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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.
Microsoft is the best software maker in the world! ..and now to Jeff for the weather..
"Persistance is Fertile" - Me. I can quote myself if I want to.
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
Politics aren't nearly partisan enough, Microsoft has to go and encourage further escalation of tensions between the radical left and right. Get your free tub of Microsoft Popcorn(TM) while it's hot!
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Keep your eyes to the sky.
This new project highlights the absurdity of our two party system and past media inadequacies. The whole world is reduced to two schools of thought "conservative" and "liberal" with an additional dimension for "emotion". This is perfect for the manufactured consent way of doing things where issues are displayed without depth and championed by more or less annoying, emotional "experts". Rational thought is completely cut off, because anything outside of the "mainstream" represented by the extremes is automatically smeared as the unworkable product of starry eyed idealists or terrorists. So, the complexity of the real world is eliminated and policy is made by those controlling the media. The correct opinion for the good little sheeple will be found right in the middle of the pretty, Vista style chart.
No thanks, Microsoft, I'll keep reading blogs and thinking for myself. MSNBC never showed me where the good ones were and I doubt they will in the future. You can't run an honest search engine, so there's no way in hell I'll trust your company to tell me how to vote.
Will Microsoft favor the blew states with this new service?
Will pro M$ stuff be pushed up? Pro vista stuff filled with PR talk will be push over real stories from uses.
This is reinforcing old patterns by selective presentation of opinions, just like traditional media. 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.
Come on, that's just too obvious a joke for /.
Like sorting by geek bias.
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.
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.
Moderate as flamebait any non-political satire site that uses the terms 'moonbat' or 'wingnut' or other words, as they evolve, in the main article more than once.
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 being called 'moonbats,' but the average leftist you talk to doesn't deserve that label.
Or did you pull this out of your ass?
"Blews" (sounds exactly like) "Blues" (which just so happens to be the color) "Blue" (which) = Political color affilated with Democrats
So they are using a name to categorize political bias in the news with a politically biased name. Brilliant.
I know, I know, it's short for BLog + nEWS = BLEWS, but, duh.
It may make some paranoid types to think it's all just a "REWS".
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
People on the both sides believe what they believe and self select evidence that fits their world view, and rejects any evidence to the contrary as lies and propaganda. The purpose of creating or reading a political blog is to get a feeling of belonging with other people agreeing with what you believe.
Thats why I love slashdot. There are a million idiots, trolls, and very smart people that will challenge anything I say on any topic under the sun. No sacred cows. minimal censorship.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
>> quick way to avoid articles they don't want to read
If anything, this broadens one's political horizon by letting them see what the nutcases on the opposite side think, with the added benefit of seeing what the other side REALLY cares about.
For the conservative side, they're simply scraping stories from Drudge Report.
but you won't find those opinions reflected in broadcast news. Try fitting this or this 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.
I was a little thrown off by their choice of colours. Up here in Canada the Tories(Conservatives) are always blue and its the Grits(Liberals) who take Red.
Hmmmm... bloggers are defined as "liberal" or "conservative", depending on the kind of things they say, yes? Then, Microsoft want to classify the things they say, based on what kind of bloggers they are?
Can you say "circular"? Sure. I knew you could.
Doesn't NBC already have a patent on this?
Seriously though, every news outlet in the world has been doing this since before Gutenberg was born. Even Microsoft's idea to tailor it to each user dynamically isn't new. That's been done towards anyone who could have you executed since pre-historic days. Didn't they just rule that making an old idea available over the Internet was not sufficient to receive a patent?
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
I can guarantee there are going to be some false positives in links to blogs about people loving bush
Excuse me while I gather the virgin sacrifice and assemble the pentagram required to solve your problem
Burn all the hippies. I need to fuel my environmentally friendly furnace.
This wouldn't be questioned if it were not Microsoft doing it. Matching content to constituency is something being researched in many areas.
I record my sleeptalking
I'm a libertarian, you insensitive clod!
Get the facts!
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?
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
MS. FARMER ...
As you can see, the Lifeline is
controlled by two polar extremes:
"Fear" and "Love". Fear is in the
negative energy spectrum. Love is in
the positive energy spectrum.
MS. FARMER
(furious)
He asked me to... forcibly insert
the Lifeline exercise card into my
anus.
http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Donnie-Darko.html
But will you get to decide, or will you be presented with a viewpoint you expected to believe in ?
It'll be interesting to see how this works out, considering both US parties are well to the Right of any of our major parties in Australia, let alone those in Europe.
The difference is, they're doing something with it.
-- haaz.
Now this exactly the sort of bias that this thing finds: republic vs democratic, yin vs yang, sucks vs blows.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Support the RIAA, CIA, NSA, DMCA, BSA, and anything else that ends with A, and accept that these incidents are coincidence.
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 site uses it to, but there membership is closed, so I haven't seen it in action. Their Trust Metric system is described at www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html. Though it seems to be more centralized than the Cicle's system was.
Though I suppose it would require too much processing for a centralized web server with a large userbase to handle.
[1] I don't know what happened to the Circle project--I think their site was thecircle.org.au
I have only one question.
Can it also give me news stories with no bias?
Ah well. It was worth a shot.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Sorting news as "liberal" or "conservative"... because there isn't already enough false dichotomization of people's views in modern politics. As long as this keeps up, we're ideologically locking ourselves into a two-party system.
In other news, the democrats, with the inventor of the Internet, developed a system that automatically makes any republican text display in white on a white background, so that it is impossible to read.
Let's test this software:
In a meeting today, Bush said, "
."
See, the system is working.
Can someone please provide a proper link to the site instead of linking to a blog ABOUT the site?
