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Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
31–40 of 163 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#32Instead of making some sort of judgement call (this is biased in X manner), how about a tool along the lines of something I read about in an SF story a long time ago (sorry, don't recall the title or author). I remember the point-of-view character looking at news items on a screen and things like "connotation indices" and "hyperbole metrics" were included. Those sorts of indicators would give each reader a chance to realize to what degree bias exists and leave it to them to decide how important that was.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#33Dude... people dont even believe in the scientific method anymore, and definitions and facts are themselves liberal bias. What is some tool gonna do to convince those who have shut down entirely??
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that may work but you also need to have intellectual resources to be able to process all the information and see something for what it really is. Also, people serving news are upping the game by using the latest in psychology research to influence us. We need _somebody_ on our side.
Hmm, i think its a very difficult task. I think perhaps a useful thing would be to intentionally break the bubbles. Something like an inverse-recommendation engine. E.g. instead of "people who read article X also read Y", you say "people who read X did not read Z". Or if you had access to people's facebook likes (does facebook provide an API?) you could find the most anti-correlated users and recommend each other's l…
Isn't what I mentioned sort of similar? It is difficult for sure which is why I am asking for help.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#35[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious how you think this would work. First of all, I'm interested in what you think a news publication free of bias would look like. Would it be a straight recitation of factual occurrences? That would be useless, right? How would you decide which story gets a big headline? Which detail gets included? Second, the USA Right in general has completely broken with the idea that there is any such thing as "fact" tha…
I am not interested in unbiased news sources. I am interested in showing alternately biased news source so that you can develop your own opinion. Even showing snippets of alternate views superposed on the same article can help people a bit. My aim is not to solve the problem in its entirety. If others cannot understand our opinion, we should at least try to understand theirs. The current situation is horrible in term…
Then you have the problem of giving equal weight to inequal ideas just because they happen to be in opposition. You see this a lot on debate shows where they have a climate scientist and a climate change denier, giving the appearance of debate within the scientific community (e.g.) when there is very little.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#37I'm concerned that your frame for this might be off as I don't think the "filter bubble" is rational opposing viewpoints around a particular topic so much as there just being so much misinformation and plain weirdness out there.
There's a saying about it being 10x harder to refute bullshit than it is to spew it. How do we in the information and technology wing of society build tools to deal with that?
Alex Jones had a rant about how Obama and Hillary Clinton both smell like sulfur because they're demons.
I'd assert it's a "real story" and exactly the kind of filter bubble issue we're talking about as Alex Jones was personally thanked post election by Trump [1] and when it happened the sitting president of the United States made remarks about it [2].
I had a real conversation with an elderly relative of mine who told me quite straight faced that they read all about this and how it was true - this isn't bubbles it's different realities.
1 - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-alex-jones_...
2 - http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/12/politics/obama-sulfur-smell-al...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#38I also don't have the skills for building such a thing. But if I could help with such a project through testing/QA, or contributing to a website, or gathering resources - whatever, really - I would, and I would use it. I've been thinking a lot about confirmation bias and echo chambers lately, too, and the truth is I don't know exactly where to look for opposing viewpoints all the time, and it's hard to gather the cou…
Those are interesting ideas. We need to do something at scale and something algorithmic so that we don't end up in "chicken and egg" problem. I'll create a github project and share it with folks who are interested so that we can discuss more and come up with a concrete idea.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#39We have a small team of researcher on that topicm working from Berlin and Paris, come say Hi or get in touch ! :) http://cmb.huma-num.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Algodiv-Ge...
A great article of O'Reilly about this topic too : https://medium.com/@timoreilly/media-in-the-age-of-algorithm...
Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?
#40I saw two big issues on both right wing and left wing political blogs and news sources over the election: assumption of bad faith (and in the worst case intentionally taking the least favorable interpretation of some news item) and lack of fact checking. Untruths abound.
It happened on both sides, people were routinely taking everything Trump was saying and turning into a joke or making it out worse than it was (some things were very bad and deserved the attention, but lots of things weren't bad but were painted with that same brush). Until people are willing to admit that whatever the result will be of this kind of project will not address the root of the problem.