PolitEcho
Visualize the political leaning of your Facebook friends.
What is PolitEcho?
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Summary
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.
User reviews
User reviews summary
Pros
- Instructive and insightful graphics.
- Impressive speed.
- Easy to install, no junkware.
Cons
- Stopped working and developer is not responding.
- Categories for news sources and political figures are considered inaccurate.
- The app can be unreliable as it only takes into account of well-known US sources.
Most mentioned
- The tool provides a visual representation of political leanings.
- Helpful in understanding user's own bias.
- Classification of news outlets and their associated political bias is questionable.
Recent reviews
Safety
Risk impact
PolitEcho is risky to use as it requires a number of sensitive permissions that can potentially harm your browser and steal your data. Exercise caution when installing this extension. Review carefully before installing. We recommend that you only install PolitEcho if you trust the publisher.
Risk likelihood
PolitEcho has earned a good reputation and can be trusted.
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