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Ask Skewz.com Founder About Detecting Media Bias
Skewz.com is not the Microsoft-funded Blews experiment that is supposed to help detect rightness and leftness in stories based on blogs that link to them. Instead of detecting blog links, Skewz relies on readers to submit and rate stories, and even tries to pair stories that have "liberal" and "conservative" biases so that you can get multiple takes on the same event or pronouncement. The Skewz About page explains how it works. The site has drawn a fair amount of "media insider" attention, including a writeup on the Poynter Institute website. But what does all this mean? Where is it going? Can Skewz.com help us sort our news better and make more informed decisions? We don't know. But if you post a question here for founder Vipul Vyas, maybe he'll have an answer for you. (Please try to follow the usual Slashdot interview rules.)
What do you offer to entice users to register and rank stories for you? It seems that the benefits just come from the people that do all the work, is your only incentive that the person feels good for helping you out? Do you rank your users? Is there a reward system even if it's only number of stories ranked?
The article said you are hoping to raise your current set of 600 users to something more like 10,000--what are you doing to accomplish that?
My work here is dung.
The Left say the media is to Right.
The Right say the media is to Left.
How do you prevent your own views from skewing the results. Because someone who is Left or Right of Moderate would consider themselfs a moderate, while they are not truely moderate. So they would True Moderate coverage as Slightly to the Left or Right.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
How will you keep the results from being biased by the responders? For instance, if you were to have more links to this from fox news than from other news outlets, you would get a large number of conservatives rating stories. In that instance, you would get a lot of people saying that right-leaning stories are more unbiased and more unbiased stories would be rated liberal. The opposite would be true too; if you get a lot of traffic from moveon.org, there's going to be a large number of people rating things as conservatively biased.
This effect could even arise from random fluctuations with a small enough response group, and unless this is controlled, your site could eventually be labelled as "conservative" or "liberal" which would discourage the opposite group from voting, possibly providing a feedback mechanism for bias.
How would you prevent this from happening while still allowing users to generate the results?
Yes American here however I'll take issue a bit and say that religion and the "right" has been noted by politcal researchers using sound emperical methods, see for example:
.02
"In 1939, Leonard W. Ferguson carried out an analysis of political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward:
* War
* Reality of God
* Patriotism
* Treatment of criminals
* Capital punishment
* Censorship
* Evolution
* Birth control
* Law, and
* Communism
Submitting the results to factor analysis, he was able to identify three factors, which he named Religionism, Humanitarianism, and Nationalism. Ferguson's Religionism was defined by belief in God and negative attitudes toward evolution and birth control; Humanitarianism was related to attitudes opposing the harsh treatment of criminals, capital punishment, and war; and Nationalism described variation in opinions on censorship, law, patriotism, and communism. Note that this system was derived through purely empirical methods; rather than devising a political model on purely theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was purely exploratory. Although replication of the Nationalism factor was spotty, the finding of Religionism and Humanitarianism had a number of replications by Ferguson and others.[1][2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
As I said I think the definitions of left and right are pretty muddied these days but I do think there are worthwhile differences to note between secular humanistic thinkers who we may label "left" for lack of better terms and those with a more tough minded religous thought who we may label right wing.
Just my
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?