← Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
Outrage Overload: Rethinking politics, division, and media
BONUS - Rethinking Your News Diet: Two Approaches to a Healthier Information Intake - Drew Steigerwald & Alex Fink
00:25:10
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- [00:17]
David Beckmeier
Welcome to Outrage Overload, a science podcast about outrage and lowering the temperature. This is a bonus episode about tools for a healthy News diet.
- [00:52]
Alex Fink
I've seen a study somewhere. I'm not sure I can give you the citation, maybe I can send it later, but that the more people watch the news, the less informed they are. And that is not something that used to be the case 20 years ago. It's a very recent phenomenon that more exposure to the news doesn't just get you irritable and antsy and possibly gives you PTSD according to some studies, but it actually makes you less informed unless you have a really coherent strategy of how you sample the news, how you get everything from the left to the right, how you cross reference things, et cetera. Most people just consume whatever happens to be in their feed on social media, and what they get after two hours of this is more confused.
- [01:37]
David Beckmeier
We live in an era of information overload. But it's not just the sheer volume of data that's the problem. It's the overwhelming challenge of separating fact from fiction in our much larger and more fragmented media landscape. Today, Americans face an unrelenting stream of information that spans the entire gamut from fact to disinformation. Millions have limited skills to help them or have no desire to differentiate the facts from the nonsense. This has unleashed our hardwired cognitive biases to do much more damage. As Ian Bogos writes, nowadays, too much information is on offer, most of it bad or wrong, and we spend our time either sifting for gold in the filth or mistaking the filth for gold. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. I'm your host, David Beckmeier, and today we'll be exploring two innovative platforms designed to help you navigate the news landscape and reclaim control of your information intake. These tools offer different approaches to tackling the problem, but they share a common goal to provide you with a healthier, more informed news diet. To help us navigate this complex landscape, I spoke with two experts whose work is focused on reimagining news consumption. First, I spoke with Alex Fink, founder and CEO of the OtherWeb. OtherWeb is a platform that leverages AI to filter through the noise and deliver personalized news experiences.
- [03:02]
Alex Fink
So before I looked at news as a business, I spent 15 years building cameras, computer vision, perception systems, that sort of thing. And at some point it just dawned on me that the world doesn't need more cameras and I probably need to do something better with my life. Improve the world in some way. So I thought, okay, what is the biggest problem I see around me that I might be able to do something good about? And the answer seemed to be that the biggest problem is people consume junk all day and at the end of every day when they come back from work. So I don't know how it happens because we produce a lot of good information. But somehow at the end of the day, everybody opens the news or social media and what they see is for the most part, just noise, right? It has very loaded noise, it is very emotional noise, it is very sensationalist noise, but it's primarily noise. Even if you open serious news publications, there are very few things in there in any given day that are actually news. For the most part, it's commentary on. Commentary on somebody's reaction to news that happened a week ago, Right? But there's very few actual news happening in any given day worth reporting on. And yet we have this very large industry that tries to fill in the gaps, tries to compete for clicks. And the way they compete for clicks and engagement is typically by triggering our emotions.
- [04:24]
David Beckmeier
I also had the opportunity to speak with Drew Steigerwald, co founder and editor in Chief of 1440 Media. 1440 offers a human curated approach to news, focusing on delivering accurate and informative content.
- [04:38]
Drew Steigerwald
I think one of the really interesting things about the genesis of 1440, so myself and my co founder Tim, neither of us have what you would call a traditional background in journalism or media. Tim was in finance and private equity and my background was actually science. So I got my PhD in Material Science and physics. The reason I bring that up, Tim and I were friends before starting 1440 and we found ourselves often complaining about the state of the news media. And we had very common complaints. And it was, you know, at first it was sort of a joke, but eventually, you know, it became clear that both of us kind of had the same pain points in what we perceived as like, the delivery of news and information.
- [05:33]
David Beckmeier
Today we'll explore how these innovative platforms can help you reclaim control over your information intake. The digital age promised an abundance of information at our fingertips, but what we've actually gotten is often more noise than news. As Alex Fink pointed out, social media platforms have inadvertently become breeding grounds for misinformation and polarization. The relentless pursuit of clicks and engagement has led to a landscape dominated by sensationalism and clickbait.
