Who we are

The Blindspotter was created by the team at Ground News. Ground News is a news comparison platform that was created to improve our broken media ecosystem, by abstaining from manipulative algorithms and giving you more control over the news you read.

Our mobile app, web app and browser extension are home to 250,000 mindful newsreaders who use our news comparison platform to easily access the full story and engage with news beyond their filter bubble. Decidedly apolitical, our community is home to people from across the political spectrum, no small feat in an increasingly divided world. You can access our mobile and web app here.

Ground News is run by a team of seven industry outsiders and is not affiliated with any corporate media/technology companies. Most of the company is owned by the team and the majority of our funding comes from paid subscribers. To learn more about us, visit our about and testimonials page. Or join the conversation on Reddit and visit r/groundnews

For press/other inquiries, contact us at feedback@ground.news

Why we created the Blindspotter

Filter bubbles are playing a more dominant role in our discourse and we are becoming more divided because of it.

Engagement maximizing algorithms are siloing us into our own bubble of personalized content and eroding our shared sense of reality.

Taking a mental note of the narrative of each piece of content you interact with is difficult and time-consuming, so we created The Blindspotter to help you easily visualize your news filter bubble. The tool also allows you to see the news diet of other accounts on Twitter, enabling you to see if your favourite influencer is keeping a balanced news diet, or if they may have a blindspot

What the tool does not tell you

The data generated by the tool should not be interpreted as exactly representative of someone’s political beliefs. An individual’s news diet may inform their political beliefs, but it is not the only determinant. Someone who expresses partisan views may have a balanced Twitter news diet and hold those views for different reasons.

Limitations of the tool

Our tool cannot decipher if an interaction with news content is positive or negative.The results of the tool may be less meaningful for accounts largely run by assistants/staffers.Our tool only records interactions with news sources that have a bias rating, so smaller local publications may not be included as a “news interaction”We source our bias ratings from allsides, mediabiasfactcheck and adfontesmedia. You can read more about the methodology behind our bias ratings here

I have a news blindspot - now what?

A news blindspot can be defined as a lack of exposure to news from one side of the political spectrum.

A news blindspot can impair your ability to have civil dialogue with someone who has opposing political views, as you simply aren’t getting the same information as them. Walking a mile in someone else’s news can help build a

greater understanding of their perspective and foster better conversations about society’s most important issues.

Here are some steps to take to start checking your news blindspot and adopt a balanced news diet:

Awareness - Realize you’re in a bubble

Unless you make a concerted effort to keep social media algorithms guessing, you are likely enveloped in a filter bubble. Whether your algorithmically curated feed leans left or right, you are likely absorbing opinions with one specific ideological bent. Let's change that.

Analyze - Examine where your news comes from

Take a deeper look at the news sources that you are consuming? Do they all have a similar underlying narrative? Are most of them owned by one mega-corporation?

Corporate biases and political biases have an influence on the news that is reported - and the news that isn’t. Be wary of sources that conceal their biases and instead purport themselves as the sole arbiter of truth.

Action - Pop your filter bubble

The best way to burst your filter bubble is to read news from perspectives you typically avoid. If you identify as a liberal, read news from right-leaning publications. If you identify as conservative, read news from left-leaning publications. This is far more time-consuming than simply browsing your Twitter or Facebook feed, so we created the Ground News app to make it easier to read the news from a variety of perspectives and get the full picture.

Our methodology

The Blindspotter can only access interaction data that is publicly available and it can not read the data of private accounts. These interactions include tweets, retweets, replies, and likes.

In order to pull the data, the tool parses through an accounts last 3200 tweets and records interactions with news content that have a bias rating. Our database currently contains 2063 news sources with bias ratings, which includes 878 left-leaning sources, 571 right-leaning sources and 614 that are centrist. The system also recognizes that all interactions are not equal, as people are likely more hesitant to tweet/retweet a piece of news than they are to like it. We place the following weights on interactions with news content: liked (1), tweeted (2), retweeted (1.5), quoted (1.45), replied (1.85).