us to inquire about our research. Our research methodologies do allow you to see how these flawed interventions have influenced online discussion.
Farrell also reports an argument from Menczer and Flammini that, in other circumstances, some of their conservative critics might themselves make:
As social media become more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, they become more attractive targets of abuse. For instance, social bots have been reportedly used to suppress free speech by disrupting communication among protesters in Iran and Russia. Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong have to deal with efforts to infect their computers with malware. If we’re to understand this abuse, and help people stop it, we need good research. That is how good research can help improve democratic debate—not by judging which political argument is better or worse, but by identifying attempts to systematically abuse technology in order to drive people out of online conversation.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.