A news platform that brings together article summaries from various news media sources from a wide political spectrum.
What is it?
FlipSide is a news platform that brings together article summaries from various news media sources from a wide political spectrum. The application presents the topics on the top of the media agenda and the coverage from the various sources. In this way, readers can notice the differences and biases that exist in coverage and get a broader perspective on different events. The content of the presented articles is short and concise, and invites the readers to go deeper if they wish. In addition to the main news items, the application offers additional content according to categories that are also presented from different information sources, side by side. In addition, only with prior consent, the application collects information about the users' reading habits over time, and presents them to them for the benefit of self-reflection so that they can learn about the ways in which they consume news. Our vision as the developers of the application is to shatter the media bubbles (filter bubbles) by expanding the news picture that is presented to users and exposing them to the news biases.
Project Info
Students: Uri Blanka, Maor Tal, Barak Lisk, Gal Anabi, Chen Sternfeld
Lecturer: Dr. Noa Morg
Technological supervisors: Eran Ilani
Teaching assistants: Ofir Sadaka
How It Works?
FlipSide is based on retrieving RSS files from the various news sources and comparing them which is done on the server side and entering the information in the Firebase DB. Every time a change is made in the DB, the information is extracted and presented to the user in such a way that he can be exposed to different coverages for the same topic. For each topic, the same coverages are presented, through which the user can be exposed to the summary of the article (by clicking on its title) and through it go to the full article. During the stay in the application, the readings of the user's summaries are sampled in order to show the distribution of his reading on the various sites.