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"A few weeks ago at the Teen Vogue offices, I caught up with Bobby Kennedy III, the 24-year-old Outreach Director at the newly launched website Ameritocracy.com. A recent Brown alum, he and 28-year-old Porter...\n\n[\n\n](http://blog.teenvogue.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/09/12/ameritocracy_logo.gif)\n\nA few weeks ago at the Teen Vogue offices, I caught up with Bobby Kennedy III, the 24-year-old Outreach Director at the newly launched website Ameritocracy.com. A recent Brown alum, he and 28-year-old Porter Bayne teamed up to create the site as a way to filter\u2014and fact check\u2014all kinds of political talking points that are being thrown around by the media. Thanks to new technology, information multiplies at a faster rate than ever before, making it tough to determine what's true and what's not, especially with politicians misquoting facts and figures, statesmen skewing statistics, and most mainstream news outlets taking on a liberal or conservative bent.\n\n\"For so many people our age, understanding this election is one of the most important things right now,\" Bobby tells me, holding up his wallet\u2014that's plastered with an Obama sticker\u2014for me to see. \"But we live in a culture of sound bites. But you have to dissect them, you have to look at their sources.\"\n\nAmeritocracy takes these sound bites\u2014be it snippets from candidates' speeches or lines from a New York Post op-ed &amp;amp;#x2013; and rates them on two criteria: relevancy and accuracy. \"The idea behind Ameritocracy is that there's all this information out there\u2014in fact, we've got more information than we've ever had thanks to the web. But somehow we know less than we used to. For example, 60% of people in 2005 thought that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, even after the 9/11 Commission Report said this simply wasn't true,\" explains Porter, the site's founder, a self-proclaimed \"Seattle Republican.\" (Translation: \"I tend to be a bit more liberal on social issues.\")\n\nBut you can't really blame ignorance or a lack of interest: \"It's not that people aren't smart enough; it's not even that people don't care. It's just that they're not getting good information from a format they can trust,\" Porter continues. With the presidential and vice-presidential candidates firing off shots at each other through defensive speeches and offensive ad campaigns, things get taken out of context and the real issues at play become muddled. \"What's really going on with healthcare? What's going on with the price of oil? What are the specifics I need to understand for this election before I cast a vote?\" Porter questions, rhetorically. \"We have to start with the facts.\"\n\nThink of Ameritocracy almost as an attack on Truthiness\u2014that Colbertian concept. Check out the site for more info.\n\n\u2014LINDSAY TALBOT"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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