SpinSpotter – What We Do and Why

SpinSpotter is people-powered. It relies on people like you to use our tools to help make the Web a more truthful place. We believe that every time a journalist or marketer or anybody puts words up online, they ought to be held to some kind of standard. If not, then how can we trust what we read?

We think Spinspotter has broad appeal regardless of one’s interests.  Whether you’re a news junkie seeking unbiased reporting, looking for truthful product reviews, reading a Wikipedia entry, or evaluating someone’s LinkedIn profile or anything else online – you should be able to ask “Is that true?” and get an answer that gives you confidence.

So we built “Spinoculars,” a free and easy plug-in to your Web browser (we now support both Internet Explorer and Firefox) that lets you highlight and share the spin you find and also lets you see what other SpinSpotters have deemed biased, dubious, or patently false while you’re surfing the Web.  Learn more about what we do here.It’s simple, fun and—guess what else? You can actually EDIT the spin, right on the page of origin … compare that to a Letter to the Editor.

As an example, here’s what Fox News Readers saw in the article below—scroll down what SpinSpotter users were hip to.

Fox News Plays The Obscured Source Gane

SpinSpotters were hip to this—if they had Spinoculars, they saw the edits right over the top of Fox News. Oh…in this article, Fox did the same to two other sources—see it here.

SpinSpotter Does The Fact Checking Fox News, uh ... "Forgot"