Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Truthy?
2. What is a meme?
3. What is a diffusion network?
4. What is Astroturfing?
5. How can I tell what a meme is about?
6. What is the interactive network?
7. What is meme co-occurrence?
8. What do the movies mean?
9. How does Truthy predict political affiliation?
10. How can I tell if a meme is truthy?
11. Is this site liberal or conservative?
12. Where do you get this data?
13. How do you detect interesting memes?
14. What is sentiment analysis?
15. What technology do you use?
16. Where can I read more?

What is Truthy?
Truthy is a research project that helps you understand how memes spread online. We collect tweets from Twitter and analyze them. With our statistics, images, movies, and interactive data, you can explore these dynamic communication networks.

The name Truthy comes from a term coined by Stephen Colbert, truthiness, which describes claims that feel like they ought to be true, but aren't necessarily. Our first application was the study of astroturf campaigns in elections; ideas spread by astroturf techniques are typically truthy.

What is a meme?
A meme is an idea, value or pattern of behavior that is passed from one person to another by imitation. In the Truthy system, a meme can be a #hashtag, @mention/reply, URL, or phrase.

What is a diffusion network?
A diffusion network is the graph obtained by connecting user nodes with edges that represent the spread of a meme. Edges can represent retweets (in blue) or mentions (in orange). We run a component analysis algorithm and visualize the largest connected component from the diffusion network for each meme.

What is astroturfing?
Astroturfing denotes political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but are disguised as spontaneous, popular "grassroots" behavior. The term refers to AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

How can I tell what a meme is about?
The detail page for each meme provides a live Twitter stream of tweets for that meme, which can be helpful in understanding the conversations around a meme.

What is the interactive network?
The interactive network is a visualization of some of the users from the diffusion network. The system picks users to display based on its prediction of their influence within the network. Larger circles represent users who have been retweeted more often. A thicker line between two circles represents more interaction between those two users. Circles may be colored according to our prediction of that user's political affiliation.

What is meme co-occurence?
Co-occurrence is when two or more memes are present in the same tweet. The co-occurrence diagram on the meme detail page shows the top ten memes that co-occur with a given meme. Each line that passes from one meme to another shows how often that meme co-occurs with the others.

What do the movies mean?
They show a meme's activity over time. Truthy can generate three different kinds of movies. Co-occurrence movies show which other memes are co-occurring over the selected time, so you can get a sense about which topics people were discussing together. The two other kinds of movies visualize the retweet and mention networks, so you can see who was retweeting whom (about the particular hashtag), or who was talking to whom.

How does Truthy predict political affiliation?
The process is entirely automated; we have trained a classifier as described in our paper Predicting the Political Alignment of Twitter Users; because the classifier was trained on English-speaking users discussing US politics, we only predict political positions of users speaking English and discussing memes related to US politics.

How can I tell if a meme is truthy?
At this stage, the site does not yet provide an explicit assessment of 'truthiness'. That is an ongoing research effort; we plan to use various features, including feedback from users, as input to to classification algorithms. In the meantime, the site is available as a service to the public. Hopefully the various views, statistics, and visualizations that we provide of the data will help you make up your own mind about particular memes.

Is this site liberal or conservative?
We are a non-partisan research group. The memes we track are the results of automatic detection algorithms based on a large and comprehensive set of keywords including the names of all candidates, districts, and other terms related to the upcoming elections. The mix of the thousands of memes that you can see on the site is simply a reflection of the active chatter in the Twittersphere.

Where do you get this data?
We collect and process real time data using the public Twitter API.

How do you detect interesting memes?
The Truthy system focuses on memes that have undergone significant changes in relative volume and those that account for a significant portion of the total activity on Twitter.

What is sentiment analysis?
Sentiment analysis is the practice of using an automated metric to estimate the emotional content of text. Particularly, we use a custom implementation of the OpinionFinder algorithm, which finds emotionally-charged words in the stream of tweets and calculates a ratio of positivity to negativity.

What technology do you use?
We use a variety of tools to bring you the Truthy service. The overall effort is directed using our own custom scripting language called Klatsch. This language uses the Gephi Toolkit for graph layout. We also rely on a number of other publicly available tools, including Boost, Django, Google Chart Tools, ImageMagick, JQuery, d3.js, MPlayer, MySQL, and the Twitter APIs.

Our thanks to the authors of these tools for making our site possible! Finally we gratefully acknowledge CNETS and NSF for funding the computing infrastructure that hosts the Truthy service.

Where can I read more?
You can find details, publications, and datasets in the about page and the project page.