8 ms·

Hi all, 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 t

Hi all, 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 https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews). I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Cheers Philipp

hnhg 5y ago
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%20jazeera%20english&src=typed_query 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.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  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.
- eganist 5y ago
  > 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. 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-reliability/ 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 https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.
    - nomdep 5y ago
      Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    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. https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/ https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/
wffurr 5y ago
Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  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.
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  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.
d0mine 5y ago
Note: there may be other options how the same events are covered e.g., China, EU, Russia
teapourer 5y ago
Really nice idea and implementation. How did you determine each source's placement on the left/right spectrum?
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  I used the rating from adfontesmedia (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/)
Quanttek 5y ago
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-sources/ 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. Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.
giantg2 5y ago
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).
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  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.
- jefurii 5y ago
  > Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)? That'd be great but would require someone to review each article, which is probably out of scope for this one-person project.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Unless using machine learning to process based on more granular criteria.
- imiric 5y ago
  Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932abb1a91a0f66a4bfc23553ae1df25a7/src/helpers/constants.js https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932a... 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/ 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.
xivzgrev 5y ago
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
orzig 5y ago
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
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>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/ 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-exists-1826271755 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.

hnhg 5y ago

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%20jazeera%20english&src=typed_query 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.

Hadjimina 5y ago
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.
eganist 5y ago
> 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. 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-reliability/ 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 https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.
  - nomdep 5y ago
    Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  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. https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/ https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/

wffurr 5y ago

Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?

Hadjimina 5y ago
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.
gremlinsinc 5y ago
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.

d0mine 5y ago

Note: there may be other options how the same events are covered e.g., China, EU, Russia

teapourer 5y ago

Really nice idea and implementation. How did you determine each source's placement on the left/right spectrum?

Hadjimina 5y ago
I used the rating from adfontesmedia (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/)

Quanttek 5y ago

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-sources/ 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. Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.

giantg2 5y ago

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).

Hadjimina 5y ago
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.
jefurii 5y ago
> Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)? That'd be great but would require someone to review each article, which is probably out of scope for this one-person project.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Unless using machine learning to process based on more granular criteria.
imiric 5y ago
Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932abb1a91a0f66a4bfc23553ae1df25a7/src/helpers/constants.js https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932a... 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/ 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.

xivzgrev 5y ago

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

orzig 5y ago

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

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>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/ 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-exists-1826271755 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.