Show HN: Narratives Project – A news product for a more peaceful internet

[ShaunCammack]

Hey HN! I’m Shaun, and I started the Narratives Project (https://www.narrativesproject.com/), a non-profit that presents divisive news events as contrasting narratives to show why people disagree. Our goal is to lower people’s distress about the news and animosity towards those they disagree with.

Our current news media system incites instead of informs. On-the-ground reporting has been replaced by armchair journalism, most people are locked in viewpoint silos that are occasionally penetrated by the worst of the other side, and the entire system is in an escalating panic about Those Bad People Over There.

People of different political persuasions look at the same event and immediately come to different conclusions, and often become agitated with those on the other side. When asked why others disagree, they usually give one of four answers: they're stupid, ignorant, brainwashed, or evil. Or all of the above!

It's probably not helpful to think that half the country is stupid, and it's a recipe for catastrophe to think that half the country is evil. So we're trying to work on the better answer, which is that people come to different conclusions because they have different priors and experiences. That may be obvious, but it’s difficult to remember in the moment, when we're confronted with someone on the other side of an intense topic.

We produce short, substantive analyses that present the perspectives on either side of an issue, and illustrate the underlying reasons for how people come to those conclusions. We identify what either side is focusing on, how they're interpreting new information, and how they're reasoning.

When we summarize the narratives, we describe them as though we believe them. In this way, we center diversity of perspectives as default. Presenting conflicts this way nudges the reader away from mind-reading bad intentions into their political opponents.

We like to imagine a person on their lunch break, who only has a few minutes to investigate a news event that everyone is talking about. They scroll through Twitter, read the opinions of people they agree with, and then open up our content to get a quick overview of the whole discourse. Most likely they go back to work still entrenched in their opinion, but hopefully also with an understanding of why people disagree with them (and it's not that they're evil).

Or imagine a mainstream conservative aunt who watches Fox News, and her progressive niece who watches left-leaning Twitch streamers. They have difficulty discussing news, not just because they disagree, but because they don't have any way of talking between their worldviews. They just end up sending each other links to partisan articles, which is not a great way to have a conversation. Instead of this, the niece sends her aunt our content about the topic, which helps them both feel acknowledged and talk productively about the disagreement (values, experiences, priors, etc.). They still disagree, but they don't think each other are crazy or stupid, and they’re no longer on a track that was pointing toward hating each other.

We believe that when news consumers can at least minimally understand those they disagree with, it helps to alleviate distress, understand their own position and feel acknowledged, and is a key step towards the humanization of their apparent enemy.

Here's two examples of recent posts:

https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/why-cant-we-agree-on-the-nonexistence-of-biolabs-in-ukraine/

https://www.narrativesproject.com/news/perspectives-on-ketanji-brown-jacksons-supreme-court-confirmation-hearings-days-2-4/

And here's a recent Instagram version:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbh6kxhArKa/

There are other organizations and products out there that share our concern, such as AllSides, The Flip Side, Braver Angels, Ground News, etc. We’re different in two ways.

First, news aggregators offer people news from both the right and the left to see where others are coming from. But there are too many divisive stories and too few hours in the day for this to be practical for the average person. Also, I think that watching oppositional news often just confirms people’s beliefs that the other side is awful.

More deeply, other organizations rely primarily on partisan media articles to build their understanding of the discourse. They assume that narratives are the product of top-down influence. We think narrative emerges from the interactions of individual agents sharing information, which is then picked up by the media and propagated. So we rely primarily on a social media listening tool (Meltwater) that gives us access to the full firehose of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. Our understanding of the discourse comes from looking directly at online conversations, and aggregating the different perspectives and positions.

We've learned a lot this year, but one of the biggest things we've figured out (through user testing) is that our design is not yet intuitive. Once users get what we're doing, they see value in it and want to share it, but there's a gap before that point, which we need to bridge.

So at the moment, our biggest questions are: How can we design our product to be accessible, obvious, and useful to the average media consumer? And how can we best compete within the incentives of our unhealthy media ecosystem? And that's why I'm showing this to you. What do you think? Does it make sense? Are there considerations I'm missing? Is there a different format that we should experiment with? I would love to hear your thoughts!

