BSmeter vs Improve the News
Improve the News — the nonprofit born from an MIT research project led by Prof. Max Tegmark, whose reader now runs under the Verity name — solves the framing problem: for a given news story, it clusters coverage from roughly 5,000 publications and hands you sliders to move across the political left/right and establishment vs. establishment-critical spectrums, so you can see how the same event is told differently. BSmeter solves a different problem: you hand it a YouTube, TikTok, Instagram Reel, or podcast link (or run its extension while you watch), and it transcribes the audio, pulls out every verifiable claim, and scores each one 0–100 against live web sources with the evidence linked. One shows you the spread of narratives around a story someone else already wrote up; the other tells you whether the specific sentence a creator just said out loud checks out.
BSmeter vs Improve the News: side by side
| Feature | BSmeter | Improve the News |
|---|---|---|
| What you point it at | Any video or audio, any topic — paste a YouTube/TikTok/Reel/podcast link, or use the Chrome/Firefox extension while you watch | Its own aggregated news feed. You browse stories it has already clustered; it isn't a tool you submit an arbitrary link to |
| Unit of analysis | The individual claim — each verifiable statement gets a 0–100 credibility score with the cross-referenced sources linked | The story — synthesized across many outlets and positioned on bias spectrums rather than adjudicated claim by claim |
| Political & establishment bias mapping | Doesn't do this. BSmeter has no left/right outlet spectrum and won't show you competing narratives on a story | Its core feature. Bias Split sliders let you move across political stance and establishment stance (plus style and depth) with AI-assisted source positioning |
| Curated source breadth for news | Cross-references each claim against live web results — good for verification, but not a curated newsroom pool | ~5,000 publications spanning mainstream and alternative media, continuously maintained by a nonprofit team |
| Deepfake & AI-generated media signals | Flags synthetic/manipulated media signals and logical fallacies alongside the claim scores | Not applicable — it works on published text journalism, not media forensics on a clip |
| Cost | Free tier; Basic $3.99/mo; Premium $8.99/mo for heavier use | Completely free with no ads — a 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded by donors, with no paid tier to upsell you |
Where BSmeter wins
- Improve the News can't tell you whether the podcast you're listening to right now is accurate — it only covers stories its team has aggregated. BSmeter checks any clip you hand it, including a random creator's 40-minute upload that will never appear in a news feed.
- Claim-level verdicts with receipts. BSmeter gives you a 0–100 score and the linked evidence per claim; Improve the News deliberately defines a 'fact' as what sources on opposite sides agree on, which is a reasonable editorial policy but leaves contested single claims unadjudicated.
- It works on spoken audio and video — the format most misinformation actually travels in now. BSmeter transcribes first, so a health influencer's Reel or a three-hour podcast gets the same treatment as a written article, plus deepfake and fallacy flags.
Where Improve the News is stronger
- The bias sliders are genuinely excellent and BSmeter has no equivalent. Being able to drag from left to right, or from establishment consensus to establishment-critical, on the same story is the fastest way to see how framing is doing the work.
- Serious institutional credibility and incentives: it grew out of an MIT research project led by Prof. Max Tegmark, runs as an apolitical 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and takes no advertising — so nothing about its ranking is optimized for engagement.
- A ~5,000-publication source pool spanning mainstream and alternative outlets, with story clustering that surfaces contrasting narratives instead of one summary. For daily news reading and media literacy, that breadth is something a claim-checker simply doesn't provide.
Anyone who wants to know if a specific video or podcast is telling the truth — checking a creator's claims mid-watch, vetting a viral clip, or getting evidence-linked scores on health, finance, or political claims spoken on camera.
Daily news readers who want to escape a single outlet's framing — people who want to read across the political and establishment spectrum on the same story, and who value an ad-free nonprofit with no engagement incentive.
The verdict
These aren't really competitors — use both. Improve the News is the better tool for reading the news: it shows you the spread of narratives around a story across thousands of outlets, and its bias sliders do something BSmeter doesn't attempt. BSmeter picks up where it stops, at the video and podcast layer, verifying the individual claims in content that no aggregator covers. Read the news through Improve the News; run the clip your uncle sent you through BSmeter.
BSmeter vs Improve the News: FAQ
Is BSmeter an Improve the News alternative?▾
Not really, and we'd rather be straight with you. Improve the News (Verity) is a news aggregator that maps how ~5,000 outlets frame a story across political and establishment spectrums. BSmeter is a claim-checker for video and audio. If what you want is to read a news story from multiple angles, BSmeter is the wrong tool and Improve the News is the right one. If you want to know whether a specific YouTube video or podcast is accurate, Improve the News isn't built for that. Most people who care about media literacy end up wanting both.
Can Improve the News fact-check a YouTube video or a podcast?▾
No — that isn't its purpose. It aggregates and clusters published journalism, and it operates its own podcast and YouTube presence as outputs rather than as inputs to check. There's no way to submit an arbitrary video link for analysis. BSmeter is built specifically for that: it transcribes the audio, extracts every verifiable claim, and scores each 0–100 against live web sources.
Improve the News is free and nonprofit. Why would I pay for BSmeter?▾
You may not need to. BSmeter has a free tier that covers casual use, and Improve the News being a genuinely free, ad-free 501(c)(3) is a real advantage we're not going to pretend away. BSmeter's paid tiers ($3.99 Basic, $8.99 Premium) are for people running a lot of video through it. They're also not substitutes — the money buys claim verification on video, not a bias map of the news, which Improve the News gives you for nothing.