Media Bias

[jdaniele]

One of the hardest things to understand is how to scale someone or a company's bias. We can feel it and think we see it but to truly be unbias to data. I'm going to compose a list of known sources that's sole job is to check sourcing I guess you can say.

https://library.fvtc.edu/News/BiasCheck
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

[jdaniele]

https://www.cjr.org/innovations/measure-media-bias-partisan.php

Biased compared to what?
Academics have been trying to quantify media bias for some time, and researchers in the field say techniques are improving. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are allowing computers to read facial expressions and vocal tone. Researchers are analyzing larger and larger datasets for occurrences of specific phrases, which could show how an issue is framed or what sources are cited. For example, economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro analyzed the 2005 Congressional Record to find phrases frequently used by either liberal or conservative members of Congress, and compared these to the news content of over 400 newspapers over the same time period. Their 2010 analysis found that newspapers' political slant correlated fairly well with the public's perception of them: The Washington Times slanted right, The Washington Post slanted left, and so on.

[jdaniele]

Media bias isn't the only area that grabs everyone attention. A slightly newer area is social media bias. To no one surprise social media company seem to lean one way or the other. The question that comes in is whether their policies are suppressing free speech. While it isn't illegal for companies to control the tone on their platforms it does bring up a lot of debate on who gets to choose what's ok and what's not ok. There are laws that protect these companies from being held accountable but simply allowing questionable information to exist bring very bad PR so they tend to lean more on the liberal stance. Another question that comes into play is the AI involved with posts being taken down.

There have been an uprising of newer platforms that promise to not censor posts. While this is partially true, it seems they have been standing by their word. Websites like Parler don't take down post that attack people based on gender or race unless the post shows a clear call for violence. This isn't surprising either because not all speech is technical legal. Websites can't host information that is against the law such as child pornography or threats to hard a person physically. Parler has been very public that they do take these posts down but it isn't automated like other platforms have been. Other companies have stopped supporting their back-end services such has domain registrar and webpage hosting. They have since come back online after coming into new agreements.

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/15/968116346/after-weeks-of-being-off-line-parler-finds-a-new-web-host
http://aei.pitt.edu/5895/1/5895.pdf

Since then a lot of account shifts have occurred. Even on messaging apps such as WhatsApp, mass amount of users have moved to others such as Signal or Telegram. We will see how it goes but you can tell the public is making it known that are very aware of the situation and will take action by not supporting their changes. With the amount of options out there, big tech still has a strong hold but you can absolutely see a decent. The question now is, what's next?