Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias

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.

This just in...

Microsoft is the best software maker in the world! ..and now to Jeff for the weather..

Perfect...

Because we all know that the most effective way to be informed is by only talking with and listening to people you already agree with. /sarcasm

Re:Perfect...

Oh come on, where's your engineer's curiosity? This isn't to actually use, it's just a cool technoloogy. Come on admit it, even microsoft can throw together some pretty neat stuff. Besides a lot of people like reading bloggers or watching news relevant to their ideology's interests. For example my parents can't stand CNN because of a percieved liberal bias, so they only watch FOX news. yeah they already agree with everything said but it's still a news source that reports current events and they'd rather get current events from a conservative spin.

Re:Perfect...

It's interesting to read the local newspapers of the different parts of the world (LA Times, California, West Coast), (Toronto Star, Canada), (New York Times, New York, East Coast).

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).

Re:Perfect...

> The Sun

Which, by the way, along with Fox News and the brand-new european front Sky News are all part of the Murdoch Empire.

Oh come on.

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.

Re:Oh come on.

You're not trusting microsoft's anything. The people who write this code are experts in their respective fields, who so happen to be on a microsoft payroll. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer didn't get together over a lunch and write a list of what they decree to be republican or democrat. The shareholders don't vote on what should be included in which column. This is not representative of microsoft, just paid for and owned by microsoft. True making them red or blue might be a silly squeeze, but the fact is that the readers will identify with that sort of sentiment. Look at the Red State/Blue State maps that everyone makes and looks at on TV. Anyway, it's just an experimental thingy, like any other. Deserves the same respect any other experiment does, even if you don't go try to formulate a business model based on its findings.

Re:Perfect...

Please, please don't do that. Treat us as real people and react to what we're saying instead of the potential that we have breasts. Please?

Re:Perfect...

The truth has a liberal bias.

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.

Re:Perfect...

I would find it much more interesting to read the opposing viewpoint. I already know what mine is.

Re:Perfect...

I know what my viewpoint is. I also know what the opposing viewpoint is. Why would I read news from the opposing viewpoint when it just ticks me off?

Re:Perfect...

Some people with an opposing viewpoint might word it in a reasonable manner.

That's probably why it ticks him off.

Re:Perfect...

The various wings of the radio don't really equal an opinion, they equal a sensationalist lunatic fringe based on marketing. If I told a bunch of liberals to listen to Bill O'Reilly they would learn nothing of conservatism, but they would learn to HATE conservatives because he really is an asshat who represents no-one. I can say the same of telling conservatives to read the Nation, you learn no valid points of view, only group think.

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

Re:Perfect...

And this tool would allow you to do that, right? Seems like it could be very useful to those of us who want to know how the other side thinks - whatever that "other side" is. Of course, it would also handily package up the news for those who only want to hear from their own side, but at least it might get them reading more than one source. It's safe to stick to, say, Fox or CNN if you know that's what you like to hear, but if someone were to give you a list of other sites that would probably also suit your perspective it might encourage you to branch out a little more.

Re:Perfect...

I think it was Chris Rock who said it best:

The whole country's got a fucked up mentality. We all got a gang mentality. Republicans are fucking idiots. Democrats are fucking idiots. Conservatives are idiots and liberals are idiots.

Anyone who makes up their mind before they hear the issue is a fucking fool. Everybody, nah, nah, nah, everybody is so busy wanting to be down with a gang! I'm a conservative! I'm a liberal! I'm a conservative! It's bullshit!

Be a fucking person. Listen. Let it swirl around your head. Then form your opinion.

No normal decent person is one thing. OK!?! I got some shit I'm conservative about, I got some shit I'm liberal about. Crime - I'm conservative. Prostitution - I'm liberal.

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...

Re:Perfect...

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...

And before long we'll have News for Nerds!

Re:Perfect...

>Because we all know that the most effective way to be informed is by only talking with and listening to people you already agree with. /sarcasm

And yet you're here on Slashdot?

Re:Perfect...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but I don't see where it says this would only give you liberal opinions if you read the liberal-tagged news. On the contrary, it will give you what other liberals blog about, and that is probably more often than not things that they do not agree with.

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.

Not exactly...

BLEWS also offers a "see the view from the other side" functionality, enabling a reader to compare different views on the same story from different sides of the political spectrum.

In reality, most people will use this tool as a quick way to avoid articles they don't want to read. "Opposing/Differing viewpoint? Screw that, moving on!"

Re:Not exactly...

Yeah, a lot of people will talk about the 'net as if it's this great thing that gets all kinds of different people together for dialogue and understanding, but in reality it just makes it easier for people with fucked up ideas and values to find each other and convince each other that they are right and everyone else is wrong. It just leads to even more polarization. This MS thing is just a symptom of that.

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.

Manufacturing consent with Power Point

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

Actually, the whole world seems to have reduced us to one school of thought. Most non-US citizens seem to have a hard time telling our two parties apart. The common analogy I hear from British friends is that the Republicans are exactly like the Tories, and the Democrats are almost exactly like the Tories.

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!!!)

Re:Manufacturing consent with Power Point

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].

Great

Great, software that will make people more close minded, less informed, and just generally less intelligent. Oh wait, did you say it came from Microsoft?

On the Internet, no one knows you're a blog

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]