Skewz.com Founder Vipul Vyas Answers Your Questions About Media Bias 75
You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them.
1) Why is everything about "bias"? (Score:5, Insightful)by MillionthMonkey
Shouldn't just "being full of [bleep]" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?
That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.
Vipul Vyas:
First of all, we've enjoyed all the great feedback from the Slashdot community. You can't get a more intellectual and insightful set of observations from any other group. With regard to rating bias on more granular terms, I'll answer the question with two points:
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative. People perceive an article to be biased one direction or the other because of a variety of factors which include: biased word selection, assumptions not supported by data, poor sourcing, open demonization, inaccuracy, omission of facts, and guilt by association as a few examples. All of these factors in some combination create the perception of either liberal or conservative bias because folks on one side perceive their side is not being fairly represented by virtue of these factors being present. So the overall bias is a distillation of all these factors.
Second, all of the above being said; we are planning functionality to support this more granular reasoning for identifying bias. This will likely be used by power users that really want to dig into the reasons for bias. We believe this will be interesting because it will enable us to be able to track news sources in terms of both bias and the reasons for bias such as inaccuracies. This should add a new dimension of insight.
2) Incentivising Registration? (Score:4, Interesting)
by eldavojohn (898314)
What do you offer to entice users to register and rank stories for you? It seems that the benefits just come from the people that do all the work, is your only incentive that the person feels good for helping you out? Do you rank your users? Is there a reward system even if it's only number of stories ranked?
The article said you are hoping to raise your current set of 600 users to something more like 10,000--what are you doing to accomplish that?
Vipul Vyas:
Great question. I believe people really enjoy the Skewz forum in which they can blow the whistle on pieces purporting to be objective but are not and also push forward pieces that they advocate despite their bias. When we first started the site we were simply transferring our own daily behavior of sending around emails with articles and our reactions to them. Just being able to find a community to exchange ideas and interact with is a huge draw for people...sort of like Slashdot but for politics. Many people can get angry with what they read in the paper, but their only recourse is to send a letter to the editor and hope that it gets read or the remote possibility that it gets printed. With Skewz they can call out such issues instantly and get an immediate reaction from a community of people from both sides of the political landscape. The feedback loop is immediate.
To answer your question more direction, right now Skewz does have a user ranking system. Users are ranked in terms of their experience on the site (number of articles submitted or skewed, comments made, etc.). Users are ranked from rookie Congressmen all the way up to incumbent Senators to keep with the political theme. We also provide individual statistics with regard to user activity under the user's Skewz Me! profile. These all provide incentive from a pure personal accomplishment perspective.
A curious thing we've observed is that people both 1. reveal bias in the 'main stream or corporate media,' and 2. submit articles that they know are biased from say the blogosphere that support their position. So one of the biggest emerging reasons that people are active is to promote their perspective in an environment where they feel they might just reach the other side. I believe people honestly feel that they can reach the "other side" on our site simply by virtue of the format.
With regard to getting to 10,000 users, we're relying on the basics:
1) Great reviews from the Slashdot community (that's you guys),
2) Strong content from a politically involved community and an intuitive mechanism to attract both opinion readers and trend setters,
3) Strong ties with the blogosphere to create a mutually rewarding Skew mechanism through our widget program which is customized for political blogs in ways that more generic widgets for sites such as Digg are not, and
4) Good motivation or our current users to invite their friends - which we're seeing a lot of.
We are pleased with the results so far as we have a healthy number of people enjoying Skewz.
3) Missing sliders (Score:4, Insightful)
by Tsar (536185)
From your site's What is Skewz? [skewz.com] section:
"Skewz was started by a group of 4 guys with diverse political views who engaged in frequent political sparring. We tired of the coarseness of the public political dialog and the tendency for both sides to talk past each other. The goal was not to make peace between liberals and conservatives. Instead, we wanted to encourage liberal-conservative dialogue by improving on the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the discussions. We hoped that doing so would take focus from the cosmetic appeal of parties and personalities that generate allegiances and place it instead on wit and wisdom of intelligent debate."
It seems that your site's focus is currently on cultural/political bias rather than the "wit and wisdom of intelligent debate." If your project is to be true to its goals, shouldn't there be evaluation sliders for an article's wit, insight, wisdom and informativeness? We use a simplified system for that on Slashdot and it works surprisingly well most of the time.
