[HN Gopher] Show HN: Narratives Project - A news product for a m...
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Show HN: Narratives Project - A news product for a more peaceful
internet
Hey HN! I'm Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project
(https://www.narrativesproject.com/), a non-profit that presents
divisive news events as contrasting narratives to show why people
disagree. Our goal is to lower people's distress about the news and
animosity towards those they disagree with. Our current news media
system incites instead of informs. On-the-ground reporting has been
replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in
viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of
the other side, and the entire system is in an escalating panic
about Those Bad People Over There. People of different political
persuasions look at the same event and immediately come to
different conclusions, and often become agitated with those on the
other side. When asked why others disagree, they usually give one
of four answers: they're stupid, ignorant, brainwashed, or evil. Or
all of the above! It's probably not helpful to think that half the
country is stupid, and it's a recipe for catastrophe to think that
half the country is evil. So we're trying to work on the better
answer, which is that people come to different conclusions because
they have different priors and experiences. That may be obvious,
but it's difficult to remember in the moment, when we're confronted
with someone on the other side of an intense topic. We produce
short, substantive analyses that present the perspectives on either
side of an issue, and illustrate the underlying reasons for how
people come to those conclusions. We identify what either side is
focusing on, how they're interpreting new information, and how
they're reasoning. When we summarize the narratives, we describe
them as though we believe them. In this way, we center diversity of
perspectives as default. Presenting conflicts this way nudges the
reader away from mind-reading bad intentions into their political
opponents. We like to imagine a person on their lunch break, who
only has a few minutes to investigate a news event that everyone is
talking about. They scroll through Twitter, read the opinions of
people they agree with, and then open up our content to get a quick
overview of the whole discourse. Most likely they go back to work
still entrenched in their opinion, but hopefully also with an
understanding of why people disagree with them (and it's not that
they're evil). Or imagine a mainstream conservative aunt who
watches Fox News, and her progressive niece who watches left-
leaning Twitch streamers. They have difficulty discussing news, not
just because they disagree, but because they don't have any way of
talking between their worldviews. They just end up sending each
other links to partisan articles, which is not a great way to have
a conversation. Instead of this, the niece sends her aunt our
content about the topic, which helps them both feel acknowledged
and talk productively about the disagreement (values, experiences,
priors, etc.). They still disagree, but they don't think each other
are crazy or stupid, and they're no longer on a track that was
pointing toward hating each other. We believe that when news
consumers can at least minimally understand those they disagree
with, it helps to alleviate distress, understand their own position
and feel acknowledged, and is a key step towards the humanization
of their apparent enemy. Here's two examples of recent posts:
https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/why-cant-we-agree-on-the-
nonexistence-of-biolabs-in-ukraine/
https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/perspectives-on-ketanji-
brown-jacksons-supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-days-2-4/ And
here's a recent Instagram version:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbh6kxhArKa/ There are other
organizations and products out there that share our concern, such
as AllSides, The Flip Side, Braver Angels, Ground News, etc. We're
different in two ways. First, news aggregators offer people news
from both the right and the left to see where others are coming
from. But there are too many divisive stories and too few hours in
the day for this to be practical for the average person. Also, I
think that watching oppositional news often just confirms people's
beliefs that the other side is awful. More deeply, other
organizations rely primarily on partisan media articles to build
their understanding of the discourse. They assume that narratives
are the product of top-down influence. We think narrative emerges
from the interactions of individual agents sharing information,
which is then picked up by the media and propagated. So we rely
primarily on a social media listening tool (Meltwater) that gives
us access to the full firehose of Twitter, Facebook, and other
platforms. Our understanding of the discourse comes from looking
directly at online conversations, and aggregating the different
perspectives and positions. We've learned a lot this year, but one
of the biggest things we've figured out (through user testing) is
that our design is not yet intuitive. Once users get what we're
doing, they see value in it and want to share it, but there's a gap
before that point, which we need to bridge. So at the moment, our
biggest questions are: How can we design our product to be
accessible, obvious, and useful to the average media consumer? And
how can we best compete within the incentives of our unhealthy
media ecosystem? And that's why I'm showing this to you. What do
you think? Does it make sense? Are there considerations I'm
missing? Is there a different format that we should experiment
with? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Author : ShaunCammack
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-03-28 15:18 UTC (1 days ago)
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| I like the idea of understanding opposing viewpoints in a way
| that doesn't sensationalize them. I would prefer to have the
| opposing viewpoints represented by intelligent, polite,
| respectful individuals - not summarized by an editorial team.
| garrisonj wrote:
| Confronting conflicting opinions is uncomfortable. You will get
| many angry responses from people from all sides (if you are doing
| your job right). So y'all will have to find a way to deal with
| that emotionally.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Thank you for making this. It is very needed!
