New tools for living in the Era of Opinion

We are living in what we here at FairSpin like to call the Era of Opinion.  Traditional news institutions are being supplanted by smaller, independent writers and publishers who increasingly take a perspective on the issues they cover.  Perspective-based news is rapidly becoming the norm as more and more news producers turn in that direction as a means to compete for audience.  And the very standards of journalism are shifting as we begin to understand and accept that there is no longer a black-and-white distinction between “the professionals” and everyone else.

The result is a blurring of fact and opinion that has profound implications for our society and for us as individuals.  One major issue is that the old methods we’ve used for years to filter and evaluate the news are no longer relevant to the times we are living in.  When so much of the news we read has an “angle”, how do we determine the facts?  When new writers are appearing every day, how do we decide who to trust and listen to?  In short, how do we make sense of the important issues of our day?

We created FairSpin to help answer these questions.  Opinions are great — they just shouldn’t masquerade as facts.  We believe that by revealing perspective in the news FairSpin can provide a uniquely relevant and timely view of both the media and the issues it covers.

Today we’re taking another big step toward that goal.  We’ve just launched a new homepage that surfaces the day’s important issues and then sorts related stories according to their perspective. This makes it easy to get every side of the story, at a glance.

We’ve also rolled out a new area of the site called the River.  It shows you the very latest news stories collected by FairSpin and organizes them from left to right along 5 degrees of bias. This novel view of the news enables you to quickly see, for example, the difference between a factual news report, a left-leaning perspective piece, and a hard-left opinion piece.

We think these new improvements make FairSpin more useful, and we hope you agree.  Please give them a try and let us know what you think!

Stephen and Dave

Transparency in politics and media: FairSpin visits the Personal Democracy Forum

This week we attended the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City.  Now in its sixth year, PDF gathers together over 1,000 technologists, journalists, and political organizers to explore how technology is changing politics.  We felt that attending this popular conference would be a way for us to learn more about what others are doing in this space, as well as to get feedback from some deep thinkers.  Additionally, a major theme of this year’s conference was “transparency”, which is an issue at the very core of our efforts with FairSpin.

We were also fortunate enough to receive partial sponsorship from Google, who deferred a portion of the conference registration fee for people like ourselves who are experimenting with social media and politics.  We were very grateful for this assistance and we appreciate the fact that Google walks the walk in terms of supporting the efforts of startups and non-profits that are trying to make a difference.

Overall we found PDF an excellent conference.  It was well organized, well-attended, and featured a number of thoughtful speakers on a wide range of topics.  Some specific high points:

• David Weinberger, in a talk entitled “Truth and Transparency”, argued that we should not expect that increasing access to facts and data will inherently lead to harmony and wisdom.  Instead it leads to never-ending debate, argument, and conversation, and this is a good thing that we should design for and embrace.  We couldn’t agree more, and we think that FairSpin is well poised to harness the constructive controversy that erupts when facts and opinions are laid bare.
• Vivek Kundra, White House CIO, announced the launch of USAspending.gov, a site that tracks and visualizes government spending.  This is yet another addition to a growing portfolio of open government initiatives from the Obama administration, including data.gov.  To say it was well received by the audience would be an understatement.
• In a talk entitled “The Dangerous Power of Sharing (Power)”, Mark Pesce noted that “the 21st century will be a series of run-ins between hierarchical organizations and adhocracies” — that is, between traditional government and media and the crowdsourced versions we are fashioning around them.  Pesce sounded a cautionary note by pointing out that such innovations could be used for ill as well as for good.  He also asked the interesting question (paraphrased): “can technology lead activism to be flagged as terrorism?”, citing the Anonymous movement as a possible example.
• A panel comprised of both traditional and new media journalists discussed the challenges in making crowdsourced or “citizen” journalism work in the real world.  Andrew Turner of geocommons.com observed that people need a reason to get involved, and that usually means an issue they care about or that affects people in their lives.  We’ve been doing a lot of thinking along these lines with FairSpin lately and looking for ways to present political news in a manner that people can more easily relate to.  Look for some new things from us in that regard soon.
• We had a good time hanging out with some cool people, including Gabe Rivera (creator of memeorandum, which provides the story feeds for FairSpin today) and Fabrice Florin of NewsTrust (a site that identifies and promotes quality journalism).  Both have been gracious with their time and advice and FairSpin has benefited from it.

There were of course a few low points to report as well:

• Randi Zuckerberg, when asked about Facebook’s continuing refusal to ban holocaust denial content, gave this disappointing non-answer: “free speech is reeeeeally hard.”  Well, that may be true.  But if Pappa Facebook can’t figure out the right thing to do here, what hope do we have for other online communities?  We think that holocaust denial is clearly hate speech, and we’re far from alone.
• There was not nearly enough conservative representation at the conference.  The organizers acknowledged the problem but said that they have made great efforts to expand the audience beyond its liberal core.  It is our hope that this will serve as a wake-up call for right-leaning technologists.  Without voices from all sides of the political spectrum we cannot have a true discussion or debate on the serious issues we face.
• We were bummed we missed a chance to meet Clay Shirky, whose writings have been an inspiration in our work on FairSpin.  Clay was scheduled to participate in a panel at PDF but a conflict came up.

Regardless, we came away from PDF feeling energized.  Why?  Because it is clearer to us than ever that FairSpin is addressing a critical need that people care about: transparency. People on all sides of the political spectrum are hungry for it.  We need it in government perhaps now more than ever given the scale of the challenges we face.  But we also need it in the media, where an explosion of voices online has left us ill-equipped to judge the credibility of sources and the stories they report.  We think the time for FairSpin is now, and we’re back at our computers working hard to make it happen.  Thanks for your help!

Stephen and Dave

Iran in the media: a diversity of opinion

We built FairSpin with the goal of revealing the bias behind today’s news and opinion, believing that this could both provide a more compelling news-reading experience and also help bring transparency to the media.  The site has now been up and running for a couple of months and we’re very encouraged by the response it’s getting.

At the same time we’re also starting to notice that FairSpin is doing some interesting things that we neither planned nor expected.  This is part of the fun in building a new product: discovering that it sometimes has a mind of its own and that its very existence suggests new opportunities.

One of the interesting things we’ve discovered is that by sorting out stories, authors, and sources across the political spectrum, FairSpin enables you to more clearly see how the left and the right approach and respond to the same issue.  This in itself is quite educational and can often help in forming your own opinion about the matter at hand.

A great example is the current Iranian election crisis.  Journalists and bloggers across the political spectrum have been providing riveting coverage of the events unfolding on the ground in Tehran.  Both sides of the aisle share concerns about reports of violence and suppression.  Where they strongly differ is in their reaction to the Obama administration’s response to the situation.  Journalists and bloggers on the right tend to be favoring a more forceful endorsement of the Tehran protesters, while those on the left generally believe that doing so would undermine both U.S. interests and those of the protesters.  But at the same time, there are interesting exceptions that challenge a traditional categorization of opinion.  For example, George Will is today speaking out contrary to a position taken by fellow conservatives.  

You can already watch this story unfold in real-time on FairSpin, and the placement of each story according to political bias makes it easier to follow the debate.  Now, as a new experiment, we’ve built a page that tracks stories about the Iranian election crisis from across the political spectrum.  Check it out here:

http://fairspin.org/iran

We plan to experiment with other issue-oriented views of the news like this, so let us know what you think.

