You will be held accountable for tweeting about politicians?

Not sure if I'm reading this right.

It looks like there's a site that is going to sift through all the twitters in the world to find out how internet rumors start.

This is going to be done in order to stop misinformation from spreading on the internet about candidates for the November 2nd election.

Link to article

Researchers at Indiana University have just launched Truthy.indiana.edu, which they humbly declare a "a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections."

What the Truthy team does is sift through thousands of tweets to figure out how a certain meme was born and how it grew.

What are the ramifications of this, if any? How will this affect voting? Why is a university getting involved in politics? Any one care to share their thoughts?

Why is the headline so sensational?
This program is only going to look for deliberate misinformation and see where it's coming from, it's not going to delete them instantly or anything like that.

It just looks like a good tool to see where the information is coming from, wouldn't it be nice to see anti-global warming tweets and finding out they're coming from high up on the big oil chain? or other way around if you think global warmings a hoax.

reply to post by hippomchippo


I agree, this could be good. The question arises, who is to judge what is misinformation or not? Will this help us know what is true from false, or will it help minimize legitimate objections by finding an 'untrustworthy' source?

What also comes to mind is Shirley Sherrod, making a speech at the NAACP. Someone took that speech, posted it online, and it made her look racist. People were talking about how she wanted to sue whoever put that up there to ruin her name. To this day, some people still think she is racist, and some people think she's not. If one were to tweet about that, would it be considered disinformation? Even more to think about, if you were to post something that could be 'damaging' to a political career, something like a conspiracy, could you be held accountable for libel?

Originally posted by againuntodust
reply to post by hippomchippo

 

I agree, this could be good. The question arises, who is to judge what is misinformation or not? Will this help us know what is true from false, or will it help minimize legitimate objections by finding an 'untrustworthy' source?

What also comes to mind is Shirley Sherrod, making a speech at the NAACP. Someone took that speech, posted it online, and it made her look racist. People were talking about how she wanted to sue whoever put that up there to ruin her name. To this day, some people still think she is racist, and some people think she's not. If one were to tweet about that, would it be considered disinformation? Even more to think about, if you were to post something that could be 'damaging' to a political career, something like a conspiracy, could you be held accountable for libel?

Nobodies going to be judging information.
It's about tracing information to a source, nothing else.
YOU and ME get to decide if we trust a certain source over another.

Yeah, who is going to decide what is the truth and what is disinformation.

This sounds awful familiar.

For some reason Cass Sunstein comes to mind.

Originally posted by saltheart foamfollower
Yeah, who is going to decide what is the truth and what is disinformation.

This sounds awful familiar.

For some reason Cass Sunstein comes to mind.

YOU ARE!
I'm going to guess you haven't read the article.
It shows the source and flow of a meme via twitter, nothing more.