About Wirebeat

Wirebeat wants to empower people to be more informed, incentivise news that is transparent and just, and give experts the loudest voice.

Helping people to be more informed

Our aim is not to report the news, but to change the incentives around content creation by demanding the highest level of quality and reliability. Misinformation, speed over depth and a race for clicks have reduced the quality of the news you receive and often fail in its duty to hold the powerful accountable. Wirebeat will always champion free speech but recognises the need to label and contextualise articles where possible. This aim is in service to the long term sustainability of high-quality journalism and to diminish the harmful impacts of unsubstantiated or inaccurate publications.

This platform aims to apply analytics against a set of principles:

• Promote transparency, distinguishing between 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of consequence' by applying analytics to articles and their authors
• To help provide readers with a complete picture of the media being consumed
• Reduce Sensationalism, especially where the source has a history of being factually incorrect, unjustifiably damaging or designed to humiliate rather than hold to account
• Disincentivise clickbait by seperating articles which have a positive intent to inform readers with those which are designed to get attention and generate advertising revenue
• Inform readers where news is heavily bias, opinion based or politically extreme
• Clear areas of omission may be deemed a failure of duty to a publisher's readers
• Connect people to comparable opposing views, facts or areas of nuance
• Highlight the use of false equivalence, or a deliberate attempt to cause outrage for profit

We use data science to help identify credibility, bias or agendas to online news sources by:

• Keeping score of historic misinformation or stories which turn out to be false or misleading
• Provide visability and unearth agendas such as political affiliation or financial incentives to misinform
• Question how the person has aquired the information and what are their credentials
• Provide an audit trail and be open news evidence

We aim to raise awareness on the different techniques/questions you should have when consuming news:

• Check the source and consider what the publishers interests are
• Broaden your view to validate the facts. The more impactful a story is to you the wider you should go to verify the facts from additional sources (especially the ones you often disagree with as the facts should not change)
• Consider who would be best place to comment on a topic, is their voice present in the story?
• Challenge yourself to separate the facts and your opinion. If the facts changed would your opinions change?
• Loyalty to a narrow spectrum of publishers increases the risk of you only hearing people who hold the same views
• Do your own fact checking sites such as factcheck.org look to combat misleading information, allsides.com looks show how media can be bias

We will not compromise when it comes to doing the right thing:

Wirebeat is committed to making a positive impact in everything we do. An example of this is Wirebeat being a carbon negative entity who offsets its full carbon footprint by planting trees: ecologi.com/wirebeat, this also extends to all of our staff offsetting their own carbon footprints.