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Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 14, 2008 08:21 PM
from the next-measure-the-magnitude-of-political-affiliation dept.
from the next-measure-the-magnitude-of-political-affiliation dept.
wiredog writes "The Washington Post is reporting that Microsoft is developing a program that classifies news stories according to whether liberal or conservative bloggers are linking to them and also measures the 'emotional intensity' based on the frequency of keywords in the blog posts." If you would like to jump right to the tool you can check out "Blews" on the Microsoft site.
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This just in... (Score:5, Funny)
Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Interesting)
The LA Times always seems to have these stories with a rich person/poor people theme (gentrification/regeneration of downtown creates homes for wealthy people, but displaces the Mexican community, another story is high school with swimming pool won't let local kids use it during summer holidays). The Toronto Star seems to have these stories where the local politicians are always present when some Hell's Angels den is being busted (even though it was already vacant for months). Scottish newspapers (Edinburgh News,Evening Express) alway seem to have stories about travellers blocking up road lay-bys, park-and-ride zones and city parks. English newspapers alway seem to have stories about people being arrested and jailed for tackling burglars, or anyone refusing to pay their council tax out of poverty gets thrown into jail, while the burglars get hours of commmunity service (Tabloids).
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The ones that always surprise me, however, are the British tabloids. They're not quite (nearly( as bad as American tabloids, and are therefore taken quite seriously by some, which is troubling to say the least. The Sun, and The Scottish Daily Mail come to mind as being two such papers.
Move a step up to papers like The Guardian and The Times, and jo
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The ones that always surprise me, however, are the British tabloids. They're not quite (nearly( as bad as American tabloids, and are therefore taken quite seriously by some, which is troubling to say the least. The Sun, and The Scottish Daily Mail come to mind as being two such papers.
Have you ever been to America? There are more than a few people here that do give our tabloids that level of attention and contemplation. Really it's an embarrassment.
Probably the only tabloid I've ever read was the Weekly World News, and that one was sufficiently far from anything that resembled reality, that you'd have to be pretty screwed up to believe any of its articles to be factual. But it was a pretty good read and usually hilarious.
OTOH, that explains all the lawsuits I've heard about recently tar
Re:Perfect... (Score:4, Informative)
Which, by the way, along with Fox News and the brand-new european front Sky News are all part of the Murdoch Empire.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A
Oh come on. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a substitute for analysis like a big mac is a substitute for food. The world is far more intersting than a three column spreadsheet and there are always more than two ways to look at any issue. Trusting Microsoft's choice of events and opinions is a sure way to remain ignorant and be guided like sheep to the traditional media slaughter [slashdot.org].
Google does a much better job by scraping titles and sentences coherently. Especially important is their people involved feedback. Trying to force all of that into "Democrat" and "Republican" is worse than useless, it's misleading and that's why Google never did it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh come on. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Replyiing twice to the same post is bad form but I feel I must.
Once I was employed at a major chip vendor's technology development lab that was being downsized. A coworker suggested I might find work at Microsoft.
My reply: My local septic tank cleaning company has openings too. I will try them first. At least it's honest work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a cool technology demo, and perhaps does a nice job of gathering and visualizing a two-dimensional dataset. This was most likely thrown together in a few afternoons as a result of a conversation held over lunch one day that began with "Wouldn't it be neat if we...."
Similarly, Ope
Arbitrary divisions or trust metrics? (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't seem very new or interesting to me. But then I don't think politics really fit into the "liberal"/"conservative" thing.
I thought something like The Circle[1] would work much better for something like this. It's postings were sorted by a trust based system, so the more you trusted someone, the closer to the top their posts would appear, and you could rate each post as well. Supposedly Advogato's [advogato.org] site uses it to, but there membership is closed, so I haven't seen it in action. Their Trust Metric [advogato.org]
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What bothers me here is, your comment asking us to respect what you're saying got +5 insightful. ElizabethGreene's comment [slashdot.org] hasn't been modded at all. It's entirely possible that I'll get modded up for pointing this out, and she still won't get modded up.