Vipul Vyas:
Fair point. I think if you look at the discussion we have on the site today, it's quite a bit less bombastic than what you see on partisan sites. We're seeing people come to Skewz for more sophisticated debate with people from the other side of the political spectrum. People use the backdrop of a specific story with asserted facts and that backdrop helps keep things from getting personal and also keeps the focus on the article and topic being discussed. I believe that has really helped keep the community culture very positive.
But to your point, as indicated in my response to the first question here Skewz is adding functionality to allow people to more discretely comment on the positive and negative elements of the submitted articles.
4) Skewz me? (Score:4, Informative)
by Jeffrey Baker (6191)
Skews makes no sense. Take this article as an example:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080401184532.kxjxy7xo&show_article=1
It's an AFP wire story with completely straight, factual reporting about high school graduation rates in the USA. There is no commentary from the author whatsoever. However Skewz users rate the story as "Liberal", giving it 2.5 out of 5 points on the Liberal scale. I'm having a hard time seeing the logic there. How can a purely factual report on this topic possibly be considered leftist?
Vipul Vyas:
I think your observation makes the point. What many perceive as "straight up" objective can still be perceived as biased. With the article in question and the rating, I just learned something about how some segments of our polity interpret events...and it's very different from the way I interpret them. I think that's the point of Skewz.
Ultimately we'd have to ask the members of the Skewz community as to why the article was skewed left. I believe this is the insight you get from a site like Skewz. If you look at some of the comments associated with the article you see some interesting and even surprising perspectives which I never would have thoughts of.
Folks on the left felt the article was objective to slightly leftward leaning by pointing out the serious problems faced by inner city youth. So, liberals felt that the story being covered was good coverage of objective reality with maybe some modest left bias in terms of advocacy for a traditional set of liberal positions like uplifting those in inner cities and focusing more on education.
Conservatives had a more visceral response. If you look at the comments, the perception was that the failings were implicitly pointing to George Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Some said the article didn't associate blame with the students or parents. Others pointed to the photo associated with the article showing jubilant African American students. They felt that the picture was out of line with the point that graduation rates among minorities were extremely low.
These sharply different take-aways from a fairly straight forward articles create the most insights. Skewz lets you augment those insights by seeing who skewed the article in what way. Each person's profile provides their political orientation so you can see how liberals reacted to an article and how conservatives reacted. That makes for some interesting insights. In addition, you can leverage the split view function on Skewz to see a story about the same news event that is rated with the opposite political orientation to the one that you are currently reading. That really lets you flesh out the whole picture in terms of the world of opinion.
5) Complaints? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Notquitecajun (1073646)
Have you ever gotten complaints from actual journalists about how their stories are rated? I think one thing that we rarely - if ever - hear is how actual journalists rate the news. I'm not talking pundits, either, I'm talking about those who are supposed to report on the who-what-when-where-how of the news.
Vipul Vyas:
We haven't so far but we hope to become more influential and at that point we'll matter to journalists. Unfortunately, some journalists are not too worried about what their readership thinks. That's where the Slashdot community can help by posting and skewing articles to keep the media honest. Our blog widget program will enable political bloggers to let their readers rate their articles and post them on Skewz. Now, bloggers by their nature are biased advocates of certain positions. That being said, there is value in understanding the information these blogs present relative to the traditional media. The closer the traditional media gets to certain segments of the blogosphere, the less likely they are representing an objective perspective. The blogs, on the other hand, carry their liberal and conservative affiliations as a badge of honor.
6) Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated (Score:3, Insightful)
by melted (227442)
Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated: http://research.microsoft.com/~chrisko/papers/ICWSM_paper.pdf, albeit totally orthogonal to what skewz.com does.
Are you guys using machine learning at all? If not, how do you protect yourselves against user bias (e.g. the situation where liberals like your site and conservatives don't, so you get mostly liberal stories). Personally, it seems to me that Skewz is just a glorified Digg with sliders.
Vipul Vyas:
There's always the risk that one side dominates the site. That being said, there is such a perception of media bias on both sides that I believe Skewz provides a legitimate venue for that discussion to take place which will continue to draw people from both ends of the political spectrum. If we provide an even playing field, we'll be a place where either side can come to try to evangelize the other in terms of their perceptions. Skewz is an political open space.
