Hello World,
As many of you have probably noticed, there is a growing problem on the internet when it comes to undisclosed bias in both amateur and professional reporting. While not every outlet can be like the C-SPAN, or Reuters, we also believe that it's impossible to remove the human element from the news, especially when it concerns, well, humans.
To this end, we've created a media bias bot, which we hope will keep everyone informed about WHO, not just the WHAT of posted articles. This bot uses Media Bias/Fact Check to add a simple reply to show bias. We feel this is especially important with the US Election coming up. The bot will also provide links to Ground.News, as well, which we feel is a great source to determine the WHOLE coverage of a given article and/or topic.
As always feedback is welcome, as this is a active project which we really hope will benefit the community.
I think having this post isn't a great idea because you are just assuming the websites bias are legit. At the very least there needs to be a lot of warnings in the bots post about the websites biases and the methodology they use so the reader can come to their own conclusion.
The website itself says itās distinctions of left and right are US based which is very skewed from the rest of the world. There should be a disclaimer or it shouldn't be used in any world news communities.
Centrist Bias
The website follows the idea of āenlightened centrismā since if it determines a website has a left/right lean (again arbitrary) it affects the factual ratings of the sources.
Despite my personal opinions on the pointlessness of using a US based left/right bias criteria I'd feel better if it was at least kept it it's own section but when you allow it to affect the factual rating of the source it's just outright wrong. The factual accuracy of the website should be the sole thing that affects this rating.
Questionable Fact Checking
Even just checking some of their ratings raises doubts on the websites credibility.
āWikipediaās editors declared that the Anti-Defamation League cannot be trusted to give reliable information on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and they overwhelmingly said the ADL is an unreliable source on antisemitism.ā
Maybe Wikipedia editors are a good arbiter of truth and maybe they arenāt but as people can see there isnāt a consensus and so by choosing Media Bias/Fact Check youāre explicitly choosing to align your ātruthā with this websites biases.
MBFC rates it as "highly credible" despite it publishing laughably bad hit-pieces on UN officials who openly criticize Israel.
I did a debunk on one of their articles that was removed from this very community due to disinformation, but I've posted a screenshot of my critique here for anyone who is interested.
The Intercept getting only a āmostly factualā rating (3rd highest) despite their admittance it has never failed a fact check.
This is literally in bold at the top of the page:
Overall, we rate The Intercept progressive Left Biased based on story selection that routinely favors the left. We also rate them as Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to previous fabricated work and censorship of writers.
Fabricated work.
Is there anything that's more of a capital crime in journalism than fabricating quotes? Surely we can all agree that publishing fiction as news is the opposite of factual reporting? They may not have failed a fact check in the last five years but it just isn't possible for them to have published fabricated news without ever failing at least one. By their own admission they failed five in that incident alone.
Iām not going to die on the intercept hill here Iām fine with the fact that even though they fired the person itās a stain on their record so sure letās say that rating is fine.
It was one of the first 3 I checked so Iām sure Iāll find more that are problematic when I have a chance to look because itās their methodology thatās biased. Also the other 2 I pointed out are clearly not correct.
Got rebuttals for any of my criticisms about the methodology?
A standard of factuality needs to include a provision of avoiding emotionally-loaded, manipulative language. Otherwise you can pump unlimited amounts of propaganda with full factuality simply by "asking questions".
I wont disagree that there should be a ranking for using loaded language but combining it with the factuality ranking twists what the ranking means since to the average person theyāre going to read that as how accurate the facts are.
It should be its own separate rating from factuality. Again if weāre going to have to have a bot like this put clear disclaimers and ideally find a better one than this.
There doesnāt exist a site to magically do what you want.
Likewise itās not needed. It doesnāt add to the quality of discussion on the community. All itās going to do is cause conflict as we now have to constantly point out to people how garbage the source is so that they donāt let it influence them.
As the other poster says we donāt need to have something like this at all.
If youāre adamant about it then make a post where people can suggest which one we use and vote on it. We can also adjust the bots comment to clearly call out the chosen ones biases and methodology. As it is now itās actively harmful as I mention in my other comment.