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| Thank you! We're trying.
| pvg wrote:
| It'm not sure this approach really works, at least by the
| examples you've linked. The first one is essentially a made up
| non-story, a piece of wartime propaganda by the aggressor in the
| conflict. The second describes the opposition to Ketanji Brown
| Jackson's Supreme court nomination in terms of tweets by Candace
| Owens and Jack Posobiec both of whom are, whatever one may think
| of their politics, essentially shitposters. Posobiec's Wikipedia
| page pretty much leads with that:
|
| _John Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right and alt-lite
| political activist, television correspondent and presenter,
| conspiracy theorist, and provocateur._
|
| It doesn't sound like a healthy way to "compete within the
| incentives of our unhealthy media ecosystem".
| irq-1 wrote:
| Two big problems are topic selection by following the
| mainstream media and treating bullshit as views that should be
| understood.
|
| Narratives should ignore the bullshit, and choose topics based
| on what people want to learn about. There are dozens of wars
| going on right now, how about a short history and summary of
| each?
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| I don't think this is a problem of fake narratives versus
| reasonable people. It's that we all use narratives to
| understand the world, and those narratives often conflict. And
| if our goal is peace, it's more important to understand these
| differences than it is to adjudicated between them.
|
| This is particularly true if some of these perspectives are
| actually pretty worrying. Because if we just write folks off as
| crazy or brainwashed, we don't really understand them. It's
| perfectly fine to still think other people are wrong, though.
| pvg wrote:
| Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media
| not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up
| narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a
| caricature position, how is this addressed by basically
| amplifying bullshit further? The 'other side' of advocacy for
| Judge Brown Jackson's nomination is not actually Candace
| Owens shitposts. That's a disservice to both the idea of
| narrative and to the position being misrepresented.
| coffeecat wrote:
| > Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional
| media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made
| up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a
| caricature position, how is this addressed by basically
| amplifying bullshit further?
|
| All narratives are made-up narratives. The problem is, your
| bullshit/not-bullshit dichotomy doesn't necessarily line up
| with someone else's. Your idea of bullshit versus not-
| bullshit has your own priorities/associations/assumptions
| baked into it. A steel-manned version of the opposing
| argument probably isn't going to line up with the average
| statement of the argument as you're likely to find it in
| the wild. You can just ignore shit-posts that you consider
| bullshit, or you can try to understand the
| priorities/associations/assumptions that lead people to
| make those shit-posts.
|
| Kudos to the OP for doing this. Providing people with
| sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit
| isn't going to win you any popularity contests though,
| except among people who already like sympathetic
| representations of what they consider bullshit, which isn't
| exactly the audience who needs this.
| garrisonj wrote:
| I'm often not looking for the "correct" perspective, I'm just
| looking for what the other perspectives are.
|
| If a lot of people think a certain way, that's enough for me to
| want to learn about it.
| emerged wrote:
| You're doing the thing they're trying to fix.
| riskable wrote:
| I read a number of articles and they're alright but I think
| you're boiling down people's opinions on these things a bit too
| much. "Those who oppose..." "Those who support..." are just made-
| up by your staff. You don't _really_ know that 's what people who
| oppose/support something actually believe. For all you know the
| reason why someone supports a given bill is because a source they
| trust says they should support it. The assumption that people
| have _reasoned_ themselves into supporting /opposing any given
| thing is a great big one.
|
| You may be able to fix this just by changing your wording a bit.
| I don't know though.
|
| As an example, I spoke with someone recently here in Florida that
| supported the "don't say Gay" bill for no other reason than, "it
| pisses off liberals." There's _far_ more tribal support
| /opposition to things that have nothing to do with logic or
| reason. My neighbor is a prime example.
|
| Related to that bill in particular, I feel you got it wrong with,
| "Those who support (the "don't say gay bill"):
|
| > "Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education.
| Instead, parents should be the ones in charge of their children's
| education -- especially when it comes to determining what topics
| their children are ready for."
|
| This is just my opinion here but I really feel this completely
| misses the boat in regards to the opposition's argument. They
| don't feel that "parents should be in charge of their children's
| education" because that would mean that some gay couple with an
| adopted child could make those sorts of decisions. They don't
| want that at all!
|
| Also, who's to say that teaching (or even discussing with) K-3
| kids basic facts about sexuality is bad for them? Those that
| support the bill do! _That_ is their argument: That _their_
| beliefs about sexual education are the only ones that are
| acceptable. Not that they think, "parents should be in
| charge..."
|
| "Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education.
| Believe that teaching children about sexuality or gender identity
| is morally wrong and such topics should be prohibited from
| classrooms."
