George Leef’s latest column for Forbes looks beyond typical wasteful government spending to focus on a more disturbing item within the federal budget.
[N]ow consider a research project that’s being funded by the National Science Foundation. The project purports to detect what the team of researchers label “social pollution” on the Internet. Specifically, the research focuses on Twitter use with the goal of learning how ideas spread through our culture.
Keep in mind that the mission of the National Science Foundation is to “promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare.” Putting aside the question whether there is any constitutional authority for broad brush spending for the “general welfare,” (Madison would have said there wasn’t), does this research come close to doing so?
The research team (professors at Indiana University) say that their investigation of Twitter usage will be useful in distinguishing between memes (ideas that propagate in popular culture) that arise “in an organic manner” and memes that are “manipulated” into existence. Even if we make the heroic assumption that analysis of Twitter accounts can enable them to make that distinction, how does it make anyone better off – other than the researchers themselves?
What takes this research out of the “what a waste of money” category and puts it into the “menacing government nosiness” category is the fact that the project, named “Truthy” after TV personality Stephen Colbert’s term “truthiness,” has a clear and chilling ideological slant. Truthy zooms in on tweets including hashtags like “teaparty” and estimates the “partisanship” of their senders.
This is reminiscent of the IRS’s “Be On the Lookout” words, which led to scrutiny of groups presumed to oppose the continuous expansion of the federal government. Using words like “constitution” or “tea party” led to exceedingly minute and slow review of applications for tax-exempt status by IRS officials. Similarly, in this project, only the “truthiness” or partisanship of Twitter users who aren’t on board with the reigning big government philosophy is to be examined.