Boooo. Running a community as a mod-dictator and not being able to hear feedback and react to it like an adult. Just because you thought of something, doesn't mean it is a good idea or that people will like it. The approach of "better than nothing" is naive and plain wrong - misinformation isn't "better than nothing" it actively hurts the community.
Every newspaper has its bias. MBFC heavily favors western liberal perspectives. It is often fine on domestic policy but not reliable when it comes to foreign policy.
As this is worldnews and not Americanews, MBFC ratings are not reliable. Articles should be judged by the evidence they provide.
Seeing as this is the stance the admins stance on decisions that are majority hated by the community, I'm just gonna leave this instance and go to one with admins that are more user-focused.
I expect community leaders to take reasonable feedback from the community respectfully even if they disagree, rather than doubling down on very unpopular decisions. Especially when said community funds the platform.
The majority of the bots posts have more downvotes than upvotes. The community has voiced its dislike for this bot as a majority.
Choosing one organization to be the arbiter of truth and bias gives them way too much power. I think fact checking should be the responsibility of whoever reads the article.
Yes but have you considered that by using a fixed source you can shift the Overton window to where you want it to be?
At least I acknowledge that the Overton window on lemmy.ml leans to the left. This is just slowly tilting the Overton window on lemmy.world to the right.
Yes, everyone should always do all their own work every time. Trust nothing! Formula of gravity? Newton and Einstein might be liars, and all the science textbooks could be complicit. Do your own research. Conduct your own experiments. Is the Earth flat? Grab a sailboat and find out!
The Jerusalem Report (Owned by Jerusalem Post) and the Jerusalem Post
This biased as shit publication is declared by MBFC as VEEEERY slightly center-right. They make almost no mention of the fact that they cherry pick aspects of the Israel war to highlight, provide only the most favorable context imaginable, yadda yadda. By no stretch of the imagination would these publications be considered unbiased as sources, yet according to MBFC they're near perfect.
Interesting how @Rooki is still a day later active in this post responding to all the comments supporting their bot, but manages to avoid replying to all the legitimate criticisms on display.
Really shows the mods don't value feedback, which begs the question why even bother making a thread to get feedback if you've already made up your mind.
They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation.
After Conrad Black acquired the paper, its political position changed to right-leaning, when Black began hiring conservative journalists and editors. Eli Azur is the current owner of Jerusalem Post. According to Ynetnews, and a Haaretz article, āBenjamin Netanyahu, the Editor in Chief,ā in 2017, Azur gave testimony regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuās pressure. Current Editor Yaakov Katz was the former senior policy advisor to Naftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister and head of the far-right political party, āNew Right.ā
During the 2023 Israel-Hamas conflict, the majority of stories favored the Israeli government, such as this Netanyahu to Hezbollah: If you attack, weāll turn Beirut into Gaza. In general, the Jerusalem Post holds right-leaning editorial biases and is usually factual in reporting.
Overall, we rate The Jerusalem Post Right-Center biased based on editorial positions that favor the right-leaning government. We also rate them Mostly Factual for reporting, rather than High due to two failed fact checks.
Based on MBFC's methodology, they can't have more than 6 points (out of 10) toward credibility, which is the floor for high credibility. They're one lost point from being listed as a medium credibility source, not "near perfect." They've also failed two fact checks in news reporting (not op-ed), which is seriously non-perfect. No one reading that page could walk away thinking that jpost isn't biased toward both the current Israeli government and conservative causes. MBFC calling them "right-center" is also consistent with how they're rated just about everywhere else. AllSides rates them as "center" (with a note that community feedback in disagreement believes they "lean right") and even Wikipedia describes them as "center-right/conservative".
This is predicated on the assumption that those organizations are neutral arbitrators of facts, but they aren't.
They might have a better gauge on reality than OAN, or PatriotEagleNews.ru, but that doesn't mean platform moderators should present them as if they are a source of universal truth.
People can be critical of posts, comments, and their sources, without the heavy hand of moderators using a privatized Ministry of Truth.
We don't even have to look very far back to see how platform level "fact checking" systems are used and abused to silence and suppress information that goes against mainstream narratives or is viewed as politically damaging.
MiniTrue would just remove wrongthink, so that's hyperbolic.
I don't love relying on this one source of fact/bias checking so much, but the general idea of not allowing unrestricted use of whatever source without warning is good.
Its better to have some "fact checking" than the "trust me bro" system.
We all know all "fact checking" systems have humans behind it, those humans can have biases, dislikes or do mistakes. But thats the reason why we should not have such system is not good. Its the viewers discretion to believe into the fact/bias checks of the given page. We are just giving our best effort to simplify the view.
Then i give you the recommendation to block the bot, if you dont like it.
Anyone is free to rip apart my comment, and that source, but that task becomes more difficult when bots that have been anointed as bias and fact checkers, contradict them in any way, or are themselves biased.
Overall, we rate Mondoweiss as Left Biased and Questionable due to the blending of opinion with news, the promotion of pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist propaganda, occasional reliance on poor sources, and hate group designation by third-party pro-Israel advocates.
I feel like āblending of opinion with newsā and āoccasional reliance on poor sourcesā is all that really need be said.
I independently checked Mondoweiss using Media Bias a few months ago because it was posted elsewhere and I had not heard of it before, but was disturbed to see the extra reasoning behind the rating.
Itās for sure questionable at best, the Wikipedia discussion someone else posted was enlightening on that, but ādesignation as a hate-group by pro-Israelā sources doesnāt really mean much when sources like the ADL equivocate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic rhetoric in bad faith.
Have you looked into who runs Media Bias Fact Check? It's pretty much as opaque as it gets for a website that claim to have an authoritative list of biases for hundreds of websites. Just because it's a meta source does not make it any more credible than any other random website.
Given the overwhelmingly negative response from the community, what is the justification for leaving the bot in place? Is it because the moderators think they know better than everyone else?
Numerous comments contain thoughtfully researched, balanced and reasonable criticisms, and your reaction is to basically call them just a bunch of negative nellies, rather than to consider maybe whether they have a point.
If I made a bot that shared fake news in comments on every single news story, would you say that having the option to block that bot is sufficient? I can block anyone, yet you still ban people for breaking the rules here.
Youāre getting way too defensive, and digging your heels in - criticism isnāt always bad faith.
I wish bot comments didn't count toward the comment count, too. It's annoying to see "1 comment" and then you look and it's just this or the summary bot.
Bot: Hmm this article reflects reality, thus it is biased to the left.
Using charged language like that constitutes disinformation and is reprehensible. Imagine if viewers started disregarding a source on account of your bot declaring it biased.
You can even be better than that! You can make a community that fact check news article / news pages. Then we can add the threads from that community to the bot and have there news page specific discussion.
Why does the bot spend so much space asking for donations to mediabiasfactcheck.com and thanking them for an api? Especially when it's one of the few areas not in a spoiler block so it's always shown?
Please get rid of it. I'll figure my own truth from facts I descern are true. I don't need someone else telling me what to believe. Especially with the election coming up...
Media Bias Fact Check is totally meaningless in world news since the overwhelming majority of international news coverage seen in the west is filtered through just three global agencies, AP, AFP and Reuters and they always toe a pro US/Nato line.
Hmm. It's not a perfect way of measuring source bias, and bias is only correlated with truthfulness as I think they themselves admit, but I applaud the spirit.
I worry that people will put too much stock in it's assessment, and as far as I can tell propaganda posting is already pretty controlled, on .world specifically. Did you code this yourselves? Is there some way one of us could request to push to the source, like if I figure out some way it could be better? In particular, it would be good to add notes on the specific sources commenters have described as having issues not covered by MBFC.
I appreciate having this bot, and I also think that it can be tweaked to be better. Are there other services that do something similar (ex. I see ground.news in the bot comments). What might be better is if there was a bot that linked to a few different options, so that people can benefit from the extra information. I seem to remember a Lemmy bot that was doing something like that last year, but I can't find it now.
