Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
The !news@lemmy.world mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.
Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.
Yes. A certain amount of my complaint about MBFC bot is not that it’s a bad idea per se, it’s just that the database and categorizations are laughably bad. It puts Al Jazeera in the same factual classification as TASS. It lists MSNBC as factually questionable and then when you look at the actual list, a lot of them are MSNBC getting it right and MBFC getting it wrong. It might as well be retitled “The New York Times’s Awful Neoliberal Idea of Reality Check Bot”. (And not talking about the biases ranking – if that one is skewed it is fine, but they claim things are not factual if they don’t match the appropriate bias, and the bias is unapologetic center-right.)
You can’t set yourself up to sit in judgement of sources that write dozens of articles every single day about unfolding world events where the “objectively right” perspective isn’t always even obvious in hindsight, and then totally half-ass the job of getting your basic facts straight about the sources you’re ranking, and expect people to take you seriously. I feel like mostly the Lemmy hivemind is leaps and bounds ahead of MBFC bot at determining which sources are worth listening to.
FUCK FUCK FUCK YES
This is an actual up-to-date and very extensive list that people who care bother to keep up to date in detail (even making distinctions like “hey this source is ok for most topics but they are biased when talking about X, Y, Z”). This would immediately do away with like 50% of my complaint about MBFC bot.