Participant #1:

Before you listen to the Tech Talk Daily podcast, I have to ask are the high levels
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Burris. Welcome to the Tech Talks Daily podcast, where you can learn and be
inspired by real world examples of how technology is transforming businesses and
reshaping industries in a language everyone can understand. Here is your host, Neil
C. Hughes. Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily podcast that after several months
of mainstream media and social media seemingly intent on dividing the global
community when it needs to be united more than ever. I want to try and continue to
create this more positive narrative of how technology and people are trying to make
the world a better place and shine a spotlight on these people that are making a
difference. So, yes, I'm turning into an aging hippie, but I have no fear
technology is at the heart of it all. And after recently coming across The Factual,
which helps people find unbiased news on critical trending topics, I felt compelled
to learn more about how they are using a completely transparent algorithm to rate
over 100 new stories every day and curate the best stories across the political
spectrum and beyond. So everyone avoids bias but becomes more well informed. And
sometimes that might mean hearing things that you wouldn't normally depending on
what news channel you tune into. So buckle up and hold on tight so I can beam your
ears all the way to San Francisco so we can speak with Arjun Morethey, who's going
to tell us all about The Factual and the story behind it. So, a massive warm
welcome to the show. Can you tell the listeners a little about who you are and what
do you do? Sure. I'm Arjun Morphe. I'm a co founder and CEO of The Factual. And the
factual is a start up out of the west coast of the United States. We help people
find unbiased news on trending topics, and we do this via a couple of different
products every day, a newsletter and a website. We've built technology that helps
rate how objective and unbiased an article is, how credible it is. And so we use
this technology to consistently rate about 10,000 articles that are published every
day. We sort them automatically into topics and pick the best ones. The highest
scoring ones across the political spectrum. Put it together in a newsletter that
goes out every day with the website as backing evidence. And sent it out to tens of
thousands of users. Helping them sort of get the news they need without all the
fluff. All the opinion. And then they can be on their way. Absolutely love what
you've created here, especially at a time where we should be more united than ever,
there seems to be more division than ever. And over the last few weeks alone, I've
noticed more and more people that I know that are saying that the news outlets that
were respected, especially in mainstream media, etc. In the past, are now becoming
increasingly partisan and biased. So when you combine all that with social media
timelines that turn into echo chambers that just feed your existing opinions back
to you, it seems that people are either choosing to unplug and just walk away from
it completely or end up arguing with friends and family. Is that something that
you've seen too? And can you tell me a little bit more about the scale of the
problem that you saw? Yeah, that's exactly what's happening here in the States as
well. And I imagine in most countries around the world, the scale of the problem, I
think, is very big. There are quite a few surveys and studies that show the amount
of partisanship has grown over the last few years considerably. And now there was a
study from the Knight Foundation, which is a big journalism foundation in the
States, where they said almost half of all Americans feel that the news is overly
biased. One out of two. That's a staggering number. When you have people that
fundamentally just don't trust the news that they're getting at such large numbers,
it's hard for society to really move forward and solve big problems collectively.
So the problem is big. It's very serious. It's why we wanted to work on this. My co
founder, Joy and I, we were finishing our last start up about four years ago, and
we said, look, if we're going to do this again, startups are a lot of work. Let's
do something that is really meaningful, that we can see ourselves dedicating at
least a decade to solving. Because if you want to make anything of impact, it
usually takes at least ten years. And this was a problem that was near and dear to
our hearts. We're both news geeks, me especially, actually. So that's what got us
into it. And as far as what's driving it, I think you actually hit on a lot of the
points. The first is when the cost of producing news, just writing news essentially
has gone down. Then what's happened is you have a lot more news that's being
produced. And as I mentioned earlier, there's something like 10,000 articles that
are written every day in the States and I'm sure worldwide probably triple that.
