A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're tweeting about pocket change. These people at Indiana University want to know if you know someone whose social media pants are on fire and antisocial. "To train our algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!"
What's in it for me?
What's in it for me?
The project stands to benefit both the research community and the public significantly. Our data will be made available via APIs and include information on meme propagation networks, statistical data, and relevant user and content features. The open-source platform we develop will be made publicly available and will be extensible to ever more research areas as a greater preponderance of human activities are replicated online. Additionally, we will create a web service open to the public for monitoring trends, bursts, and suspicious memes. This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.Since I have never gotten a good grasp on Twitter, I want Truthy to know that I am there for them on Facebook. When someone puts "subversive propaganda" on FB, I "hide this post." My "hate speech" antennae work pretty well, at no cost to you, the snoopy taxpayer.