I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. People from the left think that all the people from the right are evil and vice versa. Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. That's why I built "Their news".
With "Their News" you discover news from the entire political spectrum without any filter bubbles.
My recommendation is that you try out different hot political topics and compare the most extreme political positions. It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.
I thought about if I could somehow monetize the website, but I read somewhere (I think it was in the book "Range" by David Epstein) that it is probably impossible to do so. In the book, the author spoke about a study where researchers offered to give the participants a small cash amount if they read some articles that is in direct opposition to their beliefs. The participants declined. This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .
Behind the scenes:
It uses the media bias rankings from adfontesmedia as well as a news API by newscatcher (they were awesome and helped me a lot. Go check them out!). You are presented with a slider with a few dots. Each dot represents a news outlet (e.g. Reuters, Forbes etc). The news articles are shown below the slider always come from news outlets close to the slider. The entire project is 100% open-source (but contains a lot of spaghetti code ) on my github page (https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews).
I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have.
Cheers
Philipp
It's been fun playing around with it, thanks for putting this together, it's nice work.
I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.
Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors.
On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al...
That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.
I wanted to keep the website "clean" (whatever that means) that's why I did not specifically states that their.news is mainly built for US news. But I agree that this could have been made more clearer.
Regarding the al jazeera thing: I was thinking about adding news with foreign languages and then using e.g. deepl.com to translate all the news on the fly and make it searchable. This would be really cool, but would require a pretty big restructuring of the project.
> I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.
I haven't seen anyone say that it's "quite on the left" in any sphere other than the partisan right.
Edit: Even OP's project seems to represent the modest left-skew accurately. Can you help me understand where your "dead-centre"-on-OP's-platform v. "quite on the left" interpretations came from?
People aren’t great at distinguishing comment and editorial from the news.
It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation.
I'd say that it's essentially all editorial at this point.
It strikes me as several waves peaking at the same time. One being normal civilization cycles that result in political violence, another being a death of professional standards in reporting. To be fair, some eras of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers were just as manipulative as the modern ones.
A practice I try to stick to is to read non-Anglosphere (and particularly non-US) newspapers only. For one thing, the rest of the world appears to keep on keepin' on and isn't overly concerned with the minutiae of US palace politics or the Chauvin trial.
I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.
> I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.
This only reinforces the meta-point. Everyone's sharing their perception without citing anything. So far, the few research entities looking into media bias are all asserting (with randomly sampled data points as best as I can tell) that The Guardian presents reliable news with a left-leaning opinion skew, whereas self-selected commenters (i.e. those who chose to reply to my initial comment) here are asserting from their own perception that The Guardian's "basically the left-wing paper," "editorial is usually pretty far left," and "quite on the left."
There's value in learning the methodologies employed by these analysis firms and think tanks, deciding whether you agree with how their analysis is performed, and upon deciding, either performing the same (time consuming) analysis yourself or delegating to the group(s) who's methods you most align with. That's largely why I'm fine with Ad Fontes. I haven't looked into how AllSides draws their conclusions, but either way, they're both in agreement re: The Guardian.
This is a healthier way to conclude how a news outlet leans compared to just going by our own perception.
Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception out there that the Guardian's comment section in particular is pretty left wing particularly on identity politics stuff. Even if the core paper is pretty central - e.g. It broadly supported the Blairites over the Corbynites over past few years.
It would be really interesting to have some visual data on their comments section here compared to other papers e.g. of numbers of articles on say class, race, gender and some kind of ranking of their left wing / right wing strength.
And likewise for regular reported core news/articles.
As it stands there might be a lot of bias in people's individual views- including this comment.
Still it is interesting to compare articles. It's a cool site.
Your comment about the Guardian prompted me to check and it turns out there is a comprehensive page on Wikipedia. Who knew? The Guardian isn't on it but the Daily Mirror is - not sure I understand why since I would pretty much agree with you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_left-wing_publicatio...
I'm not sure what the methodologies are. There is no objective "left" or "right", the two camps are just defined in relation to a supposed center. Where you place a newspaper depends on your perception of what the center should be- and that's a political, not a factual choice- which depends on the moment, the culture, etc.
I've checked the bias analysis of some Guardian articles in one of your sources. They strike me all as pretty far left- if not in the contents, in the choice of subjects. Consider that it's perfectly possibile to compose a newspaper entirely of dry, factual articles about, for example, episodes of worker's abuse or of immigrant criminality. Each article is absolutely unbiased, the newspaper is absolutely biased.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ don't know what to tell you. It took me all of "ad fontes methodology" in google to find the links above, and their approach is objectively stronger than your or my gut feeling/opinion.
And if you were to ask for my opinion, I'd say that The Guardian leans ever so slightly right, but that's why I rely on objective methods to rank media bias rather than my own gut.
Sorry, you're right, I should have googled. Those methodologies don't strike me as particularly insightful- in the end what they try to do is to give some structure to the guts feelings of the (however chosen) reviewers.
Anyway, to go back to the original point, Ad Fontes puts the Guardian solidly in the left (22% to the left). Looking at a sample of rated articles, only 2 out of 25 are classified as imperceptibly to the right, while a few get close to the "hyper-partisan left" field.
Looking at specific ratings, an article titled "Scandal! Horror! Biden's press-briefing notes prompt rightwing outrage" (featuring a mocking tone and a clear indication of the "enemy" right in the headline) is given a -9 bias, the same rating of the newspaper as a whole. And "skews to the left" feels like an understatement.
(Ah, looking at the media bias chart, turns out that the New York Post (whose articles are sometimes censored by Facebook) would be less biased that the Guardian. Interesting.)
I see that CNN is in the middle-of-the-road section.
Search 'Trump' (naturally, it's currently the best test case) and you get:
"Former President Donald Trump repeated familiar lies about the 2020 election and insulted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Saturday when speaking to Republican National Committee donors gathered for the first time since Trump’s defeat, a person in the room told CNN."
'familiar lies'
'insulted'
'a person in the room told'
... What would the proper ultra-centrist way of characterising lying and insulting Mitch McConnell be? Like, are you expecting them to use euphemisms, or just not reporting on former presidents lying?
I was thinking about that. It's not so much being a 'centrist' but being able to tell the difference between reporting and interpreting. The best case would simply be a transcript.
