CuiBono: A truth detector for political ads

Submitted by boblannon on December 4, 2011 - 14:39

Website/App store links:

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=d3fqpjr_52fbrbvnts

Summary:

This mobile app listens to political advertisements and returns information important for understanding the context of those advertisements. Information will reference coverage on sites like FactCheck.org and data maintained by the Sunlight foundation and its partners. It will include:

links to journalists' coverage of the ad itself (when available)
links to coverage of related issues
links to information about the political action committee (PAC) responsible for the ad

a link to a parody video on the (soon to be live) FlackCheck.org

Technical details: The app makes use of the echoprint software made open and free by echonest: http://blog.echonest.com/post/6824753703/announcing-echoprint

Why we are working on this problem:

Because while all political ads have to be "true," context matters. Political ads aren't bound to tell "the whole truth," and viewers are not always aware of the context from which quotes and facts were selected.

After the Citizens United decision, interest group spending on ads increased. For House races, between 2008-10 there was a 277% increase in volume of ads aired that were paid for by interest groups. (Source: Wesleyan Media Project). Many experts expect to see a continued rise in this volume as we enter the 2012 election season.

In order to ensure that voters can understand the context of the information communicated in political advertisements, it is important to make coverage available to those voters immediately.

What we accomplished during the event:

During this event, we developed three key components of this application:

a mobile application that quickly samples a small stream of audio and converts it into an echoprint audio fingerprint
an api to which the mobile application can submit queries in the form of an audio fingerprint
a server that recieves audio-fingerprint queries and returns the closest match from a database of advertisment

Traction:

We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the open-source code made available by echonest at https://github.com/echonest

We have been in contact with two journalistic resources to plan future collaboration:

The Wesleyan Media Project (http://election-ad.research.wesleyan.edu/)
FactCheck.org

Next steps:

UPDATE:

As of 2/13, we now have a fully functional application and webservice, complete with submission forms for advertisements. Going forward, we hope to bring on board content creators as well as develop web scraping routines to help curators keep current with the fast-paced world of political ads and coverage thereof.

We'll also be looking at ways to refactor our code and bring the webservice to a more mature state.

Next Steps:

opencalais integration to parse journalistic resource text
intergration with more sunlight foundation apis to generate richer content
a public site for user submissions of advertisements and associated metadata
developing matching algorithms to pair journalistic resources with advertisements

Community help:

Any and all journalistic resources that can be brought to bear on this problem will make the data returned to users rich and germane to the relevant issues.

Code Repository:

https://github.com/CuiBono

Category:

Application

Status:

Prototype

Programming languages:

Frameworks: