News media has a manipulation problem.
We're building the fix.

Modern news isn't optimized for truth. It's optimized for engagement — clicks, shares, outrage, fear. Headlines are engineered to trigger emotional reactions. Articles are laced with urgency signals, loaded language, and editorial manipulation disguised as reporting.

The result: a population that is simultaneously over-informed and under-informed. People consume more news than ever but trust it less. Many opt out entirely — not because they don't care about the world, but because consuming news has become toxic.

The insight

The facts themselves are fine. The manipulation is in the language — the framing, the urgency inflation, the emotional triggers, the clickbait patterns. If you strip that layer away and present just the facts in calm, clear prose, news becomes useful again.

How NTRL works

NTRL analyzes news articles at the linguistic level, identifying manipulative patterns across six categories:

• Attention & Engagement — Curiosity gaps, urgency inflation, sensational formatting
• Emotional & Affective — Fear appeals, outrage engineering, identity priming, sentiment steering
• Cognitive & Epistemic — Certainty manipulation, evidence distortion, false balance
• Linguistic & Framing — Loaded language, metaphor escalation, agency hiding
• Structural & Editorial — Headline mismatch, information burial, quote manipulation
• Incentive & Meta — Incentive opacity, agenda masking, normalization

Learn more about the full taxonomy →

Manipulative language is removed and replaced with neutral alternatives. Every change is visible — you can always see what the original said and what NTRL changed. The app shows the original text with category-colored highlights so you can learn to spot manipulation yourself.

What NTRL is not

NTRL is not a fact-checker. We don't determine what's true or false. We don't rate bias left or right. We don't aggregate three versions of the same story and call it balanced.

We do one thing: remove the manipulative language so the facts can speak for themselves.

Our commitment

• Transparency: Every change we make is visible and explained
• No engagement optimization: We succeed when you're informed, not addicted
• No personalization: Everyone gets the same news, the same way
• Privacy: We don't track your reading habits or sell your data