read before you read
Know what an article does to you — before you read it.
Undertone is a browser extension that shows three things next to every newspaper article: who wrote it, how it is likely to make you feel, and which experts outside the paper back it or contradict it. Nothing about you is stored.
- Free for readers
- Chrome
- Belgium first, then Europe
Every day you read twenty headlines written to make you feel something.
You do not notice the emotion; you only notice that you walk into the day angrier or more afraid than you woke up. And you rarely know who wrote the piece, or what the rest of the world says about it.
You read an opinion as a fact.
Without knowing whether the author knows the subject.
You feel the tone, not the content.
A headline that alarms beats a headline that is accurate.
You get one version of the story.
What science, or the rest of Europe, says stays out of view.
What you see before you start reading.
Author
Who wrote this, what they have expertise in, and what they wrote before — including at other papers. With a source. Anonymous stays anonymous.
sourcedImpact
How this piece is likely to make you feel: calm, hopeful, unsettling or anger-provoking. Computed in your browser, with a version number — and an honest “unknown” when the signal is too weak.
computedSources
The study the article is about, the official figures behind a claim, and how the rest of Europe reported the same news. No newspaper as a source; science and statistics instead.
sourced
Three steps. No account.
Install the extension
One click in Chrome. No registration, no e-mail.
coming soon to the Chrome Web Store
Open an article
At any newspaper, in your language. Undertone recognises the article by itself.
Read the cards, then the piece
Ten seconds of context. After that you read the way you always did — but awake.
News is not neutral. It does not have to be. But you are allowed to know.
Every headline is a choice: which word, which tone, which image. Newspapers make those choices with craft — and with an agenda, a deadline and a business model. Undertone does not take those choices away from you; it makes them visible.
Next to every article you see who wrote it and what that person wrote before, which feeling the piece is likely to provoke, and what science and official figures say about the same question. Computed in your own browser, without the text ever reaching us.
Read the full method →In ten seconds
This is how Undertone works.
We built this because we missed it ourselves.
Undertone has no face and no newsroom. It has a method, and the method is open: every number carries a version number, every source a link, and what we do not know we show as unknown. We build in the open — you can follow every step.
- 0
- article texts stored. Ever.
- 0
- accounts needed. Install and read.
- 4
- languages from day one: nl · fr · en · de.
- v0.1.0
- the method, public and version-stamped.
[Reader reactions follow after the beta — no invented quotes will appear here.]
Be the first to read with Undertone.
Free for readers, later too. We send one mail when the beta opens and one when we go live. Nothing else.
No newsletter, no reselling. Your address stays with us until you say it can go.