We live in a very connected and globalized world, yet we do not know what other peoples are thinking and talking about. Sometimes we are locked in our media and social bubble, not realizing that other things are happening.
The purpose of this project is to show at first glance what is talked about, and therefore thought about, in other places in the world.
This is not only out of cultural curiosity, but also to understand why a certain thing is talked about and not another.
One of the goals here is to be able to indicate in objective terms the presence of propaganda, that is, news that is not intended to inform, but to influence citizens politically.
Economic sustainability
The economic sustainability of this project may come from donations and grants. Direct monetization is not currently planned. If, as is expected, traffic will be substantial, it could be monetized through small referral links, etc.
How it is done
The platform would need to read RSS feeds from major websites, divided by country/language, and highlight which topics are more common than others and in which countries they are talked about.
The map below could be an example of an interface. On each nation, a small pie chart would show what people are interested in mainstream media.
Different ‘views’ would show how there are connections between different countries, allowing one to understand, not only which cultures are dominant, but also the spheres of influence.
Integration with OpenAi, for possible automated reports, would be very interesting.
Examples are now proposed, whose data are invented. A drop-down menu should also be added so that the time window can be selected.
ES 1
The following screen shows the most talked about topics among the Italian press news. Fifty percent of all news items are about the Russian-Ukrainian war, 45% pro-Russia, 45% pro-Ukraine, and 10% are neutral news.
ES 2
In this example, we take the topic ‘education’ and analyze it in the different territories. In Italy only 1% of all news stories are about this topic: half of them are about low salaries as far as teachers are concerned, and the other half of the news stories are about bullying.
In France, 4% of the total news stories talk about ‘education’. Half of them explore new educational methods, 0.5 percent talk about problems with teachers’ salaries, and 1.5 percent talk about the possibility of removing grades in school (again, it would be interesting to see if they talk about this favorably or unfavorably).
Conclusions
Why don’t I do it? Because I am not a programmer and would be very slow to implement it. At the same time I believe that, an open source project that has a self-organized community behind it is much more solid than a hobbyist or for-profit project.
If you are interested in the project and are interested in collaborating, you can contact me on Telegram or Matrix.