Can you trust the news you are reading?
When I was a kid my parents subscribed to three newspapers. I never knew why they picked those three but each paper had different comic strips so I was happy. Years later my father explained that the newspapers provided different political views. Reading all three helped him understand the issues better.
With the internet providing much of our news now, subscribing to three newspapers may be antiquated. But the need for multiple high-quality perspectives is more important than ever as most of us get our news from an all-too-agreeable social media. The resulting polarization of America is no coincidence, and it’s tearing apart our communities, friendships and even families.
Many of us want to get multiple perspectives but don’t know where to look or which sources to trust. Even long-standing respected publications have articles of varying quality and in the last year it’s become more apparent that every publication has a political bias, acknowledged or not. So how do you figure out what’s credible and know who you can trust? We’ve spent the past year developing a solution.
Introducing CivikOwl
Today we’re excited to announce CivikOwl — a smarter way to read the news. Our Chrome extension instantly analyzes news stories and suggests better stories for the topic at hand.
Here’s how it works:
Evaluating the quality of a news story
CivikOwl determines the credibility of a news story by evaluating the quality and diversity of sources (links) cited. A high quality news story likely has:
- Several unique sources
- Links to credible and relevant news sources
- Minimal links to their own site (referencing one’s own publication repeatedly may suggest a narrower argument)
- Links to news sources across the political spectrum (it requires more thought to write a news story citing sources that disagree with you).
- Multiple outlets talking about the story
The method would be tedious for a reader to do on every story. CivikOwl does this for you — automatically and instantly.
Now when you’re on a news story the CivikOwl icon will change color to indicate the rating for the story. Clicking on the CivikOwl icon shows details of the rating including the quality and diversity of sources in that story.
You can see all links cited in a story at a glance, along with its political leanings and credibility rating:
Detecting news quality in your Facebook feed
With 62% of Americans getting a portion of their news from social media detecting news quality there is crucial to broadening our perspectives.
CivikOwl instantly analyzes news stories in your Facebook feed and gives you a quick way to find alternate, high-quality perspectives on the topic.
We will add the same support for your Twitter feed next.
What about fake news?
Fake news isn’t as common as it might seem and biased news is likely a bigger issue according to media researcher danah boyd. But when fake news does manifest itself, often in social media, it is usually reported on low credibility news sites only. Thus, CivikOwl checks if the story you’re reading is not being reported on credible news sites and warns you if so.
This isn’t a fail-safe for weeding fake news out but does reduce your exposure considerably.
Now that you know the story you’re reading has poor-quality sources and is biased, how do you find better stores and perspectives?
Breaking out of your news bubble
Reading high quality stories from multiple viewpoints is the best way to break out of your news bubble. But most of us aren’t sure where to find these high quality viewpoints or are too busy to do the legwork.
CivikOwl searches hundreds of credible news sites and alerts you when a better story exists:
Discover new sources of high quality journalism
The Internet has enabled many news outlets to focus on specific topics where their reporters have deep expertise. CivikOwl hunts for these high quality sources, from across the political spectrum, so you get the best insights on issues that matter to you.
Where does our ratings data come from?
There is no widely accepted way to rate the bias or credibility of a news story. So we use a combination of signals that provide valuable guidance.
We leverage ratings data from non-partisan sites — AllSides and Media Bias Fact Check — and combine those with a machine learning algorithm most recently used by researchers to evaluate Wikipedia’s bias. These three sources combine crowdsourced data, human judgement, and algorithms, respectively.
Coming up next
Our next release is a mobile app that will bring you the highest quality news and perspectives that go beyond the left vs. right political spectrum.
We will also add support for evaluating breaking news and editorials, both of which have few sources and hence are typically not analyzed by our extension yet. However, this should be a cautionary note for you the reader since breaking news changes rapidly as the story develops and editorials are meant to be persuasive rather than objective.
As our user base gets larger our machine learning algorithms will be able to evaluate breaking news and editorials better. More on that in a future post.
Everything we build is based on feedback from folks like you so please let us know what you’d like to see. Please leave us suggestions at Product Hunt where we’re featured today.
Finally, on a personal note I’ve noticed a significant change in my outlook on various issues ever since I started reading high quality news from across the political spectrum. I am more appreciative of how complex every issue is and how the media can sometimes oversimplify in an effort to make a point.
I hope CivikOwl helps more of us understand the nuances of issues and empathize with other perspectives. We hope this will be a step in getting us all on the same page when it comes to the news.
ps: Thanks to our friends Alan Berkson and Jill Soley for feedback on this post, and to them and every other early adopter for helping us develop CivikOwl. We’re grateful for your support and counting on it for the next step too!
