Could just be me but with characteristic-level severity levels it's not immediately clear to me if they're referring to like the categorical severity (e.g. "when labor power is suppressed that's a critical sign of encroaching fascism") or the present-day severity (e.g. "recent news points to there being critical levels of labor suppression happening right now").
I can suss out that it seems to be the present-day severity, but it wasn't intuitive (for me at least).
And how does your scale/algorithm work in terms of time-dependence? If there isn't any news indicating signs / intentions of labor suppression for a couple weeks then does that drop the severity level (both at the characteristic level and/or the overall level)?
Cool project at the very least for keeping track of recent alarming news. I hope we never have to find out how accurate your tracker really is...(Then again that opens up the can of worms of "when does fascism arrive?"...with the answer always being earlier in retrospect than predicted in present.)
as for the time-dependance / algorithm, good question .I'm still working on tweaking it, right now recency has a 30% weight. I just started this last thursday so im quite unsure how things will change / look on the site over time and what makes sense for a half life / decay of an article.
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable" ― George Orwell, Essays
In this case, the site has a bunch of sliders, whereby each slider indicates how far along we are on that axis of what they're calling fascism. Each of those axes can easily be one or more individual topics. At any rate, this website is at least more specific than "something not desirable" when it comes to how it defines fascism.
They seem to be slightly different than the ones OP uses for the classification, but they are reasonably close.
"The pursuit of unity in its most extreme form, rejecting and eliminating alternative thoughts and ideas by any means necessary."
> fascism /făsh′ĭz″əm/
> A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Looks to me that a lot of the current happenings in the US are heading in this direction.
Isn't the current admin trying to do the opposite?
> Donald Trump's policies resemble an administrative coup d'état, says journalist Annika Brockschmidt. He and Elon Musk are undermining the separation of powers in the USA and disregarding civil rights. The political opponent is becoming overtired.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/in-den-usa-findet-ein-adminis...
But yes love the idea : )
Would be interesting to see how filtering by different news sources of different political biases affects the ‘severity’?
Would be cool to even have designated groups so you could filter by left wing, right wing, international, etc.
Gonna work on this after I optimize the codebase
yes - not sure what detail you want but I'll try to be thorough here.
Tech stack is React, Next JS, Radix UI lib, Tailwind, Firebase for database auth and cloud functions, Vercel for deployment, OpenAI for article classification, WorldNewsAPI for news.
Cloud Functions run at different intervals, I have one that runs every 30 minutes (recent news), 12 hours (weekly news), 84 hours (monthly news) and 168 hours (quarterly news). This is a big WIP
On a cloud function run it fetches articles from newsAPI, this search is done with a mix of keywords that determine if its related to the current administration, then gets filtered down to 'credible' sources (listed in a comment on this thread). The content of the articles that pass these filters get send to gpt-4o to be classified for relevance (is it an action of the administration / related) if it passes that >70%, the ai determines if it matches any of the 14 steps of facism, and will add a direct quote / impact / summary of why it matched that step, and finally will get added to DB and displayed on the site.
In terms of development - heavy use of Cursor IDE, and start with v0 by Vercel which is why I was able to get this up and running within ~3 days. Although the codebase looks disgusting rn
Also, almost impossible to click the Additional Resources as it's obscured my the bluesky button.
Great appreciation for what you've created!
If one chose to unplug they would realise in short time how easily and how often they are being programmed to buy into rage-bait through mis and disinformation campaigns.
It's got to the point where a significant number of people are easily triggered by beige and mundane topics such as what brand of car a stranger has purchased to how someone identifies sexually and if someone lists two basic pronouns on an email.
Until people realize they actually control so very little in their day-to-day lives I fear it will only get worse.
Allowed Sources Major Wire Services (1.0) Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg Top US News (0.9) NYT, WaPo, WSJ, ProPublica
Conservative Media (0.7-0.8) Fox News, National Review, Washington Times, The Dispatch, Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Reason
Progressive Media (0.7-0.8) Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now!, New Republic, Jacobin, Truthout, Slate
International (0.8-0.9) BBC, Guardian, FT, Economist, DW, France24, Al Jazeera
Fact Checkers (0.9) FactCheck.org, PolitiFact
Major Networks (0.8) NPR, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNBC
Digital Media (0.7-0.8) Atlantic, Wired, Axios, USA Today, Time
So does the Digital Media group as a whole - it seems overly reductive, and the sources are too varying in quality/reliability to be given the same weight. And does something like Time really fit in there, considering they've been print media for the vast majority of their existence?
(Love the project overall, though! Thanks for creating and sharing.)
OK, my feedback is that it is a very left leaning list of sources. I use a site, https://www.allsides.com, that does media bias ratings and rates sites from -6 (high left bias) to 6 (high right bias), and outside of the ones you have listed specifically listed as "Conservative Media", every site that I could find was negative, other than the FT which was listed as "Center" with no numerical rating. Yes, even the WSJ, although that was WSJ news rather than opinion, opinion was slightly right.
Here's the list I got, I had to make some choices on what to use, "ABC" for example can refer to different things.
The Nation -5.00
Slate -4.50
Democracy Now! -4.00
Mother Jones -4.00
New Republic -4.00
Jacobin -4.00
The Atlantic -4.00
Guardian -3.50
AP -3.10
AFP -3.10
Wired -2.75
Time Magazine -2.30
TruthOut -2.00
Politifact -2.00
ProPublica -2.00
NPR -2.00
CBS News (Online) -1.50
FactCheck.org -1.60
Washington Post -1.63
NBC News Digital -1.80
New York Times -2.20
Al Jazeera -2.30
Bloomberg -2.40
USA Today -2.00
Axios -1.70
ABC News (Online) -1.42
Economist -1.40
CNBC -0.90
Reuters -0.89
BBC -0.80
WSJ -0.20
FT ? Rated as Center with no #
RealClearPolitics 0.16
Reason 0.28
The Dispatch 2.00
Washington Times 2.00
Washington Examiner 2.30
National Review 2.50
Fox News (digital) 3.88
If you're trying to build a left leaning media bubble, you're doing a pretty good job. I would be curious to see results from the opposite, choose a few examples of "Liberal Media", and populate the rest of the list with sources that were rated as leaning right.
And I'm sure some people will disagree with the allsides bias ratings. There's no way to be completely objective on something like that. They seem pretty believable to me, but I'm not watching the same movie y'all are.