I read too much news, and I noticed I was doing the same two things over and over: nodding along at stuff I already agreed with, and getting irritated by stuff I didn't. At no point was I actually clocking *how* either one was written.
So here I am with this thing called Veritype. It's a Chrome extension. You right-click an article — or highlight just the paragraph you're suspicious about — and a panel opens beside the page.
It'll tell you roughly where the piece sits left-to-right, but honestly the score is the least interesting part. The useful bit is underneath: which specific words are doing the persuading, who got quoted and who conspicuously didn't, what's been left out. Then it writes you the strongest version of the argument on the other side. Not a strawman it can knock over. The actual best case. I've also tried to add some more and more interesting features over the past couple of releases (1.2.0 is currently submitted for review).
There's also a Similar Sources panel that finds the same story covered elsewhere and shows you where those outlets sit, in case you fancy reading the version that will annoy you.
There's things it's bad at, which you'd find out anyway, so I may as well go first:
\- It is not a fact-checker. It has no idea whether anything in the article is true. Framing and accuracy are two different problems and I have gestured at one of them.
\- Bias by omission — the story nobody ran, the expert nobody phoned — is the most important kind, and it's the kind it's worst at. Turns out it's pretty dang hard to spot what isn't there.
\- Paywalls and PDFs stump it. It just sits there looking useless.
\- Run the same article twice and you get slightly different wording and a slightly different number. It's a language model, not a set of scales.
\- One article is not a verdict on an outlet. Someone is going to screenshot a single result as proof that their least favourite newspaper is Officially Biased, and I'm going to have to live with that.
Free tier is 10 a day, no card, no trial that quietly becomes a subscription. Pro's $5.99/mo if you go past that. You can also paste in your own Anthropic API key and pay them directly instead of me, which is admittedly a strange thing to build a button for, but it felt wrong not to.
[www.veritype.app\](http://www.veritype.app)
I'd genuinely rather have the criticism than the upvotes — especially if you hit an article where the read is just flatly wrong. Those are the ones I can actually do something with. SERIOUSLY, this is my first real release so go ahead and give me some feedback. Ideas for features are welcome as well. This is pretty niche, and I know it. If you read this far, thanks!!
submitted by /u/fossilsareopaf