Stephen and Dave

Tweeting the news, from left to right

FairSpin now offers a new way to get the news you’re interested in — via Twitter.   We are operating three new Twitter accounts, each one tracking a different slice of the political spectrum as judged by FairSpin users:

• fairspinleft — Left-leaning news and opinion
• fairspinneutral — Unbiased and factual news
• fairspinright — Right-leaning news and opinion

Each tweet contains the story title, the author and source, and a link to read the story. For example:

New stories are posted to the appropriate Twitter feed as soon as they come into FairSpin.  We also update Twitter any time the community’s votes move a story from one part of the spectrum to another.  For example:

These tweets are a great way to stay informed, but they also give you the option of customizing your view of the news.  Want to live in your left- or right-wing echo chamber?  Just follow fairspinleft or fairspinright.  Want to see just factual news without all the posturing?  Follow fairspinneutral.  Personally we’re following all three.  It’s very interesting to see how a news story comes in and then cascades in real-time across the political spectrum as people react to it.

—Stephen and Dave

Revealing bias in real-time with FairSpin and Twitter

One of the more interesting trends in media these days is the mass migration of journalists and bloggers to Twitter.  It seems like nearly everyone has an account, from professional writers to TV pundits to entire newsrooms.  While some of these feeds simply echo content that is already available elsewhere (for example, tweeting a newspaper’s headlines), many of them are in fact very interesting.  Why?  Because they provide a direct, real-time, and often unfiltered view into the thoughts and perspectives of the people who write the news we read.

At FairSpin, one of our goals is to increase transparency in the media by revealing the bias behind today’s news.  Today we’re taking another step toward that goal by launching our Twitter view.  This new view aggregates the tweets of leading journalists and news bloggers and then organizes them from left to right according to the political bias of the writer.  Bias is determined just like it is on the rest of FairSpin, by users voting on today’s news — and by extension the people who write it.

You can see it in action here:  http://fairspin.org/twitter

We’re tracking over 100 journalists and news bloggers so far, and expect that number to grow along with FairSpin.  We also expect the accuracy of these bias judgments to increase as more and more people vote on news stories.  If you know of a Twitter account that should be on FairSpin, please click the “suggest” button and let us know!

—Stephen and Dave

You spoke, we listened: some new improvements

Since FairSpin launched a few weeks ago we’ve been constantly gathering feedback from our users and looking for ways to improve the service.  A few common themes have emerged, and today we’re taking action on them by making some improvements to FairSpin.

New condensed layout

FairSpin’s homepage now features a 3-column layout instead of the original 5-column approach.  It still shows you all the top news from left to right, but in a manner that is less overwhelming and easier to digest.  This is the new default view but you can easily switch back to the original 5-column layout if you want a more detailed view of the political spectrum; just click the “Increase spectrum detail” button:

Activity bar

We also heard from some users that they wanted a better sense of what the FairSpin community is doing, so we have added a new information bar on the right side of the homepage.  This bar shows you vital stats (such as the number of stories and votes in the system) as well as a summary of the most voted-on items and most-read stories.

This bar is kept constantly up-to-date so you can always see what stories, authors, and sources are most interesting or popular.

Welcome screen

Finally, we heard that some FairSpin visitors were having trouble figuring out where to start and what to do.  We’ve added a new information screen that is shown to all new visitors.  Or you can also view it directly at http://fairspin.org/welcome if you’re interested in seeing it for yourself.

We hope you like these latest improvements.  Please keep the feedback coming, and thanks for using FairSpin!

— Dave and Stephen

Tweet the vote

FairSpin is now integrated with Twitter. After you vote on a story you’ve read, you’ll be given the option of tweeting your vote:

Your FairSpin tweets include the title and URL of the story, and also indicate how you voted (left, right, or neutral). Here’s an example:

Twitter integration makes it easy to share interesting stories — and your opinions about them — with your friends. We hope you enjoy it!

—Stephen and Dave

Now integrated with Facebook

We’ve just rolled-out integration between FairSpin and Facebook.  You can now sign-up for FairSpin with just a few clicks using your Facebook account.  Or if you already have an account on FairSpin, you can easily link it to your Facebook profile.  Just look for the Facebook button on either our homepage or login page.