I would start by saying that Donald Trump made claims about the election and finish up by stating the actual things that he said about Mitch McConnell. Being an adult, I'm quite able to figure out the context and severity of what he said. In addition, I'd probably use better sourcing than 'some unnamed guy we talked to'.
Like I said upstream somewhere, it would be fun to rewrite news articles to report news rather than to interpret news. Save the prose for editorials.
We haven't had real news reporting in the US in a long time. The family and I watch BBC America for something more akin to news here, as the major "news" orgs in the US, are spittle inflected hyper-partisans. All of them.
This deeply saddens me, but I suppose it was inevitable.
> In addition, I'd probably use better sourcing than 'some unnamed guy we talked to'.
So, I see a lot of complaints about this, but everyone uses unattributed sources. It is realistically the only way to report on politics, unless you just want to print press releases, which is really more the realm of wire services. This is how it has always worked. (Even then you have to be careful; politicians often make press releases by leak...)
I don’t see an issue with pointing out that a lie is a lie.
CNN and its ilk haven't been news for a very long time. Moreover, classifying them as "middle of the road" is insulting to those of use who are centrist, middle of the roaders.
I’m impressed. This really shows the utility of lying often, loudly, publicly and repeatedly in shaping public opinion and perception. I stopped reading any British newspaper but the Guardian in the early 2000s but the idea that it’s any less partisan than the Fabian Society...
In US at least, the population skews substantially left. Younger folks in the US lean quite left but don't vote.
While Republicans and Democrats are represented fairly evenly in elections, in population surveys that include non-voters Democrats have a ~20% edge.
For example, if only people under 45 voted in the last election, Biden would have won over 400 electoral votes. Perhaps getting the most in history.
So the definition of left leaning varies depending on whether you include all voters or the whole population.
This accounts for some of the reason why conservatives dismay media, tech, science, media, and schools being "run by the left". They are. The working and school population is younger and also votes less, and is very liberal compared to party policy positions.
The parties pander to the average voter, and news orgs to the average American. That's why so many news orgs "lean left"
Personally, I think it is valuable to understand that the thought process behind political views. I may not agree with anything they say but I may be able to understand their reasoning behind it, which is already a big step.
Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.
I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs...
I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is...
Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do.
Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction.
Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc...
TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.
Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
They banned quite a but more than that.
* Bans for mentioning a news article that mentioned the site of Hunter Biden's laptop leak.
* Bans for disagreeing with the mask policies.
* Bans for posting COVID-19 studies that are different than what is mainstream.
* Bans for posting articles of a politician that is also an admin.
* Bans for discussing election fraud.
* Bans for upvoting content.
That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped.
Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.
If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting results?
Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences.
This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so.
I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.
I think it depends whether you are following more mainstream opposite-position sources or following sites whose entire purpose revolves around hating the outgroup. You allude to this with the reference to "politically engaged".
A place like the various incel forums tend to degrade into being about hating womem, coontoon genuinely hated "niggers" and the more extreme social justice places genuinely do hate cis "white" men. But if you can find less extreme places that have another purpose other than hating the outgroup, you'll be able to converse with more reasonable people who aren't caught up in virtue/hate spirals. Find the average incel/racist/sjw and they'll have more nuanced views and can actually be talked to without them just repeating how much they hate you.
Because if you actually stop to look at 'their' side and compare the news stories to 'your' side, you'll find both sides are full of exactly the same kind of loaded subjective language, usually written in the same adversarial tone and distort truth in some way to fit an agenda.
In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side.
> In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side.
This is not how media bias works. What you're referring to is how propaganda works (well, one type anyway: Where you report the opposite of the truth in order to confuse people into thinking, "I don't know who to believe anymore").
That is not actually true. Not in terms of how the person doing reading will perceive it. And not in terms of how world works.
Real world is not perfectly symmetrical. It is not composed of two sides in the first place. In the second, even if you roughly split it, it rare ends up as "both are the same". That ideology of perfect center is just emotionally convenient model.
Worse is watching otherwise intelligent friends parrot the crap you see coming out of the propaganda arms of each party or party faction.
They accept what they hear uncritically, as it feeds into their own beliefs (confirmation bias), without questioning the basis/interpretation.
I've found for me, the lowest anxiety manner in which to consume news, is generally, to not consume it. In most cases, news in the US is propaganda (left, right, doesn't matter). It is a set of partial observations passed through ideological filters and summarized according to the desires of the presenters. There are no US based "news" organizations that do not have stakes in the outcome of their blather.
I actially prefer reading the news from „the other side”.
I know very well news from „my” side from friends and the Facebook/twitter bubble, but I want to know the other viewpoints as well.
Even if 70-90% of it is pure crap, I found that often „my” side is just as guilty of ommiting parts of information, and presenting things with sometimes extreme bias.
I was having lunch with a friend of mine recently, and he remarked that of his friends he had, I was the closest to being a Republican and he wondered what news site I read.
He was surprised to learn that my go-tos were generally to the left of what he read, for exactly the reason you describe.
If a story is getting attention across the spectrum, 'the opposition' is always more likely to capture the facts that you might miss.
Very cool website! However, I am not sure if ad fontes media is a good source of media bias ratings. Their methodology doesn't even name all the dimensions used to rate sources and their "training manual" provides very little useful guidance (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...). It doesn't seem like they are doing any inter-rater reliability testing.
I don't find any peer-reviewed journal articles using the rating either.
So you're using outlet/organization level bias ratings to assign bias ratings to individual articles on a specific topic? Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)?
For example, when I looked at the articles in the middle of the slider, it seemed that they were more of a mix of left and right leaning articles, not necessarily middle ground articles (and seemed to be somewhat more left skewed articles than right, but varried by subject).
There is still a bug where you get news from all sites the first time you search for a topic. Just adjust the slider slightly and you should see the correct results.
The bias definetly varies by topic, but I just simplified it so that all articles from one specific outlet have the same bias. Big oversimplification but should (roughly) work.
I'm sure they are eventually updated, but making a general judgment per news source to show individual articles means it will occasionally be wrong and misleading for the reader. The name alone, "their news", suggests an us vs. them mentality that we could use less of these days.
For once I think machine learning would be suitable for this. Have something like GPT-3 process individual articles and produce a bias number. I think this is how https://www.improvethenews.org/ works, and at a quick glance, does a much better job at classifying.
