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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…

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

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.

corsicanguppy ,

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.

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

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

Raffster ,

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.

otp OP ,

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.

gothic_lemons ,

Thanks everyone for your comments and information. Thank you OP for making this thread. I will now begin downvoting MediaBiasFactCheck bot

leftzero ,

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.

otp OP ,

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

leftzero , (edited )

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.)

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

Nougat ,

Because I don’t trust some internet rando’s bot to have my best interests in mind.

otp OP ,

The opinions don’t come from the bot or its creator though

Routhinator ,
@Routhinator@startrek.website avatar

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.

BlorpTheHagraven ,

Yeah, or when it says The New York Times is leftist.

Helpful for keeping me honest about checking sources, not always very honest itself.

davidagain , (edited )

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.

OhNoMoreLemmy , (edited )

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.

Linkerbaan , (edited )
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

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 lemmy.world/post/18245990

DudeImMacGyver ,
@DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

MapleEngineer ,
@MapleEngineer@lemmy.world avatar

Extremists never let reality get in the way of their absolutist slurs.

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Imagine calling people advocating against literal Genocode extremists.

MapleEngineer ,
@MapleEngineer@lemmy.world avatar

Where did I say that?

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

Where did I say you said that?

some_guy ,

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.

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

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

DudeImMacGyver ,
@DudeImMacGyver@sh.itjust.works avatar

I refer you to my previous statement friend.

Linkerbaan ,
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

I refer you to my previous statement.

AbsoluteChicagoDog ,

As opposed to the anti-Zionist Republicans? The fuck are you talking about?

Linkerbaan , (edited )
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar

As opposed to the anti Zionist third parties such as Cornel West and Jill Stein.

Do you believe Republicans are liberal?

Furbag ,

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.

otp OP ,

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.

frog_brawler ,

It’s biased.

MindTraveller ,

Because fuck Ground News and fuck that spambot

DampSquid ,

Why fuck Ground News?

MindTraveller ,

Their judgement of what’s left, what’s right, and what’s center is arbitrary and misleading.

andrew_bidlaw ,
@andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

WarlockLawyer ,

That last part is the biggest annoyance for me. Gives me false hope a conversation has started

MataVatnik ,
@MataVatnik@lemmy.world avatar

Same

otp OP ,

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

BestTestInTheWest ,

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.

otp OP ,

That’s a great point. Why are the others downvoting when they can simply block it instead? Lol

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

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.

Aatube ,

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

andyburke ,
@andyburke@fedia.io avatar

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.)

imPastaSyndrome ,

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

ccunning ,

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.

Carrolade ,

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.

ccunning ,

Unless your goal is to spread misinformation

EXACTLY
This is why anyone vehemently opposed to it is an instant 🚩for me

ShepherdPie ,

Can you even point to a post where the bot calls the source out as propaganda (in whatever choice of words it would use to indicate this) or highly untrustworthy? I’ve literally never seen it say anything but left, left center, or center on any source and usually always highly trustworthy or trustworthy.

Carrolade ,

No, it will not specifically identify propaganda. Could just check their entry for RT if you wanted, I’ve never bothered to look. That’s a Kremlin funded publication though.

Iceblade02 ,

That has more to do with the fact that centre-right/right/far-right sources are seldom posted to lemmy and the communities implementing it generally prefer factual reporting.

Here are some examples of other ratings:

mediabiasfactcheck.com/goteborgs-posten/

mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-sun-bias/

mediabiasfactcheck.com/fria-tider-free-times/

ShepherdPie ,

I don’t doubt there are far-right sources out there, but the person I replied to stated that ‘people are complaining because the bot is calling out their posts as right-wing propaganda’ which I’ve seen zero evidence of here on Lemmy.

Maggoty ,

Mmmm yes everyone who wants to get rid of the conservative corporate disinformation bot is themselves trying to spread disinformation.

Projection, that’s totally original.

Carrolade ,

In America, that is not conservative in the slightest, unless you’re coming from a hard communist position. What’s the corporation?

Maggoty ,

MBFC

Carrolade ,

Yeah, it’s just owned by one dude named Dave, funded mainly through user donations.

Maggoty ,

Oh because that’s better?

Carrolade ,

Uh, yea, actually. When people complain about corporations, they’re worried about how shareholders, who have no actual emotional or long-term attachment to their ownership of the company, have no real incentive to actually do things in any sort of ethical, or even long-term healthy way.