And so all these articles are being written and they're all competing for the same
amount of attention from an audience. And so how do they stand out? Well, one way
is to become increasingly more narrowly focused, to be more what's the word? Hyper
partisan or sort of angst inducing because that stands out, right? Something that
makes you angry or get you frustrated, that stands out a lot more in a crowd that's
very like, plain. And so it's hard for news outlets to not fall into this trap of
saying, well, how are we going to get people when there's so much written out
there? You've got to really stand out. That headline is going to be punchier and
nastier and then the result is that's what gets liked and shared and spread around
and that's what we all see as the really extremist stuff and then it sort of
reinforces these smaller beliefs that we have and we start to think like that and
then of course, it's a big circular story. So very disheartening understandable how
we got here and that's why we're trying to solve this. In fact, one of the
decisions we made early on, Neil, was when we created our algorithm to rate news
credibility, we did not include any popularity signals and that was a very
conscious choice because we said, look, if you do that, all you do is you reinforce
the existing system. So we don't do that. And the upshot of it is the way that we
end up writing. You find a lot of really great writing out there. There's amazing
journalism being done today. It's just hard to find. And we are living at a time,
like you said, where tech is being blamed for dividing people rather than uniting
them. So can you tell me a bit more about how you're attempting to solve the
problem with the Factual, what the Factual is and just walk me through how
listeners would get the most out of it? Sure, yeah. So as I said, the Factual helps
people get unbiased news and trending topics and you can go to our website and sign
up. That's the easiest place to just find the newsletter. The way that we do it,
we've got this algorithm that looks at every article published in four dimensions
and the dimensions are how we generally think of credible news. If you ask someone
what makes for credible news, they'll say, well, I'd like it to have a good amount
of evidence. I mean, the facts, the sources have to be really good. I want it to be
not very opinionated. I feel like most things are really opinionated these days.
I'd rather not it'd be nice that if it's written by a journalist who knows what
they're talking about, some sort of an expert in the field perhaps. And yeah, on a
reputable site, not something out of Macedonia by a bunch of kids or something. And
so we took those four sentences that people kept saying to us and turned it into
code. And so we look at how well sourced an article is, so links and quotes and
where they point to and how extensive they are and are the primary sources,
secondary sources, repeat and all kinds of things like that. We look at how
opinionated an article is and that's an algorithm, part of a family of algorithms
called natural Language processing algorithms. So they look at the tone of voice
and grammar rules and all kinds of things like that to assess how opinionated a
body of text is. And then we get into some of the learning aspects of the
algorithm. So we look at who the author is and have they written on this topic
before and how did previous articles on its score for sources and opinion and do
they write exclusively on this topic. Et cetera. Basically trying to ascertain are
they beat reporters. Something of an expert and then they score well and then the
site reputation is historical scores for that site by every author and article. And
so that framework, as I said, there's no popularity in there. We also make the
entire system transparent. Unlike most tech, which is sometimes fairly blamed for
the problems
today, it's generally a black box. In our case, all of our ratings are
transparent. You can click on any article and see why it was rated a certain way.
And between the transparency, the consistency, the lack of popularity, all these
things, we've built a system that's quite different than any other news feed out
there. And as I said, the big surprise to us when we were building this, we thought
big deal. It's all fancy talk, it's just going to rate. The New York Times or the
Washington Post is number one. Like big deal. But because of the things that we
did, and particularly not including the popularity signals, we ended up finding a
lot of really high rating news sites that are not mainstream news sites. And this
is still veteran journalists writing for smaller publications that really focus on
the topic. And there's something of an expert in that topic which is effectively
what we want. And so what we were finding is there's great writing out there and if
we can bring that together and show people different viewpoints on an issue and not
very partisan, not overly opinionated, but really well evidenced source, then
people can understand that most issues in the news are actually quite complex. It's
far more than the sound bites that you hear. There are rarely simple solutions to
problems and there are rarely solutions that don't negatively impact one group.
