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Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

realtimefascism.com

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Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#11

Post by visekr »

rayemkay wrote: post #9

impressive! so much good journalism exists on substack. wondering what criteria you're using for allowed sources and if you'll expand to different journalists' substacks.

I'd love to tap into that eventually! Right now I'm using an API that give me a dump of like all articles and I filter that through a list of 'credible' sources. I'm not the most educated about what are good sources for this but this is my current one. (it also shows on the site under - 'what is this') Would loveee feedback on this list.

Allowed Sources Major Wire Services (1.0) Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg Top US News (0.9) NYT, WaPo, WSJ, ProPublica

Conservative Media (0.7-0.8) Fox News, National Review, Washington Times, The Dispatch, Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Reason

Progressive Media (0.7-0.8) Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now!, New Republic, Jacobin, Truthout, Slate

International (0.8-0.9) BBC, Guardian, FT, Economist, DW, France24, Al Jazeera

Fact Checkers (0.9) FactCheck.org, PolitiFact

Major Networks (0.8) NPR, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNBC

Digital Media (0.7-0.8) Atlantic, Wired, Axios, USA Today, Time

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#12

Post by mongol »

porcoda wrote: post #6

Cool site. One thing I wish we had were rich, open archives of news that could be fed into something like this so we could see not just the live updating perspective, but a retrospective time series of the fascism-o-meter over a long time. Especially seeing how the different contributing categories change over time, and how you likely would see some of them start ticking up earlier than people might expect.

I don't think I have ever seen anything described as fascism if it happened before the 20th century. Mussolini seems to have coined the word and it described his regime and later ones. But even if the characteristics match also earlier regimes, I have not seen the word used. For example, was Napoleon fascist? Was Caesar fascist? Never heard it elaborated on.

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#14

Post by ajjdkfnn »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> Wouldn't it be nice if someone also developed a tracker for when leftist governments

Do you realize you are telling on yourself?

The OP only says fascism.

You are the one who brought left vs right into it.

The fact that you equate “fascism” with “right” should be illuminating.

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#15

Post by camkego »

visekr wrote: post #11
rayemkay wrote: post #9

impressive! so much good journalism exists on substack. wondering what criteria you're using for allowed sources and if you'll expand to different journalists' substacks.

I'd love to tap into that eventually! Right now I'm using an API that give me a dump of like all articles and I filter that through a list of 'credible' sources. I'm not the most educated about what are good sources for this but this is my current one. (it also shows on the site under - 'what is this') Would loveee feedback on this list. Allowed Sources Major Wire Services (1.0) Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg Top US New…

Are you comfortable sharing which API you use?

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#17

Post by [deleted] »

ajjdkfnn wrote: post #14
southernplaces7 wrote: post #10

[flagged]

> Wouldn't it be nice if someone also developed a tracker for when leftist governments Do you realize you are telling on yourself? The OP only says fascism. You are the one who brought left vs right into it. The fact that you equate “fascism” with “right” should be illuminating.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#18

Post by visekr »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #16

Nicely done. Little design & branding details/style on point. Can you talk about what tech you used more? Are there really that many headline APIs for all those sources available freely?

ah thanks : )

yes - not sure what detail you want but I'll try to be thorough here.

Tech stack is React, Next JS, Radix UI lib, Tailwind, Firebase for database auth and cloud functions, Vercel for deployment, OpenAI for article classification, WorldNewsAPI for news.

Cloud Functions run at different intervals, I have one that runs every 30 minutes (recent news), 12 hours (weekly news), 84 hours (monthly news) and 168 hours (quarterly news). This is a big WIP

On a cloud function run it fetches articles from newsAPI, this search is done with a mix of keywords that determine if its related to the current administration, then gets filtered down to 'credible' sources (listed in a comment on this thread). The content of the articles that pass these filters get send to gpt-4o to be classified for relevance (is it an action of the administration / related) if it passes that >70%, the ai determines if it matches any of the 14 steps of facism, and will add a direct quote / impact / summary of why it matched that step, and finally will get added to DB and displayed on the site.

In terms of development - heavy use of Cursor IDE, and start with v0 by Vercel which is why I was able to get this up and running within ~3 days. Although the codebase looks disgusting rn

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#19

Post by visekr »

camkego wrote: post #15
visekr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to tap into that eventually! Right now I'm using an API that give me a dump of like all articles and I filter that through a list of 'credible' sources. I'm not the most educated about what are good sources for this but this is my current one. (it also shows on the site under - 'what is this') Would loveee feedback on this list. Allowed Sources Major Wire Services (1.0) Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg Top US New…

Are you comfortable sharing which API you use?

of course! WorldNewsAPI - wasn't my first pick but was the most affordable for me, but i like it so far, no complaints!

Re: Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker

#20

Post by digdugdirk »

mongol wrote: post #12
porcoda wrote: post #6

Cool site. One thing I wish we had were rich, open archives of news that could be fed into something like this so we could see not just the live updating perspective, but a retrospective time series of the fascism-o-meter over a long time. Especially seeing how the different contributing categories change over time, and how you likely would see some of them start ticking up earlier than people might expect.

I don't think I have ever seen anything described as fascism if it happened before the 20th century. Mussolini seems to have coined the word and it described his regime and later ones. But even if the characteristics match also earlier regimes, I have not seen the word used. For example, was Napoleon fascist? Was Caesar fascist? Never heard it elaborated on.

Sparta is generally held to be the fascist 'ideal' of a state, so the roots do go back. It's an interesting question though, and I'm not sure what technically defines the boundary.
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