ML-powered newspaper for showing news from many political perspectives
knowherenews.comWell done. As others noted, I feared worse based on the headline.
But I think it's really important to replace the "left bias"<>"right bias" slider with a button and text field that simply requests users to report non-neutrality in the write-up, without identifying it as "left" or "right".
Reduction to left/right is rarely helpful and often unhelpful. For most issues complex/significant enough to warrant headline, there isn't -- or shouldn't be -- a monolithic "left" or "right" position one could be biased towards.
Is an authoritarian bias left or right? Is a populist bias left or right? Or is a pro-universal-income bias left or right? Is legislative supremacy as opposed to judicial supremacy a left or right bias?
Better to get the yes/no data about perceived non-neutrality and then analyze the qualitative comment.
Agreed. Without the two party political system with their entrenched collection of positions, who knows what subgroups might appear. Low tax, high spending (i.e. pro deficit)? Pro gay marriage, anti-abortion? Anti abortion, but pro universal health care? Pro 2nd amendment, and pro universal income? I've met all these people.
One limitation a site like this runs into is the fact that there's no such thing as an "impartial" view on fundamental questions of value. For example, what's the "impartial" view on whether to accept more refugees from war-torn regions? Just because a view is sandwiched between others on whatever particular spectrum chosen, or t uses dispassionate language, doesn't mean it's "impartial". It's still a view argued from values. Stated differently, for many (all?) questions there isn't a view that remains once we've filtered out all of the "biased" views. To further complicate things, one's person's "bias" is another's "commitment".
Perhaps best to refer to the default view here as "composite" rather than "impartial".
Sure, there are no impartial answers to these questions. But there can be impartial reporting on actual events taking place, and I think that's the goal here.
The "Give our impartial story your own bias score" slider should be explicit on whether it's just "far left for unbiased, far right for very biased", or if the two ends of the slider represent some implied political positions.
It was originally meant to reflect a left-right political axis for controversial political stories. We publish spins with a few other types of stances now (e.g. Hawk vs. Dove, Environment vs. Free Market) and the explainer could use an update. Thanks for the feedback on it.
lol “perspective of the ML developer” maybe
Something like this can be great, but feel a hand curation would probably be better served. Here’s a quick one, read Vox and then Breitbart. It’s an intellectual rollercoaster ride.
This is a trope I see commonly repeated but have a difficult time understanding. In what way does (in this case, for instance) an algorithm predicting political bias come to reflect the political biases of the person implementing the mathematical operations behind some gradient descent scheme more so than whoever provided the labels of whatever data it's ultimately trained on?
I agree, this is the best approach by far. You should read fox news and cnn to get a balanced perspective. Though few minds can handle the cognitive dissonance, sadly.
That works about as well as spending a day in fire, followed by a day submerged in freezing water as a strategy for temperature regulation...
If you absolutely must approach this with a false-equivalence (or "fake-balance") mindset, the WSJ and NYT are two much better sources, and have a better claim of being equidistant from something approaching a political center (CNN, at least when I used to watch it, was nowhere near as insane as FOX at the time).
I you don't have much time, just read the NYT. It's the pinnacle of journalistic integrity, and, despite repeat assertion to the opposite, they are better today than they have ever been.
Isn't this rather like suggesting you read anti-vax and vaccination proponents or climate scientists and climate change deniers in order to get a 'balanced' perspective?
It’s worse than that.
While you’re right that they aren’t equidistant from the political center, the bigger issue is that they’re both incredibly dumb.
I'm worried based on some of the comments that people might be reading only the Impartial view and not also the Left-bias and Right-bias versions of the same story. I'd strongly suggest reading all three versions of a story before using the slider to provide feedback on the various versions.
This is great work! I have wanted some version of this news site for years and have been making sketches for how it would work. My working title for the site is "Unspun" and very similar in spirit, except instead of the "Impartial" view, the "center" would just be a list of facts about things that happened that were referenced in both a Left and Right version of an article. And there would be lines connecting the center facts to where they show up (if they do at all) in the Left and Right articles. I'm pretty happy with this format, but I still kind of want to see all 3 versions at the same time so I can cross-reference. But I must like it because I just sent links to a whole bunch of friends and family. :-)
Is bias the right thing to focus on? It's like we're all discovering that journalists are imperfect humans just like the rest of us. Even if an article is a mere list of cited facts there is judgement in which facts to include and in what order to list them.
The better questions about a news source are
1) do they have integrity?
2) are they in touch with reality?
I believe the purpose of newspapers is to give facts which allow me to make up my own mind. Which is certainly harder than just spouting the party line I guess. Take the Swedish Democrats: I agree with their stance on immigration but their economic policy and their social conservative beliefs I do not share.
Interesting idea - though I feel like I’d need to know more about the algorithm, ml inputs, limitations etc, etc before I could trust what I was seeing was well rounded news.
