Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

[harigov]

We all know how the election turned out. I believe the internet is contributing to echo chambers because of filter bubbles. I think it is rare to see some news that is not biased one way or another, and I believe it is hard to expect it not to be so, because of our own individual biases. I think there is a need for tools that can help us see the other side.

What if we had a tool that is delivered as a browser extension, that can show links to alternate views (think URL links) of the exact same topic that you are reading? It can use information like how biased the current article is towards different people/events/ideas and find an alternate article that can help you understand other-side. It may not solve all the problems but it would be a good start. Would you find it useful? Do you have a better idea?

This requires skills (NLP/ML) that I don't have but I am willing to spend time/effort (I am a programmer/big-data-engineer) to make it a reality. Would anyone be interested in working on it? It will be open source and any organization that runs this will be non-profit.

[michaelbuckbee]

I'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...

[blipblop]

The key is to apply DRY principles to argumentation.

If someone makes a claim, you should be able to hyperlink to it where the argument has already been explained.

Then each participant can "agree" or "disagree" with each claim in an argument chain. And every time they disagree they need to dive deeper to refine their argument.

Eventually all arguments reach a point of "because I say so" and ultimately it becomes a popularity contest. E.g. We should maximise happiness for all, etc.

But...the good news is argument reasoning can be objectively validated to some extent. Soundness and validity.

And definitions are arbitrary. People have to agree on definitions or there is no point in debating something. I would say that most arguments are about the parties not agreeing on definitions, and wasting time stringing together argument chains where both sides have different conceptions of the words being used.

I believe lawyers/politicians should be programmers and instead of arguing and making laws in English prose, they should use a structured programming language.

[mtberatwork]

Indeed, if we do not agree to a common set of facts and a shared reality, how then do we proceed with any kind of meaningful debate? To paint a basic picture, how do you debate the feasibility and merits of sending humans to Mars with a person who denies the moon landings? You might say these are extreme cases, but with the rise and "normalization" of Alex Jones-type media outlets, this will only get worse.

[harigov]

I agree. It looks like this problem is multi-faceted. Maybe the problem that you mentioned is 60% prevalent and what I mentioned maybe 30% (random numbers). We should still try to solve these problems. What do you propose? I am genuinely interested because this is getting out of control.

[garysieling]

There is a recent trend in the higher quality side of long-form articles to including primary source materials (videos, documents from trials, etc) in articles, but it's a lot of work.

[hga]

As an Alt Right Trump supporter, I can state without question that the worst thing about 2016 politics so far is that Alex Jones and his InfoWars no longer earns automatic dismissal, i.e. he's been publishing some good stuff, therefore people I follow have been linking more to him, etc.

What that says is not specifically clear to me, but it's nothing good, unless he's become significantly more sane as of late.

[return0]

I think the tool you need is "skepticism". Teach people to not rush to ascribe labels to everything they don't like, and to stop ignoring anything that has been labeled as X-ist by their bubble. Teach people to not think with slogans and hashtags or listen to celebrities.

[harigov]

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.

[jellicle]

You turn on the TV. It tells you something. You turn on the radio. It tells you something. You turn on the internet. It tells you something. Should you be skeptical of it when all your sources of information agree that this is a real fact?

What if the fact is "there will be an eclipse next week"? What if the fact is "Hillary killed Vince Foster"?

The difference between the two facts above is that many more media outlets will report about the second one; there's lots more confirmation available for that one.

[veddox]

In some ways, it's a matter of education - people need to be taught to think, and to think through other peoples' positions. "Sapere aude!", Kant told his listeners, "Dare to use your mind!" We need more of that, on both sides of the political spectrum.

[garysieling]

The stated problem resembles Snopes, but the key feature is building trust.

[alistproducer2]

> I think it is rare to see some news that is not biased one way or another

I would posit that part of the problem is the implicit assumption that biased != factual. This assumption is true on both sides of the political spectrum, but it takes on a different character for those on the right.

I understand the sentiment that prompted you to post this, I'm just not sure what you propose is any kind of a solution. If anything I believe it may make things worse by affirming the bias != factual assumption.

[mtberatwork]

I would also add that the "bias argument" is trotted out so much that it appears to be turning into a cliche in its own right. For instance, I may link to a cogent, factual article published by Politifact only to have it quickly dismissed as a "biased" source by those too lazy to consider its content.

[harigov]

That's an interesting way to look at things. That's what makes HN comments worth reading. What if we show distribution data about bias [as in positive/negative attitude towards a thing or a person] along with article? It's not like I have a solution but I see that there is a need.

[veddox]

> but it takes on a different character for those on the right.

Could you expand on what you mean by this? Because in my experience, the right has no monopoly on disregarding out of hand anything written by the other side...

Nonetheless, I agree with you that biased news is not bad per se. In fact, in a healthy democracy, one would expect news to be biased - after all, the media are among the most important channels of national discussion. The problems come when bias exceeds fairness and truthfulness.

[noname123]

This is a pretty good website and they also have a proprietary algorithm to determine the political spectrum of the source: http://www.allsides.com/

NYTimes is ranked moderately liberal while Fox News is ranked right (http://www.allsides.com/bias/bias-ratings)

[harigov]

Thanks! It seems interesting. The problem I see is that - it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people. Also, journals shouldn't be the only source. Every side needs to be heard and someone's voice may come from their own blog. I am not sure how it would work but we should at least give it a try.

[wendybeth]

I 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 courage to just dive in when I know a good amount of it will make me feel ill.

Maybe just starting with a collection of opposing resources? There could be a call to action to ask people to submit articles or sources for various "stances" on different topics, and a list divided by topics and view points, or links to the few sane and awesome discussions you can occasionally find where people who think differently actually talk to each other about their differences like rational human beings. That might be an approachable place to start, anyway.

[harigov]

I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation.

[harigov]

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.

[jstewartmobile]

One component of this problem that is rarely mentioned is bias-by-omission. Journalists commit this sin frequently and vigorously. With enough elbow grease, you could make some progress towards detecting it.

[pg314]

It is certainly an interesting idea, and I don't want to discourage you, but how would you reach the people who would benefit from it the most? If you are aware of a filter bubble, you can easily seek out alternative information...

[harigov]

Good point. If it works, maybe we can convince browser developers to include this as default similar to how security is done. We are putting more effort to secure our computers than securing our minds. Even if I were aware of being in a filter bubble, it takes time and effort to get out of that. We need to make it easy.

[mevile]

I 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.

[wyldfire]

I think the idea is promising but I'm pessimistic that those who need it most would opt-in.

It sounds like a valuable project: good luck.

[beachy]

Good luck indeed.

But it sounds like a technical solution to a human problem.

I reckon there are two camps - people who are skeptical, analytical and self-moderate the news that they receive, and people who love living inside their bubble, and positively don't want to hear contrasting worldviews.

Not sure why the latter would ever want to install a browser extension that challenged their views.

Facebook on the other hand - if they took the filter problem more seriously - that could make a real difference.

[harigov]

Thanks. It is clear that most organizations don't want to invest effort in doing what is right. If there is some ready-to-use extension/service that is proven to help, maybe we can convince the browser developers to include it in their default installation.

[PaulHoule]

Another issue is that many biases are structural, technological or driven by commercial pressures.

For instance, I would say CNN is biased toward coverage of school shootings and airplane crashes. CNN has the problem that there is not enough news to fill 24 hours so they run a heavy rotation of the same crap that is cheap to produce. Probably the best footage they show is stuff they downloaded off Youtube.

When you catch the CNN crew on a slow news Sunday they will admit that their problem is engaging an audience, both in the sense that they need to make money and also in the sense that they have some duty to inform the populace, the populace has duty to inform itself, etc. The truth is their content is boring, depressing, and awful but they have varied their formula a lot and they really believe they've found a local maximum of what people will watch.

In some sense CNN was biased towards Trump because he's interesting. I would look for news about Trump every day because it was likely he would say something crazy again and I think this was the case for a lot of other people. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all had great ratings this season.

This 1971 book

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Machines-Ben-H-Bagdikian/...

is about as ahead of it's time as Ted Nelson's work and is very much about what news would be like in the age of the World Wide Web and it contains a damning indictment of the very concept of "news". (i.e. not only is there not enough news to fill a 24 hour tv show, but it's arguable that there is enough news to fill a newspaper every day)

[jjn2009]

>In some sense CNN was biased towards Trump because he's interesting.

Bias with respect to how much coverage there was of the candidates, however many would say the content of that coverage was biased against him.

Besides this small point I agree. Time spent on a particular subject or topic is a subtle bias in itself which can be driven by many things (including money) and has huge effects on public perception of people and issues.

How does one expose bias in this subtle behaviour in an automated way, even with machine learning?

[pinetop]

I recently began working on a (somewhat) related NLP project looking at the shift in sentiment in Trump-focused articles published pre- and post- election. The motivation for the project is the observation that many of the left-leaning news media outlets - who consistently lambasted Trump in the lead-up to the US election - have begun to dial back their criticism post election, presumably in an attempt to (re)build bridges and ensure their continued relevance in the ensuing Trump milieu. It seems that the results of such an analysis have the potential to be a concrete and relatively simple example of the deviation from any stable media narrative, and perhaps a nice opportunity to spread this message to a slightly wider audience.

The project is nascent, but it should be straightforward to implement (I have already begun to amass articles from several major news sources). While this may or may not be relevant to your stated goal, I'd be happy to share more info if you're interested!

[harigov]

Hey pinto, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation. I would like to make use of your code for fetching articles from different news sources as a starting point. You are free to contribute to the project as well. Please let me know!

[harigov]

I am definitely interested. I will include you in the project group.

[jquip]

Hallo, any links? I'd be interested.

[iaw]

What I've wanted for a while was a curated news source that allowed me to collapse topics (e.g. only one story about the presidential race per day). The goal would be to present both "perspectives" as well as identify the core shared truths between the two.

The problem is cross-article context comparison is actually a bit harder than news article summarization and the amount of time required to pursue it made it seem a bit too much of a chore.

One extension would fall to politicians and public entities that make statements where it could validate/compare their statements to their historic actions. Beyond the "is this reporting accurate" it would go into "do we think this actor is being truthful based on historic behavior"

Edit: The other nice thing about this is that I could hear about the things that aren't the recent election cycle or terrorist attack. It's like sensationalist news signals were saturated which raised the noise floor drowning out all of the other news.

[mazr]

We 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...

[harigov]

Hey mazr, I created a new GitHub project over here - https://github.com/harigov/newsalyzer and a corresponding gitter chat group over here - https://gitter.im/newsalyzer. You can feel free to contact me through my id @ gmail so that I can start the conversation. I think your expertise could be of real help in building this.

[anasfirdousi]

I'm already working on my startup which started way before this election. News bias didnt happen and it is not a new problem. It's been there for centuries. Unfortunately, it's my startup idea and I don't want to open source it. The work is in its super early stages but if some one is interested in teaming up on this and working together, shoot me an email at [email protected]. I live in Silicon Valley so if your local it will be great but location doesn't really matter if you passionate about the idea!

[tmj]

Instead 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.

[cdvonstinkpot]

I was on an Assembly project that tried to do this, think it was called "Flipside". It never went anywhere, IIRC required coders didn't materialize.

Having been inspired by sama's dialogue regarding the downside of unfriending those with opposing views (on the election), I've militantly kept up on opposing Facebook friends' perspectives, giving conscious effort to see their point(s). I see the value in adding opposing news sources to my feed, but the rancor I see (on both sides) is a turn off. Haven't found reliable opposing sources that don't require that I, at least at some level, apply a sort of what I've come to refer to as 'normalizing' their points. So much emotionally charged rhetoric- I guess the 'sizzle' factor sells, but requires additional calories burnt to see through & try not to be disproportionally influenced by.

Maybe a sub-Reddit or sub-Voat -type thing could be built which includes meta-rating elements to allow for rating bias leanings. Dunno what kind of software might already exist that could do this kind of thing for cheap.

tl;dr: A failed Assembly project tried this recently It's hard to create a fair Facebook feed of opposing views A Reddit/Voat -type board with meta-elements to track bias might exist cheap

[jquip]

I'm thinking on the same lines as you! :)

[qwrusz]

A different or supplementary approach could be removing the bias from a news item.

Instead of trying to determine which biased side an article is skewed towards and then finding other links to what is determined to be the "alternative view". Scrubbing bias or at least highlighting it is already helpful.

For example: at work we get daily emailed briefs with major business news items summarized to ~3-5 bullet points of facts. Journalist opinions/bias and rhetoric language is mostly removed in the bullet point sentences. It's not a perfect system by any means, not even close, and I would love to see something similar offered that's improved and expanded in what it can do.

This type of bias scrubbing/summarizing is easier in business news and sports news which involve more numbers and figures reporting (+nowadays many of the full articles may also be written entirely by bots - see link below). It would be harder to expand this for longer investigative/politics news articles. But a partial imperfect solution here is better than status quo.

I would be a user of a tool that could summarize key "unbiased facts" from articles and I would be interested in helping build it too.

Link to a NYT story about algos writing/summarizing news: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-an-algor...

[hga]

What if the bias was created by omitting important facts that, for example, contradict the narrative of the item.

Sports are indeed a good domain for what you're talking about, but that's because they're run by well known rules, it's a highly artificial domain, not directly including the messiness of general human affairs (except in that they're played, refereed, managed etc. by humans).

Business ... well, how many stories about Yahoo! have ignored its negative market net worth when its Alibaba stake is removed, when that was relevant? Not necessarily examples of bias, but....

[larubbio]

I had thought about something like this a couple of years ago. My idea wasn't really about tracking bias, but providing reputation for authors and news outlets. Users (via a browser plugin or some other mechanism) could declare an article or statement as biased in a certain direction. That vote would give me information about the article, the news outlet and the reader. I could then present that information back to users. In this way I could learn just how biased I am (and maybe even the areas of my bias) and the bias of authors and organizations. Perhaps you could see how an author's bias changes when they write for different sites.

However I don't think just pointing out bias will really help. People like their bubbles, and moving out of them is painful and potentially with real world consequences for them. I also think if you show a user an articles bias ahead of time, it will just be used as a filter or a way to reinforce their bubble. I thought this article was interesting.

http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-...

[jquip]

Very insightful.

[crimsonalucard]

How do separate bias from truth?

If I said more asian people are smarter than white people I am biased and racist.

If I said more asians have black hair than white people I am not biased, I'm stating an objective fact.

The only fundamental difference between the two statements is that there are hard numbers lending support to one statement (asians having black hair) and the other statement does not. Neither statement, from a technical standpoint, can be verified definitively.

To build a machine that identifies whether or not a statement is biased one must first build a machine that identifies whether or not the underlying statement is true or false.

Building such a machine is an impossible endeavor because the means in which we identify whether or not something true or false is through data, a source which in itself can be biased.