Minimize Your Confirmation Bias

Listen to the other side with Balanced News

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About Balanced News

A Chrome Extension That Helps You Read News from Different Perspectives

This tool is created by a group of university students who care deeply about making critical thinking easier for everyone. The global spread of political polarization is a concerning issue which threatens the stability of out society.

By making news from the other side a click away, Balanced News aims to simplify the process of seeking out news from the other side to bridge the deepening knowledge gap which contributes to political polarization.

Comprehensive Sources
Cloud Data Analytics
Light Up When Needed
Features

What Can Balanced News Do?

More features will become available in the upcoming releases!
You can also let us know what features you would like to see.

News Detection

Balanced News Extension will be automatically turned on when you are on a news webside included in our sources. Our icon will light up as a reminder.

Channel Evaluation

Once you click on the lit-up icon, Balanced News will evaluate the partisan score for the current site. You can also learn how the partisan score was calculated.

Article Recommendation

With just one click, Balanced News can recommend an article on the same topic from a channel with the opposite partisan rating through a push notification.

Privacy Protection

Balanced News leverages the safety provided by Serverless Computation and API Gateway on Amazon Web Service, always protecting your privacy.

Product Demo

Watch A Quick Demo

Check out how you can use Balanced News to help you read news from different perspectives.

Why Should You Use Balanced News?

Learn more about confirmation bias and the “steel man” argument

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for information that confirms one's existing beliefs.

 

As most news media nowadays have political biases, one’s beliefs are reinforced by repetition when they only follow one news source, insulating them from rebuttal.

"Steel Man" Argument

The “steel man” requires one to find the best form of their opponent's argument and then argue with this.

 

To build the virtue of critical thinking, one great excercise one can do is called the “steel man” argument. This requires one to completely understand the opponent first, and the result is a stance that holds up to scrutiny.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Feel free to contact us if you have more specific questions

The following list of media is supported:
ABC News, Bloomberg, Globe, Breitbart, Business Insider, CBS News, CNBC, CNN, Daily Caller, Daily Mail, FiveThirtyEight, Forbes, Fox News, Guardian, Huffington Post, LA Times, Mother Jones, MSNBC, National Review, New York magazine, New York Times, Politico, Real Clear Politics, Salon, Talking Points Memo, The Daily Beast, The Hill, US News & World Report, Vox, Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, Washington Post, and Washington Times.
The Partisan Scores are generated based on the frequency of sharing media sources among users who retweeted messages from either of the two general election candidates (@donaldjtrump and @hillaryclinton). The underlying data extracted for this purpose included 44,074 users and 206,955 of their tweets, which cited 5,798 media sources.

A media source that was included only in the tweets of accounts that retweeted Hillary Clinton received a score of -1.0, and if found only in tweets of those who retweeted Trump, the media source was given a score of 1.0.”
Our main source of data is a research conducted by the Berkman Klein Center in 2016.

*Faris, Robert and Roberts, Hal and Etling, Bruce and Bourassa, Nikki and Zuckerman, Ethan and Benkler, Yochai, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election (August 2017). Berkman Klein Center Research Publication 2017-6, Available at SSRN.
This project is made possible by the The Rosemary Speirs Leadership Grant which funds 338 young women and gender non-conforming leaders to accelerate advocacy efforts in local communities across Canada. This grant is made possible thanks to generous financial support from the Department for Women and Gender Equality.
Our team has members very experienced in UI/UX and back-end development, and we are hoping to find a front end developer. If you are interested, please use Chrome to inspect the popup page of this extension and find out how to apply.
Need Help?

Contact With Us

Alternatively, feel free to email us at balancednewsorganization@gmail.com

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