For example, a format like this might get the benefits of the bot while also addressing the concerns people have:
Wikipedia: Left Bias, Privately Owned, High Factuality
See the Ground News page for this article to compare bias and credibility with other sources
See this page to learn about this bot, and how you can support the tools above.
If the bot was open sourced somewhere, then people could contribute improvements to formatting and add/remove sources as appropriate. It doesn't need to be a fully democratic process, as the maintainers would get the final say, but it would make people trust the tool a lot more.
Other small tweaks / bugs
The links need an https:// at the start, else it breaks and shows https://instance/LINK
If the data can be condensed some more, with inline links as opposed to full ones. Yes we should recommend that developers fix their apps/frontends, but with federation it's likely that there will be breakages in a lot of places. Improvements to comment format will help.
I'm not sure if the thank you and donation link is appropriate in the comment, since it feels like an advertisement / endorsement. Having that information on a separate link would be more fair. For example, ground.news also has a donation page, but it's not in the comment.
Thanks for the feedback. With the new format we will think about it, but i think this is pretty good.
We will discuss this and come back to you. We would love to open sourc ethe bot but the code quality for reading is not in a good state. We will have to clean the code up. But we will be working for that.
While I'm not as concerned with MBFC as many others are, why not use Wikipedia's RSP as the datasource? Made by the most reliable user-generated platform in the world, it's a great list of controversial sources and is completely open. Changes are also infrequent enough so that adding to the database by hand would be quite easy.
I also echo the concerns raised below on the uselessness at a glance due to the accordion hiding the only information and purpose the bot was created to serve.
A whole lot of people here don't read MBFC each day and it shows. They tend to take a single and testable claim and make a decision. It's really easy to see if the claim is true or false if the claim is specific. They don't have a habit of taking a big claim and ruling it false because of one small detail like Snopes does.
See, this is what I'm talking about. They don't fact check articles by specific publishers. They fact check a claim. "Is this statement true", "did X Y", etc. they don't do "is this this article by the guardian true." That's a whole separate thing not done by them.
They offer a separate service where they rate the general trustworthiness and bias of a publication but that's not the same as doing a specific article, is it?
Your comment makes me wonder if you might be confusing them with someone else or are intentionally saying something about them that isn't accurate. Because your comment is incompatible with what they actually do.
Deciphering media bias is tough, and finding 1 site that will 'perfectly' identify biases is an impossible task, but at the minimum having this bot show up on posts 'gets people thinking' about the credibility of their news sources.
MBFC doesn't have to be the ultimate arbitrator either. If it is missing something about a specific article people can call it out in the comments. At the end of the day, the worst thing it does is add more data about a news source and I'm not gonna complain about that.
Media Bias Fact Check is a fact-checking website that rates the bias and credibility of news sources. They are known for their comprehensive and detailed reports.
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A lot of the criticism I've seen thus far falls into two categories:
Users complaining that their favorite source is scored poorly
Users complaining that the ratings have various sources of statistical bias
The ones in the first group I think should take it as a wakeup call that they are either headline shopping or missing out on other perspectives of current events. This is especially important on the international stage where armed conflicts will naturally produce two opposing accounts (and lots of propaganda).
The second group have a point - MBFC isn't the end all be all, but it's certainly better than nothing. Having meaningful bias measurements for each relevant scale would be impressive but way beyond what MBFC aims to do.
So all in all - I see this as a very positive change
While I love the idea, I KNOW that there are certain groups that will refuse to accept that factual information. Tankies, for instance, will refuse to accept any criticism of their preferred sources. (As will Russian-asset Jimmy Dore.) Far-right conservatives will do the same, only on the other end of the spectrum.
Itās subjective. The opinion of one random man on the internet and his supposed volunteers.
Iāve seen it rate Indian papers low and add comments like āNever once reported anything false.ā Meanwhile some US garbage will be ranked as reliable and the comments are an essay on all the times theyāve been busted lying.