Hi all!

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

  • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
    1·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
      01·
      3 months ago

      Thanks for the feedback. I have had the thought about it feeling like mods trying to tell people how to think, although I think crowdsourcing an open source solution might make that slightly better.

      One thing that’s frustrating with the MBFC API is that it reduces “far left” and “lean left” to just “left.” I think that gets to your point about binaries, but it is a MBFC issue, not an issue in how we have implemented it. Personally, I think it is better on the credibility/reliability bit, since it does have a range there.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
        01·
        3 months ago

        Just a point of correction, it does distinguish between grades. There is “Center-Left,” “Left,” and “Extreme Left.”

  • trevor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Remove it please. It’s an obtrusive advertisement for Ground News.

    It’s incredibly annoying to see comments: 1, only to click the post to see an ad. It makes me less inclined to interact with Lemmy at all. It’s the same kind of crap that ruined Reddit.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
      0·
      3 months ago

      We want to keep it in some form. Would you prefer not having the Ground News link?

      • qevlarr@lemmy.world
        0·
        3 months ago

        We want to keep it in some form.

        There’s your problem.

        You’re not really looking for feedback if you’ve already made up your mind. Stop pretending to listen to the community if you’re ignoring the countless blocks and downvotes. That’s your feedback right there

        How about you remove the bot and then fix whatever problems you have without doubling down on the bot solution? If you want community feedback on mod overburden, I’m sure people will be willing to help with that. But stop forcing the bot.

  • stormesp@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    @jeffw@lemmy.world Why did you stop replying to posts here? Most people is telling you the bot is bullshit. You stopped commenting in this thread while being active elsewhere, are you going to take action or not?

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.

    Bull fucking shit. The majority of feedback has been negative. I can’t recall a single person arguing in its favor, but I can think of many, myself included, arguing against it. I hope you can find my report of one particular egregious example, because Lemmy doesn’t let me see a history of things I reported. I recall that MBFC rated a particular source poorly because they dared to use the word “genocide” to describe what’s going on in Gaza. Trusting one person, who clearly starts from an American point of view, and has a clearly biased view of world events, to be the arbiter of what is liberal or conservative, or factual or fictional, is actively harmful.

    No community, neither reddit nor Lemmy nor any other, has suffered for lack of such a bot. I strongly recommend removing it. Non-credible sources, misinformation, and propaganda are already prohibited under rule 8. If a particular source is so objectionable, it should be blacklisted entirely. And what is and is not acceptable should be determined in concert with the community, not unilaterally.

    Edit: And another thing! It’s obnoxious for bot comments to count toward the number of comments as shown in the post list. Nobody likes seeing it and thinking “I wonder what people are saying about this” and it’s just the damn bot again. But that’s really a shortcoming in Lemmy.

  • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
      11·
      3 months ago

      One issue with poor media literacy is that I don’t think people are going to go out of their way to improve their literacy on their own just from a pinned post. We could include a link in the bot’s comment to a resource like that though.

      Do you think that the bias rating would be improved by aggregating multiple factors checkers’ opinions into one score?

  • Five@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    Who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

    This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website.

    MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. I’ve spoken with @Rooki@Lemmy.World about this issue, and his response has been that he will continue to use his tool despite its flaws until something better materializes because the API is free and easy to use. This is like searching for a lost wallet far from where you lost it because the light from the nearby street lamp is better. He is motivated to disregard the harm he is doing to !politics@Lemmy.World, because he doesn’t want to pay for the work of actual fact-checkers, and has little regard for the many voices who have spoken out against it in his community.

    By giving MBFC another platform to increase its exposure, you are repeating his mistake. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.