Link to my open source project repo: https://github.com/rennahweng/two-bias/
Link to my personal Github Pages: https://rennahweng.github.io/ (11/12 assignment)
I want to build a chrome extension that investigate news articles from opposite sides of an event, an issue, or a story. Often times, many news cover the exact same events but in completely different ways, but they are often biased towards one side. My extension will suggest readers new articles that present a variety of different perspectives from what they are reading. When an user navigates a news/press website (like FoxNews, NY Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street, The Guardian), they start reading an article that's biased towards one side of the story. While they are reading, my interface will pop up a bubble from the extension on the upper-right side of chrome browswer, and it will say something like “This is the event you’re reading about : blablabla” to make sure that my extension have detected the right event from the news. From there, it shows a list of recommendated new articles from separate groups of news sources. Each of them should represent one end of the polarization of that event. Suggested articles should have a variety of biased perspectives on the event, so users are exposed to other people's point of view and will become more awared of the other side. I want to encourage people to be more open-minded and less judgemental!
On my roadmap, I’m planning to add an additional feature where the user can toggle between “similar bias” view or "opposite bias" view, so they are given the freedom of whether read more articles that have the same bias on the ones they are currently reading, or read articles that shows an opposite or different bias.
News articles are always biased. No matter how hard an reporter/editor tries to be objective, they are human-beings who are born to have subjective opinions. If we can’t avoid reading biased news articles, why don’t we just present another biased yet opposite article on the table? Often times, people are not aware of the biases in the news they are reading because of their lack of understanding of the event, lack of accessibility to other resources, thus lack of perspectives for users to make a less judmental and narrow-minded opinion. Often times, a story is split up to two sides, two bias. I want to increaase people's accessibility to a wide range of news sources and a variety of perspectives. Users should make their own judgements with their own eyes on how the two bias or two opposite sides perceives the "reality" of the same exact thing so wildly different. Be more aware of the bias!!
- HTML/CSS JavaScript for front-end
- web scraping
- data analysis
- NLP (not much experience with this)