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Poll Crashers Tilt Unscientific Polls Their Way

Tyler Knowlton — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:41:24 +0000

by Simon Owens, November 6, 2008

During the Republican National Convention, NOW, a PBS weekly TV news magazine, posted an unscientific poll on its website asking viewers to vote on whether they thought vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was qualified for the position. Like most polls the show posts every week, it was taken down from the front page and replaced by a new one after gathering a few thousand votes.

But in the weeks after it was removed, someone unearthed the still-present URL for the poll and linked to it at the conservative website, Free Republic. The site has become famous for sending hordes of readers to crash unscientific online polls, so much so that the act of doing so has been termed “freeping.” In this particular instance, members of the Free Republic felt that the poll showed a sign of bias, and the poster linked to it to “provide them with a result they did not expect.”

“Send this email to every non-liberal you know,” the person wrote. “Let’s get some balance into this survey group. This is the easiest vote you will ever make. It takes literally two seconds.”

Predictably, the numbers on the poll in favor of Palin began to move up, but during the freep several liberal websites got wind of it. Typical of the blogosphere, the poll became a link-fest version of tug-of-war. Close to a hundred bloggers linked to it and liberals and conservatives began forwarding email chains to their friends asking them to vote (I actually received one of these emails less than an hour before I sat down to begin writing this article).

PZ Myers

One of the bloggers who eventually linked to the poll was PZ Myers. An associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota-Morris, Myers is arguably the most popular atheist and science blogger on the Net. His blog, Pharyngula, is published as part of the Science Blog network (owned by Seed Media Group) and averages more than 50,000 readers a day. In recent months, he and a small group of other atheist bloggers have begun a constant and often-successful campaign to crash online unscientific polls, usually to counterbalance or push back against what they see as either anti-science or overly-dogmatic beliefs.

After Myers finds a poll dealing with religion or science on a news website, he’ll provide a link to the site along with a pithy or mocking comment. “The Edmonton Sun asks, ‘Should God be left out of the University of Alberta’s convocation speech?’” he noted in one such post recently. “I should think so. They should also leave Odin, Zeus, and the Tooth Fairy out of it, unless it’s to make a joke. Surprisingly, though, 67% of the respondents disagree with me so far. Will that have changed when I wake up in the morning, I wonder…?”

Why Poll Crash?

I spoke to the science blogger, and Myers told me that when he links to a poll he can typically swing the results by 10,000 to 20,000 votes in a particular direction. Indeed, within an hour after he linked to the Sun’s poll, the results went from 67 percent of the respondents saying “no” to 91 percent “yes.” Though he has participated in poll crashes dating back to over a year ago, he has only begun conducting them on a semi-daily basis within the last month and a half.

“It’s a very popular thing with some people because they can flex a little itty bitty muscle, and a group going there and doing something shows we have some clout, a clout in expressing an opinion,” Myers said. “There have been a couple places where the polls are so poorly done and so easily manipulated, and people go nuts; they write a script and send in hundreds of thousands of votes. Which is kind of cheating, but the whole point is that these polls are silly and useless anyway.”

The bloggers’ motivation in linking to these polls, he said, was, in essence, to delegitimize them. Because these polls are unscientific and therefore largely biased toward the demographic of the website on which they’re posted, Myers argued that poll crashing makes it harder for people to use the polls simply to reaffirm their own biases.

“For instance, if I put a poll on my blog asking whether evolution is true, everyone would say ‘yes’ with just a few outliers,” he explained. “If you put it on something like [Christian conservative group] Focus on the Family, everyone there will say ‘no.’ So the point is to show that these are highly prejudicial polls, they’re sampling unscientifically, and they’re really kind of worthless. And you can’t use those results to say anything at all. I mean, what can you say about such a poll?”

But the inaccurate data isn’t the only problem that Myers has with these polls; he also detests the poor construction of many poll questions and the limited answer choices given. It’s not uncommon for him to link to a poll while issuing the caveat that — due to the perceived inanity of the question or answers — he doesn’t know which choice his readers should pick.

In speaking to Myers, I learned that his averseness to these polls sometimes carries over to even their scientific counterparts. He argued, as have others, that media coverage of elections is much too poll-obsessed and that covering a campaign in such a way perpetuates misconceptions about why voters should choose a particular candidate.

“If you look at the major networks’ coverage of the election, for instance, what you find is that they turn it into a horse race,” he said. “All they report is who’s ahead, who’s behind and by how much. It is distracting and detracts from the coverage of the actual issues. So that’s another reason to get in there and disrupt these polls: it’s because the polls really don’t matter. You shouldn’t vote on whether someone is ahead or not. What you should be voting for is whether they have policies that you agree with.”

Measuring Enthusiasm

I spoke to a few of the people responsible for publishing polls that Myers had crashed, and surprisingly there were no bitter feelings toward bloggers who deliberately try to skewer their results. In fact, both the people I interviewed said they welcomed such online participation. They argued that instances of poll crashes allowed them to gauge the level of enthusiasm for a particular issue.

Joel Schwartzbert, the director for new media for NOW, outright rejected the notion that the poll question on the website — whether Sarah Palin was qualified to be vice president — was somehow biased or leading. When the news magazine formulates each week’s poll question, he said, it bases it on a pressing issue that has become part of the national conversation. In this particular instance, there had been a sizable amount of discussion during the Republican National Convention over Palin’s qualifications for the position.

“As an example, during the Democratic convention, we asked people if they thought the party is unified,” he told me. “So we did not pull this issue out of a vacuum, it was the most relevant and talked-about issue. When the convention ended, that poll was retired. We don’t link to old polls, nor do we have an archive of old polls. So what people did was they found that poll sort of drifting in the vast outer space of the Internet, and looking at the source code found the URL, and that’s what became viral. It did not even begin to become viral until it was formerly retired on our website.”

To date, more than 50 million votes have been registered on the poll, both from constant freeping and from bots running rampant and falsely inflating the numbers. Eventually, NOW changed the poll to track a user’s cookie so they could only vote one time per computer.

Because of this one poll, Schwartzbert said, both NOW and PBS as a whole have experienced traffic numbers that far surpassed previous viewership records by wide margins. And in attracting all that traffic, they were able to drive readers to other NOW content linked at the bottom of the Palin poll. In this respect, the poll was able to engage the online community and expose a much larger audience to more reputable and scientific information.

I asked the new media director about the unscientific nature of such polling and whether it could be misleading in displaying public opinion.

“I don’t find any online polls to be accurate enough to be worthy of public broadcast,” Schwartzbert said. “We do not announce these poll results on air. If we were going to announce them on air you can be assured that it’d be a scientific poll that’d be very official. We don’t offer up these results to measure scientifically any demographics. The point of these polls and other polls is so that people can register their vote…And the poll engine has a way to generate enough excitement to look at our investigative reports, which are still very thoroughly vetted and meticulously fact checked and very scientific.”

Schwartzbert said that people like polls in the same way that they like memes and lists, and part of using new media is understanding that “these other devices are a way to get people to come to your table. But you want to rely on your bread and butter, and, in our case, the video investigations are the meat of what we do, and what best serves our mission. So the poll is a way for people to express themselves and bring people to our larger core mission, which is to reveal what’s going on in our democracy.”

TV Series Finale gets poll crazy

Trevor Kimball, editor for the site TV Series Finale, agreed that the polls are more a measure of online enthusiasm for a particular issue than anything else. His website focuses on television shows that are canceled or on the verge of being canceled, and a few months ago he published an article about talk show host Montel Williams making a comeback. Along with that article, he ran a poll asking whether Williams should bring back psychic Sylvia Browne onto his new show, a poll that was later crashed by Myers.

Kimball told me that poll crashing isn’t an anomaly at TV Series Finale, but that when a website is dealing with hot button issues it should expect outside participation.

“We deal with a very passionate group of people,” he said in a phone interview. “Only a few million people may watch a television show; when it’s canceled, a lot of people feel very passionately about them. This happens even for television shows that, you know, most people might not even know exist or couldn’t care less about. On somewhat of a regular basis someone will post a link to an article that we’ve done and a poll that we have done, and say, ‘Hey, they’re asking about this canceled show, go voice your opinion.’ This kind of thing happens regularly.”

