Dublin Students Create App To Combat Bias, Misinformation

DUBLIN, CA — Four Dublin High School students won second place in Rep. Mark DeSaulnier’s Congressional App Challenge with Politica AI, an extension and website that helps readers recognize political biases and misinformation in articles they read.

DHS students Rohan Vij, Ayush Garg, Jimin Lim, and Mohit Varikuti used a large language model sensitive to existing media biases to create instant bias, factuality, and trustworthiness ratings for millions of articles. Users can copy and paste a link into the website, and receive information on the news source according to Ad Fontes Media, bias rating of the article, logical fallacies, and alternative news perspectives.

“As high schoolers, we often consume dozens of news articles and opinion pieces every day, each with their own agendas, biases, and ideas. The sheer amount of information present today means that it is often impossible to discern subtle biases or detect misleading information,” co-creator Ayush Garg told Patch. “We wanted to be able to identify this unbiased reporting to build our own stances and viewpoints rather than have them fed to us by the news.”

“We also found this issue at club meetings, like in the JSA (Junior State of America) club,” said co-creator Rohan Vij. “During weekly club meetings at our high school, we often saw that debates were not over the topic itself but over what information surrounding the topic was real or not. People on both sides of the debate were receiving completely different information about the same topic, leading to debates not over ethics but over factuality.”

For more information, visit politica-ai.tech.