While positively impacting another group. It's complex. And what we're trying to do
is to convey that complexity in a way that's easy to digest and help people be more
empathetic to other groups and say, look, I get it. It's a complex issue, and it's
okay that you have different viewpoints of me. I can still respect that, and we can
still live together. We don't have to agree on it. But I understand you have a
different frame of reference, a different background, a different understanding of
this issue or different interests in this issue. And that's understandable. That's
really what we're trying to get to, Neil. It's just sort of an empathy for
differing viewpoints, even if you don't agree with it. And that exact point that
you just mentioned there, that seems to be something that's lacking all over the
world, isn't it, where everyone's kind of fallen into this binary thinking where
everything's left or right, yes or no, right or wrong, and can't live in that gray
area in the middle anymore. And if anybody hears any alternate facts that disagrees
with their viewpoint, they just shut down or get into name calling, whether it be
boomer, Karen, COVID, idiot, whatever it may be. If you've got a different opinion,
they just get shut down, don't they? Yeah, it definitely seems bad. One observation
that we have that gives me hope is it seems like there's sort of an extreme left
and extreme right, if you will, that do get all of the attention. And they're the
ones that do a lot more than name calling and sort of get really anxious over
things, but there's actually a fairly large majority in the middle that's just a
bit more quiet. And I think they're the ones that are torn. They're like, well, I
kind of agree with a little bit of that. I kind of agree with a little bit of this.
And yes, I'm not really extreme on either end. I think they're the ones that don't
actually immediately resort to name calling. In fact, I think they find it a little
uncomfortable to be pigeonholed into, well, are you for this or against this? And I
think when you make everything a very binary choice, a lot of people find that very
hard to accept. My hope is that that population is very large, and if we can just
empower them to say, you're not alone, most people are like you. We're a little bit
of left and right, and that's okay. Yeah, if we can get them to speak up a bit
more, hopefully we can get the world to see that it's not all black and white and
the people that make it seem like that they might actually be the minority. Well,
I've watched enough Spiderman movies to know that with great power comes great
response. You have picked a big problem to tackle here. So I've got to ask, why is
the secret to overcoming bias and encouraging readers to break out of their echo
chambers. So it's a multifaceted problem. The first is sort of, I think, accepting
that maybe you don't know everything. It's hard to accept or appreciate someone
else's opinion if you think you know everything. So I think the first step is, oh
my goodness, this is a hard problem. And that's I think the first step that we're
doing is trying to educate people that whatever the issue is that you're reading in
the news, it's difficult and here's some of the complexity behind it. And then I
think it gives people a little bit more like, wow, that's hard. And then the next
step is seeing different viewpoints. And oftentimes this actually comes when you
hear it one on one with people. Frankly, it happens really well offline. You have a
good conversation with a neighbor or friend or someone in your community about an
issue and you just listen. It's much easier to then break out of your filter
bubble. It's like, well, I remember I was talking to so and so. I heard this person
and boy, it really had an impact on me. So I think personal stories that give color
to a viewpoint, that helps a lot of people also break out their bubble. So those
are the two steps that I have. By no means do we have the answer. Of course, we're
just early in this game. But I think first, help people understand that it's
complex and maybe you don't know everything. Second, expose them to new viewpoints,
ideally stories from people in your community, and help you understand that that's
what different people are going through that might help you break out of your
partisan bubble. Absolutely. As this is a tech podcast, I've got to ask, can we
take a look at the tech under the hood that makes all this possible? I appreciate
you probably can't share too much, but is there anything you can share there? Yeah,
absolutely. And in fact, we share a ton on it because we're in the business of
helping people trust the news. And the first question that people ask, right is,
who the heck are you? How are we supposed to trust what you say if we don't
understand much about you? So we make as much as we can possible transparent. So we
have a page right off the homepage. It's the how it works page and it details the
algorithm. And there's a little explainer video that goes through all of the bits
and pieces of how we built it and how we minimize our own bias and all these
things. And as I said, every article that we write has a rating on it. This is
either on our news site or if you download an extension or if you sign up for the
newsletter, you can click on the grade and it'll show you those four great factors.
It will show you the site rating, the author rating, the evidence rating, and the
opinion rating, all four of those will be transparent on any article we rate. I
guess in a nutshell, what I would say is if you're trying to get a high level
understanding of the algorithm, the sources, how well evidence is it? What we do is
we take an article, we extract all the links and quotes out of it, and then we run
a series of analyses on it. How diverse are the links, how extensive are they, who
do they connect to? If they repeat that kind of stuff, how long are the quotes, are
they attributed, et cetera. And then you get a score for that opinion score. As I
mentioned, it's a natural language processing algorithm. So it looks at a lot of
grammar rules, if there's a lot of subjective pronouns, if there's unnecessary
adverbs exclamations, all kinds of other things like that. And then to exclude
quotes, et cetera. So it gets a little hairy. But basically he's trying to figure
out is the writer being very opinionated or not? And then the other two are the
historical scores. So the author rating is particularly interesting. Now we built a
database of over 50,000 journalists and every article that they've written, we
classified it to one of hundreds of topics and we look and say, do they write on
this topic all the time exclusively? How do those previous articles score? And
basically give them an expert rating. And then the site rating is essentially a
roll up of all the ratings for that site or every article that's ever been written.
