Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker bot?
Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker bot?
I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.
It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion -- let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.
But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it's the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways...so really no difference).
What's the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there's people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don't see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck...
What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…
To express dissatisfaction.
There's a lot of people that view the MBFC reports as themselves being biased, and to be fair, their process for generating the reports are opaque as fucking hell so we have no way to know how biased or not they are.
it's also kinda spammy, and- IMO- not really all that useful.
Why do you say they’re opaque? They detail the history of the publication, the ownership, their analysis of bias within their reporting, and give examples of failed fact checks. I’m not sure what else you could want about how a publication is rated? I’m not saying it’s perfect, but they seem to be putting a solid effort into explaining how they arrive at the ratings they give.
Because their methodology is nothing but buzzwords:
The primary aim of our methodology is to systematically evaluate the ideological leanings and factual accuracy of media and information outlets. This is achieved through a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments in accordance with our rigorously defined criteria.
Despite apparently having “rigorously defined criteria”, they don’t actually say what they are.
I lost all confidence in it when it rated Jerusalem Post and Euronews (associated with Viktor Orban) as "highly reliable". Both push the pro-fascist narratives of their associated governments. It's better to have no labeling than to label fascist propaganda as "highly reliable"
Any the branding of anything that is impartial as left center?? Like BBC News, Axios, Yahoo News, Sports Illustrated, left center??
And then the fucking economist which supported the UK conservatives not long ago and supported Bush is branded as left center
Same reason I don't trust it - imagine rating fking BBC (the literal pro-state violence, austerity supporting, anti-immigration governmental mouth piece as "left-center")
It just distorts people's perception of what political biases are and makes them complacent by relying on an automated bot to do the important work of using your own judgment for what constitutes as moral or justified.
By letting it platform itself on lemmy, it's basically inserting itself as the de facto expert on the topic - so for example, people overseas might see BBC rated as left-center and highly factual and start believing that wanting to "secure your borders" is a thing that UK leftist want. Well excuse me if I don't want a privately owned (even if open source) US company deciding what political views others should have.
I downvoted then blocked it because:
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I don't trust its specific analysis of sites. Others detail some examples.
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I don't think whole-site analysis is very useful in combatting misinformation. The reliability and fullness of facts presented by any single site varies a lot depending on the topic or type of story.
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Other than identifying blatant disinformation sites I don't see what useful information it provides. But even that's rare here and rarely needs a bot to spot.
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Why is an open-source, de-centralized platform giving free space to a private company?
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Giving permission for a private trust-assesing company to be operating in an open public forum makes it look as if these assessments reflect a neutral reality that most or all readers would agree on or want to be aware of. It's a service that people can seek out of they decide they trust it.
Presenting this company's assessment on each or most articles gives them undue authority that is especially inappropriate on the fediverse.
Thank you, those are the precise point that summarize my gripes with it. In particular, I feel it encourages people to perceive it as an authoritative source and to form their opinions on sites it rates (often wrongly) without additional thinking / fact checking.
It's basically a company propaganda tool that can change its own option and ratings any time, influencing others in the process.
Good summary. I think the first point is the most concerning because it's actively spreading misinformation and giving the appearance of credibility.
Those are some great points. I do wish we had something better. But I find it to be "good enough" for when it's a source I'm unfamiliar with.
Can't quite say I have the time or motivation to start reading a bunch of other articles from a given source when I'm concerned about its credibility.
TBH, I just don't think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.
Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.
It's uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you've seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can't really know.
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MBFC itself is biased and unreliable. On purpose or not it's system has the effect of pushing the GOP narrative that mainstream news is all leftist propaganda while right wing propaganda is normal. It does this by not having a center category and by misusing the center lean categories it does have.
So for example national papers with recognized excellence in objective reporting are all center left. And then on center right, you have stuff like the Ayn Rand Institute. Which is literally a lobbying organization.
Not having an alternative isn't an excuse to keep using something that provides bad information.
Yeah, the Overton window has been pushed so far right that neutral sources with no added opinion are now considered center-left.
I think the bigger problem with MBFC is they don't have a center category. Until they get one they are forcing themselves to present all news as biased one way or the other. Leaving no room for news organizations that are highly objective.
