Federal Agencies Cracking Down on Memes
WASHINGTON, DC – Through a National Science Foundation grant, the federal government is bankrolling a database of “suspicious memes” and other “false and misleading” political ideas posted on social media. So far, nearly $1 million has been spent on the plan, which is based at Indiana University and known as “Truthy,” inspired by comedian Stephen Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.”
A major focus of the project is determining whether memes are created by professional political activists or regular internet users. Truthy’s “About” page suggests that such content distributed by the “shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns” is just one example of “political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution” lurking on social networks. The ultimate goal of the project, as explained in the NSF grant, seems to include suppression of this content: “[Truthy] could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”
Truthy is scheduled to begin reporting users to the FBI this fall. Users will remain in the federal database “forever, regardless of their innocence or guilt, or their intentions.” said lead FBI agent Paul Horner. “This database will be shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other agencies.
Facebook has also made a secret deal to report users to the FBI for creating memes and sharing them with other users. Calls to Facebook went unanswered Friday.
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you can count on the fact, yes fact, that the those targeted as false and misleading are the ones telling the truth. we who post also read posts and the most dangerous ones always have evidence. we also can distinguish the silly rants that make no sense from opinions based on fact. this is government totalitarianism at its worst.
America, Love it or Leave it, Comrade!!!
I wish this one were true.The cost of dirty tricks has gone way down and there are amateur Leni Riefenstahls on the left and the right (but mainly the right, alas) who are working at disinformation all the time. Line ‘em up and shoot ‘em.
The memes are somewhat effective tool to get the message across cuz it has cool graphic and catching info and they mostly are telling the truth!. I bet the reason why Federal Agencies are on this ridiculous witch-hunt over these meme-creators because the messages on those memes especially about Pres. Obama and his administration! They are mostly the truth. Seems like Pres. Obama, the Democrats and their supporters/voters just cannot stand to learn more and more truth are coming up to the surface thanks to those memes! People are getting smarter, wiser and got more informative because of those memes! And those liberals are getting stomped and restless. They don’t want us to know the truth, simply put!
You can put lots of informative stuff in one creatively-made memes!. People don’t have lots of time to read articles but this eye-catching memes, they are packed with information you wouldn’t find in common day-to-day news! There are a lot of good, informative memes out there in Tumblr world. Only a few are ‘leaked’ or shared on Twitter and fewer in Facebook.