The Hill – A Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission is warning about a government-backed study that “seems to have come straight out of a George Orwell novel.”

Commissioner Ajit Pai — one of two Republicans on the five-member commission — warned in aWashington Post op-ed on Saturday about a National Science Foundation study of people’s communications on Twitter, which he said amounted to government monitoring of people’s speech.

“In the United States, the government has no business entering the marketplace of ideas to establish an arbiter of what is false, misleading or a political smear,” he wrote.

“The federal government has no business spending your hard-earned money on a project to monitor political speech on Twitter.”

The “Truthy” study, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is being developed by Indiana University researchers to study how popular ideas and jokes spread throughout popular culture.

One focus is the spread of “political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution,” researchers said.