6 ms·

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

99 points by visekr 2y ago

Hi HN, Wanted to share a project I made over the weekend - a real-time fascism tracker. The site fetches recent news from trusted sources, filters it for keywords related to fascism and the current US administration, and then sends it to GPT-4o for classification according to the 14 characteristics of fascism described by Dr. Lawrence Britt. With the rapid pace of news in the US, especially post-election, it’s hard to keep up. I built this site so you can quickly see important topics and draw parallels with similar historical events. Would love to hear your thoughts. - Ryan

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
macintux 2y ago
Technically impressive, deeply sobering, and I'm going to stay away because by the end of 2020 I was barely able to sleep, and this is so much worse.
exabrial 2y ago
[flagged]
cootsnuck 2y ago
Slick design, I like it. Could just be me but with characteristic-level severity levels it's not immediately clear to me if they're referring to like the categorical severity (e.g. "when labor power is suppressed that's a critical sign of encroaching fascism") or the present-day severity (e.g. "recent news points to there being critical levels of labor suppression happening right now"). I can suss out that it seems to be the present-day severity, but it wasn't intuitive (for me at least). And how does your scale/algorithm work in terms of time-dependence? If there isn't any news indicating signs / intentions of labor suppression for a couple weeks then does that drop the severity level (both at the characteristic level and/or the overall level)? Cool project at the very least for keeping track of recent alarming news. I hope we never have to find out how accurate your tracker really is...(Then again that opens up the can of worms of "when does fascism arrive?"...with the answer always being earlier in retrospect than predicted in present.)
- visekr 2y ago
  Good feedback! ill work on making it a bit more clear. as for the time-dependance / algorithm, good question .I'm still working on tweaking it, right now recency has a 30% weight. I just started this last thursday so im quite unsure how things will change / look on the site over time and what makes sense for a half life / decay of an article.
  - leereeves 2y ago
    You need to work on your classification algorithm. Classifying anti-Trump mass media articles as "controlled mass media" is just embarrassing.
porcoda 2y ago
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.
- visekr 2y ago
  Thanks! and this is actually one of the things on my list. Still noodling on how to do this effectively and efficiently, since I want it to follow my same process of filtering through gpt-4o, and running 10 years of data through that could cost me. But yes love the idea : )
- mongol 2y ago
  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.
  - digdugdirk 2y ago
    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.
    - antifa 2y ago
      You could say what the fascists want is a post-industrial era caricature of Spartan society.
rayemkay 2y ago
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.
- visekr 2y ago
  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
  - camkego 2y ago
    Are you comfortable sharing which API you use?
    - visekr 2y ago
      of course! WorldNewsAPI - wasn't my first pick but was the most affordable for me, but i like it so far, no complaints!
  - pesus 2y ago
    Putting the openly biased/partisan (and more often than not intentionally deceptive) media sources at the same level as major networks, digital media, and the low end of international media seems like a mistake to me. It lends an undeserved level of credibility to the extremely biased sources, and at the same time unfairly conflates the other media sources with them. So does the Digital Media group as a whole - it seems overly reductive, and the sources are too varying in quality/reliability to be given the same weight. And does something like Time really fit in there, considering they've been print media for the vast majority of their existence? (Love the project overall, though! Thanks for creating and sharing.)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
southernplaces7 2y ago
[flagged]
- ajjdkfnn 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gs17 2y ago
    Fascism is generally considered "far-right". From Wikipedia: >Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3] Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,[4][5] fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[6][5][7] If you want to question their framing, I would recommend going after that their "leftists" are likely poorly defined (or only really exist in the US if you're so far to the right that everyone is the far left).
  - antifa 2y ago
    > One sees less of that, since apparently, when a government with strong leftist signaling does the same or worse, it's all for a decent if slightly misguided cause perhaps. I'm wondering what they're talking about, since it seems like all mainstream media in the US already do what they claim? For example, everything bad that happens in China/North Korea gets reported in the US, usually with no regard of if it's true or a baseless conspiracy theory, even good things such as constructing a billion miles of high speed rail per hour or turning deserts green is reported with headlines suggesting that you should think it's a bad thing. So maybe they meant something that filters out sensationalism and misinformation and sticks to just the facts? Good luck fact checking the narrative NATO wants you to know without learning the languages of every "leftist" government of interest to you, and also not falling into somewhat obscure media outlets that are more often reactively contrarian to NATO propaganda rather than downstream of strong primary sources.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
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?
- visekr 2y ago
  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
delichon 2y ago
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ― George Orwell, Essays So this is a "something not desirable done by the current US administration" tracker.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  George Orwell wrote this because of how words are co-opted by the media to obfuscate and dilute their meaning. A discussion can still define it and that definition can be used for the purpose of discussion. In this case, the site has a bunch of sliders, whereby each slider indicates how far along we are on that axis of what they're calling fascism. Each of those axes can easily be one or more individual topics. At any rate, this website is at least more specific than "something not desirable" when it comes to how it defines fascism.
- ptrhvns 2y ago
  Well, except there are 14 characteristics being reviewed, so is this still true?
- 9283409232 2y ago
  Here's the meaning. > fascism /făsh′ĭz″əm/ > A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. Looks to me that a lot of the current happenings in the US are heading in this direction.
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    > subject to stringent governmental controls Isn't the current admin trying to do the opposite?
    - 9283409232 2y ago
      We aren't there yet. These people are not anti-regulation, they are anti-regulation that prevents them from making the most money so for the time being they will gut the environment and other safety regulations. We haven't gotten to the mass regulatory capture part that shuts out competitors yet.
andrewinardeer 2y ago
The terminally online are handing over their minds to others and being subjected to a current and sustained adverserial nation state psyop of foreign influence. If one chose to unplug they would realise in short time how easily and how often they are being programmed to buy into rage-bait through mis and disinformation campaigns. It's got to the point where a significant number of people are easily triggered by beige and mundane topics such as what brand of car a stranger has purchased to how someone identifies sexually and if someone lists two basic pronouns on an email. Until people realize they actually control so very little in their day-to-day lives I fear it will only get worse.
hereme888 2y ago
[flagged]
- aforwardslash 2y ago
  True. Trump's plan is to stop having palestinians, that would solve it. And if you can't kill them all, just deport them. Dead people have no claims; deported people is the next best thing. Its not about left or right, and never is - its about power and money. F** the people, right?
- grouchomarx 2y ago
  Doubt that but we’ll see. As for bias it appears to be pulling sources that include fox and the Washington examiner. Does that also make it inherently right wing biased?
KN3LL2K 2y ago
Wow love this. But also terrified? Would be interesting to see how filtering by different news sources of different political biases affects the ‘severity’?
- visekr 2y ago
  Loveee that idea. Would be cool to even have designated groups so you could filter by left wing, right wing, international, etc. Gonna work on this after I optimize the codebase
9283409232 2y ago
Fraudulent Elections is at low threat level. Might want update that since Trump just abolished the FBI team that was fighting election interference.
- cadamsdotcom 2y ago
  It’d need to be reported on as such and then assessed by gpt-4o as such. Since that’s how the site works.
brokenmachine 2y ago
Great idea and very well executed, bravo!
spstoyanov 2y ago
cool idea!
c420 2y ago
On Firefox Mobile I'm unable to scroll the What Is This pop up. It vanishes if I try. Also, almost impossible to click the Additional Resources as it's obscured my the bluesky button. Great appreciation for what you've created!
jdizzle78 2y ago
[dead]