Also, based on a recent Harris Interactive Poll Blog readership is almost evenly distributed with 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly reading blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.
Interestingly, most all of the founders of Skewz come have speech recognition and statistical language modeling background. We leverage language modeling in our split view function which matches stories on the right with their corresponding foils on the left to provide a fuller perspective. So from that perspective we do use some linguistic modeling at a basic level.
I applaud what Microsoft is doing with Blews. However, I think Skewz is a pretty different site in that it's user driven, and we're interested in understanding what people think. If you're really into the political blog world you realize that different blogs have different degrees of alignment with the left or right and this actually evolves. In fact, some folks completely swap sides over time. In the end politics is about people and their perceptions. We think its valuable to get it directly from the source to best understand how these trends evolve. For example, Andrew Sullivan has evolved from being a fairly right wing stalwart to being an Obama supporter. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs moved in the other direction after 9/11. These movements are best described by asking the polity itself.
7) Cultural polarization as a web service (Score:2)
by Tsar (536185)
What filters will be available in the future? Will users be able to limit the stories they see to those rated, say, (+4,Reactionary) or above? That would allow your portal to emulate the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos or the John Birch Society homepage at the user's whim, removing the risk of accidental exposure to differing viewpoints.
Vipul Vyas:
I'm glad you asked this question. Skewz actually has this functionality today. If you are a registered user you'll see a spectrum under both the liberal and conservative sides. You can slide the hands there to bracket the stories to see more or less extremes of each side. In this way, you can create your own view or synthetic version of the Drudge Report or Daily Kos. But keep in mind, by virtue of the format you are always at risk at being exposed to the other side...which is a risk that has many rewards.
8) Where is your value add, without a better spectrum... (Score:2)
by PotatoHead (12771)
Of political alignment?
IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.
So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?
Vipul Vyas:
Good question. When Skewz first started, I used to just visit a couple of sites that were more or less aligned with my existing political beliefs. However, Skewz has exposed me to a variety of different perspectives...some of which I didn't even know existed. Even if I don't agree with some of the new perspectives I've been exposed to, I now have a better sense of how other people think and what their logic is. In some respects, I didn't realize what I myself was reading was biased because I was completely unaware of other facts or theories on the same subject that were out there. Skewz has enabled me to still get a lot of the information I was getting before while at the same time exposing me to an entirely different world of thinking in a format that's relatively easy to use.
With regard to your question on the spectrum, it works because you're not just rating the corporate media left or right which I take it you mean the traditional media. Blogs are also well represented on the site. Users can submit and add weight to what the blogs are saying. If there are subjects or angles that the traditional media are not covering then these stories can be submitted and rated. Again, people tend to reveal bias in two ways: 1. I know this is biased, but I like what it is saying or 2. this purports to be objective and it's not so I am blowing the whistle. Some people also use the site to employ a third tactic. They submit articles as being objective that deal with subject or facts that they feel the media has not covered through "bias by exclusion."
9) Truth, and the real bias we need to worry about (Score:2)
by Gat0r30y (957941)
It seems that the news media has become increasingly segmented, and indeed this provides a way for people to get only the news they want to see. But my issue stems not from Left or Right, but from a more general perspective. An increasing bulk of the news out there is increasingly aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. I can see that there is a place for tabloids, and their stories, just like there is a place for soap operas. However, it seems that the tabloid mentality has infiltrated all facets of corporate news media. Instead of raising debate about policy, the dialog in most mainstream news outlets has become more along the lines of "OMG, Hillary is 2 points down! And she doesn't have as many myspace friends as Obama! And McCain is super hot!". I propose that what we need is not a "Left vs. Right" filter, but a "Pointless drivel I wouldn't read if it was printed on Lindsay Lohan's ass and I was doin her from behind vs. Actual News Content which I might find of Value".
I gave your site a quick look, there were 3 stories on the front page which might have entailed some sort of policy issue, or problem facing the electorate.