So between those four elements, that's how the tech works. And then the rest of it
is a consumer product, whether it's a newsletter or the website. And it's standard
stuff on building that. And we've already talked about the increasing distrust of
mainstream media in some circles, but then we've also got mainstream media itself
is falling under a lot of criticism and Twitter got into hot water as we record
this podcast for removing an article themselves. So again, it's such a hard problem
to tackle. So how does the factual grade article credibility? So each of those four
factors is evaluated for every article and they're weighted slightly differently
based on type of articles. Political articles or articles about politics are
weighted slightly differently than say, a business article or a science article.
But nevertheless, it basically spits out a number between one to 100. It's a
percentage. And the best way to think about it is it's a probability that this
article is credible. So the reality is, no algorithm that I know of, or at least
very few, can really tell if something is true or false. That's an extremely
difficult thing for a computer to do, and especially when it comes to news because
it requires context and history and judgment and nuance. It's not easy. And instead
what we're essentially doing, I mean, at a high level, the tech is basically
saying, does this article have telltale attributes of credible articles? Does it
have signs that it's written in a way that would be credible? And effectively, it
gives you a probability rating. So the way
that we advise readers is, look, if it's rated, if it's got a 75% or higher
probability of being credible, it's probably a good article. Now, that by itself
doesn't mean that there's zero bias. In fact, it's almost impossible to have
something that has zero bias because first of all, what is bias? I mean, you have
to agree on a baseline against which biases, and it's hard enough to agree on that
baseline. And fundamentally, we're humans, we have a frame of reference and we
probably have some biases we're probably not even aware of. And that's okay. And so
what we espouse in the newsletter and the website is no single article will be the
full truth on any story. That's just asking too much. Get into the habit of reading
two or three, even if you skim them, but you have to see different viewpoints. It's
the only way to really get the full story. And that's what we're trying to make
easier rather than you having to search for everything or going to very partisan
opposing out, like a lot of people think, oh well, I'll listen to CNN and Fox in
the States and that'll solve the problem and that's certainly better than only one
of them. But both of them are fairly partisan and not particularly the best on
either side. What we're saying is there's better on both sides. Let's get you that.
Let's make it easy for you to see. We'll give you the highest scoring articles from
multiple outlets and together that will give you a good solution. Love that. I'm
curious, do you have any stats on who your readers are? What kind of feedback have
you received? Do you get to hear any feedback all the time? In fact, I would say
the number one job of the CEO is really customer support. I reply to every email
that is sent by a reader, even a welcome email. Sometimes people reply to it and I
reply to that as well in a lot of cases. Yeah. So hearing directly from our readers
and acting on feedback and criticism is the best way for us to get better. So it's
really my number one job. And I would say the feedback that we've gotten has been
largely positive. People have been really happy with what we're trying to do and
how we are trying to simplify their lives and take out some of the frustration and
anger and tension when it comes to news. The news should not make you so unhappy
and so angry. It should just inform you and then you should be on your way. And
that's what we're trying to do. We've also received some good criticism on places
where we've not been very transparent or where our algorithm seems off. One of the
things that people see on our scores is oftentimes left leaning outlets score a
little higher than right leaning outlets. And so people would say, well, hey, do
you have a left leaning bias? And we've taken great pains to explain why that's not
the case and why that even happens. It has to do with the fact that there's just,
frankly, more news on the left and a lot of general purpose outlets versus more
politically focused outlets on the right and things like that. So we've written a
blog post. We had this explainer video, but all these kinds of things. Every time
people ask us a question, what's going on? If we either make a tweak or change if
it's appropriate or we explain it better. And I think that really goes a long way
into building trust with people, is answering their questions as honestly as we
can, admitting where we're wrong, making changes if necessary, and then being
transparent about the whole process and the technology. Excellent. And what's the
overall vision for the factual and the future of how we consume news? Is there
anything you can share there? Yeah, absolutely. At the heart of it, we think
there's a huge audience that just wants credible, unbiased news and not a ton of
