The Politicization of Everything is Nearly Complete

More news on that National Science Foundation "study" misnamed "Truthy" in which Indiana researchers claimed to be researching and exposing  “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,”. It won't surprise anyone remotely acquainted with academe to find out that the  “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas,” and “hate speech,” they were targeting would turn out to be primarily conservative. The authors even bragged of having Twitter suspend conservative authors.

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.

I wonder if they put that in the "Results of Previous NSF Funded Work" section of their next proposal; they might as well.