A) UK considering "Health Vouchers" for NHS patients.(marked conservative)
B)Study: only 1/2 of students graduate high school in US Cities (marked liberal)
C)'Silent' Famine sweeps globe (marked liberal)
Everything else was the "high school lunchroom" type of discussion, who's up, who's down, why they might be up if they are up, why they shouldn't give up and "rah rah sis boom bah for My Favorite Candidate". My question is this, how can we elevate actual issues to the discussion? How can we start a dialog based on the problems we face, and the policy which the candidates propose to fix these problems? Food shortages, Education, and Health care are real issues. The day to day of campaigning is interesting for sure, but how can we keep it from dominating the news landscape as it does now?
Vipul Vyas:
This is a great question. I believe it's human nature to do both. The "name calling level of debate" is indeed easy and appealing. But that being said, if you look at the actual debate on Skewz; the level of debate is more solution oriented than you'll see on many other more partisan sites. In fact, the three substantial articles you mention may not show up anywhere on many other news outlets. You are right in that news outlets tend to cater to the segments they are going after. With Skewz, the community decides what is most interesting so the feedback loop is more immediate. By and large, the self-selecting community has been more about deep debate on real issues versus mudslinging- even in this election season. On Skewz you can find finely parsed debate on Obama's health care plan or global warming for example.
Often the submitted article is the launching point for more detailed discussion where folks often learn a great deal about the other side. For example, liberal and conservatives (generally) seem to agree on US presence in Afghanistan...much to the surprise of many conservatives. Conversely, gun control is not as passionately pursued by liberals (at least those on our site currently) as many conservatives had assumed.
News media give their customer base what they want. With Skewz, the community decides what it wants, and so far we seem to be selecting a more sophisticated news consumer.
10) What about consensus? (Score:3, Funny)
by prxp (1023979)
What about when both parties reach a consensus and the story ranks 100% liberal and 100% conservative? Does the system explode? Is this a new sort of Quantum Computer? Enlighten me, please! (but hey, be fair and balanced, will you?)
Vipul Vyas:
We accommodate for this through the center skew which points to an objective view that everyone agrees represents reality objectively. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough. (and by the way the quantum version of Skewz where articles can be liberal and conservative at the same time is coming up and will be part of the theory of everything...:-)
RED FLAG! (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, that's how he opens a discussion about bias in media? He wants to be taken seriously right?
He's just adding some spin. (Score:2)
That being said, it still isn't newsworthy.
Re:RED FLAG! (Score:4, Interesting)
BLUE FLAG! (Score:3, Funny)
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The majority of tv/movies/music/internet sites/advertising campaigns (which drives the previous) either target people under thirty (nice amounts of disposible income) or people over thirty (by telling them they can be hip again, by doing what 30-year-olds do).
Your standard reply to a lot of questions seems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Aren't you worried that as your site gains popularity, its flaws (as in, pandering to the political divide) will drive the level of discourse down, not up?
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Mod systems, which were invented to raise the best comments to the top, are instead used to skew the discussion. It happens here as well. I've had and have seen completely factual statements modded into oblivion. Try reading a th
Re:Your standard reply to a lot of questions seems (Score:2)
In my experience with the site the past few days, there doesn't seem to be much discussion. (This is coming from Slashdot, though - Skewz articles generally have only a few pages! of comments associated with them.)
I think they were trying to say was that they're hoping that a site dedicated to pointing out leftward/rightward bias would hopefully attract people interested in intelligent discussion, not propaganda. We'll see as their audience increases.
I also don't see them as "perpetuat[ing] the politi
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I guess. My perspective is the exact opposite though: that a site that points out only rightward/leftward bias will attract those who think this is an important feature of news stories, and that this cannot lead to intelligent discussion.
True.
Too bad (Score:2)
We don't live in a binary world (Score:4, Insightful)
The world just isn't about two shades of grey, that's just some kind of fantasyland.
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That's because both major political parties here are firmly in the grasp of the multinational corporations who can "contribute" to only two parties, ignore the rest of the parties, and not care who loses because they win. They get the laws passed they want passed.
Of
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And, as a matter of the same COURSE, we have already dispatched black helicopters to your location. You may wish to change into clean clothes real quick...
Re:We don't live in a binary world (Score:5, Insightful)
US view of the concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" are wildly different from other countries. As are concepts like "left" and "right"; pretty much every country links it's own set of (lack of) values to these words.
