It certainly seems that most of the ringing over Truthy, the disturbing University of Indiana internet speech monitoring project funded by the National Science Foundation, is occurring in the brains of conservatives. Does that mean that one is a biased right-winger to think that the government has no business deciding what is “misuse” or “abuse” of social media—social media meaning “the communication of opinions, statements and ideas over the web”?

I don’t think so. I think it means that a troubling number of progressives, including a large constituency in the Obama administration, are convinced that the only way for their ideology to prevail is to marginalize opinions they don’t like as “hate speech,” restrict the First Amendment by demonizing opponents, and engaging in de facto censorship though harassment. Being opposed to that doesn’t make anyone right wing. It means that they reject the unethical theory that the ends justify the means, which at this point in our history seems to be flourishing primarily on the Left.

Did you miss the news about Truthy when it first provoked a flurry of news reports last fall, almost exclusively from conservative media? That’s because the mainstream media—surprise!—saw nothing at all alarming or even newsworthy about a government-funded project to “study how memes spread on social media,” to identify what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online,  to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” —in other words—mine—-to track down opinions and assertions on the internet that argue against Obama administration policies, progressive movements and the agendas of liberal-biased researchers.

When the conservative news service Washington Free Beacon blew the whistle on this under the radar and misbegotten project—a project that could only scratch the surface of being ethical if it was absolutely non-partisan and neutral in all respects, which in 21st century U.S. academia is impossible—the reaction at the University tells us everything we need to know.

The Free Beacon acquired emails from the University, and they revealed a partisan and ideologically slanted group of researchers determined to spin rather than enlighten. In the e-mails, University officials designated the  Free Beacon reporter of the story a “faux journalist” to justify their not cooperating with her investigation. Among other things, the Free Beacon report didn’t adopt the sanitized version of Truthy’s activities used in official releases, and had revealed head researcher Fil Menczer’s support for numerous progressive groups such as Organizing for Action, Greenpeace, and MoveOn.org.  “I told Fil tonight that we’re done talking to faux journalists like the woman from the Washington Free Beacon who started this mess,” Mark Land, associate vice president for public affairs and government relations at Indiana University, wrote in October. “I told him just to forward any further inquiries to me so I can summarily ‘no comment’ them.”

“FYI. Yesterday afternoon, a prominent conservative website published an article about the Truthy research project,” Thom Atkinson, a social media strategist at IU wrote to the communications team. “As a result, there has been a substantial amount of outrage expressed on Twitter about this threat to our freedom. Most of the comments I’ve seen are attributing the project to President Obama and that it is a new type of mass surveillance database. But we are getting some hate tweets, too. I just thought you should be informed.”

Among the Twitter messages identified as “hate tweets” were those of Jim Terwiliger (@datsneefa) who tweeted: “University of Indiana helping to create fascist #policestate #traitors” …“wow, your school is #fascist as hell,” and “so you guys have become #fascists and #terrorists now?” James P. Shea, senior director of planning and communications for Truthy, then declared Terwiliger worthy of further surveillance.“We’re certainly not the only organization (The White House, Chicago, police) he’s disparaging, apparently from Texas”

Oooh, Texas.

I guess that settles it: he’s a hateful bigot!

The Truthy team was instructed to “keep monitoring” Terwiliger’s tweets.

A graph of Twitter traffic using the Truthy hashtag, which prior to the Free Beacon report did not exist, was then circulated along with the warning, “UPDATE: Be warned! This item has now hit Fox News.”

Emails also reveal that the Indiana researchers dug into the background of FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai after he penned an op-ed criticizing the project.

Lest anyone doubt the orientation of the people running this project, attention should be paid to this quote from Menczer, who thought he was defending Truthy as promoting free speech in an article by one of the reporters Truthy did not regard as “faux.” article.

“If your opinions are based on things that are factually false, that hinders free speech because you have to be informed to have an engaged and useful conversation.”

Imagine what the members of Menczer’s favorite activist groups, like Move-On.Org, regard as “factually false.”

Some final observations:

1. If this doesn’t bother you, seek help. Reading more diverse political philosophers, pudits and news sources would help. Check your history of Russia, China, and other totalitarian governments. Re-read 1984.

2. It would also be instructive to review the Ethics Alarms archives and elsewhere for all the blatant lies, misrepresentations, false statistics and imaginary narratives created and circulated by the people and groups that the IU researchers regard as great Americans and benign….you know, about such topics as gender disparity in salaries, gun deaths, the deficit, the IRS scandal, the Affordable Care Act, what and who the NSA is monitoring, climate change, rape on college campuses, what sparked the Benghazi attacks, and “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”…just to name a representative few. Do you think any “false memes” on those matters are being flagged by the project? Would you like to buy a gold mine in Peru?

3. Every American, right, left, black, white, old, young, of any party and political persuasion, should fall down on their knees and thank God, Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster for those horrible, stupid, racist journalists who work for the so called “right wing media.” Without them, we would be completely unaware of such dangerous incursions on free speech and political dissent engineered by those good, compassionate progressives who know what’s best for us all. Google Truthy and observe how much coverage this project has received anywhere other than The Free Beacon. Do you think the public has a right to know about such a taxpayer funded project? That out government thinks that monitoring “social media pollution” of thought is a legitimate government function? That researchers with a strong political bias are charged with deciding what opinions don’t qualify as free speech?

4. No, I don’t trust the government, any government, and certainly not university scholars, to decide what “misinformation” is. Anyone who does has not been paying attention, is confident that the official assessment will be congruent with their own personal agendas, or is an idiot.

5. Progressives who are ethical and objective should be horrified at the turn their colleagues and compatriots are taking toward censorship, intimidation, doctrine, narrowness, arrogance and the suppression of healthy dissent. The signs are everywhere. Who is going to break ranks and show integrity and trust in the ideals the nation was founded on?

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Sources: Free Beacon 1, 2; The Daily Caller, Indy Star,

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts, and seek written permission when appropriate. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work or property was used in any way without proper attribution, credit or permission, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.