As its creators acknowledge, it still has to overcome some daunting technical and human barriers to live up to its lofty aims. (Its home page at spinspotter.com proclaims, “Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news.”) But a month into its release in a test version that is only available for the Mozilla Firefox browser — an Internet Explorer version is expected in a few weeks — it gives an interesting peek at where the future of truth-squadding may lie.
Any attempt to judge news articles could rely on experts, a broad audience of readers or a set of formulas. SpinSpotter combines all three, but for now the formulas are still being adjusted, the audience is not yet big enough, and it remains to be seen how unbiased or effective the experts are. SpinSpotter grew out of a longstanding obsession of Todd Herman, a conservative former talk-radio host who is the company’s chief product officer. “I thought of this 10 years ago,” he said. “The things I’d see in mainstream media drove me crazy.”
The chief executive officer, John Atcheson, is politically liberal, and he and Mr. Herman say they tend to balance each other out. “We don’t delude ourselves into thinking we’re going to eliminate spin, and that’s not even our objective,” said Mr. Atcheson, who has been an executive of several technology companies. “We just want it to be transparent, above the surface.”
With the SpinSpotter plug-in, anyone can call up a news article, insert red flags over offending passages and, in a pop-up box, explain the perceived problems and suggest edits. Another reader seeing the same article will also see those flags, can comment on them and, crucially, can vote on whether the offense is serious or not.
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