Folks who submit articles to Fark may have noticed that about a month ago we added a politics bias dropdown for politics submissions. I've said for years that Fark is a middle of the road make-fun-of-everyone website, but there wasn't any way to demonstrate the accuracy of that statement. I'm not the only one picking links after all, however the other guys share the same sensibilities and general dislike for career politicians that I do.

Political bias flagging has been running for about a month now. Generally people have been submitting political links with the bias correctly flagged, when this isn't the case we've been changing them on the admin side of things.

The bias refers to the tagline, not the actual article. We may have a commie tagline making fun of a fascist article (or vice versa), and given that the average Fark visitor clicks on 2 or 3 links we can assume that most people just read the taglines. Just like regular news outlets where most people read only the headlines. It's pretty normal.

Our system represents Commie links as -1, Neutral as 0, and Fascist as +1. By summing the bias values across all links, we get a total equal to the difference in number of links posted with a particular slant. For example on 7/28 the Sum is 7, meaning 7 more Fascist links were posted that day than Commie links.

Here are the individual results for the past 25 days (apologies for bad formatting, I'm lazy)

# of Greenlit Links / Date / SumOfPoliticalBias
185 7/29/2008 1
188 7/28/2008 7
157 7/27/2008 4
185 7/26/2008 -3
225 7/25/2008 -4
229 7/24/2008 0
240 7/23/2008 -1
145 7/22/2008 -1
220 7/21/2008 3
131 7/20/2008 -1
128 7/19/2008 1
207 7/18/2008 4
195 7/17/2008 5
223 7/16/2008 3
247 7/15/2008 -7
254 7/14/2008 -2
127 7/13/2008 -3
113 7/12/2008 0
244 7/11/2008 -1
243 7/10/2008 -7
232 7/9/2008 -9
257 7/8/2008 1
231 7/7/2008 -6
168 7/6/2008 -2
133 7/5/2008 -2

Totals
4912 -20

The total indicates we're about 20 Fascist links behind perfect balance over the last 25 days, which ain't bad considering that's less than 1 link per day.

Luckily on Fark it's pretty easy to switch the bias of any submitted political link. For example: [Hero] Bush submits plan to solve Social Security woes. This link would be flagged Fascist, +1. However if we change the Hero tag to [Dumbass], the bias flips the other direction to Commie, -1. Preferably we'd like to attach a better joke to a tagline than just flipping the tag, but in a pinch it does the trick.

Sometime in the next few days we're going to add a running tally on the site so everyone can see where we're at on the spectrum. We're still working out the details as to what this will look like and where it will live, the Politics tab is the obvious choice. Sometimes the overall site bias will change depending on what's going on in the news. Last week, Obama received massive media coverage on his World Tour. On the other hand, Bush hasn't received much in the way of positive coverage in months. Yesterday we were at +7 bias for whatever reason. Many factors will skew the ratios a bit, however we'll keep an eye on them and do our best to approach zero over time. Because my personal political bias is that professional politicians are motivated mainly by their own personal gain.

PS - I'm not the most prolific blogger, but I'll occasionally put something random up on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DrewCurtis. With insightful analysis of all sorts of things, such as how many cougars are at the county fair and whether or not the street value of a tanker truck full of ink is more than a billion dollars. It'll probably make you dumber for reading it but it's funny once in awhile.
· · ·