PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a digital tool to help people evaluate how biased their sources of news are. It’s called the Media Bias Detector.
As stated on the website, “The Media Bias Detector tracks and classifies the top stories published by a collection of prominent publishers spanning the political spectrum in close to real time by leveraging a combination of AI, machine learning, and human raters. We also conduct weekly polls to track American’s awareness of the news and where they get it from.”
Amir Tohidi, one of the researchers who worked on the project, says it was inspired in part by the “fake news” phenomenon.
“There has been a surge in research about fake news, especially after the 2016 election,” said Tohidi. “That line of literature usually focuses on outright false information.”
He says there are other ways misinformation can be spread.
“You don’t necessarily have to tell people lies in order to influence their opinions. There are many other forms of biases,” he said, and that’s what this program focuses on.
“Like cherry-picking the evidence, agenda-setting or framing stories in certain ways — and they all influence people’s minds.”
Tohidi says the main purpose of this project is to help people be better informed about the places they’re getting their information from.
“This project is focusing on online publishers and trying to classify what kind of topics they cover and when they are covering those topics. What’s the leaning in their coverage? What’s the tone?”
Tohidi said the project is possible because of recent advancements in large-language models used by artificial intelligence. Specifically, the Media Bias Detector uses the same machine behind Open AI’s chatbot ChatGPT to analyze and label news stories from various websites.
“You can do that in a couple hours automatically using these language models — and I should say they work surprisingly well,” he said. “We do test them and compare them with human annotated data, and they work well.”
The media bias detector is free for anyone to use.