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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.

DBT ,

I appreciate the bot. I like to play a game of “guess what the bot will say” before checking. I usually win, but it’s cool to have.

workerONE ,

I think it should be removed

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?

plz1 ,

I hate that I have to expand the section to see the rating. If that could be fixed, it’d be better.

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.

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.

anubis119 ,

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

mozz , (edited )
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

Not directly related to MBFC bot, but what's your opinion on other moderation ideas to improve the nature of the discussion? Something Awful forums have strawmanning as a bannable offense. If someone says X, and you say they said Y which is clearly different from X, you can get a temp ban. It works well enough that they charge a not-tiny amount of money to participate and they've had a thriving community for longer than more existing social media has been alive. They're absolutely ruthless about someone who's being tricksy or pointlessly hostile with their argumentation style simply isn't allowed to participate.

I'm not trying to make more work for the moderators. I recognize that side of it... the whole:

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.

... makes perfect sense to me. I get the idea of mass-banning sources to get rid of a certain type of bad faith post, and doing it with automation so that it doesn't create more work for the moderators. But to me, things like:

  • Blatant strawmanning
  • Saying something very specific and factual (e.g. food inflation is 200%) and then making no effort to back it up, just, that's some shit that came into my head and so I felt like saying it and now that I've cluttered up the discussion with it byeeeeee

... create a lot more unpleasantness than just simple rudeness, or posting something from rt.com or whatever so-blatant-that-MBFC-is-useful type propaganda.

jeffw OP ,
@jeffw@lemmy.world avatar

It’s tricky because we could probably make 100 rules if we wanted to define every specific type of violation. But a lot of what you’re talking about could fall under Rules 1 and 8, which deal with civility and misinformation. If people are engaging in bad faith, feel free to report them and we’ll investigate.

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.

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