But honestly? We shouldn't bother. Consume every new information with a critical mind, and don't expect editorials to do the thinking for you. There are no bias sliders for social media posts, where most information comes from these days, and we need to teach critical thinking instead of picking what we want to agree with or not.
Their news was chosen b.c. it's simple and because the point of the website is to inform yourself about their news (i.e. other peoples' news). Thanks for pointing it out though. I did not think about that.
I had a version that tried to do sentiment analysis on the article text and display an emoji below it. The idea being that one a certain issue you might only see positive emojis on the right and only negative ones on the left (or vice versa). Buuut it did not really work out so I scrapped it again.
this is cool. i would actually like to see just the news like this, vs searching for a topic. rather than going to a particular outlet for my news, aggregate a center-ist list of news articles, so I can visit that instead of various news outlets directly
You are probably right that monetizing is not feasible, but I’m principal I feel compelled to point out that almost no website monetize is the “average“ person, which is exactly the kind of person that a psychological study is trying to characterize.
Think about it like this: I’m sure a psychological study where to find that The average person is completely uninterested in a text only website about technology so I’ve never heard of. Yet here we, and I bet a few hundred of us would pay a few dollars a month for HN if that was their business model
>I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme.
No doubt true. The reason is the important problem.
>Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue.
Filter bubbles are a thing no doubt and certainly dont help but imagine your average person at the bar talking to his friends. They have a filter as established by tables IRL. Or imagine 100 years ago where someone had 1 newspaper to read and that was the most they knew about the world.
>It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.
I called this 15 years ago with google news. They kind of just aggregated the news and didnt put any slant or bias. You could see for yourself the lies made up by the journalists.
>This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .
I would say your implementation is nicer than https://www.improvethenews.org/ from MIT but you're right. People are opposed to reading outside their bubble.
If I may make a recommendation. Dont try to fix this problem the way you are doing it.
Dont try to show the news but rather let people rate and search via authors. Do like Elon musk states and let people call journalists out on their bullshit. Have rankings on the site showing how rottentomatos the news is.
I saw that website after I started their.news but when I tried to use it it was rather confusing to me. Also it seemd as if their focus was more on providing ratings to the specific articles than on quickly searching and comparing news. But you are of course right that both projects are very similar.
Yes, I am using https://newscatcherapi.com/. I was in close contact with them and they helped me out a lot. I think they are also opening up their api to more developers so make sure to check them out!
This reminds me of a 1980s magazine called World Press Review. WPR would take a number of topics every month. For each topic they would print a number of editorials from various points of view. Each editorial was accompanied by the source's masthead and a short note about the source's political perspective.
For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialist, labor, etc) rather than words like "left" or "right".
What I liked about WPR was that you got a sense that the world was more complex than a simple one-dimensional binary left/right, black/white, true/false.
I believe that left/right language obscures this complexity. Worse, labels like "extreme left" and "leans right" and assert that there is a "center" or a default. "Centrism" or "moderate" is really just a cluster of political positions, though they may be the most common ones.
The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince.
Update: WPR lives on as Worldpress.org but seems to now carry mostly original content rather than reprints.
Good point. Since I use adfontsmedia rating and wanted to have a very simple website I chose to reduce adfontes 2 axis to a single axis, which is, as you have pointed out heavily oversimplified.
The default "center" position was chose simple because at this point there are the most news outlets.
As a developer I can appreciate that you have to start somewhere, and even left/center/right does a real service in our political climate. I'm glad you chose a source that at least has two axes! Thanks for putting this project together - I'll be sharing it with friends!
> The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince.
Not familiar with the reference, but I get the idea, and mostly agree. But particularly in places like the US where there are only two “real” parties it seems that most of the groups will ally with each other, even if otherwise vehemently opposed and form two vague alliances which you could perhaps classify as left or right if you so wished.
This is even more frightening to me as I realize you can’t trust anyone’s words and see certain factions “courting” other ones (and perhaps in my view, very dangerous ones) in attempt to fight the other side while still trying to claim ideas incompatible with those they’ve allied with and help provide power to.
Not sure if you are affiliated with https://newscatcherapi.com/ but I just wanted to note that the "privacy bot" is horrible from a UX standpoint and likely brakes the GDPR as well. 1) if you decline, it pops up separately on every website. 2) it doesn't allow users to separately opt-in and opt-out to tracking 3) the wording is not clear on the privacy aspect 4) it's linked to a chat nad newsletter
left/right doesn't make much sense IMHO, it's way too polarizing in itself. you want at least two dimensions, like liberal/authoritarian policies and libertanian/socialist economics.
that said i love the 'pick your bias' at the top. hits dead center on target. could even be the title of the service itself.
When leftist media platforms like Facebook ban news about BLM marxist founder buying mansions in white area is this liberal or authoritarian/fascist approach?
It'd be libertarian, because libertarians believe that corporations should have the right to do basically whatever they want that doesn't physically infringe on another's own freedoms to do whatever they want.
Facebook banning content on "their yard" does not hurt anyone because it's their property. Therefore on a spectrum this would be Right - Libertarian.
Conservative on the political spectrum states:
Right-wing political ideologies are characterized by conservative views. Since the political compass asks us to isolate the left/right binary for economic preferences, right-wing economic policy often favors reducing taxes, limiting government spending, and fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses.
Key: "fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses"
By controlling what Facebook can/can't ban that's imposing a restriction, so the opposite of that makes this right-wing since FB is being allowed to censor whatever they choose.
Libertarian: People that hold a libertarian political identity often focus on the freedom of the individual. They believe that personal freedom should be maximized and they support the idea that government authority and control over their citizens should be displaced.5 Equality is of utmost importance for libertarians.
^ This, except lib/right consider companies/capitalism an extension of citizenship and give them more rights.
The left would probably demand more fairness/equalness since the left-wing side of the political spectrum says:
left-wing economic policy often favors higher taxes for wealthy individuals, stronger regulations for businesses, and government spending on social infrastructure.
So authoritarian/left would demand higher taxes and stronger regulations possibly it would also give the government final say in everything posted on facebook and require facebook to divulge the identity and data of any member it requests data on, court order or not.
As an aside I consider myself libertarian/left - as in I'd like less statist power (weaker federal govt, more freedom for individuals, but more oversight/regulations on businesses and corporations so they can't become countries unto themselves like Amazon and I believe egalitarianism is the most noble pursuit because we have enough resources and science to support everyone on earth - considering everything we waste daily, so why should anyone have to suffer if there's a way for them not to within our means if we just collectively desired that outcome?).
