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Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

179 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi all!

As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @[email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

I think the problem is with the whole concept. Most news organizations have more than one person working there, so unless the bot is measuring the bias of individual journalists it seems really silly. It presupposes that there's someone at the top of a large news organization dictating to the staff to make an article "more left" or "more right" or whatever. Sure at some news organizations (like FoxNews) that may happen, but I doubt that happens at AP or Reuters and many other news organizations.

I've seen many articles where the headline was incredibly biased (to get clicks I guess?) while the article was not. Clearly the editor that wrote the headline had more bias than the person that wrote the article who might've been a freelancer.

And many news articles don't have any bias at all. "Earthquake in California" is that a left or right biased article? I think it's neither. Even a quote from a politician, Kamala Harris said "XYZ" or Donald Trump said "ZYX" is it biased to report on what people said? It's a fact they said those words, is it biased to tell people what someone said? I think it's just treating people like adults who can read what a person said and make their own conclusions.

At the end of the day people have to learn how to spot bias themselves, there's no quick-fix-life-hack-work-around to skip having to build some experience with media literacy. Ground News or a bot or whatever will have their own biases, and if people are trusting someone on the internet to tell them what is biased, they've failed at media literacy from the get go.