So, apparently, Slashdotters care that you're treated fairly, and that you have breasts, but they don't care what you have to say?
I suppose it's also possible that comment wasn't particularly interesting -- or it wasn't to me,
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Read Maslow. Part of the democratization of the Internet is that we permit on the troglodyte. Your gender is a part of your self. Every portion of your self must be defended or anonomized. That's part of the game. Deal with it or play on a different field.
The best course is to ignore them. If you can't bring yourself to do that, being the naughty geek girl that despises them for their level of fail can be a satisfying substitute.
/has three geek girls of his own. Tells them to have gender neutral ID'
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only when the listener has a liberal bias.
It's pithy little witticisms like these that initially made me suspicious of the "intelligent == liberal" paradigm. Intelligence doesn't rely on the appearance of being clever.
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because sometimes, regardless of which side you favor, your side is lying about something.
Re:Perfect... (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:4, Interesting)
The odd fact is that it is the liberals who proclaim to speak in the name of reason and the conservatives that proclaim to speak in the name of religion-based morality. While the reality is that the best publication from which to get a conservative view point is Reason(tm) and the best publication from which to get a liberal view point is the New Testament. The "pundits" on both sides no longer discuss ideas. They both attack personalities.
"Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people." -Eleanor Roosevelt
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it was Chris Rock who said it best:
Keep in mind, this was a comedy show, and the delivery was actually pretty hilarious. But I think it applies.
Sorting all news into one thing or another is just an extension of this mentality, and it is harmful. Would you tolerate it if they sorted it into Black News and White News? Or into News for Women, and News for Men? Put the gardening and housekeeping on News for Women, and the tech and business stuff on News for Men...
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Funny)
And before long we'll have News for Nerds!
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:4, Interesting)
And yet you're here on Slashdot?
Parent
Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, it does say it offers the option to see things "from the other side" by giving you the same story but with the oposite tag, and that could be very useful.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not exactly... (Score:4, Insightful)
exactly... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is reinforcing old patterns by selective presentation of opinions, just like traditional media [slashdot.org]. Such simplification looks stale when you look around for yourself because no real issue can be pie charted so easily. Trying to stuff every issue into a single page with three columns and an emotion depth is almost as dumb as trying to wrap the world up into a 15 minute CNN loop. It can only give an illusion of knowing something to the most ignorant and opinionated of people.
Re:Not exactly... (Score:5, Insightful)
And I don't try to pretend that I'm not affected by this phenomena either. The only forums I frequent are technocrat, gentoo otw and here. So it becomes too easy to believe that my views are mainstream and 100% correct. But sometimes I have a moment of clarity and realize that it is only because I'm mostly talking to people with the same views (except for those KDE fuckers) and that they are just reinforcing my predispositions. A good place to go for a reality check is one of those hardcore Christian forums, where the kind of people that we call nutcases hang out, and then realize that we are just as nutty to them as they are to us.
Parent
Manufacturing consent with Power Point (Score:5, Insightful)
This new project highlights the absurdity of our two party system and past media inadequacies. The whole world is reduced to two schools of thought "conservative" and "liberal" with an additional dimension for "emotion". This is perfect for the manufactured consent way of doing things where issues are displayed without depth and championed by more or less annoying, emotional "experts". Rational thought is completely cut off, because anything outside of the "mainstream" represented by the extremes is automatically smeared as the unworkable product of starry eyed idealists or terrorists. So, the complexity of the real world is eliminated and policy is made by those controlling the media. The correct opinion for the good little sheeple will be found right in the middle of the pretty, Vista style chart.
No thanks, Microsoft, I'll keep reading blogs and thinking for myself. MSNBC never showed me where the good ones were and I doubt they will in the future. You can't run an honest search engine [slashdot.org], so there's no way in hell I'll trust your company to tell me how to vote.
