Spectrum is a two-pronged project -- both a web application and a chrome extension -- that analyzes news websites and provides an article discussing the same subject with a contrasting political viewpoint. Spectrum is designed to broaden a user’s political awareness across the political spectrum. It’s easy to fall into an echo chamber, where we only read articles from a political viewpoint we’re comfortable with. Spectrum was created for Hack the North++ 2020.
Why Spectrum? Political campaigns have become increasingly waged on social media sites. The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal is a foremost example of this. In Facebook’s largest data leak ever, where the private data of tens of millions of users was compromised, psychological profiles of American voters were sold to political campaigns to unconstitutionally meddle with the 2016 Presidential Election.
More recently, Netflix’s 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma explored how social media is fundamentally designed to nurture addiction to the platform and manipulate politics. It revealed how the algorithms behind our favourite social media networks are designed to nurture addiction and manipulate politics, by feeding users with click-bait-worthy articles, instead of legitimate posts, leading to a furious echo chamber.
Given the already extremely dichotomized political divide in the United States, we were inspired to build something that would address the echo chamber that social media users are thrust into. An echo chamber refers to when beliefs are reinforced by communication and repetition within a closed system, and insulated from rebuttal. Let’s break out of the echo chamber by educating ourselves across the spectrum.