[riskable]

I read a number of articles and they're alright but I think you're boiling down people's opinions on these things a bit too much. "Those who oppose..." "Those who support..." are just made-up by your staff. You don't really know that's what people who oppose/support something actually believe. For all you know the reason why someone supports a given bill is because a source they trust says they should support it. The assumption that people have reasoned themselves into supporting/opposing any given thing is a great big one.

You may be able to fix this just by changing your wording a bit. I don't know though.

As an example, I spoke with someone recently here in Florida that supported the "don't say Gay" bill for no other reason than, "it pisses off liberals." There's far more tribal support/opposition to things that have nothing to do with logic or reason. My neighbor is a prime example.

Related to that bill in particular, I feel you got it wrong with, "Those who support (the "don't say gay bill"):

> "Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education. Instead, parents should be the ones in charge of their children’s education — especially when it comes to determining what topics their children are ready for."

This is just my opinion here but I really feel this completely misses the boat in regards to the opposition's argument. They don't feel that "parents should be in charge of their children's education" because that would mean that some gay couple with an adopted child could make those sorts of decisions. They don't want that at all!

Also, who's to say that teaching (or even discussing with) K-3 kids basic facts about sexuality is bad for them? Those that support the bill do! That is their argument: That their beliefs about sexual education are the only ones that are acceptable. Not that they think, "parents should be in charge..."

"Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education. Believe that teaching children about sexuality or gender identity is morally wrong and such topics should be prohibited from classrooms."

[escapedmoose]

Came here to say this. The breakdowns seem… not very accurate. In most cases, the problem is not that I disagree with the statements selected for the opposition, it’s that the statements selected for them aren’t the arguments I’ve heard from the people themselves. And the arguments supposedly on my side aren’t even close to my own. Makes me question the methods here.

[ShaunCammack]

Here's an outline of our method, which might help explain this (And please feel free criticize it):

First, we look at news aggregators and twitter trends to see what the big stories of the day might be.

Then we pull a bunch of tweets with our social media listening tool and try evaluate the story on three criteria: Momentum (is it trending and growing), Partisanship (are two sides talking about it), and Emotion (Is the story morally animating).

Then we collect data by pulling tweets through our tool, and focusing on the most widely shared and engaged tweets, and sort them into pro/con (or whatever division fits the story.

Then it's analysis. We identify the facts each side is referencing, the affected values and emotions from either side, and whatever the key source of division is (if there is one.

Like any methodology, this has its limitations. It only looks at twitter, for example. If there is an argument or position out there that doesn't come through in the data, then we can't really assume it's there (although we do use broader ideas to contextualize and explain the data).

[escapedmoose]

Oh, that actually explains a lot. I don’t use Twitter, nor do most of the people I talk to about these things. Frankly, most of the stuff I see on Twitter sounds to me like it was composed by an insane person. If you used more of a “boots on the ground” approach and interviewed people who aren’t chronically online, your findings might ring more true with people like me. But maybe that’s not your goal? Nothing wrong with using Twitter as your basis, but I think the site as a whole will feel “off” to a lot of people unless you make it very clear that your data is Twitter-based.

[ShaunCammack]

I would love to have the resources to do interviews and fieldwork. But we try and get these posts out within 6 hours of them trending, before the antagonistic narratives solidify and people move on to the next topic.

And although a fraction of the country uses twitter, we think it has a much larger influence. Twitter is like a narrative breeding ground, and those narratives are then picked up by journalists, which are then propagated in mainstream media and broadcast to people who aren't on twitter.

That's at least our thinking. We should probably be more explicit about what our methodology is (and why)

[escapedmoose]

That makes perfect sense, and I believe you’re right about the eventual influence that trickles down from Twitter (though I think a lot of the vitriol gets diluted in the process). n=1, I would have had a much better initial impression of the site if the Twitter connection/methodology was more explicit. Especially if you explained your purpose for the connection, as you’ve done here.

