Swiftriver | Verifying and Filtering News (FOSS)

SwiftRiver is a free and open source software platform that uses a combination of algorithms and crowdsourced interaction to validate and filter news.

And they have a Drupal module: http://drupal.org/project/swiftriver

Could definitely be a complement to Visions Unite, it isn't a replacement, it uses user input but the focus is on automated filtering.

Although the general concept is simple, Swift relies on three incredibly complex technologies: Natural Language Computation, Machine Learning and Veracity Algorithms. [...] the user may be tracking Twitter, various Blogs, as well as a dedicated phone number (SMS), email, and news media. Swift then mashes those differing channels together into one feed, keeps track of where each item originated (it's source) and assigns a score to each source. This score is determined partly through user behavior and partly by our algorithms.