NewsPrism - Live Debating Agentic Perspective for every News

🌲 Inspiration

Today's news media(print or otherwise) are pushing their "narratives" & are harming the democracies of the world. In a healthy democracy, every voter has the right to know all the facts, presented in an unbiased way, & then only form an opinion. This is resulting in polarised societies where voters are easily persuaded with these high polarization news coming from multiple news sources.

In print media, or otherwise, news articles have, over the last 10 years, started to extensively report biased information, leading to gullible voters, & its only through X(Twitter) or Reddit discussions that we are able to get the different opinions. This is hurting our democracies.

In my country, India, we have debating sessions on Prime Time News channels, but though there are panelists coming from different perspectives and party lines, these debating sessions are moderated in such a way that not all the participants are given a fair chance to have their point. Thus leading to fragmented societies, where different perspectives are lost due to this "Noise".

⚙️ What it does

My app solves this issue by having 3 agents, one with a conservative view, one with a Progressive view & one with a Neutral view, where every news article, news link, YouTube video etc are independently analyzed by these 3 agents in parallel, & then they have a live debating session among themselves to present their view. The user acts like a Jury, & can ask any agent their view point for a topic being discussed. These agents independently identify commonalities and disagreements in a given news article and generate a Polarization Index to guide debate on these points.

Multi-Lens Analysis: Every article is processed by three distinct agents:

The Sentinel: Analyzes through a right-leaning, market-focused perspective. The Advocate: Analyzes through a left-leaning, equity-focused perspective. The Jurist: A neutral fact-checker that strips away adjectives and identifies missing context. Prism Synthesis: A final "Orchestrator" agent cross-references all outputs to find the "Shared Reality" and calculates a Polarization Index.

In the current digital news media, we have an audio option to hear the news article, but thats just a plain narration. We made an app that goes a step further, & instead has the news article analyzed by these agents and then presents you with their views from different perspectives, & have a debate among themselves.

Thus, having the News link as the "white light", NewsPrism acts like a "prism" and breaks the article into different perspectives(aka colours), thereby fostering different perspectives to voters, to hear every perspective to form their opinion.

🧱 How we built it

Frontend: React 19, Tailwind CSS 4, Motion (Framer Motion), Lucide React. Backend: Express.js (Node.js), Axios, Cheerio (for web scraping). AI Engine: Google Gemini API (@google/genai). Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform.

The Infrastructure: Google Cloud To ensure NewsPrism is production-ready and scalable, we turned to Cloud deplyoment:

Cloud Run: The entire application is containerized and deployed on DigitalOcean Cloud Run. This allows us to scale automatically based on traffic while keeping latency low for our global users.

🧗 Challenges we ran into

Creating the app with free tier account was very restrictive. We understand the advantage of such an app, but we need funding to have this deployable in large scale for the voters, who understand that every world affair, no matter how big or small, comes with different perspectives, & that democracy only thrives when it has informed voters with different opinions.

Since we already have ample experience in app development with Gemini, especially Gemini-3 pro, using an older Gemini was kind of strange!

🏅 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We gave some pretty biased news links from recent ongoing world escalations, and other political, religious, & other topics, & we were amazed how well the agents had a live debating session, presenting their viewpoint, solely from the points and facts presented in the article(aka grounded)

In the current digital news media, we have an audio option to hear the news article, but that's just a plain narration. We made an app that goes a step further, & instead has the news article analysed by these agents and then presents you with their views from different perspectives, & has a debate among themselves. We are thrilled to see these agents with different perspectives work together to help inform their viewpoint & thus present a 360-degree view of any news article.

📚 What we learned

Agents are unbiased & better than humans to convey their perspective, with a well-defined, grounded viewpoint. They cannot be tampered with, nor can they be subjected to external forces. Many times, in life, we have seen people change their viewpoint with time, but the beauty of agents are they cannot be molded or influenced, thus their perspective remains far more unbiased than a human counterpart.