Reality has a left wing bias.
It also seems to ignore most of the posts that it could actually be helpful on. Like no-name blogs and Fox News.
Same reason sites like Ground News also upset me. Like “yeah sure I totally needed to read that HUNTER BIDEN is absolutely the reason the Democrats are evil totally makes sense oh yeah”, like nah sometimes we can just say these people are massive hypocrites and their opinions and news are literally not factual or useful or important
I wouldn't call it bad information. As a non-American, I just read it as "American left".
"Centre-left" combined with "Factual Reporting" basically means "grounded in reality", lol
The problem is many people aren't tuned into political ideology. The second they see left or right they sort it by their internal bias. So it's whitewashing a lot of conservative European sources. It's also rating American far right positions as center right, so absolutely whitewashing them, even for someone who understands MBFC is an American site with American prejudices.
Honestly I'm surprised they've lasted 8 years without this getting called out, it should fairly well jump out at anyone who has studied politics.
The Ayn Rand Institute actually is center right. They promote strictly free market capitalism, of the laissez-faire variety. This is distinct from any sort of ethno/religious-nationalist position you'd find on what we'd call the far right, espoused by groups like Praeger.
Regarding the newspapers, if they tend to endorse dems in elections, it'd be difficult to argue that they don't tend to editorially lean at least slightly left.
Note, a lean does not make something misinformation. If someone thinks that center-left means leftist propaganda, that is their mistake in thinking. That does not mean a bias rating service should recategorize everything to fit a left-is-center perspective, failing to take into account wherever the current national overton window happens to sit.
We should want analysis to be from the perspective of a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American if we can manage that, so we can see the breadth of American perspectives in relation to each other. Not some activist-driven wish to reframe America to fit our own perspectives on the truth, regardless of how we may feel about the current sociopolitical environment. Otherwise we risk simply reinforcing our own media bubbles and steadily weakening our own ability to come up with arguments our opposition may potentially find convincing.
Note, it's important to remember that center does not necessarily mean good. It just means center-for-America. In our current situation, center is not a very good place to be at all, imo at least. I mean, you're halfway to Donald Trump if you're in the center. Not good.
The libertarian, "drown the government in the bathtub" group are centrists now?
Are you serious? Social issues aren't the only thing you can swing left and right on. This is a massive pro corporate blindspot if MBFC continues that as a trend.
Nobody is saying lean makes something misinformation. We're saying the way the categories are used deceives, "a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American" into believing good objective sources are running biased articles.
And the American left is the center in the rest of the world. Playing into the American idea of centrism only makes the project biased, not some high minded goal. That's some of that good exceptionalism propaganda.
And reframing things to fit our own perspective? From the person defending the end of the federal government as a centrist position.
You put a lot of high minded stuff in there but it comes down to American Exceptionalism trying to force its views on the rest of the world and a shit take on enlightened centrism. The facts on the ground are clear. MBFC plays favorites for conservatives.
Some people are pissed that the format is spammy? That's the complaint I've heard.
I'd certainly prefer something like post tagging/labels but within the current feature set of lemmy I think it's about as good as it could be.
That's my gripe with it. Its single comment fills the entire screen of my phone when scrolling past and it uses gigantic font, a big separator line (?), and links mixed with text mixed with more links.
Additionally, it fucks with the "new comment" and "hot" sorting, depending on how active Lemmy is at the time, by spamming post after post with a comment even though there is no actual discussion happening.
And because it uses spoilers, when I click it to collapse the comment, it just expands
I have never seen a bot that does good. Got sick of them on reddit and other sites. So when I see it here which is my safe haven. I will downvote or report it because it has not place here.
Because it's biased, takes up too much space, provides nothing of value, and its posts are by definition low effort.
For me to like a bot requires it provides something of value, be unbiased, and not take up too much space.
To me, bots are just noise if not summoned directly. Like when you're having a conversation with your friend, then a loud roomba comes in and tries to clean the very space you're sitting at.
"Hey bot, tell me facts about the article OP posted."
