I Built a Public Monitoring Website For The War in Iran
Tracking real-time, multi-lingual news
Yesterday, the US attacked Iran. This might be seen as a reason for joy as a cruel and criminal regime might be approaching its end. On the other hand, nobody wins when a war starts.
Iran might have seen the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, but also over a hundred girls were killed in a school in Iran.
This war will bring a lot of pain and it is not going to be a glorious story where brave Americans come to a foreign land and bring democracy.
The Iranian people stood up against their government long before: women who refused to wear hijabs, students who were killed at the demonstrations, and rights activists who were executed by the government.
Now these people are being killed by American bombs.
So there is nothing to cheer for here.
The price that people in Iran will pay for their freedom will be immeasurable.
The rest of the world will also not be the same. Iran is located at a strategically important geographical position. It is not only Iran that is being attacked: the whole region is drawn into the war:
https://iran.airealist.org/
Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Oman are being bombed by Iran. And of course, Israel is seeing bombings as well.
There is a lot of news going around. We, in the West, mostly get information in English from Western media. Unfortunately, those media are frequently not the fastest. In the age of the internet, the first news comes through reposts and sharing on social media. During the war in Ukraine, Telegram channels became the essential sources of information. Yes, one cannot trust them, but over time people are used to validating the information, checking in other sources. What I have also learned is that it is always a good idea to check what the other side is reporting: yes, they might be lying, you cannot trust media that are controlled by dictators, but behind every lie hides the truth, even if the truth is completely the opposite of what is being reported. There is no lie without truth, and sometimes it is easier to understand what is happening by monitoring lies as well.
I know from my own experience that it is extremely time-consuming and stressful. That is why I decided to build a website that tracks various news agencies and Telegram channels.
It is free: https://newsfeed-staging.pages.dev/briefing
And open-source with MIT license: https://github.com/ktoetotam/NewFeeds
Contributions: welcomed!
My primary focus was on creating diversity of sources, particularly integrating sources in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic, watching Hezbollah Telegram groups. Those are sources that are not universally accessible: a person speaking Hebrew will not know what Persian outlets are reporting, and people speaking Arabic would struggle with Hebrew.
I also included sources from far away like China, India, Russia. Russian sources were surprising because they report much faster than Western media. The only ones that are faster are Telegram channels, for example, “Electrohizbullah“.
As I said above, the lies can tell you a lot about the truth if the truth is hidden. That is why I included state controlled media from Russia, Iran and Proxies and labelled them as such:
I have built this website in 12 hours, it updates at a 10-15 minute pace, is completely open source and can be adapted to your own use cases. Further in the article, I will discuss how this website was built and how anyone else can reproduce it.
I conclude with why AI-assisted coding might become a basic skill and how we might in general move away from specialised products and towards hyper-personalisation.
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