Fast Talk: How Truthy Maps Influence On Twitter

Meet Fil Menczer, the Twitterologist behind the political meme-analyzing site, Truthy. Yes, the name was inspired by Stephen Colbert.

Fil Menczer has quite a title. He is “a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing.” For our purposes, though, he’s a leading Twitterologist, as the creator of the Stephen Colbert-inspired Truthy, a site that tracks how memes--often, specious political memes--spread on Twitter. Fast Company caught up with Menczer on the occasion of an update of the Truthy site, which is now more user-friendly.

FAST COMPANY: What was Truthy originally?

FIL MENCZER: Truthy was born mainly to look at “astroturfing,” or the abuse of social media to give the impression that there is a grassroots campaign where in fact there isn’t. After the 2010 elections were over, we used a lot of the data we collected to start asking questions about how information propagates in social media. Can we find regularities in these patterns? Can we understand the mechanisms that underlie these shapes?

And how has Truthy recently changed?

We got funded by a National Science Foundation grant to make Truthy into a public tool, something citizens can use. For example, reporters like yourself can access the data we have and really interact with the data to get a better handle on what we’re observing. We designed this in collaboration with the School of Journalism here.

So walk me through what we can learn about a given meme, say the hashtag #mitt2012.

We have access to a sample of Twitter’s data called the garden hose. It’s about a 5-8% sample, we think. When you search #mitt2012 on our site, you get data from our database regarding all the tweets that included that hashtag. For all those tweets, every one has a user that generated it. Then it may have been retweeted by some other users; when that happens, we connect those two nodes. Some nodes are sma...

[Source: Fast Company]