[notduncansmith]

This is a great point. It’s also worth considering the impact that Twitter’s algorithms have on which posts get engagement and correspondingly show up in searches for prominent opinions. You may want to curate certain Twitter accounts that accurately represent the stances of various factions (various members of government, celebrities/influencers, publications with various degrees of partisanship, etc) to check in on for takes on narratives, in addition to talking to more non-Twitter people.

[netsharc]

This assumes people's stated reasons for supporting/hating things are their actual reasons. As I said in another thread: a lot of times people just grasp the closest semi-logical explanation for the decisions that makes them look decent, because in their mind of course they're a decent person.

Like some Europeans enthusiastically welcoming Ukranian refugees although they were hostile towards Middle Eastern refugees. So they rationalize by saying these are women and children, and the M.E. refugees were men who should've stayed and faced (fought) their government's bullets.

IMO the Republican's reasons for a lot of things is just to retain power. Things like voter disenfrachisement, or opposing anything the Dems wants, because if the Dems get things pushed through, and people like it, it will make them (GOP) look bad.

Will you start writing "The reason this side opposes this is because they want to sabotage it for the other side and make them look bad, who cares about the public who's getting screwed"? You won't be seeing this on Twitter...

[nerdponx]

> As an example, I spoke with someone recently here in Florida that supported the "don't say Gay" bill for no other reason than, "it pisses off liberals." There's far more tribal support/opposition to things that have nothing to do with logic or reason. My neighbor is a prime example.

I think the lesson here is that not everyone has a rational, logical, or considerate reason for supporting what they support. Showing "contrasting views" is more than just putting two earnest-but-incompatible opinions side by side on a webpage.

You also need to include stuff like "I support this bill because it triggers snowflake liberals / gets back at those evil conservatives" and "I support this bill because I am smart and it sounds like a good idea."

> "Believe progressive ideas are dominating public education. Instead, parents should be the ones in charge of their children’s education — especially when it comes to determining what topics their children are ready for."

You also need to be able and willing to see through euphemisms, coded speech, and dogwhistles.

[octopoc]

I believe in parent rights. That is not a euphemism, coded speech, or dogwhistling. I believe the parents are responsible for raising their own children, I want to be the one to explain sex to them. I don't want the school to do it. This is one example of where the Narrative Project is spot on, at least for me and pretty much every conservative I know.

[etchalon]

Was there some large news story about Grade 3 teachers explaining the intricacies of docking that I missed?

[nerdponx]

I believe in the importance of law and order in society, but I still freely admit that "law and order" rhetoric usually means something specific and carries a handful of specific implications.

[riskable]

> I want to be the one to explain sex to them

There's two problems with this:

1) Parents often don't do that. Resulting in all sorts of societal problems e.g. increased teenage pregnancy, STDs, suicides, etc. We can argue about the age at which they need to learn about sex but ultimately they do have to learn about it and no, parents can't be trusted to teach these sorts of things (if history is any guide!).

2) You assume that the bill in question only prevents discussions of sex (as in, intercourse). That's not the only thing it prohibits. It prohibits discussions of sexuality. As in, you can't even acknowledge that same-sex relationships or transgendered people even exist. Sounds like it wouldn't come up? Think again: Teachers and students don't just exist inside a classroom. They will encounter each other regularly in the community. If some kid sees a (male) teacher kissing their husband in the Walmart parking lot how is the teacher supposed to respond to that when asked about it in school the next day?

You can say that the teacher should tell the kid to mind their own business or some other, "avoid talking about it by all means possible" excuse but it still puts the teacher at risk. In fact, schools might not even hire gay or transgendered teachers just to avoid that risk... Which is one of the big problems with the bill: It gives school administrators an excuse not to hire someone based on sex.

Remember: The bill isn't about curriculum. No Florida curriculum for K-3 has any sex-related material. It's a tool for religious/conservative parents to attack gay and transgendered teachers.

[all2]

[flagged]

[nerdponx]

In this context, a "don't say gay" bill sounds like the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy.

Perhaps sex in its entirety should not be taught before 5th grade. That's when I learned it in school. I always thought it seemed a bit early, but I suspect it was done in order to get ahead of wet kids might be exposed to from 8th graders when they moved up to middle school.

