False Ideas, Political Smears, and Social Pollution - Granite Grok

False Ideas, Political Smears, and Social Pollution

It seems like it was only yesterday that I was writing about a million-dollar federal grant to a University for the creation of a web service (called ‘Truthy’) that would scry into social media and identity suspicious memes and “false or misleading ideas,”  political smears and even social pollution.  All sorted and labeled as organic or not, as honest and open debate (or not), as defined by the government, filed away more securely than Lois Lerner’s Emails, and overseen by ‘experts’ dependent on funding from the federal government.

What could go wrong?

Ed Morrissey wrote about it again today, noting the major media’s disinterest in such an Orwellian undertaking, but his best observation comes from his column for The Week –The government is getting into the fact-checking business. Be very, very afraid.”

 

Truthy is the very definition of a top-down determination of the legitimacy of public speech. In a free society, citizens make those determinations for themselves. That is the organic approach to political speech, stemming from those who wish to engage in — or become spectators to — the contest of ideas, arguments, analyses, and proposals. Instead of allowing people to reach their own conclusions about those ideas and arguments, Truthy and the NSF instead appear to want to delegitimize the people who engage in those debates, which would in any other circumstance become the very kind of political smear that Truthy is supposedly designed to protect against.

 

As I observed (just yesterday), this appears to be little more than AttackWatch via a White Tower end around.

 

I see this as nothing more than the latest Attack Watch via Federal Grant, disguised as research, buried under a rock, with the word ‘Science’ written on it, probably in someone else’s blood.

 

The rock, as it turns out, is now major media’s ongoing disinterest, but if enough bloggers and new media outlets keep talking about it, sooner or later, Truthy will have to make mention of itself, or so you’d think.  And who would Truthy tell if it were truly seeking to address the ‘problem’ of False Ideas, Political Smears, and Social Pollution?

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