Reddit Bias Detector

Screenshot of old Reddit (r/politics) with bias detector enabled

Inspiration

Bias is prevalent in our society: most social media posts and articles tend to be skewed to a certain perspective. Neutrality in media has proven to be very important for people to develop/retain their own viewpoints. We hope that by making a convenient bias detector in our browser for everyday use, we can raise awareness on bias as well as have people approach daily life with a more open mind.

What it does

When downloaded and unpacked as a Chrome extension, our Reddit bias detector automatically detects & rates bias for posts on the old version of Reddit (old.reddit.com).

How we built it

We used Python & the NLTK library to generate the list of potentially biased & exclusively biased words to integrate into our Chrome extension. The Chrome extension was made using JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

We were doing the NLP and Chrome extension parts of the project at the same time and wanted to figure out how to combine them. We originally wanted to integrate Python with JS for the extension, but we realized that wasn't feasible. So we used Python to generate text files we could use for the extension.

We also ran into the issue of querying data from social media sites; we considered using Twitter, Instagram, and the new Reddit, but we ultimately decided to build our prototype for the old Reddit since it was easy to query from.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating a usable prototype that people can utilize to immediately assess the rough amount of bias in the Reddit posts they read.

What we learned

We learned a lot about natural language processing/NLTK and how to implement it, and we learned how to create a Chrome extension.

What's next for Reddit Bias Detector

Test our model on unused articles from the dataset & find an ideal threshold value for bias
Considering subreddits/user reputations/comments/links in addition to post titles in our model to make bias assessments more accurate
Expand our dataset of biased/unbiased articles
Functionality with new version of Reddit

Built With

Submitted to

BridgeHacks

Created by

I worked on the Chrome extension / JS parts & integrating the NLP part of the project with the extension.

Paige Yeung
I worked on tokenizing the datasets with the NLTK library, and storing and counting the "bias." I helped a bit with speeding up the extraction process, and I also created the pitch deck for this project.

Sophie Mansoor
I worked on the data extractor. I used the goose3 API to fetch articles from a dataset of URLs. I also coded a sentiment analysis program intended to improve the original detector, but time ran out before we could implement it into the final product.

Nono Horiuchi
I worked on the bias counter/percentage/checker part of the code. I edited and created the pitch for this hackathon (as well as working on the pitch deck).

Kaitlyn Zhang

Updates

Paige Yeung started this project — Jul 19, 2020 07:26 PM EDT

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