Fighting Biased Online News: Lessons from Online Participation and Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Online news has become a major source of news especially for younger generation. However, it is evident that certain media outlets report biased news. This bias can cause harmful effects on society thus democracy. There have been various attempts to identify and mitigate bias in news. At the same time various successful crowdsourcing platforms have emerged as many internet users are now active participants than passive readers. Some of these techniques have been already used related to online news sector. In this article we investigate how online participation techniques have been used in crowdsourcing and how lessons from crowdsourcing platforms can be used further to fight against biased news. New means to mitigate biased online news are proposed and discussed in the end.