No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
Since you asked:
- The bot provides little “value” vs the noise it creates.
I don’t need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it’s a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this “threshold for scamminess” would be very subjective.
- This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point (“value” vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I’d read.
Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I’ve done and I’m much happier with my Lemmy experience.
And 3., the blurb it posts is gigantic compared to what you’d actually want to know.
Also 4. The media bias website has its own bias in that centre right outlets like CNN are classified as left.
Oh so Media Bias is from the USA and believes that anything that isn’t Republican is left 😂
It’s not even on point for American politics. It’s clearly a conservative viewpoint.
How i wish that was true.
The blurb being gigantic is my main gripe. I use Sync, which includes a thumbnail of each link. The bot is wordy as fuck and links 5 different things. So every time I go the comments section, it looks like this:
That looks like a terrible app. Voyager shows it as a collapsed post with like 1-2 lines of text unless you click on it.
It’s configurable. I personally think Sync is the best Lemmy app out there. I started with Jerboa then Voyager, and feel that Sync is by far the most polished. It’s not FOSS though, so I get that it has a bad rep here. Personally I’m happy to pay a bit to the dev to support his awesome work for something I use for far too many hours every day.
You can disable the big block previews in the sync settings. Or just block the bot. Or use the Lemmy option to just not show you bot accounts.
Genuinely not trying to be an asshole, those are all options. I like the bot but I understand how not everyone might. These are options to prevent dealing with it without yanking it out of everyone’s hands.
Yeah, I get those are options. I just like having thumbnails for most everything else, since I hate clicking little text links on mobile. I used to use RiF back in the day and that was always painful for me.
I’m sorry but CNN being center right is definitely an indication of your own bias in our Lemmy echo chamber. Relative to the masses, it’s about center left but still shows significant pro-left coverage.
Say what you want about there being a former no-kidding US communist party or that other country’s police systems make the whole US system right wing, but relative to the US (which mediabiasfactcheck is designed for) it is left. I was so impressed by the site many years ago when all the things I thought were centrist turned out to be biased toward my political beliefs. That’s what truth feels like
Apology accepted
Worse it lists BBC as “left-center”. Which is weird in itself since the designation is usually lean left or center left. Political scientists don’t stress the loaded word first. So much about MBFC exposes the site as a biased amateur project it’s hard to imagine how it got as much traction as it did.
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.
So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.
I only ever hear people mention “far right” (not familiar with this bot).
Are there any sources that you, yourself, would consider “right center”?
Bloomberg, Forbes, and Fox News jump to mind.Edit - you know looking at Bloomberg’s site again I think you could make an argument for it but it does appear to be mostly concerned with fact based news centered on the finance industry. I’m just used to seeing shit guest opinion articles from them.
Edit edit - in their place I offer up CNBC with their personal finance propaganda perpetually trying to convince Americans they just aren’t budgeting well enough.
Financial times, Newsweek
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Source?
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
Do you consider the GOP to be “far right”?
I see how that happened. If you check down thread though you’ll see I would rate a campaign organization for the GOP as right, not far right.
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
Looking through all the sources you mentioned, especially the center-right sources, the ratings tend to be accurate. Did you expect the center right sources to be rated as far right and the center left sources to be rated as right wing?
I expect the fact based objective sources to be rated as center/not biased. And sources calling for a complete destruction of liberal democracy to be far right, yes. The campaign site should be listed under Right as it’s transparently a partisan organization.
The comparison with leftists here would be if they listed Anarcho-Communists as “left center”. But then your response tells me everything I need to know. You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
Your response tell me everything I need to know, that you’re the average far left Lemming that sees everyone you disagree with as a far right incel.
The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot’s reply, you’d think it was the Gaurdian.
It actually rates it significantly higher than the Guardian, which it gives a mixed factual rating and medium credibility, which is the same rating they give the Sun. It’s laughable.
Jesus, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s insane.
Ooof. If it gives the S*n even a mediocre rating, it’s shit.
Thank you for actually providing an example. I’ve asked and I’ve seen others ask but no one ever actually provides evidence to back their claim, they just downvote or say “bot bad”.
Sure, no problem. Also, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that at least some of this backlash isn’t from people who don’t like the idea that their beliefs may not be objective facts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle with that from time to time.
But the real problem I have with these bots is that they can never capture the kind of nuance vetting a source requires. The Raw Story ranks high on credibility because they don’t publish lies, but they don’t publish anything worthwhile either. Most of their, “stories,” are second hand accounts of something someone (who may or may not be credible) said on CNN, or how a politician or pundit got mocked on social media, and then given a title that implies the incident was more significant than it was. It’s difficult to judge something like that with an algorithm that simply looks for, “Credibility,” and, “Bias.”
I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.
If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you’re either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.
And to think, this quote is almost 20 years old! Things have changed a lot since then.
We still make fun of conservatives, but it’s much less funny that they’re actually in power. Conservatives are living up to the satire.
It’s like the aliens in Galaxy Quest who think their Star Trek show is a documentary, only it’s conservatives watching The Colbert Report
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
One should be even more skeptical and demanding of proof for wannabe trust-gatekeepers of the entire Internet, than one should already be for single newsmedia entities - the former place themselves as supervisors of trust in the latter and yet have even less proven trustworthiness than them.
So it’s curious that the !world@lemmy.world mods keep on pushing for people reading posts on that community to use this specific self-annointed trust gatekeeper who has repeatedly shown that they themselves are biased (quite a lot to the Right of the political spectrum and pro-Zionistl) as their trust-gatekeeper.
I keep downvoting it because such action reeks of manipulation and is exactly the kind of thing that State Actors and Political Actors would do to shape opinions in the this day and age when people can read articles from anywhere in the World.
pro-Zionistl)
Would you have examples? Genuinely curious
Pretty much all Israel sites, for one. Jerusalem Post, etc.
I see, thanks
The responses the admin who added the bot gave to people’s concerns when they announced it, weren’t that great. (Link)
The Lemmy.world admin disregarded all criticism and just said people shouldn’t complain, after just asking for feedback in the post itself
Example:
What a terrible idea.
MBFC is already incredibly biased.
It should be rejected not promoted.
Admin response:
Ok then tell me an alternative we can use in the scale for free.
None? Then pls dont just complain complain complain… And dont suggest improvements.
As if removing it wouldn’t be an improvement. MBFC themselves admit it’s nothing more than pseudoscience. The fact anyone actually takes it seriously is laughable, especially considering some of the sources they consider “highly factual”
Ah, common LW mod behavior: act like you are open to discussion, but then get upset when people actually criticize you.
Yeah it happens all too often
A comment there made a very good point. If they only had the American left/right terminology that could be fine but annoying, but they also say left/right lean lowers a site’s score. So they’re giving websites that would be properly described as center right by the rest of the world artificially higher scores.
I’ve had to block it because it takes up two screens of my phone as my client doesn’t support spoiler tags properly. I’m not going to change my client over one noisy bot.
Also MBFC seems to be a bit biased (it’s definitely not correct on a few in the UK), as most bias rankings are, it’s why services like Ground News use several of these services to make up their ratings. At the end of the day only using MBFC data isn’t much better than listening to one guy tell you “yeah they’re totally fine”
Finally from what little discussion I’ve seen with the owner of the bot, they don’t seem to be very collaborative with the rest of the community and just shut down criticism.
What app are you even using? In Voyager it’s always collapsed in a spoiler and if you click on it, it’s just some text.
Probably Sync. I’m waiting for the next update too.
I’m mostly in favor of leaving the comment-clogging bots back on reddit where they can all talk to each other without me.
So the answers in this post are mostly that people are downvoting the bot because it is often wrong and then others defending it by saying “it’s not wrong it’s just based on American politics”.
If the bot reported from a range of sources that reflect a number of different political perspectives I’m sure it’d be more useful outside of the scope of American politics, and therefore wouldn’t get downvoted.
As far as I’m concerned the vote system is working as intended.
The internet is not American. There are no nations on lemmy ✌️
Agreed. NYT is center-right from my point of view, and I think it’s a pretty neutral assertion. The bot says it’s center left. That’s the same discrepancy as if they would call Fox News Center.
In my opinion the bot tries to shift the overtone window to the right. Just because Trumpists call everything leftist media doesn’t make it that.
This may have just been an autocorrect issue, but it’s Overton Window
I asked in another thread complaining about MBFC if anyone knew of alternatives and nobody shared anything. Anyone got any?
Edit: Fuck me for asking I guess…
Here’s an analogy:
The alternative to drinking bleach is not drinking bleach. As opposed to drinking “diet bleach,” or something equally ridiculous.
Why do you feel it would need to be replaced?
Because not everyone has strong media literacy. I may have the means to assess the quality of a source on my own but that’s not the case for everyone. This problem will hopefully solve itself with more users on Lemmy who can call out bad sources but right now it’s not uncommon to find posts with zero comments minus the bias bot.
But the bot is biased itself. That’s worse than no information.
Which is why I just asked if anyone knew of any alternatives. I will say, I’m at a minimum that the bot has people talking about how news should be vetted, at least.
Some people have mentioned https://ground.news. I haven’t tried it, this is not a vouch for their credibility.
Thanks for the reply! Ground.news is used by the bot to show potential alternative sources for the story which I’ve found useful.
That part actually is useful. It wouldn’t be getting down voted if it was just that.
They are using MBFC’s bias rating too, with some additional ratings from other sources for a few publishers. Seems to have a strong US-centric view as well.
Have you asked yourself who runs the bot and what their bias is?
Because it’s literally advertising spam. I can’t believe this person would want to ruin the entire good will of Lemmy by pushing their trash.
It simply serves no purpose.
Maybe because manh people think it’s useless and stupid and wish it would go away. Trusting a random bot to tell you the political leaning of an information source so you know whether to trust the information is peak stupidity, IMO.
Because it reports sources known to be unreliable (like Jerusalem Post and EuroNews) as Highly Trustworthy
It definitely doesn’t or shouldn’t. MBFC rates it as “mostly” trustworthy on their site. Definitely not highly
And do you have examples of either the source being untrustworthy or another service rating it more towards your perspective of the source?
From your link:
So then you’re referring to “Credibility” on MBFC rather than “Factuality” which is what I was referring to.
I personally don’t put much stock in that category. The “Credibility” is based on several factors including the age and popularity of the publication, the bias, and the factuality.
By MBFC system, it has a credibility score of, by my estimate, 6 points which is the minimum threshold for the high credibility rating.
Their scoring and our interpretation aside, I would still love to see sources and reasons on why you think the Jerusalem Post should be rated lower
It is essentially the mods forcing an opinion on the validity of every post’s source.
I didn’t know it was the mods. I was wondering how it hadn’t been banned yet for being obviously biased.
They had a big metapost a few weeks ago(?) Where they essentially said: “it’s staying, we like it, get over it”
Hmm. Is it just world@lemmy.world or the whole instance?
That is the instance. Other instances like lem.ee aren’t doing it. At least I don’t think they are.
Do you mean admins? Where did they say that?
How massively disappointing if so.
Mods, not admins. Though there’s some overlap in this case.
Two reasons: It’s a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias
Oh no, now we need a Media Bias Checker Bot Bias Checker
