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

[visekr]

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

[cootsnuck]

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]

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.

[delichon]

  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]

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.

[mariusor]

If you'd care for a semiotician's perspective about the attributes of fascism, and one that lived through a fascist regime to boot, there's the seminal essay by Umberto Eco about what "Ur-Fascism" is: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

They seem to be slightly different than the ones OP uses for the classification, but they are reasonably close.

[ptrhvns]

Well, except there are 14 characteristics being reviewed, so is this still true?

[bartimus]

I would define fascism as:

"The pursuit of unity in its most extreme form, rejecting and eliminating alternative thoughts and ideas by any means necessary."

[conductr]

I do like that this outlines some vetted tenets of fascism versus the hand-wavy name-cally ways it gets thrown around so much.

[9283409232]

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.

[computerthings]

People us "AI" all the time without quotes, but this is where we pretend to care about literal definitions? Yeah, right.

> Donald Trump's policies resemble an administrative coup d'état, says journalist Annika Brockschmidt. He and Elon Musk are undermining the separation of powers in the USA and disregarding civil rights. The political opponent is becoming overtired.

https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/in-den-usa-findet-ein-adminis...

[porcoda]

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.

[mongol]

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.

[visekr]

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 : )

[KN3LL2K]

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]

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

[macintux]

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.

[ChrisArchitect]

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]

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

[c420]

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!

[andrewinardeer]

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.

[rayemkay]

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]

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

[brokenmachine]

Great idea and very well executed, bravo!

[9283409232]

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

[cadamsdotcom]

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

[spstoyanov]

cool idea!

[aforwardslash]

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]

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?

[ajjdkfnn]

> 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.