But preventing discussion of sexuality does nothing about the general problem of teaching sex education too early. It's just piling worse on top of bad.

I see no merit in banning discussion of topics like "sometimes men love men instead of women". That's literally a fact about the world, even if you think it's an abomination or whatever.

Moreover, let's extend the parent-choice principle further. Should teaching evolution in schools be exempt because some parents don't believe in it? What about the germ theory of disease? It's simply not a logically-sound or morally-consistent justification for a "don't say gay" law.

[Aeolun]

> Nothing. The point is that it is the parents' responsibility to address these issues.

What are they going to say? “I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to talk about that. Ask your parents?”

[netsharc]

> I think the lesson here is that not everyone has a rational, logical, or considerate reason for supporting what they support.

Agree. And a lot of times people just grasp the closest semi-logical explanation for the decisions that makes them look decent, because in their mind of course they're a decent person.

Like some Europeans enthusiastically welcoming Ukranian refugees although they were hostile towards Middle Eastern refugees. So they rationalize by saying these are women and children, and the M.E. refugees were men who should've stayed and faced (fought) their government's bullets...

[quantumwannabe]

Whenever someone says they support something "to own the libs/cons", what they really mean is "I don't want to discuss this with you". The vast majority of the time, people have real reasons behind their positions. If they don't believe you are genuine and just want a fight, then they might as well end the conversation as quickly as possible.

In your specific example, the website did a good job summarizing the pro-bill perspective, and you did a terrible job. The entire second half of your comment is you projecting your own opinions onto people who disagree with you, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone told you that they support it to "piss off liberals" just to get you to shut up and move on.

[pvg]

It'm not sure this approach really works, at least by the examples you've linked. The first one is essentially a made up non-story, a piece of wartime propaganda by the aggressor in the conflict. The second describes the opposition to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme court nomination in terms of tweets by Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec both of whom are, whatever one may think of their politics, essentially shitposters. Posobiec's Wikipedia page pretty much leads with that:

John Michael Posobiec III is an American alt-right and alt-lite political activist, television correspondent and presenter, conspiracy theorist, and provocateur.

It doesn't sound like a healthy way to "compete within the incentives of our unhealthy media ecosystem".

[ShaunCammack]

I don't think this is a problem of fake narratives versus reasonable people. It's that we all use narratives to understand the world, and those narratives often conflict. And if our goal is peace, it's more important to understand these differences than it is to adjudicated between them.

This is particularly true if some of these perspectives are actually pretty worrying. Because if we just write folks off as crazy or brainwashed, we don't really understand them. It's perfectly fine to still think other people are wrong, though.

[pvg]

Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a caricature position, how is this addressed by basically amplifying bullshit further? The 'other side' of advocacy for Judge Brown Jackson's nomination is not actually Candace Owens shitposts. That's a disservice to both the idea of narrative and to the position being misrepresented.

[coffeecat]

> Right but if the premise is a critique of traditional media not doing a good enough job by, say, focusing on made up narratives or 'both sides-ing' an actual position vs a caricature position, how is this addressed by basically amplifying bullshit further?

All narratives are made-up narratives. The problem is, your bullshit/not-bullshit dichotomy doesn't necessarily line up with someone else's. Your idea of bullshit versus not-bullshit has your own priorities/associations/assumptions baked into it. A steel-manned version of the opposing argument probably isn't going to line up with the average statement of the argument as you're likely to find it in the wild. You can just ignore shit-posts that you consider bullshit, or you can try to understand the priorities/associations/assumptions that lead people to make those shit-posts.

Kudos to the OP for doing this. Providing people with sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit isn't going to win you any popularity contests though, except among people who already like sympathetic representations of what they consider bullshit, which isn't exactly the audience who needs this.

[tptacek]

You're not really saying anything here. There are obviously people who are sincerely all-in on Qanon. But Qanon is bullshit. That's not a subjective assessment.

[coffeecat]

The followers of QAnon presumably don't see any major contradictions between its claims and their {experience, assumptions about how the world works}. If they did, then they wouldn't be followers.

