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