CRX id
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Description from extension meta
Visualize the political leaning of your Facebook friends.
Image from store
Description from store
Is your news feed a bubble?
Find out how polarizing the content on your news feed is when compared to your friends as a whole.
What is PolitEcho?
PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your Facebook friends and news feed. The app assigns each of your friends a score based on our prediction of their political leanings then displays a graph of your friend list. Then it calculates the political bias in the content of your news feed and compares it with the bias of your friends list to highlight possible differences between the two.
How do I use it?
PolitEcho is a Google Chrome extension. Click on the button above to find PolitEcho’s Google Chrome store page and click the “Add to Chrome” button to install PolitEcho on your computer. Once it is installed, simply log into Facebook and click on the PolitEcho icon in your navigation bar to get started.
What does PolitEcho do with my Facebook data?
PolitEcho never sends your personal information to any external services, and your results stay private unless you choose to share them publicly. PolitEcho will need to look up some basic information from your news feed and friends list. In particular, it will examine what pages your friends have liked to estimate their political leaning and the sources for the posts on your news feed to figure out the relative bias of your news feed. All processing is done client-side, so data never leaves your computer.
How does the political analysis work?
Your friends' political ratings are based on the political Facebook pages they like. We compare your friends liked pages to a database of Facebook pages that have been rated for their liberal/conservative bias and then compute a score based on any matches. Hovering over a person's data point will show you the reasoning behind the app's prediction.
PolitEcho is open source, check out the code at https://github.com/politecho/politecho
Created by Sunny He, Zachary Liu, Vivian Mo, and Jonathan Zong at Facebook Global Hackathon Finals 2016.
Contact us at [email protected].
Latest reviews
- (2022-11-22) Shannon Knight: LEANED LEFT!!! THEN STOPPED WORKING- GEEZE EVERYTHING IS LIBERAL ON CHROME EXTENSIONS!
- (2021-09-01) Stacia Harger: Loved it when it worked. Has stopped working recently and no answer from developer.
- (2020-11-10) Little Dog: It's a neat extension at most. Don't take it seriously or you're gonna shove yourself into a bubble very quickly.
- (2019-10-31) That Guy: You know its loaded because they rate the average news agency as being in the middle.
- (2017-04-14) Camron Watlington (Cam): It doesn't work. My news feed language is set to English, and I am surfing on Chrome, yet I am still being told my data cannot be accessed. The application is a good idea, but it obviously needs more work.
- (2017-04-13) Liza Bender: Very cool idea, good job doing what you've done. Improvements and suggestions: 1. where am i in the data set, compared to my friends? 2. not sure what the "confidence" level is meant to represent... it's not explained anywhere that I could find. 3. the data pages should have some explainers of the data/graphs being shown... what you have is not enough. 4. seems some of the FB pages are not categorized properly... and if you think they are then an explainer of how pages are judged would be helpful. thanks for creating what you have o far and I encourage lots of improvements. Cheers!
- (2017-04-11) James Drayton-Losotov: Really cool idea, but unfortunately very underdeveloped so far. The biggest problem is that it only takes account of very well known news sources and political figures, and almost only US ones. If most of your friends aren't from the US, there's little point using this app. It's also very crude in the way it categorizes things on the left/right spectrum. Apparently The Onion is as far-left as possible and Bernie Sanders is no more left-wing than Obama. Inexplicably, alternative medicine/fake science sites like Natural News are classified as right-wing. It's also a bit misleading that mainstream, moderately liberal sources like CNN, Time, the Washington Post and the New York Times are classified as far to the left as they are. Where, then, would one put democratic socialism, let alone full-on communism?
- (2017-04-10) Lorrie Schu: John Stossel brought this app to my attention. I've always tried to keep my friends balanced. I want to hear both sides...usually the truth is somewhere in the middle lol. I'm almost completely even with my friends, so awesome!
- (2017-03-08) Gail Cammero Reilly: While confident there is a margin for error, I found this to be more accurate than not - I like the way it can keep a user up to speed on their own bias. Thanks! Great extension.
- (2016-12-21) Xander: i like the idea but id like to assign values myself. most on my friends are far more left than liberal and theres no reflection of that here also some pages are miss labeled
- (2016-12-07) Brett Jelinek: I see it shows The Free Thought Project and Natural News as red/conservative, while it lists Washington Post, New York Times, The Onion, CNN, Time, and more as dark blue/very liberal. In fact, someone who only likes The Onion will be on the very far left. Someone who only likes Time and CNN will be almost right next to them. And then it also counts all kinds of fake news sites like Collective Evolution, which shouldn't be factored in at all. This is an interesting tool, but the way they categorize the websites is wrong and, without a careful read of the results, will give you a very skewed perception. Until they fix thix, this tool is not simply defective, it's deceptive.
- (2016-12-06) Works fast! Impressed.
- (2016-12-03) Devon B: Easy to install, no junkware, just informative and insightful graphics that make understanding your social structures so much easier. Highly reccomend (Also i'm uninstalling this when I'm done to be safe)
- (2016-12-03) Steve Dean: super insightful and beautifully rendered
- (2016-12-02) Raj Vir: Fantastic app. Really surprised at how insightful it was into my friends.
- (2016-12-02) Mark Browne: Wow - This shows that I need to get out more!