About Wirebeat
Wirebeat wants to empower people to be more informed, incentivise news that is transparent and just, and give experts the loudest voice.
Helping people to be more informed
Our aim is not to report the news, but to change the incentives around content creation by demanding the highest level of quality and reliability. Misinformation, speed over depth, and a race for clicks have reduced the quality of the news you receive and often fail in its duty to hold the powerful accountable. Wirebeat will always champion free speech but recognises the need to label and contextualise articles where possible. This aim is in service to the long-term sustainability of high-quality journalism and to diminish the harmful impacts of unsubstantiated or inaccurate publications.
Principles for our analytics
This platform applies analytics against a set of principles:
- Promote transparency, distinguishing between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of consequence” by applying analytics to articles and their authors.
- Help provide readers with a more complete picture of the media being consumed.
- Reduce sensationalism, especially where a source has a history of being factually incorrect, unjustifiably damaging, or designed to humiliate rather than hold to account.
- Disincentivise clickbait by separating articles that positively intend to inform readers from those designed to grab attention and generate advertising revenue.
- Inform readers where news is heavily biased, opinion-based, or politically extreme.
- Call out clear areas of omission that may be deemed a failure of duty to a publisher’s readers.
- Connect people to comparable opposing views, facts, or areas of nuance.
- Highlight the use of false equivalence, or any deliberate attempt to cause outrage for profit.
How we use data science
We use data science to help identify credibility, bias, or agendas in online news sources by:
- Keeping score of historic misinformation or stories which turn out to be false or misleading.
- Providing visibility and surfacing agendas such as political affiliation or financial incentives to misinform.
- Questioning how information was acquired and what the author’s credentials are.
- Providing an audit trail and being open about evidence.
Raising awareness: questions to ask when consuming news
- Check the source and consider the publisher’s interests.
- Broaden your view to validate the facts. The more impactful a story is to you, the wider you should go to verify the facts from additional sources (especially the ones you often disagree with, as the facts should not change).
- Consider who would be best placed to comment on a topic — is their voice present in the story?
- Challenge yourself to separate facts from opinion. If the facts changed, would your opinions change?
- Loyalty to a narrow spectrum of publishers increases the risk of only hearing people who hold the same views.
- Do your own fact-checking. Sites such as factcheck.org combat misleading information; AllSides shows how media can be biased.
We will not compromise on doing the right thing
Wirebeat is committed to making a positive impact in everything we do. An example of this is Wirebeat being a carbon-negative entity that offsets its full carbon footprint by planting trees: ecologi.com/wirebeat. This also extends to all of our staff offsetting their own carbon footprints.