For context, this is a solo project I've been building over the past year while working full-time. I've been responding as "we" in the comments since I got used to doing it other places lol
Looking for feedback and advice. I'm an engineer, not a journalist or policy researcher, so a lot of this domain is still new to me despite working on it for a year.
The current summary on the home page contains bias / one-sided reporting.
> While the administration describes the strikes as a necessary move to stop nuclear weapons, the conflict has already seen accidental friendly fire and threats of a ground invasion.
The balance to the assertion "this was necessary" isn't "but there's been some consequences" -- it is an exploration of the truth of the assertion.
I like this. My strategy to stay sane in US politics is to follow what the government is actually doing and avoid distractions from ragebait influencers or unhinged statements from politicians.
Thanks! The original goal of Govbase is to make US Policy impact easy to understand for citizens. For more government transparency so people know how their representatives are spending their time and who they're actually working for.
Looks interesting, but trending social only shows X which will lean conservative. Obviously Bluesky/Reddit will lean left but it should presumably show all bias influences?
I don't think Truth Social should be included as its such a niche.
Generally looks like a potentially excellent resource for marketing to media platforms.
Edit: I found a Bluesky one but had to scroll down a lot. If that's to do with relative lack of activity it should probably be clearly explained.
Why does Forbes post intentionally misleading charts?
The one for Bluesky goes from 9M DAU -> 3.5M DAU
The one for X goes from 149M DAU -> 128M DAU
Yet, the Y axis of both charts are wildly out of proportion to make it look like they are equivalent, which is also implied by the headline but clearly not true.
It doesn't look like truth social has grown much the last year, sits around 10% of bluesky by active user count. Would be interesting to see more detailed metrics about the amount of content and engagement.
Thanks for the feedback! We mainly include Truth social since Trump and a few of his closest administration are active on there and a large goal of Govbase is to follow the story from Trump posting about tariffs, the news reacting, the EO happening, etc.
I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However, most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active on X than Bluesky.
> An AI pipeline breaks each one down into plain-language summaries and shows who it impacts by demographic group.
Wont this process be inherently biased by itself? Usually attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that will inform one perspective or another.
As someone who has been working on this space for a while (not affiliated with govbase) this is really hard. Between eliminating the sycophancy that seems baked into LLMs and dealing with generalized hallucinations - it's freaking hard. I spent this weekend trying to figure out how to get my system to stop telling me the SAVE Act would be fine because it doesn't say what the process for if birth certificate doesn't match current id.
No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial agent to see if that can spot gaps.
Very true. We're constantly trying to refine this and eventually plan on hiring policy researchers for a human in the loop but we just don't have the funding for that currently. We are trying to be transparent for how our scoring does work which you can read more about here: https://govbase.com/methodology
The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that ignores the larger context of where that option even came from and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly trying to optimize to get the larger picture.
I started but could not finish a project I was calling “g(overnm)it blame” - the idea was to track each bill through committee and to the end either a sort of commit history to see which legislator (or at least which committee) added what part of the final bill.
I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?
Maybe I'm too software-engineer-brained now, but to me it seems like lawmakers should just be using a tool like git directly. The legal code is a codebase, every bill is a PR, the arguments and proposed changes are captured in review comments, and the PR is accepted/rejected on a vote.
Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?
This is actually really nice. Web page feels pretty snappy, way more so than congress.gov. I've learned some interesting things just scrolling for a few minutes, like the "Energy Freedom Act" cutting appliance rebates or the constitutional amendment for a balanced budget (wtf).
Yes I just noticed this bug today where there is some character limit impacting story headlines. I appreciate the feedback and will be looking into it today.
I think that's a good idea to highlight "unexpected impact". Our system gets the whole policy for analysis so if there is something like housing impacts within a medical focused bill, Renters and Home Owners impacts should show up.
Understandable. Our priority right now is politician and agency posts though and these accounts are just not very active on mastodon or threads. We can look further into it and another comment mentioned this too.
We're early stage, but I believe there's a space between news and actual policy that no one's filling well. If you can show people that their representatives are making their lives better or worse, with real policy behind it, they'll care.
Right now, too many people are consuming misinformation from sources they believe are legitimate, and increasingly from social media where real people are getting their news. We need to connect the policy, the personal impact ("you're losing your insurance because of X"), the news, and what politicians are actually saying, all in one place, to bring real facts to the misinformation and make government more transparent.
Looking for feedback and advice. I'm an engineer, not a journalist or policy researcher, so a lot of this domain is still new to me despite working on it for a year.
> While the administration describes the strikes as a necessary move to stop nuclear weapons, the conflict has already seen accidental friendly fire and threats of a ground invasion.
The balance to the assertion "this was necessary" isn't "but there's been some consequences" -- it is an exploration of the truth of the assertion.
Generally looks like a potentially excellent resource for marketing to media platforms.
Edit: I found a Bluesky one but had to scroll down a lot. If that's to do with relative lack of activity it should probably be clearly explained.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/11/07/bluesky-...
I wonder what will happen to trans kids in the coming years. Trans people shape the soul of the country (since the last 3 years)
The one for Bluesky goes from 9M DAU -> 3.5M DAU
The one for X goes from 149M DAU -> 128M DAU
Yet, the Y axis of both charts are wildly out of proportion to make it look like they are equivalent, which is also implied by the headline but clearly not true.
Transgender has been a part of humanity forever, just like we see in other areas of nature. Here's some history going back 150+ years: https://translash.org/articles/drawn-to-history-10-trans-tra...
Zine: https://translash.org/zines/transcestors-trailblazers-30-liv...
Some perspective, if you have an ARM CPU, it's thanks to Sophia Wilson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson
I would love to include more Bluesky posts, besides it seeming more balanced - it's also free data compared to X. However, most political social posts happen on X. Even AOC, who is the most followed account on Bluesky still I think is more active on X than Bluesky.
Wont this process be inherently biased by itself? Usually attempts (by humans or computers) to "summarize" or frame things in "plain language" will apply a bias since it intentionally omits all the myriad context and legal/societal "gray areas" that will inform one perspective or another.
No, I haven't found a good solution yet - I'm going down a rabbit hole of basically crawling the entire federal register for referenced legislation and then adding in an adversarial agent to see if that can spot gaps.
The biggest issue we have found, as you have mentioned, is just the larger context. For example (I don't think this is a real example and would need to check), the TikTok purchase deal could be ranked as an overall benefit for gig workers making content since the outlined alternative was a flat out ban hurting their income. So a deal going through, alleviating that alternative of a ban, in a vacuum is good. However, that ignores the larger context of where that option even came from and the surrounding political context around that deal. So we know the system isn't perfect right now and we're constantly trying to optimize to get the larger picture.
I found it infeasible, but I’m wondering if you saw rich enough data while making this that you think such a project is viable?
Aside from "lawmakers don't/won't understand the tool", why not do it this way?
For example, the bill title say fixing hospitals, but it contains some policy changes about housing.
1. Platforms politicians, governments, and media
2. Platforms which have an open (and free?) API
Bluesky seems to be the only one covering both, though less coverage on #1 than others, minus Mastodon
Right now, too many people are consuming misinformation from sources they believe are legitimate, and increasingly from social media where real people are getting their news. We need to connect the policy, the personal impact ("you're losing your insurance because of X"), the news, and what politicians are actually saying, all in one place, to bring real facts to the misinformation and make government more transparent.