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Came here to say this. The breakdowns seem... not very
| accurate. In most cases, the problem is not that I disagree
| with the statements selected for the opposition, it's that the
| statements selected for them aren't the arguments I've heard
| from the people themselves. And the arguments supposedly on my
| side aren't even close to my own. Makes me question the methods
| here.
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| Here's an outline of our method, which might help explain
| this (And please feel free criticize it):
|
| First, we look at news aggregators and twitter trends to see
| what the big stories of the day might be.
|
| Then we pull a bunch of tweets with our social media
| listening tool and try evaluate the story on three criteria:
| Momentum (is it trending and growing), Partisanship (are two
| sides talking about it), and Emotion (Is the story morally
| animating).
|
| Then we collect data by pulling tweets through our tool, and
| focusing on the most widely shared and engaged tweets, and
| sort them into pro/con (or whatever division fits the story.
|
| Then it's analysis. We identify the facts each side is
| referencing, the affected values and emotions from either
| side, and whatever the key source of division is (if there is
| one.
|
| Like any methodology, this has its limitations. It only looks
| at twitter, for example. If there is an argument or position
| out there that doesn't come through in the data, then we
| can't really assume it's there (although we do use broader
| ideas to contextualize and explain the data).
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Oh, that actually explains a lot. I don't use Twitter, nor
| do most of the people I talk to about these things.
| Frankly, most of the stuff I see on Twitter sounds to me
| like it was composed by an insane person. If you used more
| of a "boots on the ground" approach and interviewed people
| who aren't chronically online, your findings might ring
| more true with people like me. But maybe that's not your
| goal? Nothing wrong with using Twitter as your basis, but I
| think the site as a whole will feel "off" to a lot of
| people unless you make it very clear that your data is
| Twitter-based.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > As an example, I spoke with someone recently here in Florida
| that supported the "don't say Gay" bill for no other reason
| than, "it pisses off liberals." There's far more tribal
| support/opposition to things that have nothing to do with logic
| or reason. My neighbor is a prime example.
|
| I think the lesson here is that not everyone has a rational,
| logical, or considerate reason for supporting what they
| support. Showing "contrasting views" is more than just putting
| two earnest-but-incompatible opinions side by side on a
| webpage.
|
| You _also_ need to include stuff like "I support this bill
| because it triggers snowflake liberals / gets back at those
| evil conservatives" and "I support this bill because I am smart
| and it sounds like a good idea."
|
| > "Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education.
| Instead, parents should be the ones in charge of their
| children's education -- especially when it comes to determining
| what topics their children are ready for."
|
| You also need to be able and willing to see through euphemisms,
| coded speech, and dogwhistles.
| octopoc wrote:
| I believe in parent rights. That is not a euphemism, coded
| speech, or dogwhistling. I believe the parents are
| responsible for raising their own children, I want to be the
| one to explain sex to them. I don't want the school to do it.
| This is one example of where the Narrative Project is spot
| on, at least for me and pretty much every conservative I
| know.
| riskable wrote:
| > I want to be the one to explain sex to them
|
| There's two problems with this:
|
| 1) Parents often _don 't_ do that. Resulting in all sorts
| of societal problems e.g. increased teenage pregnancy,
| STDs, suicides, etc. We can argue about the age at which
| they need to learn about sex but ultimately they _do_ have
| to learn about it and no, parents can 't be trusted to
| teach these sorts of things (if history is any guide!).
|
| 2) You assume that the bill in question only prevents
| discussions of sex (as in, intercourse). That's not the
| only thing it prohibits. It prohibits discussions of
| _sexuality_. As in, you can 't even acknowledge that same-
| sex relationships or transgendered people even exist.
| Sounds like it wouldn't come up? Think again: Teachers and
| students don't just exist inside a classroom. They will
| encounter each other regularly in the community. If some
| kid sees a (male) teacher kissing their husband in the
| Walmart parking lot how is the teacher supposed to respond
| to that when asked about it in school the next day?
|
| You can say that the teacher should tell the kid to mind
| their own business or some other, "avoid talking about it
| by all means possible" excuse but it still puts the teacher
| at risk. In fact, schools might not even _hire_ gay or
| transgendered teachers just to avoid that risk... Which is
| one of the big problems with the bill: It gives school
| administrators an excuse not to hire someone based on sex.
|
| Remember: The bill isn't about curriculum. No Florida
| curriculum for K-3 has any sex-related material. It's a
| tool for religious/conservative parents to attack gay and
| transgendered teachers.