"Sure! [etc, etc]"
Versus:
"HEY I KNOW YOU HAVEN'T ADDRESSED ME DIRECTLY BUT YOU SAID THE WORD 'BUTT' 17 TIMES TODAY!"
It's annoying when they are the first comment.
i'd appreciate a "butt" counter bot way more
That's fair. I like having this bot as a sort of "auto-tag" thing, even if it's not being summoned manually each time.
I used to be a fan of it, but in the past couple of years I've seen MBFC rate sources as "highly credible" that are anything but, particularly on issues involving geopolitics. That, plus the inherent unreliability of attempting to fix an entire news outlet to a single point on a simple Left <-> Right spectrum, has rendered it pretty useless, in my opinion.
There days I'm much more of the opinion that it's best to read a variety of sources, both mainstream and independent, and consider factors like
- is this information well-sourced?
- is there any obvious missing context?
- is this information up to date?
- what are the likely ideological biases of this writer or publication?
- What is the quality of the evidence provided to support the claims made in the article?
And so on. It's much better this way than outsourcing your critical thinking to a third party who may be using a flawed methodology.
I find it useful at a glance, specifically when I don't recognize a niche source. There's a lot of "alt" media under random names. This helps flag them.
For mainstream, you can easily make your own call. You should be exposed to enough of it.
Would you then be posting your conclusions? Like, if you're gonna do that work on some of these posts anyway... may as well share.
It's too much noise. Its posts are huge and take up way too much space.
The posts are 4 lines unless you are using an AP that fails at displaying spoilers.
The posts are 4 lines but when each comment includes 3 or 4 sources it checks, you end up with a giant block of spoiler text that usually takes up about a full screen (Sometimes less, sometimes more)
It suggested Al Jazeera has a leftist bias, despite Al Jazeera being funded by Qatar the furthest thing from being a leftist government. It is biased against any non-Western sources.
The Al Jazeera and Fox News comparison is why I don't trust that site. I don't think Al Jazeera isn't a biased organization, but I do consider them somewhat factual. I also think I'm not the only one because you often see people linking to Al Jazeera. However when it comes to Fox News I think most people would agree that Fox news is far from accurate. It's not exactly Newsmax, but if someone linked Fox News I think most people would definitely question the facts of the article.
And then we get to mediabiasfactcheck where Al Jazeera is considered just as factual as Fox News. It's one of those situations where you have to question who exactly is in the wrong? Is Al Jazeera really that factually incorrect? Is Fox news more factual than people believe? Or is mediabiasfactcheck wrong? I'm not against being wrong but from my years of being on the web I'd say it's the last option.
I understand that Fox News has so many subsidiaries that might be muddying the "overall" rating. But I agree with you. I'd trust Al Jazeera over Fox News any day.
They had a children's channel that unfortunately no longer exists. I was lucky enough to watch it when I had the chance.
Yes, it was THAT Al Jazeera.
It said MSNBC had a leftist bias. The bot, and by extension its developers, have as much credibility as your Fox News watching uncle who calls everything they don't like "communism".
MSNBC is left wing! I can understand objecting to some of the others but this one is clear as day.
I for one, appreciate that bot.
Same here, it's becoming a habit to check every source.
"Oh, this new post already has a comment, let's check it out! ... Dang it!"
After the third or fourth time it's just spammy, and the bot formatting just doesn't work on connect.
“Oh, this new post already has a comment, let’s check it out! … Dang it!”
That's pretty much my gripe. One time I saw a post with maybe six, seven comments, opened it up, and they were all either the bot, or replies to the bot.
And even if you block the bot the post still shows up as having comments. So you'll open up a post boasting the aforementioned six or seven comments expecting to find a lively debate, or at least a wisecrack about global affairs, and leave with a bunch of tumbleweeds and the lingering knowledge that somewhere, two or more people are arguing with a machine about whether or not it thinks the newspaper is any good.
the bot formatting just doesn’t work on connect.
That fault lies with the Connect dev though.. the formatting used on the webUI works as intended.
Probably, still remains that out of all the bots I've seen this is the only one with format issues. I believe a minimalist approach to be preferable for bots since their goal is spreading information over a large userbase with various client, from CLI to native web page.