Although he agreed that the polls were entirely unscientific, Kimball said that in some ways they are able to assess the level of “passion” for a particular issue or show. He compared poll crashes to reviews on Amazon; people usually feel more inclined to voice their opinions when they have a negative view of a person, product or idea. So in this one instance, the level of disdain for psychics — whose supposed mental powers would no doubt be regarded as a product of superstition by an atheist like Myers — outweighed the level of admiration.

Online Polls Are Fun, Not Science

Greg Laden began using his science blog to engage in online poll crashing around the same time as Myers; in fact, he didn’t begin his own freeping until he noticed it on Pharyngula. Laden is an associate adviser with the Program for Individualized Learning at the the University of Minnesota. Though he and Myers share the same employer, they work at different campuses and, like Myers, he attacks the unscientific nature of these polls as being misleading.

“First of all, and this is the most important point, it’s that these are not polls,” Laden said. “Polling is a science, and polls work, and they work well. These are web widgets; it’s no more a poll than what someone put up on Flickr is the Mona Lisa. And you put them on your blog because they’re fun. Even CNN polls going back to the beginning of the Internet — the first online polls were these CNN polls. That’s how it all started really — even they put it up to entertain their readers, to entertain the masses.”

Though he agreed that the polls are a form of community engagement, he rejected the notion that they could somehow accurately measure how much enthusiasm or passion exists online about a particular issue. Instead, he said, the poll crashes are a key indicator that the blogosphere as a whole is trying to flex its muscles, and in doing so somehow assert its influence. He said many bloggers are moving beyond simple widgets to focuse on a new form of link crashing that results in an actual distribution of power: fundraising.

Crash Responsibly

Over the past few years, bloggers have continuously linked readers to pages where they could donate relatively small amounts of money to both campaigns and special interest groups. In effect, they are able to move large sums using a very grassroots strategy. Laden himself encourages readers to donate to causes, and, in doing so, he said that he is participating in a different form of poll crashing.

“It’s similar, but in some ways scarier,” he said. “Because when you’re done with that, the recipient has a lot of money, whereas before you just filled out this poll and it was completely harmless. The money is powerful because you can do something with it. That’s when bloggers have to sit back and say, ‘We have to have some responsibility here.’”

Interestingly, Laden also argued that a blogger’s responsibility even extends to poll crashing, in that it in some ways affects the level of discourse.

“People like to be part of a community that is a little organized but for the most part is an emergent self-fulfilling kind of thing,” he said. “They like being part of the community. A lot of the people are complaining at the Sarah Palin rallies that people are screaming things like ‘Kill the terrorist’ about Obama. And experienced commentators who have been watching politics their whole lives are saying there is a crowd control issue with any rally that they have, and Palin is being irresponsible. And I think that kind of thing comes to play.”

In this respect, he said, a blogger can be considered at least partially responsible if his followers conduct themselves irresponsibly when crashing these polls. Given that Myers himself has received death threats when a swarm of outraged people were directed his way by a recent campaign against him from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, he and others are no doubt aware of the havoc than can be wreaked by an unruly mob of semi-anonymous readers.

Note: Both NOW and MediaShift are independently produced for PBS. MediaShift recently added regular online polls, but they limit people to one vote per computer. Our newest poll on the home page is about poll-crashers.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate blogger for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

‘Net yields new dirty political tricks, means to fight them

Tyler Knowlton — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:55:54 +0000

Via ARS Technica

By Julian Sanchez | Published: October 21, 2008 – 08:18PM CT

Let’s face it, even hardcore privacy mavens probably appreciate the Internet’s magical ability to determine who should see that listing for used Smiths LPs and who would be more receptive to a subscription pitch for Cat Fancy. But a new report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, released Monday at the group’s Washington, DC, headquarters, warns that calculating how “people like you” are apt to vote is just one of the myriad ways network technology could prove a boon to online voter suppression campaigns.

If voting rights seem an odd cause for an organization dedicated to protecting privacy, consider that the art of political deception depends in large part in getting your lies to the right people: you need to make sure that only the other guy’s voters receive false information about eligibility requirements or polling locations. Traditional dirty-tricks campaigns have used race and geography as a proxy for partisanship, blanketing (for instance) Dem-heavy African-American neighborhoods with flyers reminding everyone to bring two forms of ID when they turn out to the polls on Wednesday.