| all2 wrote:
| Re 1): it is their right to not do those things, though.
| Responsibility in the US _ideally_ is possessed by the
| individual.
|
| > parents can't be trusted to teach these sorts of things
|
| Neither can the state. I'll refer you to Nazi Germany,
| Soviet Russia, and North Korea for excellent examples of
| why we shouldn't trust the state to decide what children
| should learn.
|
| > It prohibits discussions of sexuality. As in, you can't
| even acknowledge that same-sex relationships or
| transgendered people even exist. Sounds like it wouldn't
| come up? Think again: Teachers and students don't just
| exist inside a classroom. They will encounter each other
| regularly in the community. If some kid sees a (male)
| teacher kissing their husband in the Walmart parking lot
| how is the teacher supposed to respond to that when asked
| about it in school the next day?
|
| Nothing. The point is that it is the parents'
| responsibility to address these issues. Whether they
| actually address these issues is a moot point. It is
| their right, first and foremost.
|
| > No Florida curriculum for K-3 has any sex-related
| material.
|
| No. But many other states have introduced sex-related
| materials into curricula for K-3/4. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/spring-fever (the
| majority of the article is about the Dutch, see the
| section discussing Chicago)
| nerdponx wrote:
| In this context, a "don't say gay" bill sounds like the
| "two wrongs make a right" fallacy.
|
| Perhaps sex in its entirety should not be taught before
| 5th grade. That's when I learned it in school. I always
| thought it seemed a bit early, but I suspect it was done
| in order to get ahead of wet kids might be exposed to
| from 8th graders when they moved up to middle school.
|
| But preventing discussion of _sexuality_ does nothing
| about the general problem of teaching sex education too
| early. It 's just piling worse on top of bad.
|
| I see no merit in banning discussion of topics like
| "sometimes men love men instead of women". That's
| literally a fact about the world, even if you think it's
| an abomination or whatever.
|
| Moreover, let's extend the parent-choice principle
| further. Should teaching evolution in schools be exempt
| because some parents don't believe in it? What about the
| germ theory of disease? It's simply not a logically-sound
| or morally-consistent justification for a "don't say gay"
| law.
| etchalon wrote:
| Was there some large news story about Grade 3 teachers
| explaining the intricacies of docking that I missed?
| nerdponx wrote:
| I believe in the importance of law and order in society,
| but I still freely admit that "law and order" rhetoric
| usually means something specific and carries a handful of
| specific implications.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| I remember that in my Journalism graduation we did an interesting
| exercise where each student had to create a news article about
| Little Red Riding Hood (and then you decided if the focus would
| be on the survivor, the wolf, the act of the saviour, etc).
|
| Based on that, you may try some thought experiments with more
| open ended topics, that might bring you some ideas (does god
| exist? is climate change caused by human action? is earth flat?)
|
| Another thing might be considering having more columns for
| nuanced topics, and also have icons below each statement that has
| a counter-argument from another column.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think one of the fundamental challenges is that a lot (maybe
| even most) of people do not genuinely want to be informed. For
| various reasons.
|
| A practical one is that it costs time and effort. In the age of
| information overload, a divisive issue is one of many seen on a
| given day. People just want to slap a binary conclusion on it,
| good or bad, and move on.
|
| If you do inform yourself, there's little to no reward for it.
| Online reasonable debate is impossible in particular in the
| places where divisive issues are discussed the most: Twitter.
| It's ultra fast, outrage-driven, which means extremists always
| win, and any effort put in by reasonable people is in vain.
|
| I think that kind of gets to the heart of the matter: there's no
| incentive or reward for being well informed in the aspects of
| society where it counts: media and culture, and political
| representation.
|
| Even if you inform yourself better on a divisive issue, and
| rationally change your mind, you're unlikely to switch camps,
| politically speaking. You may be a moderate progressive and are
| just going to have to accept that you share the room with the
| far-left, same for the right wing.
|
| In reality, time and time again surveys show that Americans are
| far more reasonable and united than the cultural landscape
| suggests. Not only are far-left and far-right gross
| misrepresentations of political support, the very idea of sorting
| people into left, right, good, bad is a crime against humanity.
|
| I don't know why or how the hijacking of media can be reversed,
| but ultimately it likely is a case of "follow the money". Who
| benefits?
|
| In any case, any progress is good progress and you're asking the
| correct (hard) questions.
| chaostheory wrote:
| This is how Wikipedia should evolve. This is really great.
| bluefoot3 wrote:
| The world needs more of these. Have you considered looking into
| the goodnewsnetwork.org?