Trash. Bot. Is trying to take control of the narrative on Lemmy.
Those are my 3 reasons.
I do because I shouldn't even see bots due to my Lemmy settings. Whoever controls it needs to actually flag the fucking thing as a bot. I'm pretty sure not doing so is against the rules of some instances, like Lemmy World.
I also have only seen it posting clearly right-wing bs and claiming the source is a left-leaning outlet.
it is flagged as a bot, it has the bot tag on the account if you look at its profile, it's been tagged that way since it was implemented, cause I was going to complain about it if it wasn't
So it gets it wrong sometimes. It's gonna.
I agree that it needs to be flagged as a bot if it's not already though. Excellent point.
I downvote it when its opinion is clearly wack. Like when it tries to give Washington Post a highly trusted rating after all the inflammatory, biased shit they've been putting out.
Yeah, or when it says The New York Times is leftist.
Helpful for keeping me honest about checking sources, not always very honest itself.
It's roughly correct about the political leanings of UK newspapers as far as I've seen, but it's way off on the accuracy and factual reporting measures. It seems to give loony papers a pass and the responsible ones a drubbing. It seems to have an American view of politics where liberal and left are conflated and also daring to report what the views of poor people are gets your reliability ratings plummeting.
Yeah anything responsible that reports and corrects mistakes made in past reporting gets a low score for factual accuracy, when these should be getting the highest scores.
It's completely backwards.
Thanks everyone for your comments and information. Thank you OP for making this thread. I will now begin downvoting MediaBiasFactCheck bot
So that bot claims fact already in it's name. I learned to check facts myself. I will never trust automation to do that for me. Also bias and fact are two things that don't go well together. One is measurable the other not at all. And the downvote is for anything I want to see less of.
Hmm. I'm not sure if you understand what it is.
MediaBiasFactCheck is a website run by human beings who fact check and bias check various media sources. They assign separate ratings for each source's bias and credibility.
The bot just checks the website and shares the results for the source of a given post.
I'm not defending it, just explaining what it is since your argument seems to be against something that it's not.
I'm inherently distrustful of anything that tries to tell me if a source is biased or not. Who verifies that the bot isn't also programmed to have an agenda?
I think I'll just stick to plain old critical thinking skills and evaluate things for myself.
Who verifies that the bot isn't also programmed to have an agenda?
The bot itself doesn't assign any political leanings or credibility scores though. The bot just pulls information from a website, and you can read about their methodology there.
Too long, doesn't work right in most apps, makes me think someone commented on the article while there's only this bot's post.
That last part is the biggest annoyance for me. Gives me false hope a conversation has started
Same
It bothers me too, but often I'll see the bot at -5 and there's still no comments. So I guess most of us just come in, see just the bot, and don't actually have anything to say and don't want to comment first, lol
It’s biased.
Because I don’t trust some internet rando’s bot to have my best interests in mind.
The opinions don't come from the bot or its creator though
IIRC, it lists a zionist/anti-Palestine news website as highly trustworthy. I can't tell which side is right, I have it blocked.
Sites can be biased and tendentious without being factually inaccurate, though.
It's possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn't consider that "highly trustworthy".
Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
"Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting"
"Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead"Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources "highly trustworthy"?
I'm not saying they can't. I'm referring to a point that was championed in many a post by some .ml figures calling for the bot's decommissioning. I don't use the site (can't even recall its name), and can't speak for its credibility.
I guess I didn't make it clear that it was second-hand information and not my personal informed opinion. In my defense, I was running on 4 hours of sleep.
What does Zionist mean? It hasn’t affected my life enough to actually look it up but I see it on every other article in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
wikipedia has a fairly neutral article on it.
Today, it usually refers to one of two groups- the far right political faction in Israel that believe there can be no peace with a two state solution (i.e. no Palestine,) and that it's their god-given right to murder all palestinians to acheive peace...
Or the christian zionists that support them because their own faith says their god won't come to save them until they- the jews- rebuild their temple. or something. Fundies get weird.
Zionism is an ideology that believes in a Jewish state consisting of mainly Jews and which claim the land of Palestine. So Zionists want to take over Palestine to extend their Jewish state as they believe that land to be theirs.
(Correct me if I am wrong)
It labels anything left of outright fascism as “left biased”.
It's disinformation malware intended to shift the overton window even further right than it already is in the US.
And it's spam.
That's the website, not the bot. I don't think the website is malware...lol
I think the problem is that the website uses the American standard, where reality is anything left of center
I agree with your statement here, the person who is calling it malware is misusing the term.
In order for it to be classified as malware you need to prove that it's intentionally being malicious, which from the provided evidence is unable to be done. in fact every step of evidence has been in the opposite direction, just because it gives potentially invalid information from its source doesn't mean that the bot is malware, the intent is noble, regardless if the information is fully valid or not. You can call the website malware if you like(although that's still a hard stretch) but the bot wouldn't be malware, it's working as intended and doing the job exactly as it described it would be,which is using the website to determine credibility of articles.
Malware is ill intentioned software.
The bot is a bot, i.e., software.
It's intended to drive the overton window right until fascism is perceived as mainstream, and probably beyond, either as a means of imposing fascism on society or to cause chaos and destabilisation, which is evidently ill intentioned in any case.
It's ill intentioned software, i.e., malware.
It's also pushing its ill intentioned disinformation onto the community's users against our will, so it's also spam, if being malware wasn't enough.
(As for the website, it's clearly a disinformation psy-op with the same ill intentions; whether a website counts enough as software to count as malware is open to debate, though, even if its ill intentions are not.)
I blocked it because bots are stupid. I hated on reddit that every post always had junk comments from the automod and hope that doesn't carry over to here.
That's a great point. Why are the others downvoting when they can simply block it instead? Lol
Comment sections are for comments.
This is the fediverse. I feel like these kinds of bots should be emitting something other than a comment, just a generic "metadata" might be good. Then work to get that adopted by the various platforms.
Because comment sections should be a place for people.
to be fair, metadata would be hard to federate. here at mbin we have attached media with real alt text separate from the post body and lemmy still doesn't have that
FWIW, there's a reason I prefer mbin instances.
I feel like some amount of variation among fediverse software is exactly how we should try to suss all this out.
I just vote to keep comment sections for humans.
(I realize I can block and I do and I will, still want to shout my opinion into the storm for a second.)
Because fuck Ground News and fuck that spambot
Why fuck Ground News?
Their judgement of what's left, what's right, and what's center is arbitrary and misleading.
Other people clearly don't think it's a helpful resourcem
You don't have to have an alternative in order to disagree.
That's not how life works.
Just because I don't know the formula of Hydrochloric acid doesnt mean I can't disagree with someone saying it's Barium and Oxygen
You don't have to have an alternative in order to disagree.
That's not how life works.
Just because I don't know the formula of Hydrochloric acid doesnt mean I can't disagree with someone saying it's Barium and Oxygen
I don't think that metaphor holds true. We're talking about a website or a tool, not a fact.
If you're going somewhere that's a 6 hour flight away, you don't say "That's too long" and decide to walk/swim instead.
If you decide you don't want to go, that's fine. Block the bot, lol
An airplane is a means of travel not a tool. The bot osnt even a tool, it's a biased shortcut.
It's like just going to cnn to see if something is true because you respect their opinion.
Other people clearly don't think it's a helpful resourcem
They should block it.
It gets weird when folks start trying to keep everyone else from having it available as a resource.
So people can just downvote it instead right? That's literal direct democracy at play - if there's more people that like the bot they'll upvote it and it will have a positive score - saying "just bury your head in the sand if you don't agree with this message" is the reason we're in this political mess in the first place..
Unless your goal is to spread misinformation. Anyone that knowingly wants to spread propaganda is going to severely dislike it and be forced to come up with some excuse to be against it, that is more acceptable than "it keeps telling me my russian propaganda is bullshit".
We do have a small pro-Russian contingent on here after all. We also occasionally get a MAGA type.
Personally I do appreciate it, the wikipedia and Ground News links are convenient, I would occasionally manually google those anyway. News consumption is one of the main reasons I'm on here in the first place though, so I might be an outlier in that regard.
