Research Objectives
Truthy is a system to analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter. The Truthy system evaluates thousands of tweets an hour to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavors. The data and statistics provided by Truthy are designed to aid in the study of social epidemics: How do memes propagate through the Twittersphere? What causes a burst of popularity?
We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution. While the vast majority of memes arise in a perfectly organic manner, driven by the complex mechanisms of life on the Web, some are engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns. Truthy uses a sophisticated combination of text and data mining, social network analysis, and complex networks models. To train our algorithms, we leverage crowdsourcing: we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!
System Architecture
Streaming Twitter data is acquired in real-time from the 'Gardenhose'. We match all tweets against a set of keywords to exclude tweets unlikely to contain political discussion, and extract all memes (@mentions, #hash_tags, and urls). We further isolate memes of interest by considering only those memes that have just undergone significant changes in volume, or those that account for a significant portion of the total volume (but perhaps haven't fluctuated very much). We insert these memes in the database, and use the Twitter API to get more information on each.
Research Papers
Please visit CNetS Webpage for details on publications and datasets
Team
Indiana University Center for Complex Networks & Systems Research
Principal InvestigatorsFil Menczer
Alessandro Flammini
Johan Bollen
Alessandro Vespignani
Research Team
Jacob Ratkiewicz
Bruno Gonçalves
Mark Meiss
Michael Conover
Alex Rudnick
Karissa McKelvey
Snehal Patil
Luca Aiello
Przemyslaw Grabowicz
Clayton Davis
Web Design
Ying Wang
Additional Collaborators
Ciro Cattuto, ISI FoundationTakis Metaxas, Wellesley College
Eni Mustafaraj, Wellesley College
André Panisson, University of Torino
José Javier Ramasco, ISI Foundation
Contact
Please contact us with feedback, comments, requests, and bugs. We may not be able to respond to all messages but we do read them!