Re:Manufacturing consent with Power Point (Score:5, Interesting)
And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. Nobody's come up with a two-dimensional model of government, but I could imagine just how interesting that would be.
The House of Representatives would have to be sliced up into issues, instead of geographic regions. You'd vote for dozens of different representatives: a Transportation candidate, a Ways and Means candidate, an Ethics candidate, a Defense candidate, and so on. That way you wouldn't have to worry if your Defense candidate was pro-life or pro-choice, because they'd never cast a vote on the subject. It'd force a complete change how bills get written: they'd have to be categorized, shopped around differently, it'd actually be quite refreshing.
(Oh, God, now I'm refactoring Congress! Somebody help me get Martin Fowler out of my head!!!)
Parent
there's no end of interesting US opinions (Score:3, Insightful)
but you won't find those opinions reflected in broadcast news. Try fitting this [stallman.org] or this [technocrat.net] into the "just like the tories" box. Want to bet neither of those two bloggers ever show up in blews? Blews, like broadcast media before it, represents nothing but the will of it's corporate masters. Readers are spoon fed shallow "stories" and false choices that drive public policy in favor of those pulling the strings.
Re:Manufacturing consent with Power Point (Score:4, Informative)
Hear, hear to the parent. "Conservative" and "Liberal" have come more and more to mean two sides of the same Remocrat/Depublican coin.
They're both wealth-destroying Socialists. They're both warmongering Fascists.
And leave it to Microsoft to place a flawed concept at the very center of the design. "Click the Red Elephant of you listen to Rush, or the Blue Donkey if you listen to Air America"
Yes... just one more reason I'm an anarcocapitalist [amazon.com].Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Cuba's a fine example: the state of Cuban health care isn't nearly as simple and wonderful as you assert, though by picking and choosing through facts it's easy to see how you could be mislead into thinking that. After all, it's easy for governments to set up their sy
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't be the only one tagging as "blows" (Score:3, Funny)
And the others say it sucks.... (Score:3, Funny)
How about something useful.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A suggestion (Score:2)
Punishing people by calling them a troll for repeatedly referring to everyone they even remotely disagree with would help the public discourse. There are wingnuts, like the Phelps clan, but the majority of Evangelical Christians are not wingnuts. By the same token, many of the professional left-wing activist groups like Code Pink are worthy of bein
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
There are more than two categories! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, but no thanks (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd be more interested in what they filtered out...
On the Internet, no one knows you're a blog (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." [wikipedia.org]
This program apparently scans the blogosphere... but I wonder what that is. Is that the web? If I just have a page that expresses an opinion, is it counted as a blog, or do I have to register it somewhere as a blog? Is an RSS feed required at a site, or on the page, to be a blog? Does the word blog have to appear in the header or are "essays" counted? And if I have more than one domain name, how is that counted? Does the text have to be different in two cases in order to be counted as two opinions? How does one distinguish two distinct people who merely word things like an advocacy group told them from one person who owns two (or fifty or a thousand) sites and puts the same text on all of them? Is the site careful to understand the difference between quotation and inclusion for critique? How much are they investing in tools that allow people to detect and correct misclassification or is this "all in good fun" and "for entertainment only"?
Perhaps the answers to these are documented, but that almost doesn't matter. The point is that however they're answered, the answer is arbitrarily chosen and are not The Truth no matter how they are chosen.
In the olden days, everyone had an opinion on things, but the opinions were distributed, and people were forced to engage each other interactively in order to discover other opinions. They might agree or disagree, but it was the conversation that caused them to grow and learn. In the new world, we can count how many total opinions there are, and avoid ever talking to someone who disagrees. This takes the dialog and growth part out of the equation. At that point, what difference does it make how many people agree or disagree, since we'll just be measuring the efficiency of the cloning process, not the validity of ideas.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." --Mark Twain [twainquotes.com]
OK, but... (Score:3, Interesting)