Once you’re connected via Facebook, you’ll gain access to some helpful new features:

• Publish your votes:  Every time you vote on FairSpin you’ll have the option to publish that vote to your Facebook feed.  This gives you a way to tell your friends about interesting news stories and share your opinion.  You can also include a short comment that your friends will be able to read.
• Invite your friends:  You can easily send invitations to your Facebook friends who may not yet know about FairSpin.

Give it a try and lets us know what you think!

—Stephen & Dave

Good questions, and some answers

Since FairSpin’s public launch yesterday we’ve received lots of positive comments, constructive feedback… and votes!  Thanks to all of you who have tried it out so far.

We’ve also seen a few really good recurring questions that we wanted to take a moment to answer here.

“How are the bias ratings on FairSpin determined?”

They are calculated automatically and entirely based on user votes.  Bias is calculated when either of two different events occurs:  a user voting on a story, or a new story entering the system.

When a user votes, the vote count for the story in question is incremented and the specific type of vote (e.g. left, right, or middle) is recorded.  The system then looks at the entire set of votes tendered for that story to date and applies our ranking algorithm.  This algorithm looks at where the balance of the votes fall from left to right, and from that determines the overall bias rating.  This means that the bias for a story is recomputed every time a user votes on it, so it can change in real-time.

It’s also important to note that every vote for a story is also tabulated against that story’s author and source.  This enables FairSpin to build up an increasingly accurate picture of the historical bias of both the authors and the sources they write for.  Why does that matter?  Read on…

When a new story arrives, FairSpin checks if it has seen this particular author or source before.  If it has, then chances are that they each have their own historical bias rating (as explained above).  The authors’s bias rating is applied to the new story, or if there is no author specified then the source’s rating is applied.  This serves as an “educated guess” and enables FairSpin to place the story on the homepage spectrum and draw your attention to it.  But as soon as human users start voting on the story, the role of this “educated guess” is reduced.

So what does all this really mean?  It means that all the bias ratings on FairSpin come from you, the users.  It also means that FairSpin is constantly learning and refining its picture of the political spectrum, and your votes play a direct role in that process.

“FairSpin says The New York Times is ‘fair’?  But that’s just silly!”

What you’re actually seeing in this case is a story by The New York Times that is rated fair.  As explained above, initial story ratings are based on the historical bias ratings of the story’s author and source.  In the case of The New York Times, this means that some stories show up as fair, while others show up as left.  Sometimes they even show up on the right (former NYTimes columnist Bill Kristol’s work is a good example).  Once users vote on a story, those votes take precedence.  So the best way to help us make FairSpin more accurate is to vote on the stories you read!

“Isn’t this hopeless, since the site going to be overrun by [liberals|conservatives|libertarians|sea monsters]?”

We’ve of course seen other online social communities become dominated by one group to the detriment of another, so we know this risk is real.  But we think the concept of FairSpin is inherently nonpartisan and will appeal to both sides of the aisle.  We’ve also made some design and feature decisions with this issue in mind and we will be doing our best to ensure FairSpin grows in a healthy and balanced way.

And by the way, the fact that you asked this question means you care about the problem.  We’re glad to have you on the team.

“Aren’t you guys biased yourselves?”

Well… yeah.  Of course we are.  But everyone is.  Show us the person who is 100% unbiased and we’ll show you the positronic brain we’ve been working on.  :)

To be serious, we all bring our own internal biases to the table.  The question is whether or not we recognize them and what we choose to do about them.  By building FairSpin, we’re hoping that people (including ourselves) will find it a useful way not only to reveal bias in the media, but also to explore their own biases.

We’ve tried very hard to avoid designing any unnecessary bias into FairSpin.  In some cases this has led us to omit features.  A good example:  unlike many social media sites, FairSpin does not allow users to submit news stories.  This is because people may have different — and not always alturisic — motivations for submitting a particular story.  Instead, all stories are gathered automatically by the respected news aggregator memeorandum.  Since memeorandum has been around for a while and is almost entirely automated, it tends to be less biased and covers a broad and diverse set of sources.  Using memeorandum as our data source allows FairSpin to focus on the key challenge of detecting bias in the news instead of fighting two problems at once.

