Ending the Perpetuation of Confirmation Bias

A Critique and Redesign of Apple News

Part One: The Problem

Americans in 2019 are extremely divisive about what represents real, objective, news. While some side with the CNN tribe, others find themselves around the FOX tribe, and everywhere in between. Fake news and lack of fact-checking have led to divisiveness between Americans that has ended friendships and destroyed much of the respectful discourse that goes on between people of differing opinions. Considering people only trust a handful of news sites that back up their confirmation bias, it can be next to impossible to inform the public American people as a whole, without people questioning the legitimacy of the information.

Part Two: The Context

There was a time when fake news was nothing more than a buzz word used by right-wing conservatives as a response to news that conflicted with their confirmation biases. It existed in niche pockets of conservative news outlets and some YouTube shows like InfoWars with Alex Jones.

Following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, there seemed to be a backlash against him, his morals, and his politics immediately. While in the past, a politician’s response to criticism was either to dodge the question or simply ignore it, there was little done to fight back. In truth, the American people have historically been glued to the News, may it be in the form of print, radio, or television, for their source of news in their day to day lives. The question was never, “Is this real or is this fake”; people accepted the news because it was all most people had to inform them about the outside world.

Donald Trump’s reaction to this immediate criticism was at first nothing but rants and claims on twitter but quickly became a war upon the media. In theory, this actually makes sense for someone in his shoes. Here is an individual that is being accused by many sources to have either broken the rules of law, ethics, or morality, with little time to respond, let alone recover. There was a time when a new bombshell was coming out about the president every day. Going from a Billionaire reality-TV show host to the most important politician in the world (arguably), turned the spotlight on him in ways that he likely should have seen coming. First, it was the “locker room talk” recordings, and soon a flood of women came forward all telling their stories. In just a matter of weeks, the monstrous sexual acts that this man, the President of the United States, had committed was in the public eye. His response? The birth of Fake News. For many women who came forward, their voices were amplified by news outlets like CNN, NBC, and ABC. For Trump, it seemed that his only option to refute the claims of these women, and all those who move to expose his wrongdoing, was to refute the validity of the source – The Media itself.

Image result for Donald Trump fake news tweet

This was the spark that led the “Fake News Movement”. It appeared that whenever a conservative was under fire by centrist or leftward leaning media sources, it became easier to simply accuse the source of fabricating the story than to fight it or address it in any way. Through this, the Fake News Movement became a last-ditch effort to avoiding the consequences of one’s actions. In a world where there are no facts, nobody is ever at fault.

Fast forward to 2019, and the political systems in America and, more specifically, the handling of journalism has completely turned onto its head. Where a Presidential Conference with the public and press was once an opportunity to ask the pressing questions and reveal the motivations of this countries leaders, it has become a breeding ground for lies and Nationalistic perpetuations. Those who support Donald Trump believe that he has never done anything wrong. For most, it appears, it is easier to deny all accusations of wrongdoing, in order to admit to any miscalculation in one’s loyalties.

My own father exists behind the guise that the president has a personality problem, but has never committed any actual wrongdoing. When I ask him about his reaction to the new allegations surrounding Trump’s conversations with the president of Ukraine, my father was unfazed. While many Americans see that as the deliberate manipulation of the US election from an outside source, my father has decided that the whole affair did not occur at all.

By convincing his followers that all news is corrupt and is just out for his office, Donald Trump has made himself both the subject of the modern publication, as well as the publisher. For many Americans, if Trump didn’t say it, it didn’t happen. This sort of mindset, where the news is regarded with as much here says as a school year rumor is extremely detrimental to democracy. It is being called the *‌Post Factum Era*. We live in a society where one’s opinion is self-regarded as fact. There were days when this sort of closed-mindedness was common in people of old mindsets, from culturally isolated parts of the country. Today, it appears that people from both the left and the right are more content with their own opinion about the happenings in the world than they are with the actual facts surrounding it.

Of course, this does beg the question of actual objectivity. In the past, there was a policy that ensured objectivity in the newsroom. Watching a report from Walter Cronkite from the 60s looks totally different than what can be seen today. News outlets and talking heads will briefly present the given information, but the move to a panel of individuals who all have a different spin on the newest from the Hill. Because of this, news outlets have found it more profitable to push a certain agenda. Where objectivity and journalistic integrity once ruled the newsroom, ratings and the perpetuation of people’s fears and hates is what dives the numbers.

In recent years, this has become incredibly clear. If you ask a Conservative about their opinion of CNN, they will likely open with a wisecrack about it being the “Communist News Network”, before going on to describing it as a machine for pushing fake news about the president. On the other side of the same coin, asking a Liberal about their opinion about Fox News would likely lead to a vibe of disgust. Fox News is regarded by many liberals to be a breeding farm for conspiracy theories and unintelligent rhetoric. Is either of these sides correct? That’s hard to say.

In 2019, it is not uncommon for people to have Apps like Apple News which collects news stories from multiple sources and presents them equally in a feed. However, it is unclear if any of these sources are corroborated by the majority of readers. In 2019, it is the responsibility of the readers to determine the legitimacy of an article. Where some articles are coming from an arguable Rightward or Leftward leaning side, there is little evidence to support its relevancy and legitimacy beyond one’s own beliefs about the source. This must be improved.

