The Factual bot analyzes 10,000 news articles across hundreds of sources every day to find the most credible stories on trending topics.
Each article is evaluated by a machine learning algorithm on four dimensions: diversity and extent of sources, neutrality of writing tone, author’s topical expertise, and site’s historical reputation. The resulting percentage score gives readers a guide of how likely an article is to be credible.
The Factual’s rating system is completely automated and minimizes bias by avoiding popularity metrics and personal preferences as inputs (i.e. the model was not trained with articles classified as good or bad as that would encode the creator’s biases). Instead, stories that are deeply-researched, minimally opinionated, and written by topical experts rate highest. In fact, The Factual often uncovers highly-rated stories on smaller focused news sites.
A few guidelines for using The Factual’s ratings:
- The Factual can never say if an article is true or false. Such a determination still requires human judgment. The Factual can only say that an article has the attributes of a highly credible article.
- The Factual assumes that every article has some bias due to the author’s frame of reference. So The Factual curates a few highly-rated stories across the political spectrum, as well as some in-depth pieces, so readers have more context to get the full story.
- The Factual bot polls postings to /NeutralNews subreddit every 10 minutes and only rates the original posted story on each thread.
The Factual is not affiliated with any news outlets, or Reddit, and is an independent technology company. The mod team is partnering with The Factual only because it furthers our mutual goals related to online discussion. No remuneration of any kind is taking place. NeutralNews is the first subreddit to test The Factual bot so feedback is greatly appreciated to make the bot more useful to you.
More about the company and the rating algorithm.