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Microsoft Developing News Sorting Based On Political Bias

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the next-measure-the-magnitude-of-political-affiliation dept.

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.

5 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Perfect... by calebt3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Perfect... by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Perfect... by psychodelicacy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      A closed mouth gathers no foot.
    3. Re:Perfect... by The+End+Of+Days · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Oh come on. by gnutoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.