The first step in any online vote suppression effort, then, is to find a way to “microtarget” your message to the right set of voters. And while it may be, as The New Yorker famously claimed, that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” quite a lot of people may know you’re a 27-year-old Latino who buys books by Greg Palast and gave $250 to Dean for America. Because such obvious target-rich-environments as the Daily Kos comment fora or the “One Million Strong for Obama” Facebook group are apt to be packed with folks ready and willing to correct misinformation, effective dirty-tricks campaigns will likely rely on the Internet’s ability to surreptitiously gather information from and build behavioral profiles of users.

The report, produced by EPIC’s Lillie Coney and a team of contributors that included security guru Bruce Schneier and Multics coder–turned–National Committee for Voting Integrity chair Peter G. Neumann, outlines how—as Neumann put it via teleconference at EPIC’s offices Monday—”new technology opens up dramatically new avenues for disenfranchisement.” First, information can be gathered by a variety of means, fair and foul. A group might collect information on users who click through either genuine or bogus partisan advertisements, or who visit ideologically tinged sites, either in order to directly target them or for the purpose of “whitelisting” sympathetic voters.

The most obvious next step might be a simple spoofed e-mail containing bogus information. Now, of course, these can exploit voter confusion about new electronic voting systems. One deceptive e-mail recently circulated in Texas, for instance, warned voters that if they selected the option to vote a Democratic “straight ticket” on a touchscreen machine, they would still need to independently cast a presidential vote for Barack Obama. On many systems, doing that would actually cancel out the “straight ticket” vote.

But a sophisticated vote suppression operation has many more options available. For example, a phony website purporting to be operated by a state or county board of elections could be set up containing misleading information about poll locations or voting requirements. The site URL could be directly e-mailed to targeted voters or, more sneakily, made to appear in search results for queries likely to be entered by those voters. Speaking at the report launch, Coney noted that, as AOL inadvertently proved in 2006, even “anonymized” search queries can be used to build a user profile specific enough to identify particular individuals.

Social networking sites obviously provide a wealth of information about likely political affiliations directly volunteered by users—often conveniently linked to e-mail addresses—but they also provide helpful social hints about the likely sympathies of the undeclared. The “social graph” may also prove useful in determining which highly-connected folks are most likely to pass on misinformation to large numbers of friends, as a forward from a trusted source is generally treated as more credible than a blind e-mail from a stranger. And as the report notes, that forwarding need not even be willing or witting: e-mail viruses could be used to blast a misleading message to a target’s whole address book.

VoIP, too, opens up new possibilities. Deceptive robocalls are old hat, but the ability to cheaply phone target voters from overseas makes the tactic both more cost-effective and less traceable. Activist Jon Pincus, a contributor who spoke by teleconference at the report launch, even broached the possibility of using distributed VoIP botnets to flood local voter information hotlines in predictably partisan districts—a sort of telephonic denial of service attack.

Fortunately, Pincus noted new technology also provides folks like him with new means to fight back against suppression and disruption campaigns. The Twitter Vote Report Project hopes to allow for realtime reporting on such dirty tricks, facilitating rapid response by poll workers and activists. And the Voter Suppression Wiki collates reports in more permanent form, so voters can recognize the telltale signs of scams, and learn how to counteract them.

Just a second though—one reporter at EPIC HQ wondered—don’t these efforts themselves present new targets for meta-disruption efforts? The query prompted a nervous chuckle from Tova Wang of the group Common Cause: “I hadn’t thought about that… Are you going to write about that? ”

But EPIC’s Coney shook her head gravely. “Believe me,” she said, “anybody who reads this report and gets a new idea doesn’t have the capability to carry it out. The people with the capacity to carry it out? They’ve already thought of it all.”

Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?

Tyler Knowlton — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:34:41 +0000

Via Media Shift

by Mark Glaser, September 24, 2008

As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter’s head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly’s PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. And on the local level, there’s a new crowd-funded effort from Spot.us, Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to fact-check local political mailers in San Francisco.

