This week, President Obama launched a prominent social media campaign on behalf of net neutrality and urged the FCC to keep the Internet free and open. The man has gall. This is the same speech-squelcher in chief whose administration snooped on reporters; vengefully audited tea party pro-life activists and conservative election watchdogs and slow-walked the probe into the IRS witch hunt against them; entertained a government scheme to monitor story selection in TV newsrooms; and forked over $1 million to a researcher building a Twitter-snooping database. On Monday, House Committee on Science, Space and Technology Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, requested that the National Science Foundation send him all information about how and why the taxpayer-subsidized Truthy data-mining project came into existence. Its lead researcher is Filippo Menczer -- professor of informatics and computer science and the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing -- who is now on sabbatical at Yahoo! Labs. Menczer and Indiana University vehemently deny that Truthy is a political watchdog, a government probe of social media, an attempt to suppress free speech or limit political speech or develop standards for online political speech, a way to define misinformation, a partisan political effort, a system targeting political messages and commentary connected to conservative groups, a mechanism to terminate any social media accounts, or a database tracking hate speech.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 11:59:51 +0000
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