Show HN: Watch fascism unfold in realtime – an AI-powered tracker
realtimefascism.comHi 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 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.) 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. You need to work on your classification algorithm. Classifying anti-Trump mass media articles as "controlled mass media" is just embarrassing. 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. 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. Well, except there are 14 characteristics being reviewed, so is this still true? 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." Thought-provoking but also pretty vague. It makes no distinction between hard auth-left and hard auth-right. I do like that this outlines some vetted tenets of fascism versus the hand-wavy name-cally ways it gets thrown around so much. 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. > subject to stringent governmental controls Isn't the current admin trying to do the opposite? 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. The goal isn’t to reduce government power, but to rip out the current structures that maintain the status quo (and obey the constitution, comply with the law, annoying priorities like that) and replace them with structures that will swear fealty to the king. Then, why is Doge flagging things like funding gender-change surgery abroad instead? Steve Bannon explains this very well. It's called "flooding the zone." Because people can only focus on 1 thing at a time, fascists do 5 things at a time. The media focuses on one thing while they make progress on the other 4. The culture war nonsense has proven to be delicious bait for the media and now so has DEI. Using culture wars to attack foreign aid is a decades-old strategy of the GOP. Entirely eliminating foreign aid would not meaningfully reduce the scope & power of the federal government in the U.S. (although obviously it harms our soft power abroad and there are millions of people who will be directly and indirectly impacted). I agree deregulation is a focus of the current admin but there is also control. See pam bondi threatening to prosecute private companies with DEI programs. If you consider healthcare to be industry it would be one of our largest and he has implemented anti trans control there as well. I expect overall deregulation regarding safety and environment etc will continue but alongside it there will be strict directives that comport with the right wing social and ideological agendas. >See pam bondi threatening to prosecute private companies with DEI programs And previously private companies were being threatened with lawsuits due to disparate impact in hiring, which lead to the creation of said DEI programs If you consider the current situation control and a precursor towards fascism, you have to consider the past situation in the same light But who threatened? If you fail to see the difference between legal actions from private entities and threats by a government that shows it doesn't feel bounded by laws (see illegal actions from the memecoin department) then you should probably refrain from giving your opinion… No, i would consider the prior to be in the vein of civil rights if I believed it happened in an even remotely similar way. 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... 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. 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. 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. You could say what the fascists want is a post-industrial era caricature of Spartan society. 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 : ) Wow love this. But also terrified? Would be interesting to see how filtering by different news sources of different political biases affects the ‘severity’? 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 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. 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? 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 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! 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. 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. 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 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.) >> Would loveee feedback on this list OK, my feedback is that it is a very left leaning list of sources. I use a site, https://www.allsides.com, that does media bias ratings and rates sites from -6 (high left bias) to 6 (high right bias), and outside of the ones you have listed specifically listed as "Conservative Media", every site that I could find was negative, other than the FT which was listed as "Center" with no numerical rating. Yes, even the WSJ, although that was WSJ news rather than opinion, opinion was slightly right. Here's the list I got, I had to make some choices on what to use, "ABC" for example can refer to different things. The Nation -5.00 Slate -4.50 Democracy Now! -4.00 Mother Jones -4.00 New Republic -4.00 Jacobin -4.00 The Atlantic -4.00 Guardian -3.50 AP -3.10 AFP -3.10 Wired -2.75 Time Magazine -2.30 TruthOut -2.00 Politifact -2.00 ProPublica -2.00 NPR -2.00 CBS News (Online) -1.50 FactCheck.org -1.60 Washington Post -1.63 NBC News Digital -1.80 New York Times -2.20 Al Jazeera -2.30 Bloomberg -2.40 USA Today -2.00 Axios -1.70 ABC News (Online) -1.42 Economist -1.40 CNBC -0.90 Reuters -0.89 BBC -0.80 WSJ -0.20 FT ? Rated as Center with no # RealClearPolitics 0.16 Reason 0.28 The Dispatch 2.00 Washington Times 2.00 Washington Examiner 2.30 National Review 2.50 Fox News (digital) 3.88 If you're trying to build a left leaning media bubble, you're doing a pretty good job. I would be curious to see results from the opposite, choose a few examples of "Liberal Media", and populate the rest of the list with sources that were rated as leaning right. And I'm sure some people will disagree with the allsides bias ratings. There's no way to be completely objective on something like that. They seem pretty believable to me, but I'm not watching the same movie y'all are. If a website rates the economist as left leaning it's maybe a sign of the bias in the evaluation and how much the discourse has been pushed to the right (in the US at least) It's a reasonable take on the actual political climate in the US. Trump has a 50% approval rating, the border between approving and disapproving of him is mathematically (approximately) the political center. Are you comfortable sharing which API you use? of course! WorldNewsAPI - wasn't my first pick but was the most affordable for me, but i like it so far, no complaints! Great idea and very well executed, bravo! Fraudulent Elections is at low threat level. Might want update that since Trump just abolished the FBI team that was fighting election interference. It’d need to be reported on as such and then assessed by gpt-4o as such. Since that’s how the site works. cool idea!
So this is a "something not desirable done by the current US administration" tracker. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ― George Orwell, Essays