If they’re just going to sell their shares someday, why should they care?

If someone is working on a project of their own, it’s much more possible for it to be a passion project, where they care about more than simple short term profitability. You’re just more likely to encounter ethical behavior once that fiduciary duty to shareholder profits above all else is removed.

Maggoty ,

See that’s funny though because it’s just the other extreme. One guy is rating thousands of websites by himself?

Although we know that’s not the case. Their website says there’s a team.

Carrolade ,

Well, sure, it’s always going to be run somehow. Things do tend to be owned by people in our system. You could say it should be a nonprofit if you wanted, that’d be fair.

And yes, I’d expect a single person would be unable to handle the workload. In addition to reading and fact checking, there’s also the admin stuff, where someone has to run the website, handle expenses, shit like that.

Maggoty ,

Yes people to help the disinformation.

Carrolade ,

Uh huh. I think you just like far left propaganda. Your willingness to just whine in vague, general terms about everything without offering anything substantial in the way of criticism sort of betrays you as just participating in some sort of brigading-type thing.

Maggoty ,

Oh there’s been plenty of substantial criticism, with examples. If you’re not seeing them in this comment section it’s because you don’t want to.

Carrolade ,

I was just talking about our conversation. “Conservative!” “Corporation!” “Opposite of a corporation!” “Has a team!”

Not particularly substantial stuff. I did see your other, much better comment in here, and left a reply.

Maggoty ,

Good, now you know half of where it’s coming from. Keep looking around the comment section.

Carrolade ,

Yeah, I’d rather not. Some interaction with you is plenty, you’re very trolly.

zazo ,

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…

ccunning ,

Sure - do whatever you want. There are users on this very instance that I downvote every post they make rather than block.

I also have comment(s?) in this very thread about when I downvote it.

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

Personally I find the downvote/up vote system to be super unproductive, the only thing it accomplishes is squashing the minority opinion, I keep the score system disabled for the comments section as a whole, it makes life easier and prevents me from being effected by populous/bandwagon bias. It still sorts by score for top-level but, it made navigating so much much peaceful.

Maggoty ,

Over all and in general sure. But for things like bots it’s really good feedback.

Maggoty ,

Disinformation is dangerous. That’s how we got the white “alternative facts” thing in the first place. We shouldn’t tolerate it at all.

tyler ,

Nobody in this comment section has provided a single instance of it being disinformation. But people sure are claiming a lot of shit without backing up it one bit. I’m inclined to believe that they’re most likely far right trolls who disagree with their favorite news outlets getting labeled something.

Maggoty ,

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.

So you missed this comment then? And the ones where they point out any pro Palestinian source is rated badly?

tyler ,

There isn’t a single link or source for literally any of these claims in any of the comments. So yeah I’m still pretty sure it’s just people making shit up until they can back up a claim, even one.

Maggoty ,

That’s because you can check it all on MBFCs own website.

tyler ,

Not if they don’t provide a link to the news source they’re talking about. So yeah, still no proof, source, nothing. Pretty clear it’s your bias at this point.

Maggoty ,

So you’re too lazy to check the cross reference of BBC and the Ayn Rand Institute on MBFC and too lazy to go to their websites and you want to blame me for not giving you the simplest links ever?

Did you press F to doubt when they tried to teach you 1+1 in 1st grade too?

tyler ,

You make a claim, you source it. That’s how debates (and literally any science at all) work dumbass.

Maggoty ,

No. You source stuff that’s not generally available. Academic papers aren’t out there sourcing the existence of the universe. Asking for easily available stuff to be sourced is a form of trolling.

tyler ,

It clearly isn’t easily available if you can’t even provide a single fucking instance of it now, is it? Sourcing what you’re fucking talking about is how debates work you fucking dickhead. This has nothing to do with a bibliography. It’s about putting a fucking link referencing the material you’re alluding to.

Maggoty , (edited )

No I could. I just refuse to do your 2 second Google search for you.

Edit, to be clear I refuse to do several Google searches for you when the recommended course of action is to check their website for yourself

otp OP ,

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

imPastaSyndrome ,

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.

fmstrat ,

Everyone down voting should read this: mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/ (the entire scoring methodology is transparent)

And then laugh at this.

https://lemmy.nowsci.com/pictrs/image/e0ad83ff-bed7-4767-aef4-5eca9b4b2ad5.png

Maggoty ,

I don’t care if it’s transparent. You can be transparently biased.

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