That's an interesting interpretation and I like it, even if I disagree!
There is nothing libertarian about censoring someone.
Sure, you have the right to do that, given they're on your private property (on Facebook) but that screams authoritarianism: it's like Facebook is his own little country ruling on his citizens and limiting their freedom.
Now, the act of advocating for Facebook to be able to do what it is currently able to do is libertarian. An authoritarian measure would be, as you mention, regulating Facebook to force them to publish anything or giving exactly the same space / visibility to people of opposing viewpoints.
As an another aside, as an anarcho-capitalist (right libertarian), I've a lot of respect for your political viewpoint - that would be ideal but I think it's unachievable.
Egalitarianism - or equality of outcomes - can't happen unless you force it with an authoritarian government or you have perfect people that share voluntarily everything. On top of this, as soon as you have an authoritarian government you'll start having corruption (we don't have perfect people) which will favour government officials over normal people, throwing in the bin your egalitarianism.
Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes, I think we should focus on reaching equality of opportunity; given we have imperfect people we need a system of incentives to keep people broadly aligned with what society wants. Therefore there should be no government (which is outside the market and corruptible) and all services (including protection, healthcare, lawmaking) should be provided by the market. I think this will bring us as close to egalitarianism as we can possibly get.
> How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all business models, national borders, etc?
The general answer is, by mutual agreement among the affected persons, and by refusing to interact at all with people who cannot be trusted to abide by mutual agreements.
For a more detailed treatment, see, for example, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom.
Of course there is no simple, short path from where we are now to any feasible anarcho-capitalist society; the idea that we need governments to solve problems is becoming more and more firmly entrenched, even in the face of the terrible track record of governments at actually solving problems.
> libertarians believe that corporations should have the right to do basically whatever they want that doesn't physically infringe on another's own freedoms to do whatever they want
No, libertarians believe that actual people should have that right (subject to the non-aggression principle, which is actually more than just "doesn't physically infringe on another's freedoms"). Corporations are not actual people.
To a libertarian, corporations are tools that individual people can use if they want to work together to accomplish some common purpose. But most "corporations" in today's society are no such thing; certainly Facebook is not. Most stockholders in corporations today have no actual interest in what the corporation does or what common purpose it is serving; they view their stock as just a money-making asset. (Indeed, most "stockholders" in individual corporations today are mutual funds, not individual investors.) None of this is libertarian; it is due to government manipulation of the financial system and government regulation of corporations and investments. In a truly libertarian world something like Facebook could not even exist.
It's definitely an authoritarian measure as it involves a central entity interfering between two third parties (Facebook blocks a newspaper from talking to you).
It can also be seen as having a left bias because it seems to imply that owning money and buying mansions is inherently bad (why would they hide it, otherwise?) and therefore that rewarding people for their work (even when you don't agree with the nature of their work) is wrong.
Liberalism is a tricky word, because Modern Liberalism or Social Liberalism (or just Liberalism in the USA) are almost the opposite of Classical Liberalism.
The Political Compass avoids the terms and use:
- Authoritarian (Fascism) - Libertarian (Anarchism): from "everything is controlled by a central entity" to "everything is decentralised"
- Left (Communism) - Right (Neo-liberalism): from "everything is nationalised", to "everything is provided by the market"
At least on mobile, if you manually move the slider left or right, then make a new search, the slider doesn't reset position though the results go back to "center." Got pretty confused when it was selecting far left but showing Breitbart stories.
Also, whatever fuzzing you use seems to break with the word "socialism," instead returning social media and socializing stories.
This is a noble goal, but when I clicked on the website a few times (admittedly, only looked at about 10 articles) I ended up with a very "left" view. I do not think it is skewed by personal views -- you could see clearly who is considered evil just from the title.
Also, not to knock down the effort, but I think this can cause more outrage, by showing that the other side "is wrong" than grow sanity. Just due to the fact that mainstream media on both sides seems to grow discord. However you select those articles, results may be the same :(. My 2c.
That is a valid consern. I get the rating info from adfontesmedia, so I do not judge the poltical views of each outlet and what is condisered to be left/center/right. There is no moderation what so ever (that can be a good or bad thing). But the website definelty still contains a few bugs so that might be the issue you are running into.
Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. I am not quite sure I fully understand.
Not sure about your sorting filter, refreshing the "center" sources is giving me some OAN, Epoch Times, New York Post, Breitbart, Daily Kos, Gateway Pundit - maybe "center" is a mix of everything? It should probably be just sources from the top center 1/3 of the chart at adfontesmedia
Looking at opposing views can help bridge the gap and encourage reasonable compromises. But in order to achieve this, the presentation need to be rational and (as much as possible) non-confrontational. Unfortunately, most current articles focus on enraging the supporters, not on informing the public.
Showing such articles to either supporters or opponents is unlikely to help them understand each other. This is not a criticism of your side; but a criticism of most articles in the mainstream media. Look at old (30+ years ago) publications for comparison. We need to get back the similar quality of journalism; then showing people different views on the same topic can help us understand each other and reach some acceptable consensus. My 2c.
And I saw the same thing here in brazil. Where on the beach people play a lot of full team football for hour-long games. Context matters here and snark and politics doesn't play well without it
UI is confusing, IMO. Coming to the website I don't understand what I supposed to do. I clicked that bias line randomly, and most of the time headlines were from lefty sources. The idea is cool, but to be honest, it's hard to do it better then RealClearPolitics already does it.
I hoped that this would put side by side articles about the same subjects but with different spins. I find myself comparing breitbart/foxnews/nytimes/guardian quite often.
I agree with your points. I still think the idea and implementation is right ( it is informative and if you live in US, you can figure it out ). It is kinda funny, because I was trying to explain a friend in US political formations in the old country the other day and even though we have 2 major parties there too, in US they would both be realistically considered left-wing.
> "Left" and "right" news sources, as conventionally understood, would show a wildly asymmetrical data plot.
Isn't that what's literally represented on the site though? The dots in the slider are not symmetrical. They're "wildly asymmetrical", as it were.
As soon as I saw the slider with the dots my immediate thought was, "Wow, they don't have an extreme left dot! This could be legit!" Because--despite what common far right media tends to refer to as, "the far left"--there actually doesn't seem to be any "far left" news sources.
I mean, where's the news websites that are constantly suggesting the people seize the means of production and nationalize all industries? Where's the TV news channel with endless talking heads referring to all private businesses as tyrannical for not spreading all profits across all employees?
It would be interesting to have such a news site for comparison purposes because I think it would give every day folks a taste of what "far left" actually is (i.e. not CNN which is center-right yet ask any Fox News watcher what constitutes "far left" and they'll say CNN, New York Times, etc).
This a pretty cool idea although the problem of defining 'right' and 'left' sources obviously rears it's head (who will watch the watchers).
It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words and phrases. Get a couple of dozen friends to help out and you could do your own private newspaper.
It doesn't deal with the problem of purposefully unreported stories or your own bias creeping in, but would be a fun thing to try.
Take a look at the methodology used by Ad Fontes Media (which this site uses as part of the "left vs right" scale). It's fairly scientifically rigorous, given an inherently subjective topic. My only critique would be that a larger team of analysts might be better.
Your ad-hominem attack of a response was written 2 hours after one of the site authors acknowledged a bug that could have caused the GPs confusion. Please do give your fellow readers and commenters more credit for their intelligence.
Yeah, try searching "white supremacy" on the default (middle) view.
The top article is Breitbart whining about an article from Cosmopolitan of all places.
I also see articles from OAN, Fox News, and Conservative Review... given that this was the search it (randomly) gave me when I opened the site, I don't have an awfully high estimation of its "middle" view.
Squad was an interesting search term in a disappointing way. The results are something related to soccer except for the far right. Searching Black Lives Matter produced mostly right leaning complaints, which I guess isn’t surprising.
I was having trouble thinking of things to search that didn’t produce unbalanced results.
interesting idea, but implementation is all sorts of weird, the scale of left and right is unclear, and more importantly changes from one search to another, instead of having vague terms like leaning left and right, you could put logos of different medias on that scale, and let your readers compare different articles to each other, so you would get some fresh data
I think the degree of left/right is influenced by the makers of the rating API and I don't like it. Notice how there are several sights near the "right" but very few beyond "skews left" (at least for the search term "Biden"). I would rather divide it evenly into 2 categories left / right and maybe add some further categories like establishment / non-establishment.
Make categories that are invariant to political alignment. This continuous line is not.
That's a pretty nice thing you did here, but i'm questioned by what you call "left". Left means abolition of private property (sharing of resources) so i was expecting more left-wing publications like (just to name a few) crimethinc.com unicornriot.ninja itsgoingdown.org theantimedia.com. Some like jacobinmag.com or democracynow.org appear on the project's README but i don't find anything from there on the site.
Is there a place detailing the data sources for their.news if it's different than the adfontesmedia list? Also for people not aware that list itself was very sketchy in my view. From another comment of mine:
> Sometimes i read articles from Jacobin Mag. I don’t follow it and don’t support it, however it pops up sometimes in my “feeds”. I was surprised to see it marked as really unreliable, while all articles i read there were long-form well-sourced articles. In particular, this article about US military courts is marked as highly unreliable, why? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-...
What's your source for debunking my definition? What's your own definition? According to social sciences, and according to Wikipedia:
> Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in critique of social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated."
> Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracy and the social market to the nationalization of the economy and central planning, to the anarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council- and assembly-based self-managed anarchist communism.
Social-liberal keynesian economics, according to that definition, is very-moderate left politics (center-left), whereas marxism or anarchism are more on the left. See also politicalcompass.org to get more information on this topic you obviously don't know about despite trying to lecture me.
Also related, in the field of software engineering, we use the word "copyleft" precisely as in "abolition of private property" because copyright ensures monopoly on ideas and their expression (private property), whereas copyleft ensures they belong to everyone (collective property).
As an end note, please note that abolishing private property doesn't mean taking away people's possessions/belongings. We anarchists refer to that as usage-based property (not sure about translation, we use "propriété d'usage" in french) where property is based on needs and not on the dogmatic worship of a piece of paper (property title). That is a central disagreement with the marxists who believe a central State and its police ("dictatorship of the proletariat") should be in charge of deciding what you can or can't use, which is effectively the same as private property with the State as owner/enforcer of everything.
I don't think I've 'debunked' let alone 'lectured' but the sources you've found yourself don't support the assertion 'left means abolition of private property'. It's simply far too narrow an interpretation of a much broader label.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadI have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. People from the left think that all the people from the right are evil and vice versa. Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. That's why I built "Their news". With "Their News" you discover news from the entire political spectrum without any filter bubbles. My recommendation is that you try out different hot political topics and compare the most extreme political positions. It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.
I thought about if I could somehow monetize the website, but I read somewhere (I think it was in the book "Range" by David Epstein) that it is probably impossible to do so. In the book, the author spoke about a study where researchers offered to give the participants a small cash amount if they read some articles that is in direct opposition to their beliefs. The participants declined. This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .
Behind the scenes: It uses the media bias rankings from adfontesmedia as well as a news API by newscatcher (they were awesome and helped me a lot. Go check them out!). You are presented with a slider with a few dots. Each dot represents a news outlet (e.g. Reuters, Forbes etc). The news articles are shown below the slider always come from news outlets close to the slider. The entire project is 100% open-source (but contains a lot of spaghetti code ) on my github page (https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews).
I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Cheers Philipp
I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.
Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors.
On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al...
That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.
Regarding the al jazeera thing: I was thinking about adding news with foreign languages and then using e.g. deepl.com to translate all the news on the fly and make it searchable. This would be really cool, but would require a pretty big restructuring of the project.
Who? Both Ad Fontes and AllSides say that The Guardian merely skews to the left, and Ad Fontes' analysis concludes that it's one of the "most reliable". (Ad Fontes' analysis here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliabil...)
I haven't seen anyone say that it's "quite on the left" in any sphere other than the partisan right.
Edit: Even OP's project seems to represent the modest left-skew accurately. Can you help me understand where your "dead-centre"-on-OP's-platform v. "quite on the left" interpretations came from?
https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png
It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation.
https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/
It strikes me as several waves peaking at the same time. One being normal civilization cycles that result in political violence, another being a death of professional standards in reporting. To be fair, some eras of broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers were just as manipulative as the modern ones.
A practice I try to stick to is to read non-Anglosphere (and particularly non-US) newspapers only. For one thing, the rest of the world appears to keep on keepin' on and isn't overly concerned with the minutiae of US palace politics or the Chauvin trial.
This only reinforces the meta-point. Everyone's sharing their perception without citing anything. So far, the few research entities looking into media bias are all asserting (with randomly sampled data points as best as I can tell) that The Guardian presents reliable news with a left-leaning opinion skew, whereas self-selected commenters (i.e. those who chose to reply to my initial comment) here are asserting from their own perception that The Guardian's "basically the left-wing paper," "editorial is usually pretty far left," and "quite on the left."
There's value in learning the methodologies employed by these analysis firms and think tanks, deciding whether you agree with how their analysis is performed, and upon deciding, either performing the same (time consuming) analysis yourself or delegating to the group(s) who's methods you most align with. That's largely why I'm fine with Ad Fontes. I haven't looked into how AllSides draws their conclusions, but either way, they're both in agreement re: The Guardian.
This is a healthier way to conclude how a news outlet leans compared to just going by our own perception.
Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception out there that the Guardian's comment section in particular is pretty left wing particularly on identity politics stuff. Even if the core paper is pretty central - e.g. It broadly supported the Blairites over the Corbynites over past few years.
It would be really interesting to have some visual data on their comments section here compared to other papers e.g. of numbers of articles on say class, race, gender and some kind of ranking of their left wing / right wing strength. And likewise for regular reported core news/articles.
As it stands there might be a lot of bias in people's individual views- including this comment.
Still it is interesting to compare articles. It's a cool site.
I've checked the bias analysis of some Guardian articles in one of your sources. They strike me all as pretty far left- if not in the contents, in the choice of subjects. Consider that it's perfectly possibile to compose a newspaper entirely of dry, factual articles about, for example, episodes of worker's abuse or of immigrant criminality. Each article is absolutely unbiased, the newspaper is absolutely biased.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/white-paper-multi-analyst-rati...
> They strike me all as—
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ don't know what to tell you. It took me all of "ad fontes methodology" in google to find the links above, and their approach is objectively stronger than your or my gut feeling/opinion.
And if you were to ask for my opinion, I'd say that The Guardian leans ever so slightly right, but that's why I rely on objective methods to rank media bias rather than my own gut.
Anyway, to go back to the original point, Ad Fontes puts the Guardian solidly in the left (22% to the left). Looking at a sample of rated articles, only 2 out of 25 are classified as imperceptibly to the right, while a few get close to the "hyper-partisan left" field.
Looking at specific ratings, an article titled "Scandal! Horror! Biden's press-briefing notes prompt rightwing outrage" (featuring a mocking tone and a clear indication of the "enemy" right in the headline) is given a -9 bias, the same rating of the newspaper as a whole. And "skews to the left" feels like an understatement.
(Ah, looking at the media bias chart, turns out that the New York Post (whose articles are sometimes censored by Facebook) would be less biased that the Guardian. Interesting.)
Search 'Trump' (naturally, it's currently the best test case) and you get:
"Former President Donald Trump repeated familiar lies about the 2020 election and insulted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Saturday when speaking to Republican National Committee donors gathered for the first time since Trump’s defeat, a person in the room told CNN."
'familiar lies' 'insulted' 'a person in the room told'
The Weekly World News has taken over the world.
I would start by saying that Donald Trump made claims about the election and finish up by stating the actual things that he said about Mitch McConnell. Being an adult, I'm quite able to figure out the context and severity of what he said. In addition, I'd probably use better sourcing than 'some unnamed guy we talked to'.
Like I said upstream somewhere, it would be fun to rewrite news articles to report news rather than to interpret news. Save the prose for editorials.
We haven't had real news reporting in the US in a long time. The family and I watch BBC America for something more akin to news here, as the major "news" orgs in the US, are spittle inflected hyper-partisans. All of them.
This deeply saddens me, but I suppose it was inevitable.
So, I see a lot of complaints about this, but everyone uses unattributed sources. It is realistically the only way to report on politics, unless you just want to print press releases, which is really more the realm of wire services. This is how it has always worked. (Even then you have to be careful; politicians often make press releases by leak...)
I don’t see an issue with pointing out that a lie is a lie.
While Republicans and Democrats are represented fairly evenly in elections, in population surveys that include non-voters Democrats have a ~20% edge.
For example, if only people under 45 voted in the last election, Biden would have won over 400 electoral votes. Perhaps getting the most in history.
So the definition of left leaning varies depending on whether you include all voters or the whole population.
This accounts for some of the reason why conservatives dismay media, tech, science, media, and schools being "run by the left". They are. The working and school population is younger and also votes less, and is very liberal compared to party policy positions.
The parties pander to the average voter, and news orgs to the average American. That's why so many news orgs "lean left"
How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?
Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.
I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is...
Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do.
Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction.
Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc...
TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.
It just so happened that some large conservative subs were engaging in that behavior.
Curious, isn't it?
The place has turned toxic.
You however don't hear complaining on HR when leftist subs are closed.
Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.
Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these words refer to, precisely and explicitly (what entities do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so.
I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.
A place like the various incel forums tend to degrade into being about hating womem, coontoon genuinely hated "niggers" and the more extreme social justice places genuinely do hate cis "white" men. But if you can find less extreme places that have another purpose other than hating the outgroup, you'll be able to converse with more reasonable people who aren't caught up in virtue/hate spirals. Find the average incel/racist/sjw and they'll have more nuanced views and can actually be talked to without them just repeating how much they hate you.
In some cases you can literally take a story from one side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the other side.
https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
This is not how media bias works. What you're referring to is how propaganda works (well, one type anyway: Where you report the opposite of the truth in order to confuse people into thinking, "I don't know who to believe anymore").
> https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
You know this video is satire, right? It's not real yet I'm getting a hint here that you might have taken it at face value.
Real world is not perfectly symmetrical. It is not composed of two sides in the first place. In the second, even if you roughly split it, it rare ends up as "both are the same". That ideology of perfect center is just emotionally convenient model.
Worse is watching otherwise intelligent friends parrot the crap you see coming out of the propaganda arms of each party or party faction.
They accept what they hear uncritically, as it feeds into their own beliefs (confirmation bias), without questioning the basis/interpretation.
I've found for me, the lowest anxiety manner in which to consume news, is generally, to not consume it. In most cases, news in the US is propaganda (left, right, doesn't matter). It is a set of partial observations passed through ideological filters and summarized according to the desires of the presenters. There are no US based "news" organizations that do not have stakes in the outcome of their blather.
I know very well news from „my” side from friends and the Facebook/twitter bubble, but I want to know the other viewpoints as well.
Even if 70-90% of it is pure crap, I found that often „my” side is just as guilty of ommiting parts of information, and presenting things with sometimes extreme bias.
He was surprised to learn that my go-tos were generally to the left of what he read, for exactly the reason you describe.
If a story is getting attention across the spectrum, 'the opposition' is always more likely to capture the facts that you might miss.
I don't find any peer-reviewed journal articles using the rating either.
Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.
For example, when I looked at the articles in the middle of the slider, it seemed that they were more of a mix of left and right leaning articles, not necessarily middle ground articles (and seemed to be somewhat more left skewed articles than right, but varried by subject).
The bias definetly varies by topic, but I just simplified it so that all articles from one specific outlet have the same bias. Big oversimplification but should (roughly) work.
That'd be great but would require someone to review each article, which is probably out of scope for this one-person project.
I'm sure they are eventually updated, but making a general judgment per news source to show individual articles means it will occasionally be wrong and misleading for the reader. The name alone, "their news", suggests an us vs. them mentality that we could use less of these days.
For once I think machine learning would be suitable for this. Have something like GPT-3 process individual articles and produce a bias number. I think this is how https://www.improvethenews.org/ works, and at a quick glance, does a much better job at classifying.
But honestly? We shouldn't bother. Consume every new information with a critical mind, and don't expect editorials to do the thinking for you. There are no bias sliders for social media posts, where most information comes from these days, and we need to teach critical thinking instead of picking what we want to agree with or not.
I completely agree.
Think about it like this: I’m sure a psychological study where to find that The average person is completely uninterested in a text only website about technology so I’ve never heard of. Yet here we, and I bet a few hundred of us would pay a few dollars a month for HN if that was their business model
No doubt true. The reason is the important problem.
>Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue.
Filter bubbles are a thing no doubt and certainly dont help but imagine your average person at the bar talking to his friends. They have a filter as established by tables IRL. Or imagine 100 years ago where someone had 1 newspaper to read and that was the most they knew about the world.
>It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.
I called this 15 years ago with google news. They kind of just aggregated the news and didnt put any slant or bias. You could see for yourself the lies made up by the journalists.
>This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .
I would say your implementation is nicer than https://www.improvethenews.org/ from MIT but you're right. People are opposed to reading outside their bubble.
If I may make a recommendation. Dont try to fix this problem the way you are doing it.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-...
Dont try to show the news but rather let people rate and search via authors. Do like Elon musk states and let people call journalists out on their bullshit. Have rankings on the site showing how rottentomatos the news is.
For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialist, labor, etc) rather than words like "left" or "right".
What I liked about WPR was that you got a sense that the world was more complex than a simple one-dimensional binary left/right, black/white, true/false.
I believe that left/right language obscures this complexity. Worse, labels like "extreme left" and "leans right" and assert that there is a "center" or a default. "Centrism" or "moderate" is really just a cluster of political positions, though they may be the most common ones.
The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince.
Update: WPR lives on as Worldpress.org but seems to now carry mostly original content rather than reprints.
The default "center" position was chose simple because at this point there are the most news outlets.
Not familiar with the reference, but I get the idea, and mostly agree. But particularly in places like the US where there are only two “real” parties it seems that most of the groups will ally with each other, even if otherwise vehemently opposed and form two vague alliances which you could perhaps classify as left or right if you so wished.
This is even more frightening to me as I realize you can’t trust anyone’s words and see certain factions “courting” other ones (and perhaps in my view, very dangerous ones) in attempt to fight the other side while still trying to claim ideas incompatible with those they’ve allied with and help provide power to.
that said i love the 'pick your bias' at the top. hits dead center on target. could even be the title of the service itself.
Facebook banning content on "their yard" does not hurt anyone because it's their property. Therefore on a spectrum this would be Right - Libertarian.
Conservative on the political spectrum states: Right-wing political ideologies are characterized by conservative views. Since the political compass asks us to isolate the left/right binary for economic preferences, right-wing economic policy often favors reducing taxes, limiting government spending, and fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses.
Key: "fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses"
By controlling what Facebook can/can't ban that's imposing a restriction, so the opposite of that makes this right-wing since FB is being allowed to censor whatever they choose.
Libertarian: People that hold a libertarian political identity often focus on the freedom of the individual. They believe that personal freedom should be maximized and they support the idea that government authority and control over their citizens should be displaced.5 Equality is of utmost importance for libertarians.
^ This, except lib/right consider companies/capitalism an extension of citizenship and give them more rights.
The left would probably demand more fairness/equalness since the left-wing side of the political spectrum says:
left-wing economic policy often favors higher taxes for wealthy individuals, stronger regulations for businesses, and government spending on social infrastructure.
So authoritarian/left would demand higher taxes and stronger regulations possibly it would also give the government final say in everything posted on facebook and require facebook to divulge the identity and data of any member it requests data on, court order or not.
As an aside I consider myself libertarian/left - as in I'd like less statist power (weaker federal govt, more freedom for individuals, but more oversight/regulations on businesses and corporations so they can't become countries unto themselves like Amazon and I believe egalitarianism is the most noble pursuit because we have enough resources and science to support everyone on earth - considering everything we waste daily, so why should anyone have to suffer if there's a way for them not to within our means if we just collectively desired that outcome?).
There is nothing libertarian about censoring someone.
Sure, you have the right to do that, given they're on your private property (on Facebook) but that screams authoritarianism: it's like Facebook is his own little country ruling on his citizens and limiting their freedom.
Now, the act of advocating for Facebook to be able to do what it is currently able to do is libertarian. An authoritarian measure would be, as you mention, regulating Facebook to force them to publish anything or giving exactly the same space / visibility to people of opposing viewpoints.
As an another aside, as an anarcho-capitalist (right libertarian), I've a lot of respect for your political viewpoint - that would be ideal but I think it's unachievable. Egalitarianism - or equality of outcomes - can't happen unless you force it with an authoritarian government or you have perfect people that share voluntarily everything. On top of this, as soon as you have an authoritarian government you'll start having corruption (we don't have perfect people) which will favour government officials over normal people, throwing in the bin your egalitarianism.
Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes, I think we should focus on reaching equality of opportunity; given we have imperfect people we need a system of incentives to keep people broadly aligned with what society wants. Therefore there should be no government (which is outside the market and corruptible) and all services (including protection, healthcare, lawmaking) should be provided by the market. I think this will bring us as close to egalitarianism as we can possibly get.
How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all business models, national borders, etc?
The general answer is, by mutual agreement among the affected persons, and by refusing to interact at all with people who cannot be trusted to abide by mutual agreements.
For a more detailed treatment, see, for example, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom.
Of course there is no simple, short path from where we are now to any feasible anarcho-capitalist society; the idea that we need governments to solve problems is becoming more and more firmly entrenched, even in the face of the terrible track record of governments at actually solving problems.
No, libertarians believe that actual people should have that right (subject to the non-aggression principle, which is actually more than just "doesn't physically infringe on another's freedoms"). Corporations are not actual people.
To a libertarian, corporations are tools that individual people can use if they want to work together to accomplish some common purpose. But most "corporations" in today's society are no such thing; certainly Facebook is not. Most stockholders in corporations today have no actual interest in what the corporation does or what common purpose it is serving; they view their stock as just a money-making asset. (Indeed, most "stockholders" in individual corporations today are mutual funds, not individual investors.) None of this is libertarian; it is due to government manipulation of the financial system and government regulation of corporations and investments. In a truly libertarian world something like Facebook could not even exist.
Liberalism is a tricky word, because Modern Liberalism or Social Liberalism (or just Liberalism in the USA) are almost the opposite of Classical Liberalism.
The Political Compass avoids the terms and use:
- Authoritarian (Fascism) - Libertarian (Anarchism): from "everything is controlled by a central entity" to "everything is decentralised" - Left (Communism) - Right (Neo-liberalism): from "everything is nationalised", to "everything is provided by the market"
Also, whatever fuzzing you use seems to break with the word "socialism," instead returning social media and socializing stories.
Interesting project though.
Also, not to knock down the effort, but I think this can cause more outrage, by showing that the other side "is wrong" than grow sanity. Just due to the fact that mainstream media on both sides seems to grow discord. However you select those articles, results may be the same :(. My 2c.
Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. I am not quite sure I fully understand.
Looking at opposing views can help bridge the gap and encourage reasonable compromises. But in order to achieve this, the presentation need to be rational and (as much as possible) non-confrontational. Unfortunately, most current articles focus on enraging the supporters, not on informing the public.
Showing such articles to either supporters or opponents is unlikely to help them understand each other. This is not a criticism of your side; but a criticism of most articles in the mainstream media. Look at old (30+ years ago) publications for comparison. We need to get back the similar quality of journalism; then showing people different views on the same topic can help us understand each other and reach some acceptable consensus. My 2c.
Only if you give them your email address, apparently. What's that about?
https://www.theflipside.io/archives
1. "Left" and "right" on their own are too vague to be useful.
2. There is a difference between party affiliation/apologism and political views.
3. "Left" and "right" news sources, as conventionally understood, would show a wildly asymmetrical data plot.
4. There are multiple dimensions to political views.
Isn't that what's literally represented on the site though? The dots in the slider are not symmetrical. They're "wildly asymmetrical", as it were.
As soon as I saw the slider with the dots my immediate thought was, "Wow, they don't have an extreme left dot! This could be legit!" Because--despite what common far right media tends to refer to as, "the far left"--there actually doesn't seem to be any "far left" news sources.
I mean, where's the news websites that are constantly suggesting the people seize the means of production and nationalize all industries? Where's the TV news channel with endless talking heads referring to all private businesses as tyrannical for not spreading all profits across all employees?
It would be interesting to have such a news site for comparison purposes because I think it would give every day folks a taste of what "far left" actually is (i.e. not CNN which is center-right yet ask any Fox News watcher what constitutes "far left" and they'll say CNN, New York Times, etc).
Co-founder of NewsCatcher. The author uses our News API to power this website.
In case you want to do something similar, we did a fully free news api for all non-commercial use-cases (no credit card required):
https://free-docs.newscatcherapi.com/#introduction
It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words and phrases. Get a couple of dozen friends to help out and you could do your own private newspaper.
It doesn't deal with the problem of purposefully unreported stories or your own bias creeping in, but would be a fun thing to try.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...
The top article is Breitbart whining about an article from Cosmopolitan of all places.
I also see articles from OAN, Fox News, and Conservative Review... given that this was the search it (randomly) gave me when I opened the site, I don't have an awfully high estimation of its "middle" view.
I was having trouble thinking of things to search that didn’t produce unbalanced results.
Make categories that are invariant to political alignment. This continuous line is not.
Shows different headlines for the same stories
Is there a place detailing the data sources for their.news if it's different than the adfontesmedia list? Also for people not aware that list itself was very sketchy in my view. From another comment of mine:
> Sometimes i read articles from Jacobin Mag. I don’t follow it and don’t support it, however it pops up sometimes in my “feeds”. I was surprised to see it marked as really unreliable, while all articles i read there were long-form well-sourced articles. In particular, this article about US military courts is marked as highly unreliable, why? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-...
It doesn't, that's just a misunderstanding of your own.
> Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in critique of social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated."
> Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracy and the social market to the nationalization of the economy and central planning, to the anarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council- and assembly-based self-managed anarchist communism.
Social-liberal keynesian economics, according to that definition, is very-moderate left politics (center-left), whereas marxism or anarchism are more on the left. See also politicalcompass.org to get more information on this topic you obviously don't know about despite trying to lecture me.
Also related, in the field of software engineering, we use the word "copyleft" precisely as in "abolition of private property" because copyright ensures monopoly on ideas and their expression (private property), whereas copyleft ensures they belong to everyone (collective property).
As an end note, please note that abolishing private property doesn't mean taking away people's possessions/belongings. We anarchists refer to that as usage-based property (not sure about translation, we use "propriété d'usage" in french) where property is based on needs and not on the dogmatic worship of a piece of paper (property title). That is a central disagreement with the marxists who believe a central State and its police ("dictatorship of the proletariat") should be in charge of deciding what you can or can't use, which is effectively the same as private property with the State as owner/enforcer of everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-112-how-pol...