Lab+4

The article discuses a new online service (Thruthy) which is able to decontruct the origins of of an Internet meme and measure its thruthfullness. Currentlty it uses the Twitter Api to discover political memes. The idea is to provide a tool where people could verify if a political meme on Twitter is just a smeer campaign, or othwerwise un-true fact. Often times Internet memes grow rapidly in popularity, and can have a large impact on peoples perception of a particular politician or political party. These popular memes end up gaining high ranking search results, and people searching for accurate information may be misled by a mischevious meme. In politics, public perception is everything, and a simple 140 character tweet which goes viral with inaccurate information can have devestating effects on a political campaign.

With Thruthy, people can now use this service to 'verify' the validity of these political Internet memes. However, the way its validility is determined is by users clicking a 'thruty' button. This can cause several problems. First, the originators of a false meme could just send spam bots to the Thruthy website to 'click' the thruth button from multiple IP's, essentially countering what Thruthy is trying to do. Another problem is the memes are rated for truth by the public. This can easily create artificial or inflated statistics. The idea of a meme thruth verifier is indeed a good one, but relying simply on the publics opinion on whether it is true or not could possibly make an un-true meme apear as it is in fact true. It will be interesting to see how this service evolves, and its overal impact on smear campaigns on Twitter.