Perspectify: The Important New App for Combating Fake News

Color Coding Your News Sources

Much of the food we buy these days is labeled to disclose ingredients and a range of nutritional values. We can buy foods high in calories or trans fats, but with labeling at least we know what we’re eating.

An important free new app, Perspectify.com, uses news story labeling the same way, to tell you who’s behind what we’re reading. 

How important is that, now that lies have many more ways to fight truth?

Before I go any further with this, full disclosure. I’m a board member and have a financial interest in Perspectify’s parent company, Newsmatics.com. Newsmatics provides many useful services, among them, much like Google, it is a free news search engine. With Perspectify, most articles now come with a color-coded label, like the one shown here.

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Why Trust Perspectify?

Perspectify’s editorial team has spent literally thousands of hours researching and tagging most English language news sources for their ownership, management and editorial biases, if any. 

Each news article gives you a link to all that background information. This should be particularly useful for journalists trying to sort their way through a thick forest of news fakery.

Perspectify was launched just a few weeks ago and Newsmatics’ Chief Content Officer Jakup Leps says it’s still a work in progress. "As the user base for this app continues to grow, the potential for further improvement expands," he says. “Much like the collaborative evolution of Wikipedia, user engagement and feedback helps our editorial team fine-tune the labels."

The Evolution of Fake News

Fake news has been part of political combat since the early days of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, when vice president campaigning to defeat President John Adams, even hired what we would call today a “hatchet man” who helped convince voters, falsely, that Adams wanted to go to war with France. 

So, what’s the difference between then and most U.S. presidential elections since? With modern technology and techniques, it’s much easier to fool voters. And, perilously as we experienced in 2016, foreign governments with anti-American agendas are just as motivated and just as capable of inserting lies into our political combat as our two major political parties and their candidates.

Alerted to the threat, in 2018 and 2020 the major tech companies, various government security agencies and election officials developed systems to detect misinformation. But now, the House Republican “weaponization of government” campaign has chilled much of that effort. NPR published a revealing story about all this on November 11. 

What’s the Good News?

Fortunately, there are still many legitimate news outlets and political reporters on high alert to detect those engaged in purposeful misinformation. Perspectify.com will give them, all of us, really, a valuable tool in the battle against misinformation, a fight some of the biggest players on the Internet, like X, Facebook and Google seem to be abandoning. 

Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net