99 points by visekr 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

macintux 2y ago

Technically impressive, deeply sobering, and I'm going to stay away because by the end of 2020 I was barely able to sleep, and this is so much worse.

exabrial 2y ago

[flagged]

cootsnuck 2y ago

Slick design, I like it. Could just be me but with characteristic-level severity levels it's not immediately clear to me if they're referring to like the categorical severity (e.g. "when labor power is suppressed that's a critical sign of encroaching fascism") or the present-day severity (e.g. "recent news points to there being critical levels of labor suppression happening right now"). I can suss out that it seems to be the present-day severity, but it wasn't intuitive (for me at least). And how does your scale/algorithm work in terms of time-dependence? If there isn't any news indicating signs / intentions of labor suppression for a couple weeks then does that drop the severity level (both at the characteristic level and/or the overall level)? Cool project at the very least for keeping track of recent alarming news. I hope we never have to find out how accurate your tracker really is...(Then again that opens up the can of worms of "when does fascism arrive?"...with the answer always being earlier in retrospect than predicted in present.)

visekr 2y ago
Good feedback! ill work on making it a bit more clear. as for the time-dependance / algorithm, good question .I'm still working on tweaking it, right now recency has a 30% weight. I just started this last thursday so im quite unsure how things will change / look on the site over time and what makes sense for a half life / decay of an article.
- leereeves 2y ago
  You need to work on your classification algorithm. Classifying anti-Trump mass media articles as "controlled mass media" is just embarrassing.

porcoda 2y ago

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.

visekr 2y ago
Thanks! and this is actually one of the things on my list. Still noodling on how to do this effectively and efficiently, since I want it to follow my same process of filtering through gpt-4o, and running 10 years of data through that could cost me. But yes love the idea : )
mongol 2y ago
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.
- digdugdirk 2y ago
  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.
  - antifa 2y ago
    You could say what the fascists want is a post-industrial era caricature of Spartan society.

rayemkay 2y ago

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.

