Predicting Political Leanings: AI's New Trick

Every day, the media pumps out tons of text. To get an unbiased view, we need to understand the political slant behind the words. A new study introduces a simple statistical method to predict political leanings from text. Researchers used standard features from political speeches and manifestos to train their model. The results? The model can predict political bias better than random guessing. When the model makes mistakes, it could be because political actors change their policies.To make sense of these results, researchers focused on two main aspects: text features linked to political orientation and the positive sentiment in texts, which seems to match with political power. Want to see it in action? Try the web app that shows how the model can guess the political bias in news articles.