it. I think the truth is some of us are news junkies. I'm a news junkie. I actually
really love news. But most people just want to be informed, and then they have
things to do, families to take care of, jobs to go to, etcetera. And so what we see
is that we're serving that audience, give them what they need and prepare them to
be on their way. We think there's a very large audience for that. And if the
product is priced in a way that is appropriate and fair for a mass market so our
product, we decided very early on there would be no advertising, because
advertising can sometimes lead you down the slippery slope of once again becoming
really opinionated or really partisan because then you're competing for attention
and that's where you start getting into clip dates. So no ads in our product. Very
simple pricing. $3 a month or $12 a year. Intentionally very affordable for a lot
of people. And our vision is that we can go back to the in the States, actually
right through to the 90s. In the United States, half of Americans pay for the news
in some way, shape, or form. Half. And we think that's actually very doable across
the world and countries. If it's affordable, if it's valuable, and if it's not
trying to overstretch what it does, that's what we hope to do. I think there's a
number of ways that we get there different formats and different offerings. But at
its core, mission inform readers, try to save them time, try to save the money, get
them on their way. That's what we're looking to do. So for anybody listening, how
can they pick up a copy of the Factual? Is it web only? Is there an app? How would
they get up and running? Yeah, right now it's the newsletter and the site. So go to
the Factual.com, sign up for the newsletter and then everything will flow from
that. It'll connect you to the site, it will hook you up with the newsletter, et
cetera. We will do an app in the very near future. There's a lot of demand for it,
so that's coming soon. But I've been pleasantly surprised about the newsletter
success. It turns out, again, it's analogous to how many of us got news when we
were growing up. It came on your doorstep in a little bundle, and this is really
just a digital equivalent of that. It comes in your inbox every morning at the
exact same time, same format, and you read it, skip it, and you're done. And that's
your day. You're a good start of the day. So I've been really surprised and happy
that the newsletter has worked out so well. It was actually what helped me realize
what we were doing at its core is really helping people save time. This isn't meant
to be like Twitter. It's not yet another endless feed of news. Some people like
that, there's no harm in it, but most people don't want that. They just want to be
informed. So that's why the newsletter works well. And I think when we do the app,
we'll do the same thing. We're not going to make it endless and just sink your
whole life into it. It's be informed and be on your way. And it's not just about, I
think, helping people save time. I think you're also helping busting people out of
those echo chambers with this unbiased news on critical trending topics. I also
love how your algorithm is completely transparent on those 10,000 plus new stories
daily and only creating the best stories across the whole political spectrum so you
can be well informed without just jumping to the left or jumping to the right and
caught in a cycle of constant outrage. And we've all seen what that looks like. But
more than anything, just thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and
share that with me today. Thank you very much. You know, it's a pleasure talking to
you and it's really great chat. I hope it's useful and interesting to your
listeners. I love how this US based tech start up is using AI to create credible
news. And yes, I'm guilty of complaining as much as the next man about how
depressing the current media landscape is, but kudos to the whole team at the
factory for attempting to do something about it and creating an alternative where
people can avoid bias and become better informed. And I especially love how the
team are responding to feedback too, and tweaking things accordingly. But hey, over
to you. How are you? Avoiding those negative clickbait headlines, whether it be on
your social media channel, whether it be on your favorite news channel or
newspaper. How are you coping with it all at the moment? And what do you do to
avoid bias and find a more positive narrative? I suspect you've got a few things to
share with me. So again, this is your true calling. Email me, let me know.
Techblogwriter@outlook.com. My website is techblogwriter. Co. UK. If you need
anything at all, let me know. So all that's left for me to say is just give you a
genuine thank you for tuning into this podcast every day. I always say this, but I
appreciate that it is a big ask to put up with me bombarding your feeds with a
different episode every day, but I genuinely appreciate it and I hope you join me
again tomorrow. So thanks for listening and until next time, don't be a stranger.
Thank you for listening to the Tech Talks Daily podcast with Neil C. Hughes.
Remember, technology works best when it brings people together.