Newsflix

Inspiration

Our inspiration behind this project stemmed from our own experience with social media and the consequences it can have on young impressionable youth. So often, kids and teens are oblivious to misinformation and bias that exists in the media. With Newsflix, we were committed to building equitable learning opportunities, creating a platform that could provide inclusive and deeper understandings.

What it does

Newsflix is an interactive, curated web application designed to broaden users' political perspectives. Our unique personalized approach ensures accessibility for our intended audience, promoting nuanced learning across all ages. Users begin by selecting an age level, which sets the application's literacy level. A live news catalog page then allows users to browse trending political topics. After choosing multiple articles from various news outlets, the application generates a comprehensive analysis, highlighting the political bias of the articles and providing a newly generated unbiased summary.

How we built it

On the frontend, we built Newsflix using React.js and styled it using Tailwind CSS for a dynamic and appealing user interface. On the backend, we integrated Python's Beautiful Soup package to collect real-time news article data from current web pages. The parsed information was then analyzed by an AI algorithm powered by OpenAI to assess political metrics and generate an unbiased summary. Finally, this information was connected to our frontend for deployment to users.

Challenges we ran into

ChatGPT's inability to browse links on the internet presented a significant challenge during development. Our article search algorithm initially depended on ChatGPT to read articles via URL links.
When testing this API within our program, we discovered restrictions on the requests we could make. This forced us to make a critical change to our data collection algorithm. In response, we implemented a web scraping algorithm to filter specific data, which we then fed to an offline API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Figuring out ChatGPT API, connecting the front end to the backend API, and learning new technologies.

What we learned

The biggest lesson coming out of this project is to expect the worst and assume that whenever things are going well, there will always be new bugs and issues.

What's next for Newsflix

The next step for Newsflix is to introduce live one-on-one support through AI chats, enabling users to receive immediate clarifications tailored to their individual comprehension levels.