ABC 7: Nobias Empowers Users with Info Needed to Better Evaluate News Choices
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nobias, a tech startup dedicated to promoting responsible/inclusive technology, countering online manipulation and misinformation, today announced the company, its first products and vision for putting the power of informed media consumption in the hands of users.
“My main goal for founding Nobias was to promote responsible/inclusive technology that enables users to better control the news they read online”
Nobias’s first product is a Google Chrome extension that shows the bias and credibility of news served up by Google search results and Facebook’s news feed. Users can drill down to evaluate individual articles and authors. Giving context about the news, even before users click, can counter the effects of algorithmic curation that may keep them in a filter bubble. And knowing about the credibility can help people avoid fake news.
The company was founded by CEO Tania Ahuja, a dynamic leader who holds a PhD in finance and is an accomplished business professional with extensive knowledge in data mining and risk management. She is building experienced journalism and AI advisory teams, to help keep Nobias effective and on the cutting edge.
“My main goal for founding Nobias was to promote responsible/inclusive technology that enables users to better control the news they read online,” said Ahuja. “We want to become like a Fitbit for media consumption. It may be impossible to completely eliminate bias, but we aim to equip everyone with tools to increase awareness about the information they consume and give them control over the algorithms that shape what they read and see online.”
Nobias draws from the published methodology of Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro in Econometrica (2010), a top economics journal, to determine political bias. This data evaluates the leaning of a news source by looking at key phrases that have been or currently are used by a Democrat or Republican. The phrases determine a lean of left, right, or center.
Nobias also utilizes editorial rating information from LexisNexis to identify credible sources, both at the website level and the author level. Sources are ranked from 1-5; a 1 rating is a top national, international, or business news source, such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Authors are ranked based on the editorial strength of their employer and on industry recognition.
The Chrome extension is currently able to provide information on US political news articles from 40,000 premium and online news archives and business sources. The tool works on Google’s search engine news as well as on Facebook’s news feed. The company plans to eventually expand the extension for financial news, health news and on an international scale.
About Nobias
Nobias was founded in 2018 as a resource dedicated to promoting responsible/inclusive technology to protect consumers from deceptive or misleading content on the internet. To determine the bias and credibility of an article, it combines artificial intelligence algorithms with methodology and editorial ratings by LexisNexis. Nobias’s goal is to help people understand the landscape of media bias and to give them control over the algorithms that shape what they read and see online.
For more information, visit www.nobias.com.
This article has previously been published on ABC 7