While these sites have grown in name recognition and popularity over the past few months, they still lag behind the efforts of partisan groups who fact-check the media themselves at Newsbusters.org (for conservatives) and Media Matters (for liberals). A scan of web traffic, as measured by Compete.com, and links from the blogosphere, as measured by Technorati, shows how far the non-partisan efforts lag behind the partisan ones:

Newsbusters
Compete.com traffic (August ’08): 472,489 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 67
Google News mentions: 79

Media Matters
Compete.com traffic (August ’08): 312,728 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 47
Google News mentions: 58

FactCheck.org
Compete.com traffic (August ’08): 277,555 unique visitors (up 1,000% in the past year)
Technorati rank: No. 89
Google News mentions: 1,254 (though this includes syndicated stories by FactCheck)

PolitiFact
Compete.com traffic (August ’08): 87,602 unique visitors
Technorati rank: None (2,560 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 190

Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
Compete.com traffic: N/A
Technorati rank: None (2,357 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 171

Interestingly, the non-partisan sites receive a greater number of Google News mentions, indicating that more established news sources are citing them. But the non-partisan sites also have to struggle to break through the clutter of so much media banter and political talking heads on TV around the issue of who is lying and who is truthful in political discourse.

Bill Adair

Bill Adair is the Washington bureau chief at the St. Petersburg Times and editor of PolitiFact, which just won a Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism. Adair says that political journalists have been handcuffed by the idea that being fair means reporting what both sides say in a campaign, withoutcalling out politicians for falsehoods.

“Political journalists — myself included — have been too timid about fact-checking in the past because we were afraid we would be criticized for being biased,” Adair said via email. “But facts aren’t biased. Now, we are finally calling the balls and strikes in the campaign the way we should have in the past.”

Can Non-Partisan Sites Break Through?

So how can FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog get more notice from confused voters? FactCheck.org started in late 2003, is now syndicated on the Newsweek website, and includes a blog called The FactCheck Wire and weekly video reports. PolitiFact is just a year old, but now includes many ways for people to get their “Truth-O-Meter” reports: widgets, RSS feeds, twice-weekly emails and an iPhone application. The Post’s Fact Checker blog includes Pinocchio nose ratings for falsehoods and asks the audience to help in fact-checking.

Reviewing these sites, I wondered whether pointing out factual errors would really lead the candidates to change their ways or stop lying. Adair said it wasn’t up to non-partisan sites to do that.

“Newspapers run our items in their papers,” he said. “So there are plenty of opportunities for people to see our work. If the candidates are still making exaggerations and telling falsehoods, that’s between them and the voters. Our job is not to get politicians to stop lying. Our job is to inform voters. After that, it’s up to the voters.”

Right now, though, it’s the partisan fact-check sites that are getting more traction and are more popular among bloggers who link to them. Adair doesn’t believe that they will win the trust of a broader public, however.

“I think partisan fact-checking sites will always have their biases questioned,” he said. “The best fact-checking comes from non-partisan journalistic sources.”

Adair said that PolitiFact is “completely transparent” and includes sources to back up its stories as well as author archives for people to check. But there is no personal information for the writers that might point to how they’ve voted in the past, or if they’ve volunteered for political campaigns. FactCheck.org states clearly that its publisher accepts “NO funding from business corporations, labor unions, political parties, lobbying organizations or individuals. It is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.”

But does such transparency and dedication to neutrality matter to the public? They are becoming less enthralled with the work of traditional journalists — who they suspect as being biased — and like to go to partisan sites for political news online.

“I think that the fact checkers are useful, in so much as the public actually cares about the facts,” said Shaun Dakin, CEO and founder of the National Political Do Not Contact Registry to stop robo-calls from candidates. “The bottom line is that most of the electorate sees the day-to-day campaigning through their own rose-colored glasses. Most Democrats think McCain is lying. Most GOP voters think Obama is a loser with no experience. Every day they see the election through those frames…Unfortunately, it is an echo chamber — particularly on the Internet.”

Robert Steele

Robert Steele, a journalism professor at DePauw University and senior faculty at the Poynter Institute (which also owns the St. Petersburg Times), said that the fact-checking of politicians’ statements goes back to the work of the late Carole Kneeland in the ’80s in Texas. Steele thinks the various non-partisan sites do have a challenge in breaking through the media clutter online.