I myself am from Holland, where the term "liberal" sometimes means the complete opposite of the US interpretation of the word depending on the particular value being discussed.
And there's the point parent makes; there are a LOT more flavors than just "liberal" and "conservative", and I'm not just talking of shades of gray inbetween, but entirely different directions. Politics isn't a simple 1D scale, it's more dimensions than I can think of right now.
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Exactly, and this point was mentioned in the question thread and promptly ignored like every other time the subject comes up. Too many people are far too invested in the left/right model to allow for any change.
Instead of saying it all again, here links to the two posts I made on the topic:
Post 1 [slashdot.org]
Post 2 [slashdot.org]
So long as we cling to the broken model there isn't much hope for dialog. Lots of people have proposed various axes for a two dimensional model that work much better th
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It's certainly better than a mere right/left, but I have a hard time fitting the 3 clowns left running in the 2 major political parties to any kind of scheme. They all stand for more war, bigger government, higher taxes and less freedom.
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The major problem with Pournells's chart is it was written when the Socialists had successfully rewritten the hist
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every single socialist party was internationalist? (Score:2)
The Nazi Party was as internationalist as any other socialist.
They all want to run the world.
Same as any sane person would expect any united front in the 30s would have been an attempted Russian power grab. Their files are open now you know. You should stop plugging your ears and going 'Nah Nah Nah'. Turns out the 'Birchers' were right about more then a few things (e.g. Alger Hiss), in a paranoid time sometimes the paranoids are correct.
The National Socialists gave corporations a choice. Do as we tel
tldr... (Score:1)
Uggghh the name (Score:2)
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Slashdot should take note of the first question (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is in desperate need of a (-1, Misinformed) or (-1, Incorrect) or (-1, Complete BS) mod option, and has been forever. I can't begin to count the number of posts filled with complete rubbish that get modded up here. Sometimes the posts in question are made sincerely, without the poster being aware that what they're posting is inaccurate. So, the traditional negative mods of Redundant, Flamebait and Troll don't apply. There's Interesting, Informative and Insightful, but where's the Incorrect mod to counter these?
The closest mod that could apply to an innacurate quote would be Redundant, but that's not entirely true either. And posting a reply with a correction almost never balances things out, because the incorrect post almost invariably remains modded highly, and quite often, the correction remains unmodded.
So, the only negative mod that can be applied to inaccurate statements is (-1, Overrated), because most of the time, using any other negative mod gets nailed in metamoderation, because the post isn't necessarily flamebait or trolling.
Re:Slashdot should take note of the first question (Score:4, Interesting)
The story Friday about some sleazy lawyer suing about autisim and vaccinations forced me to comment about my oldest daughter (she'll be 23 this year), who was diagnosed as mentally retarded but I've since come to believ is autistic. It was modded "troll" despite the fact that fact was presented as fact, opinion as opinion, was heartfelt and real, and generated a lot of comments (mostly pretty redundant comments, however).
It would have been modded "incorrect" despite the fact that I only presented what I saw. Yes, it was colored by emotion, SHE'S MY DAUGHTER FOR GOD'S SAKE! If you want your ass kicked, hurt a man's lover. If you want to be fucking killed, hurt his child.
Re:Slashdot should take note of the first question (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot is in desperate need of a (-1, Misinformed) or (-1, Incorrect) or (-1, Complete BS) mod option, and has been forever. I can't begin to count the number of posts filled with complete rubbish that get modded up here. Sometimes the posts in question are made sincerely, without the poster being aware that what they're posting is inaccurate. So, the traditional negative mods of Redundant, Flamebait and Troll don't apply.
You are correct that the mods don't apply, but I believe that is by design. What is and is not factually correct is often a matter of debate. As such, if one person posts an opinion, such as "gun laws lead to more violent crime" do you really think it is useful to have Slashdot users "vote" on if this is correct by modding it "informative" or "incorrect" and seeing which gets more votes? Is it not more useful to have a real discussion where people can explain their opinions. The whole point of a debate (as opposed to an argument) is that it is supposed to lead to common ground and find the fundamental source of the disagreement. At that point if the fundamental disagreement is factual, one can discuss the pros and cons of the data collection methods. If the disagreement is moral, then at least people can have a clear understanding of the positions and form or change their own opinion based upon that moral difference.
