Show HN: Narratives Project – A news product for a more peaceful internet
by ShaunCammack on Hacker News.
Hey HN! I’m Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project (https://ift.tt/4eIFNni), 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 On-the-ground reporting has been replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of the other side, and the entire system is in an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://ift.tt/gUkn5Wj https://ift.tt/D2xl7QZ And here’s a recent Instagram version: https://ift.tt/JGId7Ty 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!