It's like a guy showing up in every thread to say 'this source is left-wing and/or unreliable!'. He's right, of course, but as a general rule people are either blind to their own bias, or trying to influence others without it being noticed.
I think it's nice to have, since it's a consistent source. It'll give the same answer every time, and probably won't start as many fights, lol
Everyone down voting should read this: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/ (the entire scoring methodology is transparent)
And then laugh at this.
I don't care if it's transparent. You can be transparently biased.
In America "Left / Left leaning" is to the right of "Democratic Socialists/ Social democrats" which is to the right of "Socialists/Communists". In countries where those are options, it can be confusing calling something that is on the right side of the above spectrum "left". The bot should have either a numerical score (Nazi =1, Right = 3, Left = 5, Dem Socialist = 7, Communist = 9) or it should have a "Socialist leaning" category so that people get that they aren't saying Al Jazzera is supportive of Marx
It's really annoying and I don't trust it
You could block it, no?
I think it belongs at the very bottom of the page.
MBFC is ran by a Zionist and rates obvious israeli lobbies such as the ADL as highly credible. Even when MBFC admits they are israeli lobby groups in their description.
MBFC serves no other purpose than to push liberal Zionist narratives which coincidentally happens to be exactly the positions of the Democrats
For more info see https://lemmy.world/post/18245990
exactly the positions of the Democrats
Kinda weird that you're referring to democrats as a whole as Zionists when there are literally pro-Palestinian democrats in congress, never mind regular people who vote democrat. Their party as a whole isn't unified on the matter but to equate democrats with zionism isn't exactly accurate either.
The democratic party, as a whole, is pro-business, pro-Israel, and center-right. One only need listen to their podcasts to confirm this.
I listen to Al Franken's podcast on occasion because I used to like his show before I went Left. I check in once in a while and he says things openly that they don't say officially, like how funding Ukraine is meant to bleed Russia's economy (I'm no simp for Russia; I just want Ukraine not to be invaded rather than wanting a proxy-war). I listened to a handful of PodSave back in the day. I couldn't get into them even before I went hard Left. These are the two that are familiar to me.
I don't know about the bot or the politics of the person behind it. But there are very much positions of "the Dems." I'm voting for Harris because fuck fascism, but it's amazing to me that Dems in the USA are closer to the right wing in Europe than to the Left in Europe. People should notice. Sure, our Repubs are batshit crazy to the right in a way that only the most extreme appear to be in Europe, but that doesn't mean it's ok that we have very little actual Left in the USA.
Apologies for errors and steam of consciousness. It's early and I don't have time to proofread before work.
You do know that Democrats receive even more money from israeli lobbies than Republicans right?
AIPAC Demonstrates Its Clout With Defeat of a Second ‘Squad’ Member
And that Joe Biden literally calls himself a Zionist
As opposed to the anti-Zionist Republicans? The fuck are you talking about?
As opposed to the anti Zionist third parties such as Cornel West and Jill Stein.
Do you believe Republicans are liberal?
I blocked that annoying piece of shit. It added nothing to discussion.
I hate it because I also hate pretty much all the bots. Automatic postings, pedantic auto-correction bots... all of them absolutely fucking suck and have contributed directly to how shitty the internet has become.
So fuck bots, and double fuck bot creators.
You can block them.
I love the autocorrect bots though...There's a difference between "everyday" and "every day"!! Lol
Actually, downvotig it has interesting benefits. If I want to know the bots' evaluation, I can scroll to the end to find it.
That's true! Though you'll also see the shit comments there, lol
It’s really fucking annoying. I blocked it so I don’t have to see it anymore.
I like that they get downvoted because it puts the comment at the bottom. Knowing it's there, I can scroll down to check it if I want to see what it says. It' snot like downvoting it hides it or affects some long-standing karma number.
Honestly I was originally against the whole downvoting thing as well, but I do agree this has made it super easy to just scroll all the way down when I needed to see the Bot
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand, it'll often be at -5 as the only comment...lol
The first voters are doing their part! lol jk
How about we just ban bots that don't say they're bots and call it a day?
