FlipSide

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Inspiration

We were inspired by the idea of helping people see multiple sides of a story. In today’s fast-paced media environment, it can be hard to get a full picture of an issue. We wanted to build something that encourages critical thinking and makes it easier for users to explore different perspectives on the same topic.

What it does

FlipSide helps you see both sides of the story by analyzing news articles and showing a counter perspective from a source with a different media bias. It breaks down each article with summaries, pros and cons, and gives you a clearer, more balanced view. It's news, with a little more nuance.

How we built it

We used a React frontend and FastAPI backend to let users submit articles and receive a balanced breakdown. Our backend scrapes the original article, finds a counterpoint from a source with an opposing bias, and uses OpenAI to summarize both. Everything gets processed and served back to the user with clear pros, cons, and side-by-side summaries- all in real-time.

Challenges we ran into

Our team was relatively new to working with large language models (LLMs), so there was a significant learning curve in understanding how to effectively use them. The biggest challenge we faced was sourcing data, specifically identifying and retrieving opposing articles to provide balanced perspectives.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was an ambitious and unfamiliar project for us, and we are proud of the results and what we learned throughout the 24-hrs.

What we learned

This was most of our team's first time learning how to use LLMs and API keys, which we found to be a lot more useful than imagined.

What's next for FlipSide

Unfortunately, one-sided information is not bound to the traditional news outlets and bleeds into social media. Next up for FlipSide is going beyond just articles and tackling bias in everyday content, helping people scroll with a more balanced perspective.

Built With

Submitted to

HooHacks 2025

Created by

I was responsible for designing and developing the UI and frontend for FlipSide, building a responsive and intuitive interface mostly with React. I implemented features like dynamic article summaries, webpages, and seamless API integration to deliver a smooth user experience.

Maya Degafe
I was responsible for integrating various APIs, including news aggregation and AI services, to enhance our application's functionality. This involved setting up and managing connections to these external services, ensuring seamless data retrieval and processing. Additionally, I contributed to the user interface design, implementing interactive elements and improving user experience to make our application more user-friendly and visually appealing.

jss0218 Sidhu
I mostly worked on the backend. Since it was my first time using some of the tools, it was both challenging and rewarding. I learned a lot about how different technologies come together to build a functional web backend. I also helped with debugging the frontend, which gave me a better understanding of how the frontend and backend interact. Additionally, I learned how to integrate AI tools into a web application, which was a particularly exciting part of the project.

Michael Belchew
I setup the initial skeleton code for the FastAPI backend and React frontend, which gave us a solid foundation to start development. I also implemented the logic for generating an article from the opposing perspective, which involved detecting the original article’s bias, identifying a counterpoint source with an opposing viewpoint, and then using OpenAI to analyze and summarize the counterpoint article.

Yafet Getachew