Watch your tweets: Big Brother is monitoring.

• Author: Soave, Robby
• Position: Citings - Brief article

Tweeters, be alert: The feds are funding a program to monitor Twitter for political speech and determine the accuracy of the content.

Lead investigator Filippo Menczer, a professor of information studies at Indiana University, has received nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation for the project, which he calls "Truthy," after an old Stephen Colbert joke about dishonest politicians. In his abstract for the project, Menczer explains that his goal is to "mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas," "detect hate speech," and monitor the Web for "suspicious memes." Menczer, an Occupy Wall Street enthusiast, is concerned about partisan organizations "polluting" social media and passing off their astroturfing as real grassroots activity.

After the conservative Washington Free Beacon exposed the project's...