“Isn’t left vs. right a simplistic and unrealistic representation of bias in the real world?”

We generally agree, and we have some ideas on better ways of representing this, but we started with what we have because it is something that everyone is familiar with and can relate to in some way.  We also wanted to keep things simple so we could launch sooner and act on your feedback sooner.  We hope that if FairSpin gets enough momentum it will provide an opportunity to try some different approaches in this regard.

Thanks again for the questions and comments, everyone.

—Stephen and Dave

FairSpin: breaking through the bias

We’ve just opened FairSpin to the public.  Check it out at http://fairspin.org and let us know what you think!


What’s FairSpin?

Following politics in our country is not easy.  It’s getting harder to tell “news” from opinion, fact from spin, journalist from blogger, reporter from pundit, and sometimes even left from right.  Even more confusing is the fact that many of these distinctions are themselves becoming meaningless.  At a time when more people than ever are showing an interest in important national issues, most of us no longer know who to listen to, what to believe, or how to make sense of it all.  This is a problem that affects more than just news hounds and political junkies; it affects all of us.

That’s where FairSpin comes in.  It’s the site that reveals the bias behind today’s news. We collect the latest political news and opinion from around the web (courtesy of the excellent aggregator memeorandum), from the mainstream media to the smallest political blog.  Then the FairSpin community votes on each story — biased left, right, or not at all.  These votes are tabulated to produce a constantly-shifting “spectrum” showing the particular leanings of any given story, author, or source.

We think that revealing bias and separating fact from opinion allows you to see all sides of a particular story and decide for yourself who you should be listening to.  Opinions are great (we all have them); they just shouldn’t masquerade as news.

You can learn more about FairSpin on our About page.


Who the heck are we?

Stephen Hood most recently ran the social bookmarking service Delicious at Yahoo.  Based on this experience Stephen is a big believer in the power of the community to organize information and accomplish goals, and sees an opportunity to mobilize readers to identify bias in the news.  Dave Baggeroer currently teaches at Stanford’s Institute of Design.  Dave is a big believer in using design to bring clarity to complexity.  He sees an opportunity to reveal bias by communicating it visually and making it more transparent.


Why did we build it?

Reading and watching the coverage of last year’s election cycle left us personally more frustrated than ever.  There had to be a better way to sort it all out and get a clearer picture.  So we decided to try our hand at building a solution.  We developed a small, working site and used it ourselves during the remainder of the election cycle.  This early version proved to be a great tool.  In fact we found it so useful that we decided to build another iteration and open it up to the public.  We hope you’ll find it useful, too.


A working model

We consider this first public version of FairSpin a “rough prototype.”  It’s very early stage and has plenty of room for improvement.  For example, the voting and ranking algorithms we use could undoubtedly use further improvement, and in fact we’re hoping that public usage and feedback will help us toward that goal.  We also use a framing device to enable voting on stories while reading them.  Yes, we know and agree that Frames Suck and we are going to explore other solutions.

We’ve also purposefully kept the site as simple as possible so that we can focus on the core challenge of revealing bias.  You won’t see many of the usual social media accessories like comment threads, content submission, childlike avatars, or Magic Truth Coins.  And that’s very much intentional.  As FairSpin grows and matures you will see some of these things appear as appropriate.  But probably not the Magic Truth Coins…


So what’s next?

Well, that’s sort of up to you!  We think we’ve started something interesting, but where this goes next will be based on the way the community uses the site and the kind of feedback we receive.  We expect people will surprise us by using FairSpin in a number of ways we haven’t anticipated, and that’s part of the fun.

Ultimately we want FairSpin to be useful, but we also hope it can make a difference.  With your help, we think it has a shot.

—Stephen and Dave