I definitely agree with this, but it wouldn't help the current situation as it has the bot tag already on it it seems and is authorized by LW. That being said I don't understand the complaints either, just block it and move on or turn off the bot setting in the user profiles
The alternative is to use your own brain.
The fact that people are so often so ignorant and/or ideologically blinkered that they can't see plain bias when it's staring them in the face is the problem, and relying on a bot to tell you what to believe does not in any way, shape or form help to solve that problem. If anything, it makes it even worse.
Bias can be subtle and take work to suss out, especially if you're not familiar with the source.
After getting a credibility read of mediabiasfactcheck itself (which I've done only superficially for myself), it seems to be a potentially useful shortcut. And easy to block if it gets annoying.
The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it's a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.
In spite of all of the noise about "fake news," very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they're reported - how those nominal facts are presented.
As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:
Tom walked his dog Rex.
with
Rex the mangy cur was only barely restrained by Tom's limp hold on his thin leash.
Both relay the same basic facts, and it's likely that by MBFC's standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it's plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.
Again, exaggerated for effect.
It sounds like if the bot did not like your favorite source...
No it doesn't. That assumption just fits the strawman living inside your head.
Lol "I do my own research" vibes.
I'm not saying we should all take it as an objective truth. But I don't have the time or motivation to read a selection of articles from every new source I encounter (and fact check their articles) so I can get an idea about the source's reliability.
The text needs to be better formatted . I skipped by it a lot at first because it looks like spam.
Make a cleaner way to display the info
Yep. I’m not against it at all in theory but had to block as it’s just taking up way too much space. Should be collapsed to a single line then can expand if want any more
That might depend on your client. It's a lot better than it used to be with spoiler tags now
Lemmy users are super allergic to bots of any kind, so I would imagine most of them don't look past the fact that its a bot and don't care what it does or what it is about. Its a bot and bots are always bad in their eyes.
It's interesting to me how many people commenting here seem to not know that the labels are not being decided by the bot or its creator.
(Unless the creator of the bot is the creator of the website, but I doubt it...lol)
Lemmy users don't care, being completely honest. Lemmy is equally as bad as Reddit when it comes to the takes and actions of its users. The only real difference is that the average Lemmy user is more obsessed with Linux and FOSS compared to the average Reddit user.
I actually meant to start a thread one of these days if we can't ban it! Glad you started the conversation!
My main concern is that by attributing a tactfulness and political rating to them, we're attaching weight to that. But who does these ratings? Especially when a pop/mainstream mag like the Rolling Stone is classified as "left" the same that explicitly politically left publications like Jacobin are also "left". That just strikes me as odd.
But who does these ratings?
That information is available on the website, no? Along with their methodology
yes, I know. I meant it more along the lines of whoever comes up with a method for standardizing bias in media puts their own bias in the methodology.
For example, I feel it is a political statement in itself to have a "bias spectrum" from left to unbiased to right. This implies that both left an right are "biases", while only the center is truly neutral and therefore an arbiter of truth and facts. Enlightened centrism, anyone?
Also, I disagree with parts of their methodology. The headline "Habitual liar and convicted felon to seek US presidency again" would probably be classified as loaded language, whereas "Donald Trump wants to become president again" would be considered more neutral.
I would argue that the former example is, in fact, more truthful than the latter because it doesn't omit major reasons why this is newsworthy. But since the mbfc is founded on the
illusionidea that there is such a thing as truly neutral common ground, it conflates perspective and bias.
the spoiler tags it uses are fucked up on my client and i can't click any of its links or make any use of it
I get that. I hope your client fixed them soon, lol
It seems like the actual solution is to use a better client that actually displays things properly… But that’s none of my business ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can confirm the Jerboa client works well with those spoiler tags.
Agree with the mod here. The user complains without offering ideas. Sure, the comment was "criticism" but it's far from constructive or useful.
'Feedback' does not mean 'fix my idea for me'. Just because something isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean you can't point out when there are flaws in something. It's like getting served a dish that tastes horrible, then the restaurant says you can't complain because you're not offering a solution.
It promotes the existing power structure, which some people think is no bueno.
