‘Truthy’ database

Project ‘Truthy,’ a program that detects and tracks misinformation, political smears and other social pollution issues on Twitter has been backed by the U.S. Federal government, which has given nearly $1 million to develop and implement the database. Researchers at Indiana University began in September 2010. The National Science Foundation heads the project. The project team says the service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.

Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models. To train our algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!