There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot

Hi all!

As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker. 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 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.

Spuddlesv2 ,

Yes MBFC is Extremely American in its definitions of left and right. A less US-centric rating would be much preferred.

I generally like the idea otherwise.

Aurenkin , (edited )

My personal view is to remove the bot. I don’t think we should be promoting one organisations particular views as an authority. My suggestion would be to replace it with a pinned post linking to useful resources for critical thinking and analysing news. Teaching to fish vs giving a fish kind of thing.

If we are determined to have a bot like this as a community then I would strongly suggest at the very least removing the bias rating. The factuality is based on an objective measure of failed fact checks which you can click through to see. Although this still has problems, sometimes corrections or retractions by the publisher are taken note of and sometimes not, leaving the reader with potentially a false impression of the reliability of the source.

For the bias rating, however, it is completely subjective and sometimes the claimed reasons for the rating actually contradict themselves or other 3rd party analysis. I made a thread on this in the support community but TLDR, see if you can tell the specific reason for the BBC’s bias rating of left-centre. I personally can’t. Is it because they posted a negative sounding headline about Trump once or is it biased story selection? What does biased story selection mean and how is it measured? This is troubling because in my view it casts doubt on the reliability of the whole system.

I can’t see how this can help advance the goal (and it is a good goal) of being aware of source bias when in effect, we are simply adding another bias to contend with. I suspect it’s actually an intractable problem which is why I suggest linking to educational resources instead. In my home country critical analysis of news is a required course but it’s probably not the case everywhere and honestly I could probably use a refresher myself if some good sources exist for that.

Thanks for those involved in the bot though for their work and for being open to feedback. I think the goal is a good one, I just don’t think this solution really helps but I’m sure others have different views.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

Removing the bias rating might be enough indeed.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source.

If you’d program something, perhaps this should be the start.

fine_sandy_bottom ,

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.

Just_Pizza_Crust ,

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?

anubis119 ,

I think this tool, while probably well-intended, only adds to the polarization problem of the world.

Beetschnapps ,

The bot is basically loud as fuck in a way that disrupts the comment feed.

Imagine how comments should create and add to a conversation. Imagine how various lemmy clients feed or service that conversation….

Now imagine how a double dropdown big as fuck post says “fuck you” to that conversation.

Just please consider how the form of your shit can be just as imposing as the content, which I really appreciate.

Yet somehow your posts always have me thinking “shut the fuck up” which seems antithetical to building a community.

workerONE ,

I think it should be removed

Naich ,
@Naich@lemmings.world avatar

You don’t need every post to have a comment basically saying “this source is ok”. Just post that the source is unreliable on posts with unreliable sources. The definition of what is left or right is so subjective these days, that it’s pretty useless. Just don’t bother.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •