I just released Truthbot, a website and browser extension to show you the companies behind your news and make fact-checking easy. AMA!

What the hell happened here. This got deleted and Truthbot is no longer in the Chrome store?

the github projects are still there.

https://github.com/Jaxkr/Truthbot.org

https://github.com/Jaxkr/Truthbot-for-Chrome

make forks and download it as long as you still can

[deleted]

You need the website to be running in order to use it. I seriously want to know why this guy deleted everything, though.

Hey. I have put up a message on http://www.truthbot.org/.

Basically no one was signing up or contributing and I realized it was fundamentally flawed. I am working really hard to get the new version out.

thanks for informing me. i also got the email reply by now. so no conspiracy :D

but why did you delete your youtube account?

Because a good product shouldn't need a video to explain it.

You realize this sounds fishy as hell? Why would you delete everything, even your reddit account under which you posted?

even your reddit account under which you posted?

This is the same account. I just deleted the AMA. It just says [deleted] on an AMA.

I see.

Yeah. I'm real sorry for this whole debacle.

So you just deleted your entire youtube account because of a delayed launch? That's not exactly believable....

Someone told me a good product didn't need a video to explain it

Fishy. Who bought you?

I can assure you nobody. It had a major security hole relating to Django's SSL redirect as well as some flaws. It's fully open source, and I have a good job so I wouldn't take bribes.

As an avid news consumer, one of the things I hate most is misleading clickbait titles that often are counter to the content in the article themselves -- and let's face it, in today's world a lot of people read headlines and not the rest...

Have you any thoughts if there is a technological remedy, similar to truthbot.org, or any other solution that is feasible? like maybe a way to hover over titles and be displayed user submitted and rated headlines, or something even better?

maybe a way to hover over titles and be displayed user submitted and rated headlines, or something even better

I like this.

The reason you see so much clickbait is because, well, it works. It gets clicks and that's all a lot of websites work. I think a feature where users could report clickbait and then hovering or clicking those articles would give the user a summary instead of giving them traffic and rewarding them for a misleading title.

Right, but at what cost. I think a lot of media companies today are being very short-sighted -- especially in today's climate where people are already skeptical as is.

I wonder if news media aren't risking complete alienation when enough people have just decided that media is just a brainwashing mechanism and stop consuming mainstream media altogether -- that's if there is a more appealing alternative.

or the scarier alternative is that we just accept it and start unconsciously consuming news as an echo box to reaffirm our own views, which causes us to pick sides rather than ideals.

I've installed truthbot.org.. it does look a bit rudimentary at the moment, but I think what you are trying to achieve is actually quite monumental if it can be brought to full functionality --

If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know..good luck!!

Thanks for installing! It is extremely rudimentary at the moment.

If there's anything we can do to help, please let us know..good luck!!

Write reviews of articles! It's easy. Just find an article, google the topic, and provide some cross references. Don't feel pressured to do that right now though. It's late.

What were some of your biggest surprises about the news industry you discovered while making this?

I think one of the craziest things I discovered is that a huge amount of all the media in America is controlled by just a few companies. Some of them are GE (Comcast, NBC), News-Corp (Fox, NY Post), Disney (ABC, ESPN), Time Warner (CNN, Warner Bros.) and CBS.

In the 1980s for example, 90% of the media was shared over 50 companies. Now that has become 6 companies.

^source

Do you think there is something fundamentally wrong with media since we don't have journalistic integrity anymore? News sources are biased all the time and news agencies boast that they're either right or left wing. They won't say a bad thing about their candidates ever. Did they get this way by bribery, or what?

I honestly don't know how we got here. As I discussed in another answer a huge amount of the media is controlled by a staggeringly small amount of companies.

I think the desire for those companies to protect their interests often gets in the way of good journalism. I think it needs to be more decentralized, which is what I'm trying to do.

Where do you get your news from?

I love the Associated Press. But with Truthbot I hope to be able to read articles from anywhere and be able to get the whole story.

What happens if you point Truthbot at itself?

https://www.truthbot.org/articles/article/https://www.truthbot.org/

your lists could also be very useful for filtering purposes. for example google and facebook have so many comains and suborganisations with many domains themselves. if i would like to block or route all google traffic over a vpn i would have to find all domains manually for myself and would miss most of them. it would be cool if this could be implemented in some umatrix style addon or umatrix itself. have you considered something like this?

That's not what I designed it for, but it could definitely be a future application (an api endpoint to get domains for organization) if you wanted to block all Gawker sites or something like that.

A lot of learning institutes are employing anti-plagiarising software to keep students from copying articles from the net.

Do you think you could utilise your software to get information on the sources used?

Identifying the actual sources of articles is hard, since they are often internal. But hopefully truthbot will allow finding resources for a specific subject easy.

Thank you for the reply.

I take it as the software makes it easier to find seperate sources for your news on the same story?

If so, that sounds great!

I take it as the software makes it easier to find seperate sources for your news on the same story?

Yes. Reviews are supposed to contain that information as they are referenced.

Hey thanks for posting. Q; Is truthbot just localized to USA/CAN right now?

Q; Where did you pull the data from for what organizations own what and what is the frequency that this is done? Ie if Wash Post is bought by Goldman tomorrow.would that be updated automatically or does it rely on users?

Is truthbot just localized to USA/CAN right now?

Yes. At the moment it's only available in English. I hope to translate it if it becomes popular! I am semi-fluent in Spanish, but as an open source project hopefully we'll be able to support many languages.

Where did you pull the data from for what organizations own what and what is the frequency that this is done?

This is pulled from Wikipedia. It is only crawled once, but can be manually updated. So it would rely on the users to update it, or wikipedia to, whichever comes first. It would be really easy to edit it in Truthbot, because you would simply to go Goldman's page and add the Washington Post as a child organization.

I ask because I am based in Aus so English isn't an issue :)

It's only crawled once per what? Year/Month/Day?

Once on page creation. It's very much alpha and relies on a community. They can be manually re-crawled, but I'm working on a way to automatically update them.

However, I want to build Truthbot's own database, and not have to rely on an external one.

will there be a firefox addon too?

Yes. Very soon. The old extension actually displayed info in the extension popup, but I scrapped that. So porting it to firefox will be simple.

Fast forward 3+ years, what do you think will be the outcome of information like this being available to the normal user?

An increased demand in independent news. Possibly a greater hunger for unbiased information, but I'm not sure really.

What did you improve from past attempts? In other words what did you learn most from your past failures

Don't make it too rigid. May need to rework it again as there hasn't been a single registration this entire AMA and it needs users to function.

So this may be a failure and I'll need to rework it more.

I haven't signed up because there's just not enough info about what exactly it does. Is it a crowdsourced list of information about companies that can be accessed by a browser extension?

You're right. I will work on increasing the information of that.

What measures have you taken to prevent Truthbot from becoming sentient and destroying the world?

What measures have you taken to prevent Truthbot from becoming sentient and destroying the world?

Many features only work sometimes. I think we'll be good. :P

I'm looking for the best food to eat to cure munchies? ...time's a factor...

Off-topic, but I recommend those frozen burritos you can buy for like a buck at the store.

Awesome concept. I will check it out.

Q: Did you pull the name from a dystopian story? Makes me think of doublespeak.

No, but the original logo looked like something from a clockwork orange.

can or will articles be grouped by the sources they used? this would help to more easily identify just grammatically different duplicates and to see how errors and misinformations propagates

No, but they could be. In a review, for example, one could write that an article is identical to many others, and give a list.

However, identifying the actual sources of articles is hard, since they are often internal.

in firefox(i dont know if chromium has something similar) certain sites can be identified by their certificates to be the official representation of a corporation. for example when i am on paypal it shows me paypal inc. written in green text front of the url. what do you think about extending this to any other websites/organisations and their owners?

At the moment, the primary identification technique is based on content and domain analysis. I could look into using EV certificates in the future, but many sites lack them.

Why didn't you post this earlier in the day so others could review your product?

Good question. You're right. Because I just finished it and wanted to share. Should I delete it and return tomorrow?

It's just a poorly written CMS. Ownership info and reviews are added manually. What did you code exactly? What does your app do?

There are millions of kids with pimples like you trying to achieve success in programming, so I will tell you the truth: you are way below average. Hard work with no talent won't get you anywhere.

Have been replying to every comment and won't stop now.

Ownership info and reviews are added manually

They aren't.

But maybe you're right. I haven't spent that long on the project and it's very rough. I will shut it down if it doesn't get good results. I'm not doing it for money, I have a software development job and this is just a hobby project.

But I definitely know what you're saying.