Bias, Neutrality and Objectivity — and the limit of measuring them

It is the worldview (bias) of the publication, its effort to remain impartial while conveying events (neutrality), and its goal to present the truth without bending it (objectivity).

These concepts are very clearly the most fundamental and complex natural elements of human communication. No text can be wholly impartial because even which word is carefully chosen reflects a hidden ideological bias. It is not feasible for software to fully formulate these deep human concepts.

Example: The human interpretation in presenting the same event as a ‘struggle for freedom’ in one newspaper and a ‘security threat’ in another.

Go deeper

Algorithms can count words, find matches, and extract a statistical tone; but they cannot know what the truth is. It is misleading for a piece of software to claim that it measures the subtleties in human behavior or the truth. Traditional research methods require deep human comprehension and sociological background. Statistical methods can only catch certain surface patterns, they cannot decipher the ideological subtext behind the event. For this reason, knowing the limits of software tools, it is mandatory to stop blindly trusting them and to always keep critical human intellect as the final decision-maker.