Balanced News

Track your political reading from all sides.

1 follower

Track your political reading from all sides.

1 follower

Get the latest political news from our app and have a healthy information diet to form your own opinions. Too often we stick with what we believe in and fail to listen to the other side. Balanced is a tool to help break that habit by keeping you thoughtfully informed of the political agenda of each news source.

Launch tags:iOS•News•Politics

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‪This is ineffective and potentially dangerous. You don’t want to blindly “all sides”, because bad faith arguments are designed to take advantage of this. You want to remove lies and bad faith actors from News; you want deep analysis from subject matter experts in Opinion; and perhaps discover there’s some timely action you can take. As far as I can tell this app is directionally opposite from these. In fact when you MOST need the bias problem solved is when one side is acting in bad faith. But that’s precisely when this app would push you toward MORE bias, not less. A few process q’s: -Do they first remove articles that are outright bad faith or lying, THEN balance?‬ -Do they measure bias per article? Author? Section? Or simply by outlet? Outlet-level labeling is insufficient. -How do you deal with outrage journalism if it’s not strongly Left or Right? “Center” would rank trolling the same as Wikipedia.

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8yr ago

Balanced News

Maker

@staringispolite Hello Jonathan, thanks for your comment. I do agree with you that “bad faith arguments are designed to take advantage of this” but I would also say Balanced News is a tool to inform you of what the political spectrum is saying. Regardless of believing in the article or not doesn’t stop it from being published across the internet. Our counterparts will be consuming this content either way. Knowing what our counterparts may be consuming can help us as a community/country resolve our conflicts by better understanding the stance they take upon a certain subject. I also believe that is key to have effective debate. Merely deleting content I don’t believe in isn’t an effective solution and itself can be viewed as biased. To answer your questions: -Do they first remove articles that are outright bad faith or lying, THEN balance? No we don’t not remove any articles, the articles are aggregated from the home pages of each source. In these times of Fake News I think there has been a big push into figuring this problem out (i.e Facebook, Twitter, Google). It is a very difficult subject matter, I feel in my opinion the best way to combat this is for people to be cautious and take great care and consideration into the content they consume. -Do they measure bias per article? Author? Section? Or simply by outlet? Outlet-level labeling is insufficient. No, I label the general source as “Left”, “Center”, “Right”. I do agree that some authors may tailor to opposite sides of the fence. I have plans to let users vote on an article level on where it stands on the political spectrum. Utilizing that data we can start labeling at the article level instead. Theres also some ML we can use to have better predictions of where an article stands. -How do you deal with outrage journalism if it’s not strongly Left or Right? Same as the response above, I label sources generally, I think have a voting system + ML can help with this issue. Thanks again for your thoughtful comment, suggestions and questions!

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8yr ago

Pros: * Does not require self-reflection of a neoliberal worldview * Some sources correctly categorized in spite of popular opinion of them (MSNBC is centrist, for example) Cons: * All sides of media are not equally valid, full stop * Believes certain media (Fox News, HuffPo) is ever worth tainting your mind with * Very few high quality or independent sources

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8yr ago

MagicPush

@mitchlillie there is a feature on product hunt called reviews

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8yr ago

Balanced News

Maker

@mitchlillie Hey developer here, thanks for your feedback! We are always adding more news sources to our app (today we added Vox, USA Today and The Blaze). If you have any request for news sources please send it my way!

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8yr ago

Hey @joncravotta ! This is pretty exciting stuff. I wanted to reach out and ask whether you are still maintaining this? I am working on modelling an article-level labeling. Would love to collaborate and have people read a balanced set of news!

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7yr ago