Open Mind

Open Mind is web extension designed to combat fake news and political polarization, using cognitive science and machine learning.
What is Open Mind?
Open Mind is a Google Chrome extension that warns users about websites known to publish fake news, tracks their political browsing history, and provides recommendations to balance perspectives. It also suggests relevant articles to broaden perspectives on social media feeds and warns about sharing unread articles. The extension analyzes browsing activity to provide insights and recommendations.

Extension stats

Users: 253 ▲ 2
Rating: 3.33 (9)
Version: 0.0.16 (Last updated: 2021-12-02)
Creation date: 2019-10-31
Risk impact: Moderate risk impact
Risk likelihood: Low risk likelihood
Manifest version: 2
Overrides new tab: Yes
Permissions:
  • storage
  • notifications
  • https://api.openmind.press/*
Size: 3.46M

Other platforms

Not available on Firefox
Not available on Edge
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Extension summary

Open Mind is a Google Chrome extension designed to combat the proliferation of fake news, and increase exposure to opposing viewpoints.

We warn readers of websites known to publish fake news by providing the user with a warning and links to more reputable sources. Users also get direct analysis on how partisan their reading patterns are in a dashboard on their new tab page that tracks their political browsing history. Our dashboard gives users a list of recommended articles that can order to balance out the perspectives and biases in your reading history. Finally, underneath articles on your Facebook, Twitter and Google news feed, we suggest relevant articles that would broaden your perspective. We also warn you with a notification if you share an article on Facebook you have not read, or read an extensive amount of news that is consistently biased on one side of a topic.

Privacy Disclosure: The Open Mind extension relies on tracking user browsing activity to provide insights to the user. The Open Mind extension is able to analyse the bias in your news and provide recommendations by sending the urls of webpages you browse to our server at https://api.whimmly.com, over encrypted HTTPS. Our server analyzes the articles and sends the results back to your browser. You can read our privacy policy here: https://openmind.press/privacy-policy

User reviews

Effectively useless. It's completely blind to many of the most notable news organisations I read from including Propublica, the BBC, Al Jazeera, FIveThirtyEight, Salon, Slate, Vox, Vice, Quartz, Aeon, CBC, and Wired. There should at least be an option to add custom sources. Sidenote: I've discovered that it will suggest articles from the BBC, but it still won't track them.
by Des, 2021-02-01

open mind is my favourite chrome extension! it has been super useful when i'm reading the news and gives me great alternatives to the news sources that I usually follow! Love it! Keep up the great work!
by Jessica Chee, 2018-07-08

I would discourage anyone from using Open Mind. It only screens articles written by it's sponsors, Washington Post, Fox News, the New York Times, ABC News and AP. If you have other sources the widget ignores them. All suggested readings are from the sponsors as well. Not very open minded of them!
by Lance Bowman, 2018-06-11
View all user reviews

Extension safety

Risk impact

Open Mind requires a few sensitive permissions. Exercise caution before installing.

Risk likelihood

Open Mind has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.

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Promo images

Open Mind small promo image
Small promo image

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