“It’s hard to keep up with the candidates’ statements and their ads, especially when there’s so much puffery and some outright lying by the candidates,” he said via email. “And then there is the ‘viral’ nature of the Internet (and to some degree talk television and talk radio) that rapidly passes along falsehoods. The key to successful fact-checking efforts is creating a rigorous process for research that can work quickly in this white-hot media environment. I do believe the good fact-checking sites make a difference, especially the ones that have credibility based on their independence and their skilled work.”

Getting Local

While the fact-check sites are focused very closely on the national campaigns, who’s watching the local races? The new Spot.us site is an experiment in “crowdfunding” journalism run by Knight News Challenge winner David Cohn, who writes for MediaShift’s sister site, Idea Lab. Spot.us recently helped raise $2,500 for the sites Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to run a non-partisan series of stories fact-checking local political mailers in San Francisco.

Michael Stoll

Michael Stoll, the project director for the non-commercial Public-Press.org site, told me that Newsdesk.org’s Josh Wilson had a longtime interest in doing election ad fact-checking so it was a good fit for them to work together on it. Stoll hopes the site’s new “San Francisco 2008 Election Truthiness” series will go beyond mailers and include ads in other media.

“Our first trial run we’re focusing on the deluge of paper that stuffs our mailboxes and gets hung from our doorknobs in the weeks preceding the election,” Stoll said via email. “We’ll also try to capture radio, TV and Internet broadcast ads. In addition, we’ve already started picking apart the partisan, paid arguments in the voter-information booklet that the city distributes to every voter. All these ads are fair game.”

Stoll says their reports will be featured on local public radio station KALW and likely in print with the San Francisco Daily Post. Despite this cross-platform outreach, it’s unclear how interested the public will be in such a project. Stoll says that the journalists writing the reports will be vetted for partisanship or any hidden agendas, and will include biographies saying where they’ve worked and whether they have been activists for political causes before.

“I think that while it’s unrealistic to have a large percentage of San Francisco voters reading this online with only viral promotion and no marketing budget, we would hope to get several thousand readers on each story this fall,” he said. “We also want to generate significant buzz in key constituencies, such as the campaigns themselves, because part of the point of fact-checking is to send a signal to advocates on all sides that there are independent watchdogs keeping track of their perhaps exaggerated claims and counterclaims.”

Barbara Kelley

As newspapers and magazines cut back on their own staff of fact-checkers, will these local and national online fact-checking sites help bridge the gap? Barbara Kelley, a journalism instructor at Santa Clara University, said the various sites might help fact-check political statements — but might also be used as a crutch by hamstrung news organizations.

“We shouldn’t NEED outside fact-checking sites,” Kelley told me via email. “I worry that if there is a cadre of these outside sites, it might give reporters and news organizations a get-out-of-jail free card and/or enable lazy reporting, as in: ‘Well, I can just report what so-and-so says on the stump without getting into the validity of what he or she says. After all, if it’s wrong, FactCheck.org will do the digging and correct it.’…It also puts too much of a burden on the ordinary news consumer who doesn’t have the time, energy or savvy to root things out on the Internet all day, as you and I do.”

When the Toronto Star recently interviewed FactCheck.org’s director Brooks Jackson, he said that he would really prefer for news organizations to do the fact-checking we expect from them so he can get on with his life:

It’s definitely ruined my fishing season once again. This is not the way I had planned to spend my semi-obscure retirement years. When’s it all going to end?…What would really be nice is if other news organizations would do what the St. Pete Times and Washington Post are doing, and put us out of business. I’ve been saying for a long time it ought to be an embarrassment to any news organization that we exist. Isn’t this a core First Amendment responsibility? I think so.

As news organizations continue to cut back on fact-checkers, there’s little chance they can be counted on to hold politicians’ feet to the fire. Perhaps non-profit sites like FactCheck.org and crowdfunded efforts like Spot.us will help bridge the gap. But it still remains to be seen if they can work in concert with other political coverage at traditional media sites.

