No “personal freedom” to violate the rights of others should exist when you are acting on behalf of the government, just like you can’t advertise AT&T’s service while on a call working tech support for Verizon and not expect to get fired.
My personal view is that the bot provides a net negative, and should be removed.
Firstly, I would argue that there are few, if any, users whom the bot has helped avoid misinformation or a skewed perspective. If you know what bias is and how it influences an article then you don’t need the bot to tell you. If you don’t know or care what bias is then it won’t help you.
Secondly, the existence of the bot implies that sources can be reduced to true or false or left or right. Lemmy users tend to deal in absolutes of right or wrong. The world exists in the nuance, in the conflict between differing perspectives. The only way to mitigate misinformation is for people to develop their own skeptical curiosity, and I think the bot is more of a hindrance than a help in this regard.
Thirdly, if it’s only misleading 1% of the time then it’s doing harm. IDK how sources can be rated when they often vary between articles. It’s so reductive that it’s misleading.
As regards an open database of bias, it doesn’t solve any of the issues listed above.
In summary, we should be trying to promote a healthy sceptical curiosity among users, not trying to tell them how to think.
[A patient] found himself afraid to disturb the stranger who had sat down in his living room, only to realize hours later that the stranger was his wife.
Thankfully, the patient was Canadian so the wife survived the encounter.
While I think it’s important to have some sort of media bias understanding, I dislike the bot being the first (and sometimes only) comment on a post. Maybe it should be reserved only for posts that are garnering attention, and has a definitive media bias answer for (the no results comments are just damn annoying to see).
It also has the knock-on effect of boosting the post higher in whichever sorting algorithm users are using. So it often feels artificially controlled whenever something has 100+ upvotes and less than 10 comments, knowing the first comment is always a bot. Like, would it be fair for me to have 10 bots that comment factual information of posts I personally like, just to boost their visibility?
Interestingly, the wikipedia article on glyphosates says basically nothing about their role in Parkinson’s and instead focuses on debunking cancer claims.
I’m really glad this is getting proper media attention. This has been going on for a while and I haven’t seen much outside of small blips in Canadian media until now.
Judging by the used car online sites, it has about as much value left as any other car with similar age and kilometers. If I had to buy a car right now, I’d probably take a hard look at the alternatives. But they’d have to actually be better, I usually make car purchase decisions based on the qualities of the car.
Although Musk is certainly trying to make such principles difficult.
Good thing my car is new enough that I don’t have to make this choice for several years. Perhaps the competition will have caught up by the time I need to get a new one.
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