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