What's unsettling about QAnon is: substantial numbers of otherwise sane, high-functioning followers, probably a bit less intelligent on average than you or me, but not that much less intelligent, find it to be a compelling theory. And that's a rather pessimistic data point that we should bear in mind when calibrating our own degrees of epistemic certainty.

[mistermann]

> Qanon is bullshit.

Can you describe the meaning of this phrase in some detail? I think I probably know your approximate meaning, but I'm interested to know a more detailed articulation of the idea.

[garrisonj]

I’m often not looking for the “correct” perspective, I’m just looking for what the other perspectives are.

If a lot of people think a certain way, that’s enough for me to want to learn about it.

[KennyBlanken]

Yep. More importantly: neither Owens nor Posobiec are journalists, subject to editorial standards and review by a news desk, an organization's editorial staff, the obudsperson, and readers. Even if they were reporters: there's often wildly different standards for tweeting versus their published work product under the organization.

There is also a difference between reporting, analysis, and opinion, which a lot of people seem to either not understand or purposefully ignore...and that an organization can engage in all three, and that all three units have very different standards.

He appears to have taken the middle road fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation) and a wild definition of "reporting"...then decided to claim he's generating a "news product" from that. That's...not how that works?

The site's "About" page has a graphic that includes the "Q-Anon Shaman", a guy who spouts no end of conspiracy theories (one sample: TVs and radios emit brain-controlling inaudible frequencies)...with an animated bouncing buddha.

I also don't see how he or his "editor" are qualified to be doing journalism review....especially not compared to plenty of other organizations already doing it.

He claims to be doing "PG research" at a UK university. Curiously the only place his name appears on a Heriot site is as a postdoc researcher in a group that has nothing to do with journalism https://cabs.site.hw.ac.uk/about/. I also see no evidence of him ever having been published academically; how he's managed that as a postdoc, I don't know.

[emerged]

You’re doing the thing they’re trying to fix.

[irq-1]

Two big problems are topic selection by following the mainstream media and treating bullshit as views that should be understood.

Narratives should ignore the bullshit, and choose topics based on what people want to learn about. There are dozens of wars going on right now, how about a short history and summary of each?

[garrisonj]

I took a quick scan of your articles and I love what you are doing. They were very clear. I will definitely come back for more.

When reading the news, I’m often not searching for “facts”, but instead I’m trying to understand the “facts” from the perspective of people I disagree with.

[ShaunCammack]

I appreciate that! You're doing the right thing, that's the best path to understanding why people disagree.

Facts without an interpretive framework are incomprehensible, and so it's really important to understand many disagreements as differences in framework.

[fleddr]

I think one of the fundamental challenges is that a lot (maybe even most) of people do not genuinely want to be informed. For various reasons.

A practical one is that it costs time and effort. In the age of information overload, a divisive issue is one of many seen on a given day. People just want to slap a binary conclusion on it, good or bad, and move on.

If you do inform yourself, there's little to no reward for it. Online reasonable debate is impossible in particular in the places where divisive issues are discussed the most: Twitter. It's ultra fast, outrage-driven, which means extremists always win, and any effort put in by reasonable people is in vain.

I think that kind of gets to the heart of the matter: there's no incentive or reward for being well informed in the aspects of society where it counts: media and culture, and political representation.

Even if you inform yourself better on a divisive issue, and rationally change your mind, you're unlikely to switch camps, politically speaking. You may be a moderate progressive and are just going to have to accept that you share the room with the far-left, same for the right wing.

In reality, time and time again surveys show that Americans are far more reasonable and united than the cultural landscape suggests. Not only are far-left and far-right gross misrepresentations of political support, the very idea of sorting people into left, right, good, bad is a crime against humanity.

I don't know why or how the hijacking of media can be reversed, but ultimately it likely is a case of "follow the money". Who benefits?

In any case, any progress is good progress and you're asking the correct (hard) questions.

[sammalloy]

Unfortunately, this kind of approach upholds and supports the status quo of false balance (false equivalence fallacy, or "both sides") which has degraded media discourse since the early 1980s. Please read "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer. The false balance in the media did not arise by accident. It was intentionally created, funded, and established by billionaires who wished to invent their own false narrative and impose it on the American people. The 1971 Powell memorandum is generally considered the opening salvo in the nascent architecture of this movement, and it has a distinct anti-science, pro-industry bias at the beating heart of its soul. I’m sure you mean well, but this is not the solution, it is more of the same problem. Facts matter. Reality exists.