visekr 2y ago
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
- camkego 2y ago
  Are you comfortable sharing which API you use?
  - visekr 2y ago
    of course! WorldNewsAPI - wasn't my first pick but was the most affordable for me, but i like it so far, no complaints!
- pesus 2y ago
  Putting the openly biased/partisan (and more often than not intentionally deceptive) media sources at the same level as major networks, digital media, and the low end of international media seems like a mistake to me. It lends an undeserved level of credibility to the extremely biased sources, and at the same time unfairly conflates the other media sources with them. So does the Digital Media group as a whole - it seems overly reductive, and the sources are too varying in quality/reliability to be given the same weight. And does something like Time really fit in there, considering they've been print media for the vast majority of their existence? (Love the project overall, though! Thanks for creating and sharing.)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

southernplaces7 2y ago

[flagged]

ajjdkfnn 2y ago
> 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 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gs17 2y ago
  Fascism is generally considered "far-right". From Wikipedia: >Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3] Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism,[4][5] fascism is at the far right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[6][5][7] If you want to question their framing, I would recommend going after that their "leftists" are likely poorly defined (or only really exist in the US if you're so far to the right that everyone is the far left).
- antifa 2y ago
  > One sees less of that, since apparently, when a government with strong leftist signaling does the same or worse, it's all for a decent if slightly misguided cause perhaps. I'm wondering what they're talking about, since it seems like all mainstream media in the US already do what they claim? For example, everything bad that happens in China/North Korea gets reported in the US, usually with no regard of if it's true or a baseless conspiracy theory, even good things such as constructing a billion miles of high speed rail per hour or turning deserts green is reported with headlines suggesting that you should think it's a bad thing. So maybe they meant something that filters out sensationalism and misinformation and sticks to just the facts? Good luck fact checking the narrative NATO wants you to know without learning the languages of every "leftist" government of interest to you, and also not falling into somewhat obscure media outlets that are more often reactively contrarian to NATO propaganda rather than downstream of strong primary sources.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

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?

visekr 2y ago
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

delichon 2y ago

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ― George Orwell, Essays So this is a "something not desirable done by the current US administration" tracker.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
George Orwell wrote this because of how words are co-opted by the media to obfuscate and dilute their meaning. A discussion can still define it and that definition can be used for the purpose of discussion. In this case, the site has a bunch of sliders, whereby each slider indicates how far along we are on that axis of what they're calling fascism. Each of those axes can easily be one or more individual topics. At any rate, this website is at least more specific than "something not desirable" when it comes to how it defines fascism.
ptrhvns 2y ago
Well, except there are 14 characteristics being reviewed, so is this still true?
9283409232 2y ago
Here's the meaning. > fascism /făsh′ĭz″əm/ > A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. Looks to me that a lot of the current happenings in the US are heading in this direction.
- SirMaster 2y ago
  > subject to stringent governmental controls Isn't the current admin trying to do the opposite?
  - 9283409232 2y ago
    We aren't there yet. These people are not anti-regulation, they are anti-regulation that prevents them from making the most money so for the time being they will gut the environment and other safety regulations. We haven't gotten to the mass regulatory capture part that shuts out competitors yet.

andrewinardeer 2y ago

The terminally online are handing over their minds to others and being subjected to a current and sustained adverserial nation state psyop of foreign influence. If one chose to unplug they would realise in short time how easily and how often they are being programmed to buy into rage-bait through mis and disinformation campaigns. It's got to the point where a significant number of people are easily triggered by beige and mundane topics such as what brand of car a stranger has purchased to how someone identifies sexually and if someone lists two basic pronouns on an email. Until people realize they actually control so very little in their day-to-day lives I fear it will only get worse.

hereme888 2y ago

[flagged]

aforwardslash 2y ago
True. Trump's plan is to stop having palestinians, that would solve it. And if you can't kill them all, just deport them. Dead people have no claims; deported people is the next best thing. Its not about left or right, and never is - its about power and money. F** the people, right?
grouchomarx 2y ago
Doubt that but we’ll see. As for bias it appears to be pulling sources that include fox and the Washington examiner. Does that also make it inherently right wing biased?

KN3LL2K 2y ago

Wow love this. But also terrified? Would be interesting to see how filtering by different news sources of different political biases affects the ‘severity’?

visekr 2y ago
Loveee that idea. Would be cool to even have designated groups so you could filter by left wing, right wing, international, etc. Gonna work on this after I optimize the codebase

9283409232 2y ago

Fraudulent Elections is at low threat level. Might want update that since Trump just abolished the FBI team that was fighting election interference.

cadamsdotcom 2y ago
It’d need to be reported on as such and then assessed by gpt-4o as such. Since that’s how the site works.

brokenmachine 2y ago

Great idea and very well executed, bravo!

spstoyanov 2y ago

cool idea!

c420 2y ago

On Firefox Mobile I'm unable to scroll the What Is This pop up. It vanishes if I try. Also, almost impossible to click the Additional Resources as it's obscured my the bluesky button. Great appreciation for what you've created!

jdizzle78 2y ago

[dead]