“Can [fact-check sites and mainstream media] work in tandem? I think they absolutely should,” said Kelley. “But that also can bring problems. There was a Boston Globe piece that referenced Obama talking about McCain’s plan to privatize Social Security and how the recent stock market collapse could have affected current retirees. Then the article quoted FactCheck.org saying Obama was wrong because McCain had proposed this plan only for those born in 1950. The article left it at that — without getting into any of the nuances, so Obama’s statement was dismissed as non-factual, but the point of what he was saying was missed.

“Finally, how many fact-check sites will reporters rely upon? You have to wonder where the sites themselves get their info — do they go back to original transcripts? Multiple sources? And also, which ones will become the arbiters of truth? Will it be like relying only upon the New York Times or AP to tell us what’s going on in Washington or Iraq? I guess what I’m saying is that, like soup kitchens, fac

by Mark Glaser, September 24, 2008

Online Watchdog Sniffs for Media Bias

Tyler Knowlton — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:22:26 +0000

Via the New York Times

By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA

Published: October 15, 2008

If you don’t trust the news media, what are your options? You can fume about bias, wonder what you’re missing and suppress the urge to throw things. Or ignore some sources and turn to those whose slant you like.

But what if there were a device that objectively flagged questionable elements in online news articles, poking and parsing words and phrases, and letting you contribute your own critiques? Well, a Seattle company called SpinSpotter has produced a piece of software — a free download that works within a Web browser — that tries to do just that.

As its creators acknowledge, it still has to overcome some daunting technical and human barriers to live up to its lofty aims. (Its home page at spinspotter.com proclaims, “Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news.”) But a month into its release in a test version that is only available for the Mozilla Firefox browser — an Internet Explorer version is expected in a few weeks — it gives an interesting peek at where the future of truth-squadding may lie.

Any attempt to judge news articles could rely on experts, a broad audience of readers or a set of formulas. SpinSpotter combines all three, but for now the formulas are still being adjusted, the audience is not yet big enough, and it remains to be seen how unbiased or effective the experts are. SpinSpotter grew out of a longstanding obsession of Todd Herman, a conservative former talk-radio host who is the company’s chief product officer. “I thought of this 10 years ago,” he said. “The things I’d see in mainstream media drove me crazy.”

The chief executive officer, John Atcheson, is politically liberal, and he and Mr. Herman say they tend to balance each other out. “We don’t delude ourselves into thinking we’re going to eliminate spin, and that’s not even our objective,” said Mr. Atcheson, who has been an executive of several technology companies. “We just want it to be transparent, above the surface.”

With the SpinSpotter plug-in, anyone can call up a news article, insert red flags over offending passages and, in a pop-up box, explain the perceived problems and suggest edits. Another reader seeing the same article will also see those flags, can comment on them and, crucially, can vote on whether the offense is serious or not.

In addition a panel of journalism graduate students at the University of Missouri picks through a random sampling of articles, and critiques the critiques. That is supposed to help guard against a group with a particular bias “gaming” the system, but it is not yet clear how well that will work.

Each individual user earns a “trust rating,” based on other readers’ votes, the judgment of the graduate students and how often they agree with other users who are highly trusted. Users will not know their ratings, but comments posted by those with the highest scores will predominate.

SpinSpotter has an advisory board of journalists and journalism professors who helped devise the company’s standards. They have varying political stripes, and include some well-known writers like Jonah Goldberg of the National Review and Brooke Allen of The Nation.

The company has also devised algorithms that search for potential fudge phrases like “critics say,” and that learn from users which expressions are most often censured.

“The algorithm approach also has serious limits, which is why the human element is essential,” Mr. Herman said. “There is no algorithm that can interpret language with anywhere near the sophistication of a reader.”

One problem with the “wiki” approach, relying on the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd to reach a rough consensus, is that there needs to be a critical mass of people picking apart each article. And there needs to be some assurance that the crowd, through self-selection, does not have serious collective biases.

SpinSpotter’s creators acknowledge that they are not there yet, though they say it is only a matter of time. (They will not say how many users the software has so far, or how many it needs to be effective.)

In the last month, they say, it has become clear that their limited following is far too small to cover the vast array of online news sources. So starting this week SpinSpotter is focusing primarily on the Web sites of five major news outlets: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times and Yahoo! News.