- [06:00]
Alex Fink
Let me try to first diagnose what I think happened in Meta and Twitter before it became X and basically how we got to where we are I don't think that misinformation was the original sin in some sense. The original problem was you monetize content using advertising. Advertising pays per click or per view. So just about everybody who's creating content and who is distributing content ends up just competing for clicks and views. Over time, all content starts drifting towards clickbait because that is the selective pressure on this entire population. Now, the platforms that feed most of that back to users like Facebook and Twitter, they start getting pressure from the public because they're misinforming the public, because there's so much nonsensical clickbait out there. So they form these trust and safety teams to try and remove the bad stuff that they're catching flack for, right? But then those teams and themselves, instead of going in and trying to remove the things that actually create the problem, they each start developing their own ideas. Maybe we should remove anybody who says this thing. Maybe we should remove anybody who says this thing, right? And there's not necessarily any correlation between what they end up censoring and what created the problem in the first place. I think the key issue that everybody's dancing around is that what created the problem in the first place is how Facebook makes money, right? And so they cannot come in and remove that without actually hurting their bottom line. If you remember the 2016 election, which is when misinformation became the big buzzword, right? If you look at the articles that got the most engagement on Facebook, it was things like the Pope endorses Donald Trump. Now, that is not Russian disinformation, right? That is just somebody trying to get clicks from people who like Donald Trump. And that article got more than 800,000 unique people viewing it. So maybe it even made a difference as far as misinformation go. But its goal was not misinformation. Its goal was to generate engagement and trust. And safety teams did not remove that. They instead removed regular people from the conservative right or from the extreme left, let's say the progressive left, who they disagreed with and they sought thought what that person said is offensive. So I don't know if trust and safety teams are the solution to the problem. I don't know if cutting them makes it better or worse. It could go either way. But I think we would be better off if we addressed the key problem, which is how is content monetized? What are the incentives for the people creating it and for the platform distributing it? And probably the best way that I can think of to do that is if people consume content on platforms that Filter junk out. There is no incentive to create junk. You can't monetize it anymore. So the more people switch to platforms with some sort of a built in filter, maybe one that they can configure themselves, but a filter nonetheless, the less incentive there is for junk creators to create junk.
- [08:58]
David Beckmeier
This obsession with engagement has created a perfect storm for the spread of false information. Trust and safety teams often address symptoms rather than root causes. The consequences of this are far reaching. Misinformation erodes trust in institutions, fuels division and can have other negative real world consequences. Polarization fueled by echo chambers and filter bubbles makes it increasingly difficult to engage in productive dialogue.
- [09:24]
Drew Steigerwald
And I think that word exhausted really nails it for not everyone. I don't want to generalize, but I think a wide swath of what would otherwise be fairly active news consumers. This sort of, I guess, what do you call like outrage, outrage based media. It if that doesn't resonate with you, it almost immediately turn is, it's a turn off, right? It's an automatic turnoff. And you know, from our perspective one of the big, you can call it a market gap I suppose. But one of the big problems from that angle is that there's not an immediate and obvious alternative.
- [10:08]
David Beckmeier
The relentless pursuit of outrage and sensationalism has led to a state of news consumer fatigue. As Drew Steigerwald noted, many people are simply exhausted by the constant barrage of negative and divisive content. It's clear the current landscape is far from ideal. So how can we navigate this overwhelming landscape of information? Let's explore two potential solutions. First, we have OtherWeb, which takes a data driven approach. As Alex Fink explained, their platform relies on AI models trained on vast amounts of data to filter and categorize content.
- [10:41]
Alex Fink
So our general approach has been humans don't do anything on our platform. We just create AI models that are trained on mostly academic data sets and we open up those models. So if you want to assert that we have a left wing bias or a right wing bias, I invite you to go to our hugging face page and try any of our models and see if it has a right wing bias or a left wing bias. And at some point I even published a thousand dollar challenge to anybody who can find the bias in any of our models. So that has been our approach to say we don't have a trust and safety team that might have nefarious intentions or might be at self biased. Our trust and safety team is a bunch of algorithms and the source is open and the data set is open. I think that is probably the future. That right now even an editor of a serious publication is in some sense suspicious. You don't know what's in their mind, right? Even if it's somebody that we've trusted for 60 years. So if we can open source as much of that process as possible, I think it will bring a little bit of trust back from the readers.
- [11:50]
David Beckmeier
This approach offers a degree of objectivity and scalability that human curation simply can't match. By giving users control over the types of content they see, OtherWeb empowers individuals to create a personalized news experience. On the other hand, 1440 takes a human centric approach. Drew Steigerwald emphasized the importance of human judgment in selecting and presenting news stories.
