Obiektyw: Seeing the Narrative Behind the News

In today’s digital landscape, where information flows at unprecedented speeds and truth seems increasingly subjective, I thought that it woul be nice to have something that would help to sift through content not worthy of my time.

From Walter Lippmann to Digital Media: The Evolution of Information Challenges

The initial idea emerged from reflecting on Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” from 1922.  Lippmann warned about how public perception is shaped not by direct experience but by the media-created “pictures in our heads”. He argued that our understanding of the world is always distorted by simplifications and biases.

A century later, Lippmann’s concerns have only intensified. What he couldn’t have anticipated was how digital platforms would accelerate and amplify these distortions. Today, misleading information doesn’t just spread, it propagates at lightning speed, reaching millions before fact-checkers can even begin their work.

This acceleration creates new vulnerabilities in how we process information. As Robert Cialdini demonstrated in his book “Influence” humans are prone to persuasion through specific triggers that bypass rational thought. In the online environment, these psychological vulnerabilities are systematically exploited. Too much information, too little time. So like Daniel Kahneman’s work on cognitive biases revealed, we rely on mental shortcuts rather than deliberate analysis when consuming information. It’s either that or cognitive overflow - exactly the behavior that digital platforms exploit and amplify with the help of engagement algorithms.

The Disinformation Security Challenge

Recent history provides troubling examples of how vulnerable our information ecosystem has become. Cambridge Analytica’s micro-targeting of voters with psychologically tailored content demonstrated how personal data could be weaponized to manipulate public opinion at scale.

More alarmingly, Russia’s hybrid warfare tactics have shown how disinformation can be wielded as a military weapon. By flooding media channels with conflicting narratives and exploiting emotional triggers to paralyze decision-making and undermine public trust in institutions.

These challenges have given rise to a new field: disinformation security. Similar to how cybersecurity protects digital infrastructure, disinformation security aims to protect cognitive infrastructure - the mental models and belief systems that inform our understanding of reality. This emerging discipline combines elements of media literacy, psychology, data science, and security practices to create safeguards against information manipulation.

But perhaps most concerning is the shift in media rhetoric from informative to polarizing. News outlets increasingly prioritize emotional engagement over factual reporting, creating content designed to trigger outrage rather than understanding. Headlines are crafted not to inform but to provoke, and nuance is sacrificed at the altar of virality. This trend is perfectly illustrated by Betteridge’s law of headlines, which observes that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Headlines like “Could This New Discovery Cure Cancer?” or “Is Your neighbourgh spying on You?” exploit curiosity and fear, even when the article itself ultimately cannot support such dramatic claims. Similarly, the rise of clickbait - those tantalizing, often misleading headlines designed solely to generate clicks (“You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!“) - represents the triumph of engagement metrics over journalistic integrity. These tactics systematically undermine the quality of public discourse by prioritizing emotional reaction over accurate information transfer.

Technical Development of Obiektyw: A Step-by-Step Process

The first tangible form of Obiektyw was a browser extension. It was a natural starting point — lightweight, always at hand, embedded directly in the context where information is consumed. The idea was simple: while reading an article, I wanted an immediate way to step outside the narrative and look at it from a critical distance, without switching tabs, copying text, or manually framing analytical questions.

The extension acted as a personal cognitive filter. With a single click, it analyzed the content I was already engaging with and reflected it back in a more structured, de-emotionalized form. This immediacy mattered. Critical thinking tools are only effective if they are frictionless enough to be used habitually — otherwise, convenience wins over reflection.

However, as I continued using the extension and thinking about the problem more broadly, its limitations became increasingly clear. A browser extension works exceptionally well for individual articles, but it struggles to capture the bigger picture: long-term trends, narrative consistency across outlets, and systematic patterns of framing that only emerge when you look at media coverage as a whole rather than as isolated texts.

At the same time, I realized that media manipulation is rarely about a single misleading article. It is about repetition, selection, and context — about which stories are amplified, which are ignored, and how the same events are framed differently across ideological lines. These are phenomena that require aggregation, comparison, and temporal analysis.

This realization marked a shift in my thinking. Instead of asking “How manipulative is this article?”, the more interesting question became “How is this topic being shaped across the media ecosystem?” Answering that question required moving beyond the browser and toward a more centralized, analytical approach.

That is why Obiektyw evolved into a web application. The web-based format made it possible to monitor multiple outlets simultaneously, compare narratives over time, and visualize ideological imbalances in coverage. Rather than reacting to content only when it appears in front of the user, the application proactively observes the information environment and surfaces patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.

Importantly, this was not a rejection of the original idea. The browser extension proved that instant, context-aware analysis has real value. The web application simply operates at a different level of abstraction — one focused on systems rather than instances. In the future, the extension may return as a complementary layer: a personal lens connected to a broader analytical backend.

Whether embedded in a browser or presented as a web platform, Obiektyw was never meant to be just another tool. Its technical form is secondary to the underlying goal: restoring agency in how we interpret information.

Beyond Technology: The Value of Critical Perspective

While Obiektyw is fundamentally a wrapper around a language model, its value lies in accessibility and immediacy.It makes critical analysis available with a single click by removing friction between normally required actions such as copying, pasting, and prompt structuring. This convenience encourages more frequent evaluation of content, helping users develop what I call “cognitive antibodies” against manipulation.

The ability to critically evaluate information has become as essential as literacy itself. Without this skill, we risk being influenced by those who understand the psychology of persuasion better than we understand it ourselves.

It’s important to note that the goal isn’t to advocate for purely factual content without perspective. Content that challenges our viewpoints and introduces new ways of thinking is essential for intellectual growth. Reading a summary of a philosophical work will never have the same impact as engaging with the original text and wrestling with its ideas.

Rather, Obiektyw helps identify when influence crosses into manipulation when rhetorical techniques are employed not to illuminate but to obscure. By highlighting patterns like:

• Emotionally charged language that bypasses rational thought
• Logical fallacies that create illusions of valid arguments
• Framing techniques that present partial truths while omitting crucial context
• Polarizing rhetoric that artificially divides complex issues into binary oppositions

The extension helps restore agency to readers in how they process information.

Looking Forward

The transition from a browser extension to a web application was only one step in this process. Different forms serve different cognitive needs — immediate, individual analysis on one hand, and long-term, structural observation on the other. The challenge ahead is not choosing one over the other, but designing an ecosystem where both reinforce critical thinking rather than replace it.

This project is just a scratch over a very deep and complex topic. Its purpose is rather to be a conversation starter than a complete solution to a problem.
As manipulation techniques evolve, so must our tools for detecting them. Possibilities of improvements in future iterations are endless, like:

• Automated source comparison with the use of LLM
• Ranking of web portals that frequently use manipulation techniques
• Collaborative databases of known manipulation patterns
• Educational components that explain why certain content raised concerns
• Machine learning models trained specifically on manipulation detection

And probably many more of which I can’t think of.

What I can think of is that in an information environment where attention is the primary currency, developing technical safeguards for cognitive autonomy becomes increasingly important.

The challenge of navigating today’s information landscape won’t be solved through censorship or platform moderation alone. Instead, it requires equipping individuals with the tools and skills to evaluate content with greater insightfulness and confidence.