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Sept. 28, 2010 - BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - Astroturfers, Twitter-bombers and smear campaigners need beware this election season as a group of leading Indiana University information and computer scientists today unleashed Truthy.indiana.edu, a sophisticated new Twitter-based research tool that combines data mining, social network analysis and crowdsourcing to uncover deceptive tactics and misinformation leading up to the Nov. 2 elections.
a diffusion network created by Truthy.indiana.edu for the Twitter burst generated by Lady Gaga supporters toward John McCain following Gaga's comments about McCain's opposition to repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Combing through thousands of tweets per hour in search of political keywords, the team based out of IU's School of Informatics and Computing will isolate patterns of interest and then insert those memes (ideas or patterns passed by imitation) into Twitter's application programming interface (API) to obtain more information about the meme's history.
"When we identify a trend we go back and examine how it was started, where the main injection points were, and any associated memes," said Filippo Menczer, an associate professor of computer science and informatics. "When we drill down we'll be able to see statistics and visualizations relating to tweets that mention the meme and basically reconstruct its history."
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