- [12:13]
Drew Steigerwald
We curate the stories that we find we do. We put a lot of time into parsing through different articles for any, you know, any particular story that's in the news that day. We put a lot of thought into word choice and framing what to include and what not to include. Just a lot, a lot of energy. And I think it, you know, I, we like to think it comes through. I think it does. But you know, at the end of the day, like you won't always get that right, like you want, you won't always nail it, so to speak. And at the same time, you know, there's human beings on the other end, on the other screen receiving, you know, receiving the digest and you know, they also read things through their own, I guess, minds of like their experiences and their perspectives and so you know, it's, it sounds a little bit corny but you know, we, we, our approach is we're, we're humans, we're not experts in all this stuff. We're trying to take sort of take this journey in the same way that the reader is and what you see each morning is like our, our best good faith effort at communicating that absent of political bias. Sorry, not just not political bias, bias in general.
- [13:40]
David Beckmeier
This method prioritizes accuracy, context and a deeper understanding of the stories being presented. By carefully curating content, 1440 aims to provide readers with a clear and informative perspective. While these two approaches may seem different, they share a common goal to help people cut through the noise and find the information they need to lets dive deeper into how these platforms compare and contrast and explore the potential benefits of combining their approaches. As we look towards the future of news consumption, it's clear that a hybrid approach combining AI and human curation holds significant promise. By leveraging the strengths of both, we can create a more informed and engaged AUDIENCE Alex Fink touched on the potential of AI to go beyond simple filtering and delve into more complex tasks like detecting logical fallacies and. And emotional manipulation.
- [14:28]
Alex Fink
I would say there's two different elements there that we could make a dent in. The first one is something that we already played around with, which is we developed a model that looks at any article and tries to determine what emotions it's likely to evoke in the reader just based on the language used. And we ended up with 13 different emotions. And one of them is infuriating. Right? That article infuriates the reader, which is essentially outrage porn. And so when people use our app, over time, we figure out which emotions they liked and we start showing them more of the articles that trigger those particular emotions. But we have an advanced customization menu where you can go in and you can see what we inferred about you. And if it shows that you really like infuriating stuff and you really dislike educational stuff, but you disagree, you can change it, which is something that TikTok and YouTube will never let you do. Right? But us being a public benefit corporation, we have the luxury of letting you do something that will probably decrease your engagement over time. So that's one element of it. The other element that you mentioned about leaving stuff out, this is something that has been bugging me a lot lately. And I think we need to develop some sort of model for these kind of logical fallacies in the argument construction that I see being used over and over again, and probably both in our politics and in our punditry. The most common bad construction that I see is your argument has flaws, therefore I'm right. And so people write a six paragraph article, five and a half paragraphs, they would be tearing down the other side's argument, and then in the last half paragraph, they would just state their alternative without submitting it to any sort of scrutiny. Because obviously if the other side has flaws, then I'm right, but typically that's just not true, right? And I see this over and over again. I see this in serious scholarly work from like the RAND Institute, for example, or from some sort of national defense think tanks. I see these publications, I'm looking at it, I'm saying, okay, you submitted the other side to all of this scrutiny. This is historic analysis where you see where it worked when it didn't, et cetera. And then you're stating your alternative and you're not even asking the basic question of does it have a track record? I don't know. I think we need to create A model to detect these kind of obvious fallacies because there's a few of these contracts that keep repeating in the vast majority of commentary articles out there.
- [16:58]
David Beckmeier
Meanwhile, Drew Steigerwald emphasized the ongoing need for human judgment in crafting compelling narratives and providing context.
- [17:05]
Drew Steigerwald
We focused on combining this sort of like one, two punch of being comprehensive. So if you only have five to 15 minutes in the morning, you only can read one thing, what would that product look like? That's how we made it. And then secondly, and I think this is where a lot of the interesting conversation and thought and a lot of the problems that you speak to is, is having an approach that's. We call it unbiased as humanly possible, which is, you know, it's a, it's a tough job every day, but that's what we strive for. So it was really combining those two, those two elements to solve this pain point that we had as news consumers. To me, one of the biggest problems is that you're like your average news consumer just wants contextual, accurate information so that they can form their own opinion. There's one of the worst feelings, at least for me, I think, for a lot of our readers, is when you think you know something or even like, let's say you tell a friend something, I read this, da da da da. And then later you find out that it actually, it wasn't really the full story or it was, they left out, you know, certain information for whatever reason, and you didn't like you because it wasn't conveyed to you in like a good faith, accurate way. You, like, walked around with this misunderstanding for some amount of time and you actually passed it along. It's a terrible feeling. And so when we think about it, we think you can talk for a long time about the incentive structures of media, but from a news consumer standpoint, the problem with sensationalist content or rage bait, or however you describe it is that it actively gets in the way of accurately communicating information.
