The Distraction Index

A civic intelligence platform that publishes a Weekly Distraction Index — a frozen, immutable weekly snapshot scoring democratic damage vs. manufactured distractions during the Trump administration.

Live at distractionindex.org

How It Works

Every political event gets two scores:

• Score A (Constitutional Damage) — Measures real governance harm using 7 weighted drivers, severity multipliers, and mechanism/scope modifiers.
• Score B (Distraction/Hype) — Measures media hype and strategic distraction using a two-layer model with intentionality testing.

Events are classified into:

• List A (Real Damage) — High A-score, dominance margin >= +10
• List B (Distractions) — High B-score, dominance margin <= -10
• List C (Noise) — Low-salience events failing the noise gate

The Smokescreen Index pairs high-B distractions with high-A damage events to surface when media spectacle may be covering for substantive harm.

Weekly Editions

Weeks run Sunday-Saturday (ET). The current week updates live; past weeks freeze permanently. No data is ever changed after a week closes. Post-freeze corrections are append-only.

Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js 16 + React 19 + Tailwind CSS v4
• Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL, distraction schema)
• AI Scoring: Claude API (Haiku for clustering, Sonnet for scoring)
• News Sources: GDELT + GNews + Google News RSS
• Hosting: Vercel with cron jobs for automated ingestion

Development

npm install          # Install dependencies
npm run dev          # Start dev server at localhost:3000
npm run build        # Production build
npm run test         # Run 180 tests across 18 files
npm run lint         # ESLint

Pipeline

The ingestion pipeline runs automatically every 4 hours:

1. Ingest (:00) — Fetches articles from 3 news sources, deduplicates, stores
2. Process (:05) — Clusters articles into events (Claude Haiku), scores events (Claude Sonnet), runs smokescreen pairing
3. Freeze (Sunday 5am UTC) — Freezes previous week, creates new week snapshot

Documentation

• CLAUDE.md — Developer guidance for Claude Code
• PLAN.md — Implementation plan with phases and architecture
• distraction-index-spec-v2.2.md — Complete product specification (algorithms, data model, UI)

Data

• 59+ weeks of historical data (Dec 29, 2024 - present)
• 1,500+ scored events
• 11,800+ ingested articles
• 210+ smokescreen pairs identified