Five things to know about 'Truthy'

Members of the House Science Committee are ramping up scrutiny of a university project that studies trends on Twitter. Here are five things to know about the project:

1. The Indiana University computer science department samples real-time public tweets to identify and study trending topics, political and otherwise. According to its initial grant abstract in 2011, the researchers seek to "explore why some ideas cause viral explosions while others are quickly forgotten."
2. The federal government's National Science Foundation issued a grant to the project in 2011. It has been given $919,917 since 2011, with the grant set to expire in June 2015. The project is also funded through the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
3. The project has explored the partisan differences in social media use and the spread of misinformation online, among a number of broader issues.
4. The Indiana University computer science department said the project is not a "political watchdog, a government probe of social media, an attempt to suppress free speech, a way to define 'misinformation,' a partisan political effort, [or] a database tracking hate speech." "There is a good dose of irony in a research project that studies the diffusion of misinformation becoming the target of such a powerful disinformation machine."
5. "Truthiness" won the Word of the Year award in a Merriam-Webster online survey in 2006 after TV host Stephen Colbert coined the term during his pilot episode of "The Colbert Report."