It’s good to know Indiana University is using tax dollars so wisely.

Elizabeth Harrington of the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Indiana University Monitored ‘Hate Tweets’ in Aftermath of Truthy Scandal

Internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon through a public records request from Indiana University about “Truthy” reveal that the school monitored “hate tweets” and shunned media outlets critical of the project after details of the federally-funded study were made public last year.

Officials called a Free Beacon reporter a “faux journalist” for reporting on the taxpayer-funded project designed to root out “misinformation” and detect “hate speech” on Twitter. Truthy, which received almost $1 million in financing from the National Science Foundation (NSF), was responsible for suspending conservative Twitter accounts and removed part of its website that monitored political users, following the Free Beacon’s reporting.

“I told Fil [Menczer] 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 on Oct. 23. “I told him just to forward any further inquires to me so I can summarily ‘no comment’ them.”

This prompted Robert Schnabel, dean of IU School of Informatics, to quip that Truthy could be used to identify “faux” news outlets.

“Good to know and we appreciate being able to rely on you to make the call on who falls in that category,” Schnabel wrote. “(Maybe Truthy needs a ‘faux journalist detector app’).”


 
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