There's Interesting, Informative and Insightful, but where's the Incorrect mod to counter these?
The correct way to deal with a post that is factually incorrect is to either post a reply that contains the facts, or find a reply and mod it informative. As much as I might have liked to have had a "-1, factually incorrect" mod in the past, that is a crutch and leads to lack of discussion. It is too easy for people to simply "vote" in accordance with their current opinion and then let the majority feel justified that their belief was reinforced by the mob. This is fairly useless and actually is harmful in that it dissuades people from real discussion that might reveal actual, verifiable facts and lead to a change of opinion.
The closest mod that could apply to an innacurate quote would be Redundant, but that's not entirely true either.
Redundant applies only if someone has already posted that comment before. This is, in fact, the most commonly abused mod in my opinion. People often use "redundant" to mod down comments they disagree with, but which have not been stated by someone already. They rely upon meta-moderator's laziness in not bothering to check the context, which is of course required to make such a determination. I'm lazy too, but if I don't look at the context, I don't meta-moderate posts marked redundant. In fact, it would probably be a good idea to toss out any meta moderation that marks a redundant post either way unless the user clicked on the context link.
And posting a reply with a correction almost never balances things out, because the incorrect post almost invariably remains modded highly, and quite often, the correction remains unmodded.
This can and does happen, but that does not mean no one reads the unmodded replies. I've also seen factual correction modded up quite often. Certainly it is not perfect, but I still think it is better than having an "factually incorrect" mod option.
So, the only negative mod that can be applied to inaccurate statements is (-1, Overrated), because most of the time, using any other negative mod gets nailed in metamoderation, because the post isn't necessarily flamebait or trolling.
They should, of course, be nailed in metamoderation. If you read the moderator guidelines you'll notice they ask people to focus on upward moderation. I'd argue it is a waste to mod a statement "-1, overrated" in most cases because it does nothing to further the discussion. I will wait until someone makes a reply that corrects it and mod that, or make a reply myself. The only time I mod so
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The problem with the Misinformed, Incorrect, or Complete BS mod would be that the moderator is just as likely to be incorrect or misinformed. I mean you could say something like: Planes were hijacked and flown into the WTC, and a "truther" with mod points is going to knock you down.
Also, there is a tendency to get into religious debate on here. You say, "I believe in God" or "There is no scientific evidence for the existence of God" and either way someone will think you are misinformed.
Grammar nazis an
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If something is factually incorrect and you know it but otherwise is a good post, i.e. doesn't seem to be a troll or flamebait, I would say the correct moderation action is 'reply' and not 'mod down'.
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But... 'fixed that 4 ya' works (Score:2)
Maybe we could add (+1, Needed fixing but still salient) to the mod options.
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Biased news sources rarely make stuff up, but they are careful about what they cover. I'm surprised he didn't mention that in the interview.
Frankfurt, H.G.:"On Bullshit" is applicable here (Score:1, Interesting)
As Skewz also circles around the question of truth, is it just pandering for bullshitters?
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"Wow, even I can admit that's total bullshit."
~ Jack Thompson on Everything he says and does
Skewz? (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I had never heard of this site. From reading the Q&A, I'm not sure I'll ever want to visit it. I like the idea of exposing bias in news reporting, but I really don't see a lot of value in what they seem to be contributing here.
I'd enjoy a site where they fact check and even where they point out additional pertinent facts that may have been accidentally or intentionally left out of an article. I'd enjoy discussion where the methodology of fact collection and analysis was discussed and the relevance of data with regard to specific policies, other news events, etc.
From what I can tell based upon the answers given though, this seems more like a site populated by people polarized to one cultural view who are highly motivated and self identify with a polarized "liberal" or "conservative" political stance (as defined by mainstream media). So they "rate" articles based upon if they are supporting or opposing a given political party's platform? That sounds, well, idiotic. A completely objective study on the effects of gun control laws on crime rates might be rated as "conservative" simply because the political party's platform is supported by the data. Not to be crude but, why they hell would I care? Unless you're not interested in being accurately informed and are just looking for articles to support whatever group you've already decided to support, this site sounds completely useless. How is this any different than just finding the most biased news sites you can (in whatever direction) and just watching their spin on things?