I think the more transparent, even talking about current limitations, will gain you more trust with users
We've had plans to write some blog posts about it, but there are ultimately only so many hours in the day. There is a very high level explainer at https://knowherenews.com/how but in broad strokes, our backend incorporates many discrete pieces which: monitor for breaking world events, structure metadata from news reports, search for corroboration, identify spin-relevant information, and ultimately, draft reports for a human editor to proof and possibly publish. We focus on American politics for now rather than a larger slice of world events.
I'm not sure how you can do this without getting sued for copyright infringement.
There are a team of human journalists and editors producing our coverage; the ML side of things is akin to a research assistant who's always awake and following what's going on.
Check the Musk story.
https://knowherenews.com/event/51fd8dac-6a58-4d8b-ba14-83f0c...
Compared to the story in Time.
http://time.com/5389781/elon-musk-smokes-marijuana-podcast/
The first paragraph is the same.
And that was just the first one I tried.
Try this one! http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-feed-red-feed
Partial-impartial is a risky mode of thinking, since it can seduce you into thinking that it's good to be impartial about all things. But there are subjects like climate change and Donald Trump, where it's irresponsible journalism to be "fair to both sides".
I assume by climate change you mean that since there is vast scientific consensus that it is happening, we shouldn't give much time to the theories that it isn't happening.
But what about Trump? Whether we like it or not, very nearly 50% of the voting population voted for him (and how many millions more were fine not voting against him by not voting at all). Are we to deny the POVs of the representative that 10s of millions of Americans elected? It's not quite the same argument as the overwhelming consensus on climate change.
EDIT>> In fact, I just realized that being deliberately unfair to Trump, as you seem to be suggesting, just feeds into his constant portrayal of MSM being "fake news", and only strengthens his position.
We should be fair to Donald Trump, because why not? Being fair doesn't mean nodding your head along to everything he says, it means not jumping the gun on all sorts of things and embarrassing yourself when it comes out wrong, which the press has regularly done when it comes to Trumpisms.
The content seems to be far better than what I had feared when reading the headline.
But still: the idea that truth is somehow subject to voting, as expressed in your slider, is far too post-modern for my tastes.
I see you bump levels based on story shares - but if I'm logged in with my email instead of social media, I don't see how that will be tallied to my account.
Cool to see our site on HN on a quiet Sunday! Shoot if you have any questions; I realize the site doesn't go into much technical detail.
I took a look at the current top item in "Politics": https://knowherenews.com/event/2471ce59-379e-40fc-87f7-fee77...
The impartial version "feels" impartial enough in tone, whereas the other two feel more openly partisan, the right one more than the left. But the story becomes more complicated when you look at the actual content.
Impartial version:
- Mentions historical dominance of left parties.
- Mentions rise of Sweden Democrats.
- Explains the Swedish political system.
- Explains the alliances.
- Explains that SD is unlikely to be in the government.
- Mentions that immigration is a central issue, but with no explanation.
- Quotes Kakabaveh from the Left party, at length. Mentions that she criticized Sweden's approach to integration, but with no details or explanation. Mentions threats on her by racists and fundamentalists.
- Is described as "impartial" at the bottom.
Left version:
- Mentions historical dominance of left parties.
- Mentions rise of Sweden Democrats.
- Explains the Swedish political system.
- Explains the alliances.
- Explains that SD is unlikely to be in the government.
- Only mention of immigration is that SD is anti-immigrant.
- Cites social democratic prime minister Löfven's criticism of SD.
- Is described as "positive" at the bottom.
Right version:
- Mentions historical dominance of left parties.
- Mentions rise of Sweden Democrats.
- Mentions that immigration and crime are top issues.
- Explains immigration and crime issues.
- Explains that SD "may not" be in the government.
- Cites SD leader Åkesson on broadening that party's appeal.
- Is described as "negative" at the bottom.
The left version goes into some detail on the workings of the Swedish parliamentary system, which are given a mere nod in the right version. On the other hand, the left version does not say anything at all about any issues with immigration in Sweden, while the right version goes into quite a bit of detail, and also discusses a crime issue, which is unmentioned elsewhere.
As for the impartial version, the content turns out to be basically the same as in the left version. Immigration is mentioned, but without any explanation of why it has become a political issue. And the politician cited is actually from the Left party, which sounds farther left than the Social-Democrat PM cited in the left version.
I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. I hope it will deliver its promise, because right now I feel like there is nowhere to go for neutral news. It's either "Omg look at what Trump is doing again! Nazis and racists are everywhere!" leftwing-bs or Breitbart style rightwing garbage.
One of those is based in fact and reality, the other is not. The reason you're having a hard time finding "neutral" news is because reality is not inherently neutral.
What is? I don't think I gave any specific examples or are you implying that other side political propaganda is completely based of "facts and reality"?
By neutrality I mean the facts and reality. Reality is inherently real and not up for negotiation. I just want to know what has happened in the world without any additional comments/thoughts/propaganda etc. by the journalist.