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| Thank you! It's the first I've heard about it, I'll look into
| it.
| vavrek wrote:
| Totally respect and applaud your efforts, although framing issues
| in terms of "left and right" doesn't make sense to me, unless
| these are meant as generic terms, which could be replaced with
| something such as "View A and View B."
|
| The whole "left / right" concept seems to break down when
| considering varied topics, as each of us may find ourselves on
| either "side" in any specific case.
|
| Am not sure what the ideal solution would be, yet am personally
| identified with positions on both sides, depending on the topic.
| prions wrote:
| https://www.narrativesproject.com/analysis/perspectives-on-c...
|
| > When we discuss climate change, we tend to tell others to "look
| at the facts." But in the age of the internet, you can find
| "proof" for any position we listed above. So how do we move
| forward, _knowing that looking at the facts is insufficient for
| developing an informed opinion on climate change?_
|
| So this "deep dive" article posts a bunch of tweets, makes the
| ridiculous claim above, and then skirts around posting any
| scientific facts because you can't just "look at the facts".
|
| This is intellectually lazy under the guise of both-sidesism.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Hey, congrats! This is a great effort.
|
| I've written about this elsewhere on hn but a while ago I made a
| project with similar goals in mind I called Rashomon. It was a
| betting market where you would receive articles without their
| title, author, source info, etc and you had to place a bet on
| whether you thought the source of the article was right wing or
| left wing. I also learned a lot from this experience, so if you'd
| like to chat, let em know.
| dang wrote:
| You should post that to HN if you're still working on it!
|
| Email hn@ycombinator.com if you want and we can help.
| octopoc wrote:
| Thanks for showing this! I like the way the left-wing view is on
| the left, the right-wing view is on the right. It isn't clear
| what the system for organizing the information from top to bottom
| is. Also visually it feels like the article ends a couple times.
| Horizontal line breaks and _especially_ the blue /red left/right
| arrows visually imply the beginning of the comments section. At
| least for me. What if you had comment boxes like in iMessage [1]
| for what the left and right say?
|
| I love, love, love your goal here. Focusing on facts vs. opinions
| is great, but you may also want to include something in the post
| to humanize the two sides. Not sure what it would be. Maybe have
| statistics about each side? I don't know how hard it would be but
| if you could say something like, "Families who live in the
| country believe..." instead of "right-wingers believe..." Just an
| idea. Reminding people that their hated enemy is just trying to
| do what's best for their people and not everything they hear in
| their echo chamber about them is true.
|
| [1] https://www.howtogeek.com/263443/how-to-see-when-a-text-
| mess...
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| Thank you for this! One of our biggest challenges is figuring
| out how best to design the article and content, we're
| definitely going to play around with the text boxes.
|
| > say something like, "Families who live in the country
| believe..." instead of "right-wingers believe..."
|
| I love this.
| sammalloy wrote:
| Unfortunately, this kind of approach upholds and supports the
| status quo of false balance (false equivalence fallacy, or "both
| sides") which has degraded media discourse since the early 1980s.
| Please read "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer. The false balance in the
| media did not arise by accident. It was intentionally created,
| funded, and established by billionaires who wished to invent
| their own false narrative and impose it on the American people.
| The 1971 Powell memorandum is generally considered the opening
| salvo in the nascent architecture of this movement, and it has a
| distinct anti-science, pro-industry bias at the beating heart of
| its soul. I'm sure you mean well, but this is not the solution,
| it is more of the same problem. Facts matter. Reality exists.
| poopsmithe wrote:
| "Secure Connection Failed
|
| An error occurred during a connection to
| www.narrativesproject.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR"
| davedx wrote:
| I think it's a good idea if it's presented as "here are the facts
| supporting each side of the argument". What I don't think is a
| good idea is providing alternative editorial views on something,
| e.g. I totally agree giving support to Owens or Posobiec as some
| kind of legitimate "alternative viewpoint" is not productive to
| healthy discourse. (These commentators constantly argue in bad
| faith and twist facts to absurd degrees to suit their narrative).
|
| Present the facts and let people decide which viewpoint makes the
| most sense. That would be a really valuable service.
| garrisonj wrote:
| I took a quick scan of your articles and I love what you are
| doing. They were very clear. I will definitely come back for
| more.
|
| When reading the news, I'm often not searching for "facts", but
| instead I'm trying to understand the "facts" from the perspective
| of people I disagree with.
| ShaunCammack wrote:
| I appreciate that! You're doing the right thing, that's the
| best path to understanding _why_ people disagree.
|
| Facts without an interpretive framework are incomprehensible,
| and so it's really important to understand many disagreements
| as differences in framework.
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