theunlocked / bias-finder

Chrome extension to show you the bias of websites you travel to.

Bias Finder

Bias Finder is currently avaliable on Firefox and Chome, due both to their large userbase and ease of extension development. Safari and Edge are not supported because Microsoft and Apple act like they want to make it hard for third-party developers.

This repository will be updated as development continues, however most versions will not have releases associated with them anymore. All updates will go to the Chrome Webstore. If you want the latest version, go there or follow the source installation instructions for a non-DRM version.

Installation from Source:

1. Download or clone the latest source code from this repository
2. Extract the zip file, if downloaded.
3. Go to chrome://extensions/
4. At the top of the page, tick "Developer mode"
5. Click "Load unpacked extension..."
6. Select the Extension folder in folder containing the source code.
7. Whenever you start chrome, you will need to click cancel when it asks you if you want to disable developer mode

Uninstallation:

1. Go to chrome://extensions/
2. Click the trash can icon next to the extension

bias-finder's Issues

Links as parts of automatically extracted site descriptions do not work

Possible Solutions:

Remove links in descriptions

• Less clutter
• Most links will be redundant
• If the user wants to view the details behind a link, they can just click the "Click here for more information" link

Make links in descriptions work

• Easier direct access to additional information

Some news sites don't work

Reply with as many of these as you can find. Some of them are out of my control, but some may also just require a slight and easy fix on my part. Do not reply with a site that is not on AllSides.

Unresolved sites

These are sites that don't work due to an issue with Bias Finder

• There are currently no known unresolved sites

Known unlisted sites

These are sites that don't work due to them not being computer readable from AllSides. These websites will be sent to AllSides in bulk.

• Slate
• KQED
• The Hill
• Media Matters

Validate and fix news source titles

https://www.etfdailynews.com/2023/01/28/janney-montgomery-scott-llc-increases-stock-position-in-invesco-senior-income-trust-nysevvr/ missing

https://www.etfdailynews.com/2023/01/28/janney-montgomery-scott-llc-increases-stock-position-in-invesco-senior-income-trust-nysevvr/
"Bias Finder
It looks like this site doesn't have a bias listing, or its listing is inaccessible by Bias Finder."

If the extension pop-up is clicked before the page fully loads, details may be missing.

This can be resolved by having popup_info.js ping background.js until it has been provided with the appropriate information. Something like an 100ms sleep between pings seems acceptable.

Implement Google Analytics

It would be nice to have access to (anonymous) usage data so that I can tell various things such as:

• The kinds of sites that users tend to visit
• How much they expand the tooltip and for what kinds of sites
• How often users actually look at the news
• And more

Privacy concerns do come up:

• Enable or disable by default? (until user opens the tooltip and selects a response for a first-time message kind of thing)
• Should analytics be released to the public?
• How much data do I really want to collect?

Most sites matched to Andrew Napolitano

Firefox 77.0.1
Bias Finder 1.0.2

I noticed most sites are matching to Andrew Napolitano. I scanned through the AllSides json feed being used and noticed that this is the first node where there is an empty string value for url.

http://drop.focuslabllc.com/XwDPr3

I'm wondering if the json feed itself has changed in a way that has broken this Firefox plugin. I love AllSides and would really love to use this plugin. For now, though, this bug is a show stopper unfortunately. So I wanted to report what I found.

Thanks!

Sometimes the news site fails to load pop-up data properly

This can be resolved with a tab switch, although it would be better if that wasn't necessary. That said, this bug is very very uncommon.

Reproduce

1. Go to a site
2. Switch tab to a news site while the site is loading
3. Wait for the site in the first tab to stop loading
4. Check additional information on second site (it will all be gone!)

Solution

Note that this has not been tested, and is just a hypothesis

• Store all pop-up information in a javascript object/dictionary indexed by the tab they come from (possible memory leak issue would need to be resolved somehow)
• Store the tab as a separate variable
• Only change the tab variable when the tab is switched, but still reload the icon, tooltip, etc. when the tab is changed or the page is reloaded.

Alternative solutions are welcomed!