When you preview a comment lately, it replaces your changed subject with RE: Parent. in the form.
If you just change the subject and submit it works like it's supposed to. You just can no longer preview your comment with the subject intact.
That's why so many thread are re: parent subject. lately.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You see, they're also developing a parallel technology for detecting Microsoft bias in an article by counting the number of paperclips linking to it. Linux bias by herring-bone count is expected to be announced shortly.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd be more interested in what they filtered out...
Not where you wanted to go with that. Females have breasts. Get over it.
Try: "Sharp knees. Sorry."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Can you imagine if we had this? Half of us would still be thinking Saddam Hussein caused 9/11.
Dear sir, pray tell what sort of news sites you would use to wrap fish?
I guess this means that we can expect some form of "Blews" Screen of Death
Cheers, Chris
There are other options. For instance, they could dislike those practices and thus seek to change Microsoft from within. Or they could take much larger issue with the practices of all of their reasonable alternatives (just about everything with money has done something bad, and if anything remains it certainly can't pay the rest of the world). They could be quite certain that 100% of people involved in unethical business practices are gone. They could consider MS Research to have done nothing wrong ever, even if MS did a horrible thing, in the same sense that Americans continue to live in the USA despite incidents like Gitmo, or with .
It is still a filter, mind you, but not an easy one to pin down, and they're designing an algorithm to sift through things rather than voting YAY or NAY on particular instances, and it can be rather harder to insert a bias into that.
FWIW here is a smart approach to such opinion mining http://www.crs4.it/ict/dart06/slides/attardi.pdf
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
It's easy to pin down.
Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. Full stop.
If you are engaged in some endeavor that will not be released fully open, and you hope your efforts will be developed into something that will cause true social change then you are engaged in a masturbatory fantasy that will not bear fruit. Proprietary solutions do not advance the arts and sciences. They only advance the causes of their sponsors.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm reminded of the New Yorker cartoon "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog."
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
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
How do they classify the bloggers as "liberal" or "conservative"? Self-identification? And is the data even meaningful with such a simple dichotomy? What about radical Jeffersonians? Anarcho-socialists? People who still vote for Nader?
Moderation -2
50% Troll
50% Overrated
TrollMods are exactly the kinds of consumers of cooked news Microsoft wants for its latest fiasco.
--
make install -not war
I think the Washington Post is perfectly balanced for wrapping fish.
--
make install -not war
And Fox news is seen rolling their eyes saying, "We've got this trademarked already."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
oh my god people. i know this is from microsoft, but it actually sounds like interesting research that could help us better understand and potentially deal with the whole polarization / daily me problem. (see cass sunstein for the background)... i mean it's an interesting ongoing research problem. this isn't intended to be a magical solution.
In other words at the top the two parties are really unified as one, unified by The hidden third party with it's special interests, and finite self serving agenda. The third party's agenda is to secure for itself disproportionate advantage and benefits, and create, maintain, and preserve various profit centers in the current system of things. Fictional conservatism which is often linked to maintaining the ways of the past, is all about impeding the evolution and enhanced efficiency of the systems that would eliminate high value profit centers.
Fictional issues are used to keep the people divided and power-less. This gives the few acting in unity more power than all the people who are engaged in ideological conflict with each other in a bath of mind fluff.
Liberalism = Freedom
Conservatism = Wisdom
There is no conflict between the two; they compliment each other, we have only the appearance of conflict born of the fictions and story lines attached to each label.
One would expect a successful representation of the people to provide personal and economic freedom that benefits the many. Yet the citizens have the loss of both to the benefit of a few resulting from the ability to divide the people amongst themselves with fictional issues.
So we have "The Third Party" cloaked and hidden by the other two, a single unified group using the two parties as it's hands but for sure they are one body and one mind.
The reality is the Democrats and Republicans are not opposed to each other but are two hands controlled by the same body and egoic mind.
Yet this third party is not totally hidden, it can be seen wearing a mask of lobbyists, and only the discerning and aware mind can see the face behind the mask.
One can only hope to chop off the head of this political beast, the hidden third party with the dissemination of intelligence, insight and wisdom. So that a new head forms, one born from the measured and authenticated voice of an informed people, guided by compassion, collective intent, wisdom and effort, preserving the freedom of the individual to spur the evolution of mankind and it's systems.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
There are only two possible political viewpoints, liberal and conservative.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
Ooh, let me guess! Did you work for Intel back when AMD64 came out?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I wish I hadn't read PNAC's 2000 position paper where they say that care will have to be taken to fully analyze and control the Internet. If that same paper's demand for permanently stationing troops in the Middle East is any example, the future of the Internet should be "interesting" (in that not-really-a-Chinese-saying sense of the word).
There are people and groups who will inevitably use this kind of technology to pipe and restrict stories to particular audiences. Don't like the way Congresswoman "Y" has been voting? Apply a judicious filter to what she and her husband and children see on the 'net.
Along the same vein, it will be a piece of cake to apply the technology to every comment you've ever posted out there in order to ascertain what type of marketing will be required to garner your vote.
Or, for that matter, the amount of surveillance that you will require.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Besides, any Libertarian will be glad to point out that they see their political position on a 2-D *map*, not a 1-D *line*: fiscally 'conservative', socially 'liberal'. How is M$oft going to code *that*?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Nobody is going to read this but me and you. You can't have your pet mods mark it down because they'll just reveal themselves in the logs.
Proprietary is not progress. That's my new meme. Don't you hate it? Sucks to be you.
I'm going to disprove your feeble point now. Are you ready? Ok, here we go:
Enough? Go away.
Help stamp out iliturcy.