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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.

4 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Perfect... by Dice · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would find it much more interesting to read the opposing viewpoint. I already know what mine is.

  2. Re:Perfect... by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I know what my viewpoint is. I also know what the opposing viewpoint is. Why would I read news from the opposing viewpoint when it just ticks me off?

  3. Re:Perfect... by mikael · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's interesting to read the local newspapers of the different parts of the world (LA Times, California, West Coast), (Toronto Star, Canada), (New York Times, New York, East Coast).

    The LA Times always seems to have these stories with a rich person/poor people theme (gentrification/regeneration of downtown creates homes for wealthy people, but displaces the Mexican community, another story is high school with swimming pool won't let local kids use it during summer holidays). The Toronto Star seems to have these stories where the local politicians are always present when some Hell's Angels den is being busted (even though it was already vacant for months). Scottish newspapers (Edinburgh News,Evening Express) alway seem to have stories about travellers blocking up road lay-bys, park-and-ride zones and city parks. English newspapers alway seem to have stories about people being arrested and jailed for tackling burglars, or anyone refusing to pay their council tax out of poverty gets thrown into jail, while the burglars get hours of commmunity service (Tabloids).

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    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  4. Re:Manufacturing consent with Power Point by plover · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Actually, the whole world seems to have reduced us to one school of thought. Most non-US citizens seem to have a hard time telling our two parties apart. The common analogy I hear from British friends is that the Republicans are exactly like the Tories, and the Democrats are almost exactly like the Tories.

    And for as much as you don't like the two party system, voting in this country is pretty linear -- you get to choose exactly one candidate for each job, and all those jobs are tied to geographic regions only. Nobody's come up with a two-dimensional model of government, but I could imagine just how interesting that would be.

    The House of Representatives would have to be sliced up into issues, instead of geographic regions. You'd vote for dozens of different representatives: a Transportation candidate, a Ways and Means candidate, an Ethics candidate, a Defense candidate, and so on. That way you wouldn't have to worry if your Defense candidate was pro-life or pro-choice, because they'd never cast a vote on the subject. It'd force a complete change how bills get written: they'd have to be categorized, shopped around differently, it'd actually be quite refreshing.

    (Oh, God, now I'm refactoring Congress! Somebody help me get Martin Fowler out of my head!!!)

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    John