Part Three – The Tech

Right now, a very popular application for the consumption of new media is *Apple News*. What used to be known as *News Stand*, a source of subscription-based periodical collections has become an application offering breaking news from a laundry list of sources. Someone can, for example, subscribe to news surrounding technology and climate change, and completely block out politics. At the same time, someone can consume exclusively news sources that align with their political beliefs. It is quite uncommon for people to consume new media through this method and gain an insight that is agreed upon by the people to be important. Apple News encourages people to form their *own* news source; A melting pot of sources and an endless scrolling home page of stories and articles, all confirming their own beliefs. However, there is no conversation. People are consuming news media with biases to both sides of the spectrum without having to ever hear the news that conflicts with their own beliefs. This has made Apple News incredibly successful. The average person would rather hear the news that supports their beliefs than to be presented with information that makes them regret their morals and ideals.

Apple News has actually caused pseudo-tribes among individuals of like minds. If you hate a politician, there is an endless list of sources that will feed into that. If you love a certain cause, there is an equally endless list of sources that will push the benefits of that cause.

Part Four – Values

Apple News, like many other sources of information, is out for the revenue. While there are little to no adds in the app, it is financially advantageous to the managers of Apple News to constantly produce news sources that will keep your attention and keep you tapping.

While Apple News is not alone in this respect (Facebook is another culprit to name only one), the exploitation of tribalistic tendencies of humans goes against a person’s agency. While people may feel that the source of news and the quantity in which they consume is beneficial to their understanding of the political and social climate in the world, enabling people to perpetuate a confirmation bias is exploitative, to say the least.

Part Five – Redesign

Where Apple maps fail the most, and where I intend on focusing the most upon, is a sense of large-community verification. A fine example of this is below, a common first page that can be found in the app.

Apple News politics section. Because of a carefully designed algorithm, Apple developers have targeted the stories being presented to me specifically. I, the user, am completely unaware of the relevance of these articles. While they may align greatly with my political views, I have no way of knowing how pressing and relevant these posts are. Furthermore, I the user, am being spoon-fed articles by an AI that is getting to know me the most I use the application. It has no barring on the real-world implications of each article and the social subtexts that come with it.

For these reasons, it would be necessary to allow for a community-based rating system. Essentially, I propose an app similar to Apple News, but that is driven by the beliefs and subjectivity of the majority of people using the application. In my proposed app, there would be an automatic intake of news articles from every news source that is recognized. This would be everything from FOX to CNN to the South China Times. All news would be initially presented in a “New” panel with equal pertinence. However, this is no way to inform the public. If a news article about a new ant species was treated with the same amount of urgency as a new piece of evidence in the Trump Impeachment scandal, it would do both articles injustice. But this is not up to me, or any one user. In order to judge the relevance, urgency, and reliability of each article, there would be a process of voting. The concept is quite simple – if you like what you are reading and think it is important, in any capacity that you feel justifies it, you would give the article an up-vote. However, if you feel that the article you are reading is not only bias, but is not important, irrelevant, or just wrong, you would have the choice to down-vote or to simply ignore. Only verified users would be able to do this voting process, as bots would quickly shift this system wildly. Over time, as up-votes and down-votes for each article collect, they are used to calculate a community-wide score. Every up-vote would cancel out a down-vote and vice versa. In the end, the articles would be pushed to the “Main Page”, in order of rating. This system would allow everyone to voice their options. In the end, the articles that the vast majority of people are in favor of would rise to the top.

In this, it would not matter if 500,001 people liked the post and 500,000 people disliked the post; the community wide-score would be a measly 1. This would essentially find the articles that are statistically too biased or flawed to be taken objectively seriously and keep them relatively out of the spotlight. However, if there is enough of a consensus from people from all different schools of thought, from both sides of the aisle, the post would gradually build enough up-votes to float to the top of the Main Page. In this way, only the posts that the *vast* majority of people see as the objective will find their way to the top of the stack. Divisive or extremist posts that either perpetuate lies or that have little relevance would gradually sink to the bottom of the main page.

It should be kept in mind that Reddit already achieves this, in a rather localized sense. Reddit is compartmentalized into subreddits which act as boards created by smaller communities of like-minded individuals. There is also a *Main Page* on Reddit, but it stands as only a place to display the top posts from each subreddit. The trouble exists here as well. If the highest-rated content from communities with a common belief is pushed to the top, even if the communities vary wildly, an incredibly liberally biased post from a liberal page would rank equally to an incredibly conservative biased post from a conservative page. Both extremes often perpetuate a feedback loop that, again, feeds in the confirmation biases of the tribes of people that frequent these subreddits.

My proposed Redesigned app would do away with all the categorization of news sources. All news sources would enter into the voting pool with an equal amount of relevancy. It would be up to all people, from all previous opinions to determine what is most relevant, important and trustworthy, and to come to a consensus as a people. This system would not drive people apart and perpetuate their confirmation biases and ever indoctrinate them into a tribe. This system would bring people together, and encourage an ongoing conversation about the news and about the happenings in the world.

Part Six – Visuals

The following are some mockups of what this redesign could look like. There may be some familiar aspects of it, because much of this mockup was created by combining the parts of other apps in order to create something that acually respects the user and adhears to their needs as people.