[octopoc]

Thanks for showing this! I like the way the left-wing view is on the left, the right-wing view is on the right. It isn't clear what the system for organizing the information from top to bottom is. Also visually it feels like the article ends a couple times. Horizontal line breaks and especially the blue/red left/right arrows visually imply the beginning of the comments section. At least for me. What if you had comment boxes like in iMessage [1] for what the left and right say?

I love, love, love your goal here. Focusing on facts vs. opinions is great, but you may also want to include something in the post to humanize the two sides. Not sure what it would be. Maybe have statistics about each side? I don't know how hard it would be but if you could say something like, "Families who live in the country believe..." instead of "right-wingers believe..." Just an idea. Reminding people that their hated enemy is just trying to do what's best for their people and not everything they hear in their echo chamber about them is true.

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/263443/how-to-see-when-a-text-mess...

[ShaunCammack]

Thank you for this! One of our biggest challenges is figuring out how best to design the article and content, we're definitely going to play around with the text boxes.

> say something like, "Families who live in the country believe..." instead of "right-wingers believe..."

I love this.

[totemandtoken]

Hey, congrats! This is a great effort.

I've written about this elsewhere on hn but a while ago I made a project with similar goals in mind I called Rashomon. It was a betting market where you would receive articles without their title, author, source info, etc and you had to place a bet on whether you thought the source of the article was right wing or left wing. I also learned a lot from this experience, so if you'd like to chat, let em know.

[dang]

You should post that to HN if you're still working on it!

Email [e-mail] if you want and we can help.

[totemandtoken]

Yeah, I'll spruce it up and shoot you guys an email when it's in a good place. Thanks!

[ShaunCammack]

Absolutely, please shoot me an email (in my bio)!

[garrisonj]

Confronting conflicting opinions is uncomfortable. You will get many angry responses from people from all sides (if you are doing your job right). So y'all will have to find a way to deal with that emotionally.

[davedx]

I think it's a good idea if it's presented as "here are the facts supporting each side of the argument". What I don't think is a good idea is providing alternative editorial views on something, e.g. I totally agree giving support to Owens or Posobiec as some kind of legitimate "alternative viewpoint" is not productive to healthy discourse. (These commentators constantly argue in bad faith and twist facts to absurd degrees to suit their narrative).

Present the facts and let people decide which viewpoint makes the most sense. That would be a really valuable service.

[frozenlettuce]

I remember that in my Journalism graduation we did an interesting exercise where each student had to create a news article about Little Red Riding Hood (and then you decided if the focus would be on the survivor, the wolf, the act of the saviour, etc).

Based on that, you may try some thought experiments with more open ended topics, that might bring you some ideas (does god exist? is climate change caused by human action? is earth flat?)

Another thing might be considering having more columns for nuanced topics, and also have icons below each statement that has a counter-argument from another column.

[ShaunCammack]

>Another thing might be considering having more columns for nuanced topics, and also have icons below each statement that has a counter-argument from another column.

I like this, thank you.

[tonguetrainer]

Tongue Trainer, a product I'm soft-launching, is a different approach to achieving greater civility online and irl. It combines Jewish laws of ethical speech (Chofetz Chaim) with Tibetan Buddhist mind training (Lojong).

The system comes as a deck of 59 slogans to ponder and practice lojong-style. Simple instructions included. Never, ever hurt someone with your words again with Tongue Trainer: https://tgc.link/tonguetrainer

[vavrek]

Totally respect and applaud your efforts, although framing issues in terms of "left and right" doesn't make sense to me, unless these are meant as generic terms, which could be replaced with something such as "View A and View B."

The whole "left / right" concept seems to break down when considering varied topics, as each of us may find ourselves on either "side" in any specific case.

Am not sure what the ideal solution would be, yet am personally identified with positions on both sides, depending on the topic.