Maybe I'm just misinterpreting the Q&A. Has anybody used the site and actually found it useful for finding objective information and helping to discover what is and is not accurate end relevant?
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"Unless you're not interested in being accurately informed" - how do you define accurately informed on the internet? Are you accurately informed by wikiped
Bias! (Score:2)
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Vipul completely misunderstood #8 (Score:1)
PotatoHead's question was very thoughtful and pointed to the problems associated with a system of political categorization that essentially boils down to binary options.
Vipul didn't actually address the question at all in his response.
I think what the questioner was asking was: Is "conservative"/"liberal" really a meaningful way of describing political leanings? If not, then the whole Skewz exercise is pointless.
Biased for Fake "Balance" (Score:5, Insightful)
So I suppose we have our answer. the point of the fake "balance" that Skewz.com promotes, along with the rest of the "contrived controversy" gossip media, is entirely once of dumbed-down convenience. They're not interested in the story, in the facts, or even in "balance". They're interested in cherrypicking the story to suit their own agenda, which is mainly just increased conflict. To distract us from ever solving any problems, which would mean less demand for their "service".
"Skewz". Couldn't have named it better myself.
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The readers don't seem to have thought the question wasn't worth answering - far from it. The criteria for which questions to answer was "highest rated". The moderator
Detecting Democrat - Republican bias is easy (Score:2, Interesting)
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Some news outlets actually have style guides to ensuret that the answer is the same regardless of party.
Fallacy of false dichotomy (Score:3, Interesting)
The assumption is that any position must be liberal or conservative, but this leads to nonsense. There is a large centrist middle. So what we see is that the largely centrist press looks liberal to extreme conservatives and conservative to extreme liberals. For example, being against abolishing social security or against abolishing the death penalty are not liberal or conservative, they are centrist. Does the media have a centrist bias?
Furthermore, support or criticism of a particular politician is not evidence of bias. It is poor reporting. Name your most or least favorite politician - probably they are in office because of a period of uncritical support by the media and their biggest problem is unfair, inaccurate, negative reporting in the media.
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How do you figure that, exactly? Aside from the morality of execution, there's the high rates of errors in death penalty cases, lack of good public defenders for those who can't afford their own, and the dozens of innocent people who were put on death row only to have their sentences overturned.
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Socialism(all kinds):Economic forces are the driving forces of society. All men desire and should have freedom.
Liberalism: The state exists to safeguard inalienable rights, including property rights.
Nationalism: The state exists to protect the culture and the people of the nat
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The reason, I think, is that such a website would be an endless catalogue of entries beginning "this is a lie to make you
Demographic Graph (Score:2)
If it gets popular, I wouldn't doubt it if you start seeing the talking head newzies start using skewz as a quick pulse-meter.
how can anyone liberal media bias with... (Score:1)
It's not about individual reporters, as anyone can
Good luck! (Score:2)
I wish them the best of luck with this. In fact, that's the same goal my website(Lucid America [lucidamerica.com]) has. But what I'm finding out is that most people don't have the time. It takes time to understand the issue enough to have a sophisticated debate about it. It takes even more time to think through your thoughts, and write them in a concise manner. At best I can manage this once a week, an
Communities and karma (Score:2)
2. I'm quite skeptical as to whether your plan is reasonable for its nominal purpose, to categorize news stories. I tend to find machine-learning approaches to this problem more credible. But I can see the 'hook' for gathering a community around your idea.
3. I would sugge
definitions (Score:2)
I was confused, and found no help anywhere. Is there a help page/faq that I missed?
For a start, I noticed that the 'liberal' was blue and 'conservative' is red, which is the opposite of my understanding (from UK politics) and makes it counter-intuitive. Actually, in the UK, I think the liberal's colour is yellow, and it's labour who traditionally uses red (with the conservatives using blue).
Then I noticed on article which seemed to be rated the o
Ignoring "story bias" (Score:2)
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative.
That totally ignores the vital third leg to the bias issue: the bias of virtually all media towards telling a story which will attract readers/viewers rather than presenting the facts.
Couple of general examples:
Headline bias: The overall article is fairly objective if you read it all the way through, but the headline and preamble is misleading. E.g. this one is all over the UK media at the moment: Father fined for overfilling bin [bbc.co.uk] "A father-of-four has been left with a criminal record for overfilling