Biasly Can Enable News Consumers To Be More Informed and Careful With News Sources
In this post, I will take an initial dive at Biasly and what it can do for you. When you read through your favorite or preferred website, chances are you have a leaning. In other words, you may identify as a liberal, moderate or conservative. When you arrive at the Biasly’s home page, here is what the home page looks like for me:
As you can see it has trending topics, news stories, different sections and a Bias meter on every story. In the world that we live in and the news we consume, there is a news agency that has for sure a leaning for different audiences. It is rare when you browse through stories to find moderate tone, but it does not mean news gatherers will try to achieve that goal in their reporting.
In the next section, I will discuss the pricing tiers and broadly go over some of the differences. What I do want you to know Biasly’s “About Page” really makes it clear it is independent unlike existing curating tools on social media platforms that are unable to filter out fake news, which is an ongoing problem.
Mission and Biasly Pricing Tiers
Before assuming that there is a political agenda, I want you to know I work as an educator. In addition, I still post reviews of tools and write about the latest happenings as an independent writer.
The old school philosophy that I come from is to include both sides to a story that includes all political philosophies. Whether you are moderate, Republican or Democrat the perspectives need to appear on posts rather than just one point-of-view. The lack of having more than one perspective tends to polarize people and divide them.
According to Biasly’s, it is a bias free approach. It explicitly states in the About Page that, “We are committed to bringing high-class Media Literacy education to K-12 schools as today’s students will be tomorrow’s journalists, and politicians.”
In this section let me provide a screenshot about the different levels of services for Biasly below.
Currently, I am using the Premium plan, which is $9.99 a month. Well worth it because it helps me contextualize some of the viral stories that trend online. This helps me understand the political leaning of a news article and source to make informed decisions, and arrive at reasonable conclusions.
There’s a good list of features and you can definitely try it free edition. I upgraded to the Premium service that includes customization options as a reader, writer and educator.
The next section is about the features for Biasly.
Features and Benefits
In this section, I will go over the “Check News Bias Rating.” This can be found under the menu “Bias Meter” and allows you to fetch a URL link. It gives you a a thorough analysis of the source using its unique algorithm.
I fetched this news story from the NY Times from Google News with no specific purpose but to demonstrate how it carries out the analysis. The NY Times is for the most part liberal but in this case the article leans moderate.
Elsewhere, there is another great feature called the Politifilter. It allows you to filter through the overall political leaning to your desired political sentiment. This is not included in the free or $4.99 package, but in the Premium package. The goal of this review is to equip you with a variety of sources and be well-informed as possible about the different types of leaning for so many news agencies out there. You do not want to prescribe to news articles or sources that are too biased or controversial in their reporting. This helps change all of that.
Biasly has the following set of instructions on how to customize the Politifilter:
Log in to your Biasly account
Hover over your account name in the top right-hand corner, and click on the “PolitiFilter” tab. This will bring you to the PolitiFilter page.
Click the button “Enable PolitiFilter News Preferences”
Then, using the sliding scale, select what kind of news you would like to see.
Underneath that, the user has the option to filter between Conservative or Liberal media being shown.
Once the user has selected their preferences, click “save” and then go back to the home site!
Takeaways and conclusions
Biasly is at the forefront of making a comprehensive tool to inform that different audiences. As I navigated some of the features, I feel better equipped and have a good grasp about how to filter out news events depending on the news source. Without Biasly you have to conduct a lot of research on your own to arrive at a conclusion.
The Biasly A.I algorithm organizes all this information into an understandable chunk and has customizations to filter through all the noise on social media platforms. It allows you to have more control of the news you consume but compare other sources while keeping in mind if they lean, left, center or right.
Please leave your comments below if you have used Biasly. Provide any constructive feedback or comments on features I may have missed to include another detailed analysis of this service.
