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arXiv:2407.10829cs.CL

BiasScanner: Automatic Detection and Classification of News Bias to Strengthen Democracy

Tim Menzner, Jochen L. Leidner

Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.

Abstract

The increasing consumption of news online in the 21st century coincided with increased publication of disinformation, biased reporting, hate speech and other unwanted Web content. We describe BiasScanner, an application that aims to strengthen democracy by supporting news consumers with scrutinizing news articles they are reading online. BiasScanner contains a server-side pre-trained large language model to identify biased sentences of news articles and a front-end Web browser plug-in. At the time of writing, BiasScanner can identify and classify more than two dozen types of media bias at the sentence level, making it the most fine-grained model and only deployed application (automatic system in use) of its kind. It was implemented in a light-weight and privacy-respecting manner, and in addition to highlighting likely biased sentence it also provides explanations for each classification decision as well as a summary analysis for each news article. While prior research has addressed news bias detection, we are not aware of any work that resulted in a deployed browser plug-in (c.f. also biasscanner.org for a Web demo).

arXiv comments
10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.CLComputation and Language cs.AIArtificial Intelligence cs.IRInformation Retrieval

On Hacker News

Linked by 1 identifiable commenter in 2 comments across 2 threads, from Nov 2024 to Feb 2026.

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements 1 comment

    • In case you're looking for the opposite, not an AI "kill switch", but a propaganda kill switch using AI to fight disinformatiom, try BiasScanner: BiasScanner - Firefox Plug-In https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/bias-scanner/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10829

      jll29View on HNParent context

  2. BiasScanner: Detect 27 Types of Media Bias & Propaganda Using AI 1 comment

    • BiasScanner is a new machine learning model (based on a fine-tuned LLM) and associated Firefox plug-in that analyzes the news you are reading and can warn you from propaganda and other types of media bias. Paste in a news story and click "Detect Bias!"; then hover over the…

      jll29View on HNParent context

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