HACKER Q&A
📣 supernova87a

Site that tells you if news/video link is starting down extremist path?


I wonder if anyone has created such a website, where you could submit a video link / news URL, and it would tell you to what extent this seems to be at the beginning of a fringe / extremist / reinforcing unhealthy "fake news" kind of directions?

I am especially interested in trying to help family / etc. who are not very sophisticated in their browsing habits be able to check themselves at least, with some kind of external measure of whether a website is reasonable or not. For example, based on the links / associations / authors / circles that some video or news site has, is this likely to be an objective source of info, or down a hole of extremism?

I would be really interested if someone has come across this.


  👤 Klonoar Accepted Answer ✓
A related issue here is that the video you're watching may not be extremist content, but may be in a niche that extremist content gets recommended to. I've noticed this happens with YouTube and any video regarding Boxing for some reason.

I'd wager money that there's a bigger issue here than individual videos themselves; you can take down one video but you're not stopping the slow tide that converts people.


👤 brodouevencode
How do you see this being different from fact checking sites (Politifact, etc.)?

👤 jruohonen
There are several attempts to rank the reliability of newspapers. Check for instance:

https://iffy.news/

For US audiences and fact-checkers, RAND maintains a comprehensive catalog of lists and tools:

https://www.rand.org/research/projects/truth-decay/fighting-...

These lists have been frequently used in attempts to train ML models for detecting dis-/misinformation, but I think the results are somewhat questionable.

You can also enter into an endless debate over the reliability of the ranks and the rankers. Further limitations include limited geographic coverage, slow-pace curation and inability to pick-up "flash websites" designed for propaganda dissemination, and so forth.


👤 aszantu
Ground.news does give some background checks to an article