[ShaunCammack]

Yeah, this is something that we're talking a lot about right now.

Left and right is a useful analytical paradigm, but it's pretty crude. We're thinking about using more pro/con splits instead. But on the other hand, most people think that there is a those people over there who are the problem, and so identifying and humanizing them seems worthwhile.

For example, if someone thinks "The left are evil anti-americas," I want to show them how "the left" can be a reasonable human.

[vavrek]

Again, your efforts are wonderful and inspiring, attempting to create understanding between opposing views.

Yet, it's hard for me not to feel like our current situation is ultimately hopeless, with a well-established trend underway of complete disintegration of all social connections and bonds. It may not be long before this internet itself collapses.

We could create viable community again in future, yet all current dominant forces are pushing everyone apart, splitting up friends, relationships, families, cultures, countries, and even dividing us internally within ourselves.

Extremes always eventually flip to opposites, so once this "isolation wave" runs its full course, we may be able to reestablish human to human collaboration again, yet we may not be really "human" at all, by this point.

[rsweeney21]

I like the idea of understanding opposing viewpoints in a way that doesn't sensationalize them. I would prefer to have the opposing viewpoints represented by intelligent, polite, respectful individuals - not summarized by an editorial team.

[bluefoot3]

The world needs more of these. Have you considered looking into the goodnewsnetwork.org?

[ShaunCammack]

Thank you! It's the first I've heard about it, I'll look into it.

[chaostheory]

This is how Wikipedia should evolve. This is really great.

[poopsmithe]

"Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to www.narrativesproject.com. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR"

[cwoolfe]

Thank you for making this. It is very needed!

[ShaunCammack]

Thank you! We're trying.

[UncleOxidant]

I read your "Why can’t we agree on the (non)existence of biolabs in Ukraine?" article and to me there seemed like one glaring omission: Is the allegation by the Russians that there are US funded biolabs in Ukraine even true? Actually, I think we can break it down further:

1) Are there biolabs in Ukraine? 2) Are they funded (at all) by the US?

Addressing 1 and breaking it down even further: How does one define a biolab? By many definitions a yogurt factory could be called a "biolab" as could a factory that manufactures antibiotics or vaccines.

The implication of the Russian allegation is that there are biolabs in Ukraine creating biological weapons. Is this true? (probably not) and if so how much has the US contributed to these biolabs? (again, doesn't seem very likely that the US is funding the development of biological weapons in Ukraine, this is the sort of thing you tend to keep close to home)

Ok, then how about the more broad definition of a biolab - are there biolabs in Ukraine that study diseases? Most likely there are Universities in Ukraine that have labs where diseases are studied. Are these kinds of biolabs a danger? Generally not unless they have very poor lab discipline (this starts to get into your article which suggests that those more on the left side of the spectrum think that studying diseases is a good thing, but I would suggest that anyone with a science background regardless of their political affiliation would agree that we should be studying pathogens in order to defend against them ).

How about, are there other kinds of labs that could be very broadly defined as biolabs in Ukraine? - yes, there very likely are. As I said above, a yogurt factory could be broadly defined as a biolab. But a yogurt factory poses no danger to anyone (except for perhaps the lactose intolerant, and even then...). Calling it a 'biolab', while broadly true, is done to give it a sort of dangerous implication. (same would apply to labs manufacturing medicines - an antibiotic manufacturing facility could be called a biolab, but it's manufacturing essential medicines) Essentially it's a propaganda move to instill FUD.

Your article read more like "Both sides have a point", but as I've outlined above, that really depends on how you define the terms and on the veracity of the original claim.

[netsharc]

I haven't read a proper justification of why the biolabs are/were there. The pro-Putin argument is that since it's paid for by the Pentagon, it must mean they're researching weapons.

Well, the Dept of Defense does more than pay for weapons, defense also means defense against things like pandemic-causing viruses or pathogens that might destroy food, that's why they're funding labs to research these things (i.e. bio threats!) in Ukraine: https://ua.usembassy.gov/embassy/kyiv/sections-offices/defen...

Somehow, no one's been able to explain this clearly to everyone who's claiming "US-funded bio weapons!".