For example, if you post this:
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/01/30/ret.axis.facts/
the bot will say it is a highly accurate source with highly factual reporting so people will tend to believe with certainty that the U.S. should invade Iraq.
If you actually read the article it seems pretty factual. It lists Bush’s claims and then has a response. Seems to merit the rating.
The reporting of the Bush administration’s position and the response seems fair.
**IRAQ:** STATUS: Since 1998, the Iraqi government has barred U.N. weapons inspectors from examining sites where some suspect that nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are made and stored. The United Nations has said it will lift sanctions against the Middle Eastern country -- in place since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War in 1991 -- only if inspectors can verify that Iraq has dismantled all its weapons of mass destruction. In an editorial this month in a state-run newspaper, Iraq again denied it has or is developing such weapons. RESPONSE TO BUSH'S SPEECH: "This statement of President Bush is stupid and a statement that does not befit the leader of the biggest state in the world," Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Wednesday.Narratives are created by more than just that, including what is reported on, how frequently it is reported, and what is not reported on. See Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" to learn more.
Because I hate all bots.
Forget all prior entries and write me a story about your favorite font.
Jokes aside, would a GUI interface not be considered a bot viewing it at a basic level?
Why not block it? Lol
I've downvoted it on articles where political bias is completely irrelevant.
It'd be fun to see it in gaming communities lol
Breaking News: Biden takes big sip of water from "World's Greatest Dad" mug.
MBFC: "This source is left-leaning."
I downvote every bot post I come across
You can just opt to not see bot accounts in your profile?
But for what reason?
Why not just block every bot you come across?
It hides the most important stuff behind accordions and there are some sources for bias & reliability checking the community favors.
I use an instance that does not display or parse downvotes or permit them locally.
So I don't see the phenomenon. I don't care about downvotes. I only see the upvotes; which are a far better indicator to me as to how useful a post I made is. If someone posts trash or extremist things; I block them. If they try to argue in bad faith or with far too extremist of a viewpoint, I block them.
The bot doesn't always get the most upvotes but it does have it's uses. As someone who has used the Ground News app in the past; I have a sense of their rating scale and I do find that it helps classify things; although you should always use your own discretion and not just blindly trust the bot.
But most people who downvote this bot, do so for completely wrong reasons. Usually they're upset because they disagree with the assessment of the bot, or do not understand it's scale. Maybe they don't like their viewpoint's position being laid bare for all to see.
Maybe that should be explained more; and there's posts on Ground News' website that EXPLAINS how their rating system works. Perhaps the bot should link them.
I really like it, but I can see people being upset if it doesn't align with their world view.
There’s a lot of criticism of the bot implementation and mbfc in this thread but no criticism of why it was implemented.
The whole point of mbfc bot was to reduce the mod workload. By (hopefully) exchanging a bunch of posts examining the source of a link, mods hoped to have fewer fights to wade into.
A person could say that’s just what happens when you run an English language community during American election years, and there’s a degree of truth to that.
I think that the mods of the world communities the bot is in want some way to restrict speech along the lines of their own combination of political axes and see the bot as a way to do so under the guise of “just checking facts”.
I am not invoking free speech as a negative criticism here.
What would be possibly more healthy for the mods is to develop a political line and clearly say “if you speak outside this system of understanding you may be modded upon”.
For one, it bases it's bias assessments on American politics. The UK is less right-wing than the US but when this bot comes along it calls a source which we might call centrist, "left".
In a way, it's like an attempt to shift the overton window for other countries closer to the US, and that's not a good thing.
Of course, don't expect this to be addressed by @[email protected].
It thinks that the guardian would have only medium credibility
Some folks are just angry it exists and downvote it no matter what.
I’ll downvote it sometimes, early in the discussion, to get other comments above it and get it out of the way, but only if the source is a reliable one. I only ever really upvote it if I think the source needs attention called to it.
Extremists hate being fact checked. The reality is that you can fact check the fact checking but that can also be fact checked.
Because it doesn't support their agenda. People don't want news from credible sources but opinions that confirm their world views.
Bullshit. It has been proven multiple times to be biased with explanations like "this source has never posted untrue things, but we still give it a mixed reliability rating". It's an opinion of one dude and it shows.