- [19:08]
David Beckmeier
Ultimately, the goal is to address the growing problem of news consumer fatigue by offering accurate, relevant and engaging content. Both OtherWeb and 1440 are working to create a healthier news ecosystem. Relying on ratings of publications at large is inadequate.
- [19:23]
Alex Fink
Good publications have bad articles and bad publications have good articles. Right? A publication is not entirely consistent in its quality. There is some sort of a bell curve. And in fact, with some publications, that bell curve is much wider than with others. Let's say the Washington Examiner. The Washington examiner has really, really good news articles and it has really terrible op eds. And so if you give a quality score to the Washington examiner, it's going to be the average of these two. But should you really avoid their news articles just because their op EDS are terrible? Seems like a bad idea. So our approach early on was besides just selecting the sources, you select your quality cutoffs, which is the slider that says, do you want more quality or more quantity under the hood? What that says is it sets a certain bar and it only shows you articles above that bar. So you could enable Breitbart and still never see an article from Breitbart because they never passed the bar.
- [20:20]
David Beckmeier
Similarly, the straightforward advice to consult multiple news outlets for perspectives from both sides has its own shortcomings.
- [20:27]
Drew Steigerwald
Sometimes folks talk about like, well, I like to get my news from both sides and just to, you know, again I said I'm get annoying about this. But just to take it back to started this like, as a news, just as a news consumer, me, myself, like, I was already up, you know, up against it in terms of time and trying to figure stuff out. Like, I don't want to double that. Like, what good does it do me to get two bad products? Like, I need somebody to give me one single good product, not two bad products. So, you know, it's, it's like we say sort of internally sometimes about this, like, you know, let's see what the right is saying, let's see what the left is saying. It sort of reminds me of like going to a restaurant, like getting a bad meal, offer to comp you like a second bad meal, and you're just like, cook my stink right the first time.
- [21:15]
David Beckmeier
As we conclude, it's clear that the future of news consumption is evolving. By embracing innovation and prioritizing the needs of their audience, platforms like OtherWeb and 1440 are leading the way towards a more informed and engaged public. The challenge for us as news consumers is real. The constant barrage of information can be overwhelming, leaving many feeling lost and disengaged. By providing a curated and qualified news experience, platforms like OtherWeb and 1440 offer a much needed respite. Ultimately, the goal is to power individuals to make informed decisions. By offering tools to filter, personalize and understand the news, we can create a healthier and more engaged citizenry.
- [21:57]
Alex Fink
My last words for I guess every public appearance are the same. I hope that people will start paying attention to what they put into their brain, just like they pay attention to what they put into their mouth. It's just as important. Our brain also needs to be healthy. And if you feed it healthy stuff,
- [22:14]
Drew Steigerwald
it will be better letting people develop their own perspective and opinions on things and just making sure we do that one sort of singular job. Sort of like, you know, because we take that approach, it's sometimes it's. It's kind of difficult to say, like, well, I hope all of our readers go off and do this in a way that we can like, measure it. You know, I mentioned we sort of difficult to have quantitative evidence on that type of impact. But, you know, again, I'll end with like this sort of corny thing. I know, I know it's cheesy, but I grew up in Ohio. When I was there, it was a very purple state. I was there for first 22 years of my life. And I just like, you know, I still have this idea that people can have. People who have different perspectives can have like, fruitful and meaningful conversations on important topics if they have the right tools. And I know like, sometimes it doesn't feel like that's true anymore or possible, but it's just something I still sort of feel in my gut. And if, you know, two years from now, four years from now, eight years from now, like more people are doing that because they, you know, we provide a product that they can use as a basis. I think that's really fulfilling, just like moving the needle a little bit in that way.
- [23:37]
David Beckmeier
You can find the other web@otherweb.com and you can subscribe to 1440 news@join1440.com both services are free. We encourage you to explore these platforms and find the news consumption method that works best for you. Thank you to Alex Fink and Drew Steigerwald for sharing their insights. And thank you listeners for joining us. And that is it for this episode of the Outrage Overload podcast. For links to everything we talked about on this episode, go to outrage overload.net if you enjoyed this episode. If you found it interesting, please tell some friends about it. Post it to your social media. Better yet, text someone. Even better, talk to someone in real life, tell them about this show. I really appreciate it. Okay, see you in a week or two.
- [24:35]
Alex Fink
Sam.