Leader McCarthy blasts ‘Truthy’ Twitter project

The furor in the House GOP over a university project studying Twitter trends is growing, as House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) added his name to the list of critics. 

McCarthy on Thursday afternoon became the highest profile Republican to come out against Indiana University’s “Truthy” project, which is partly funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

{mosads}”Government funding of this project is not only a waste during a time of budgetary constraints, it is also a danger to free society better suited for a George Orwell book than a country founded on the idea of liberty,” he said. 

The project is aimed at understanding how information spreads online. It samples real-time public tweets to identify and study trending topics, political and otherwise. An important area of interest for the project is “how social media can be abused.”

Much of its early work explored the partisan differences in social media use and the spread of misinformation online, and has broadened since then

McCarthy’s blog post, “#killingfreespeech,” on his leadership website echoes concerns from others, like Republican Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai and House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who said his panel is investigating the grant. 

“Most Americans would agree that the federal government should not encroach on free speech or play any role in determining what classifies as ‘social pollution’ and ‘political smears,’ — other subjects Truthy wishes to monitor,” McCarthy said. 

The committee will investigate the Truthy grant as well as “other questionable government-funded research projects,” according to McCarthy. 

The 3-year-old university project received mild criticism in August but that grew among Republicans after Pai highlighted it in a Washington Post op-ed over the weekend. 

The NSF has given the project $919,917 since first offering the grant in 2011. 

Researchers have pushed back on Pal’s characterization, saying it is not a government probe of social media, and it is funded like thousands of other university projects. 

But Republicans have taken particular issue with a portion of its 2011 grant abstract that proposes creating a service that “could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.”