The software insists that reader objections fit into one of six broad categories: lack of balance, using the reporter’s point of view, using passive voice, using a biased source, disregarding context and selective disclosure. But for now those categories have their own limitations. Some journalistic misdemeanors — citing just one source, or failing to offer supporting evidence for an assertion — do not fit neatly into any of the categories.

One category of complaint, use of passive voice, seems bound to flag phrases — “four people were killed in an accident,” for example — that are far from biased.

“We’re constantly tweaking,” Mr. Herman said. “People are asking us, for example, about creating a category for things that are provably false.”

SpinSpotter has financial backing from a number of venture capitalists, primarily the firm Epic Ventures, who are drawn more by the commercial possibilities than the implications for journalism.

The SpinSpotter site plans to sell ads, but the main hope for revenue lies in selling services.

“Anybody who deals in marketing and communications, a P.R. agency, a corporate marketing office, a political campaign, we can give them information on what phrases are being used out there as spin, or are being perceived as spin, where those phrases are showing up,” Mr. Atcheson said. Press releases, he said, can be scrubbed of phrases that sow doubt.

Which might just point the way toward newer, subtler ways of spinning, not toward the transparency the company advocates. But Mr. Atcheson said he is hopeful about what SpinSpotter can do for news reporting.

“We’ve even talked to some news organizations that are interested in having a version of our service behind the wall,” he said, “so they can prescreen their work.”

Delicious, Upcoming Founders To Show You Political Bias Of News Sites

Tyler Knowlton — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:07:00 +0000

Via Tech Crunch

by Michael Arrington on October 10, 2008

What has ex-Yahooer and Delicious founderJoshua Schachter been working on sinceleaving Yahoo last June? At least one project is a GreaseMonkey script that shows readers the political leanings of blogs and news sites on Memeorandum, a news aggregator.

Political sites are usually very biased, but the casual reader often doesn’t know which way a particular site tends to rant. With the newscript, also available as a Firefox plugin, sites are shaded towards blue (whiny cowards) or red (warmongers) depending on their linking behavior.

Andy Baio, who’s been working with Schachter on the project, describes it:

The colors don’t necessarily represent each blogger’s personal views or biases. It’s a reflection of their linking activity. The algorithm looks at the stories that blogger’s linked to before, relative to all other bloggers, and groups them accordingly. People that link to things that only conservatives find interesting will be classified as bright red, even if they are personally moderate or liberal, and vice-versa. The algorithm can’t read minds, so don’t be offended if you feel misrepresented. It’s only looking at the data.

Microsoft has been testing a similar product, based on different technology, called Blews.

RealScoop Tells You When Politicians And Celebrities Are Lying

Tyler Knowlton — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:11:16 +0000

Via Tech Crunch

RealScoop Tells You When Politicians And Celebrities Are Lying

by Don Reisinger on September 28, 2008

Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.

Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth. On Tuesday, RealScoop will cover the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, putting each one’s statements to its Believability test.

Political Fact-Check Sites Proliferate, But Can They Break Through the Muck?

Tyler — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:31:06 +0000

Via Media Shift

by Mark Glaser, 1:52PM

Newsbusters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 472,489 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 67
Google News mentions: 79

Media Matters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 312,728 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 47
Google News mentions: 58

FactCheck.org
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 277,555 unique visitors (up 1,000% in the past year)
Technorati rank: No. 89
Google News mentions: 1,254 (though this includes syndicated stories by FactCheck)

PolitiFact
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 87,602 unique visitors
Technorati rank: None (2,560 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 190

Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
Compete.com traffic: N/A
Technorati rank: None (2,357 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 171

read, more…

Watch The Political Spin Machine With Google “In Quotes”

Tyler — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:37:39 +0000

Via Tech Crunch

by Jason Kincaid on September 23, 2008

Google has just opened a new Labs project, called In Quotes, to the public. The site allows users to compare quotes from various political figures, displaying key excerpts from speeches and interviews that they’ve given recently.

By default the site is presenting quotes from US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, contrasting the things they’ve said on such issues as Iraq, marriage, abortion, and the economy. Users can click a “Spin” button to compare two randomly chosen quotes, or they can choose to cycle through them manually. All quotes are pulled from Google News stories that have appeared in the last few weeks. There are 20 political figures available in the United States version of the site, with other editions available for Canada, India, and the UK.