As we read news on our devices, incomprehensibly advanced algorithms lurk beneath the surface of our feeds, optimizing what we see for likes, screentime, and ads.
Video Explainer
Unconsciously, our intellectual curiosity and forbearance are being strangled by confirmation bias (reinforcing our preexisting beliefs), and recency bias pulling us into a never-ending news cycle dominated by that next “big” headline.
Deepen your understanding of politics, social trends, business, and more by surrounding yourself with an ideologically balanced curation of the best journalism and information the web has to offer.
Curated news stories feature multiple sources so you can understand the bigger picture. Read more efficiently with AI News Summaries. Unlike existing feeds, Helium does not have manipulative ads, is not edited by humans, and doesn’t track you across the web.
Slow Down Your News Consumption
Unlike traditional feeds that thrive on the latest happening and emotionally charged headlines, Helium’s feed updates every four hours and includes news from longer periods of time so you can have more room for thinking and fewer distractions. The news feed with a (customizable) end in sight. Move from events to ideas.
Unlike existing newspapers who’s website are littered with hundreds of headlines, Helium keeps things simple with one important story at a time so you can read fluidly. Less confusion, more focus.
Constantly distracted by the never-ending flow of provocative headlines, we’re deprived of the time needed for thoughtful contemplation and analysis. To accurately understand our world, we need less volume and more depth. More perspectives and less sensationalism. Create Account.
Elevate Your Perspective & Read Across the Political Aisle
Helium’s algorithm aggregates news stories and juxtaposes different sources and perspectives together so you can enlighten your understanding and challenge your pre-existing ideas. By easily seeing what different authors think, your brain will create a more realistic and grounded model of reality. Read more in less time with Helium.
Adaptive News Forecasts
Helium’s models make falsifiable, probabilistic predictions about the world based on all of the news it consumes from across the web. Over time, these predictions are fed back into the AI to enable calibration and second-order learning.
Given evidence of “significant search personalization on Google News,” Helium helps users escape their echo chambers by intentionally exposing them to a variety of intellectual ideas.
Need to tune out (balanced) politics? You can mute stories by category to reduce distractions and focus on learning.
Click here to see the sources that Helium uses (as well as some interesting new bias analysis. Updated weekly.)
Helium intentionally features thoughtful sources from across the political aisle. Now, you can read the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Financial Times all in one feed. More depth, less clickbait.
Identify News Bias
Helium’s Bias Wheel identifies potentially manipulative language, such as begging-the-question, overly sensational, appeal-to-authority, opinionated, and more.
How Does It Reduce Bias?
Although it’s impossible to remove all bias, by combining information from our collection of high-quality (and customizable) sources and filtering out manipulative content, Helium reduces potential algorithmic and human bias from your feed. Helium also reduces popularity bias— likes on social media is a poor proxy for journalistic quality and nuanced analysis. Additionally, Helium filters out news with highly emotional content and prescriptive language.
See all the axes Helium uses to measure news media bias.
More Robust Than AllSides
While Helium and AllSides share a similar vision, Helium offers two distinct advantages:
AllSides suffers from “Bothsidesism” by providing a false sense of equivalency between certain perspectives when the evidence does not justify it. Helium overcomes this by randomly juxtaposing articles from diverse, respected news sources without any human input. Helium compels you to think for yourself instead of displaying news items in oversimplified and ever-changing terms of “left” or “right.” Reducing political and social discussion to a linear one-dimensional axis like left vs. right removes the complexity and nuance necessary to obtain a deep understanding of the world.
By solely grouping news sources into categories (e.g left, right, and center) any intellectual heterogeneity within publications is ignored. It’s not uncommon for WSJ to publish left-leaning commentary or for the New York Times to publish a conservative opinion article. Labeling an entire news organization as “conservative” or “liberal” is a dangerous (and often wrong) oversimplification. There’s no such thing as the “left” and the “right.”
More Resolution/Transparency Than Ad Fontes Media
Ad Fontes Media tries to take an empirical approach, however still relies primarily on reductive and survey-based opinions that reinforce existing ideological perspectives. Helium displays weekly updated headlines, AI, specific phrases, and emotional texture to measure potential bias instead of an opaquely defined 2-dimensional chart with biased human inputs.
More Empirical Than ImproveTheNews
While Helium thinks ImproveTheNews is a great product and highly recommend its creator’s chat with Lex Fridman, ITN falls into the trap of forcing nuanced information into a rigid, two dimensional system of left-right and pro/anti-establishment. Helium’s perspectives are generated in the context of each news story, instead of relying on vaguely defined and loaded terms to describe bias.
More Accurate Than TheFactual
While Helium and TheFactual both agree on the use of author tone in determining bias, TF uses a subjective measure of “site quality” and a subjective measure of expertise based on the flawed assumption that because an author has written on a topic in the past they are more trustworthy. TF also uses direct quotes as a measure of trustworthiness; it’s not hard to imagine a manipulative article with more quotes than an honest/informative article.
More Sources than Fiat Dashboard
While the Fiat Dashboard does a nice job of analyzing biases such as “use of Superlatives,” “Bogeymen,” and more, it only covers 40 sources with low-resolution information that lacks transparency. They charge for access to topic/outlet, while Helium’s news source bias analysis is free and more powerful.