No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
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 truest 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-Israel) 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.
Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.
However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well
It’s hard to be non-biased. There’s not a single person who does not have a bias of some sort. The way people get bent out of shape over the bot makes me sad. It gives a decent starting point for anyone looking to start learning about the different biases and how different outlets report information. Of course it’s not a perfect bot or website it’s getting the info from, but it’s a valuable tool.
I did block it myself though. Sync gives large previews of links, so it did get a bit spammy. This could be disabled in the app’s settings, but it’s a feature I like so I can easily get to linked articles or videos. Wish I could turn it off for bots
The biased bias fact check bot… LMAOROLFZ…
I wish it looked like your screenshot. On Boost, I get everything folded out, occasionally with unclickable links.
The best apps for rendering are: Alexandrite, Connect, Jerboa, Photon, Quiblr, Summit, and Voyager. Sync and Boost are pretty poor at it despite being paid apps.
The spoilers look like crap on connect too. The bot takes a huge amount of screen real estate. I wouldn’t mind it as much if it was like 2 lines instead, but it takes up a whole screen.
Boost is free, but yeah.
Sync is free too.
I don’t consider free with ads or buy for no ads on the same level as the rest of the free Lemmy apps. I hate ads, won’t tolerate them.
I love how the shittiest apps are the paid ones.
Long live Voyager!
Dang. I didn’t realize how bad Sync is at rendering posts. It’s a giant unformatted mess for me as well. That screenshot is a far more tolerable presentation.
If it’s trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).
It’s getting it’s info from Media Bias Fact Check so explain to me how their method is wrong? You prefer All Sides. Or Ad Fontes Media? Both of which also say leaning left.
CNN isn’t left by any stretch. It’s corporate friendly that pays lip service to some liberal culture war issues.
In general I don’t disagree that CNN a corporation which has a fiduciary bias to it’s peers in the news it promotes. That is a bias of corporate person hood.
Many other issues there, but I’m curious on a spectrum in the US and in comparison to other similar organization in the US, how you would place CNN? Right leaning? Center? Far right?
The point being made is that “where does it sit on the current US political spectrum” doesn’t matter. Why should I care is CNN sits slightly left or right of the current American Overton window? Why is a news organisation more credible if one guy judges it to be in the centre of that window? How does Judging the BBC or NHK based on where they would sit if they were American do anything other than cement the ridiculous idea that the current US status-quo is an inviolable constant of the universe?
Who cares where it’s getting its info from? The methodology is crap and I don’t need a bot or self-appointed gatekeeping organization telling me which something is biased. It’s not that the bias isn’t there, but I’d rather decide it for myself.
Ah so you have a methodology, which is experience based, uses your individual knowledge? Can you explain how you judge political bias, so others can use it?
I applaud your interest in self-reliance, but how do you determined you are not being manipulated by either side?
The responses the admin who added 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.
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
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”
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.
- People disagree on the bias bot reporting
- People don’t like their biases being made visible
- People don’t realize they have a bias
- People find the bot noisy
The bot is tuned for US bias. Europe bias: US left is centric here.
The bot isn’t even tuned for US bias. It’s tuned for conservative US bias. The papers of record that work really hard to be objective get listed as “left center”.
Someone just told me that it “labels everything short of fascism as ‘left-leaning’” and “tries to shift the Overton window” even further right than it already is in the US.
And I suppose that is correct if your idea of the spectrum of normal political opinions is restricted to what you see on Lemmy, especially if your instance hasn’t defederated from Hexbear yet.
Where anyone puts the “center” of the political spectrum is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant. What we should still be able to expect is that it gets the ordering of sources correct—i.e., it doesn’t label Source A as being to the left of Source B if it’s actually to the right.
They (MBFC) explicitly state that they rate sources as more credible the closer the sources are to their arbitrarily selected centre.
Which is ridiculous. If Democracy Now or ProPublica take great pains to get all their facts right (which they do), and the New York Post regularly outright makes shit up, they’re marked as equally reliable based on that metric, because they’re supposedly an equal distance away from the centre.
Non-US politics is more complicated than “left vs right”.
Definitely—so sources that are close together when projected onto a left-right axis may be far apart in a more multidimensional political space. But the relative ordering along that axis can still be accurate, even if the implied proximity isn’t.
US politics is too.
It puts Reuters as the center and that seems pretty accurate, IMO.
And yet ultimately, MBFC places their center – by their own admission – based on US politics, which is decidedly right of center within the developed world.
That’s correct. It’s intended for a US audience.
If it were based on the European Overton window and you were American then there’s a good chance you would complain about its centre being centre-left for you.
It’s not wrong; you’re just not in the intended audience.
It’s not really possible to give internationally correct ratings. What an American considers centre-left is different from what a Frenchman considers centre-left, which is different from what a Pole considers centre-left. You can only report one, and the other two will then complain about it being wrong from their perspective.
This needs to die in a fire. It’s not the US Overton window. You can see that by far right sources listed as right center. Like the Ayn Rand Institute.
Just in curiosity, what is an example of a centre-right (by American standards) source for you? I make no comment about the Ayn Rand Institute as I know nothing about it
Sinclair and Fox News stations would be center right. Fox Opinion TV would be Right to Far right depending on the show and Ayn Rand is far right because it’s anarchy-capitalism.
Center, or least biased are your fact based papers of record. BBC, NYT, WAPO, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, etc.
I think you’re right in terms of the American spectrum. Do you have a link to the bot calling the Ayn Rand institute centre-right? I did some more digging into it.
I will happily retract my comment if you can.
It should then refrain from from posting on non US-media sources and/or stories and/or communities.
Of course it won’t. It’s purpose is to promote it’s owners US-centric political window.
It’s spamming political propaganda ,dressing it up as ‘facts’, and it’s getting it’s just deserts.
So the bias bot is biased, dammit
There is no need for regional tone in a “fact checker” bot. Facts are not regional. There is need for political education in the united states so that right wing things are considered right wing things again and not center positions. Respectively, anything leftist isnt communism.
Truthfully the bot gets voted down because it furthers a Zionist agenda, same as the lemmy world administration by pushing it, and many less biased instances and user groups take offense with that.
Personally I find it worthless because it lends credibility to sources that promoted the Iraq war, afghanistan, libya, syria, etc.
Any source that covered a story where thousands to millions will be/are/were murdered for the profit of the military-industrial complex as anything but an unimaginable crime is instantly non-credible. Yes, that includes 99% of American media.
Same with every media outlet wringing their hands about Hamas instead of the locking of millions of people in a concentration camp for decades that precipitated the attack.
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
Many on lemmy don’t like non-emotional driven facts because it makes it harder for them to manufacture the outrage.
The atomic unit of propaganda isn’t lies, it’s emphasis. It’s quite easy to manufacture outrage without lying if you can pick which facts the consumer sees and how they’re contextualized.
Here’s a PDF of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent.
You’ve ironically demonstrated the need for a bias checking bot. People will cite biased sources without contextualizing things like that Chomsky has a notable left leaning.
Says an attempt to manufacture outrage.
Yeah, that’s the person’s usual mo in any thread
I take it some people see it as some kind of protest at the way their clients misrender the formatting.
Because many feel that the bot has a bias itself, making it useless at best and actively harmful at worst.
I have no horse in this race and don’t downvote the bot myself, but I have also seen it call sources center left, that are definitely not left of any reasonable center.
-
It’s often wrong
-
It’s a bot and yet I still see it with the option to hide bots. Someone said it was flagged properly the other day, but since it’s the ONLY self proclaimed bot that isn’t filtered by the “block bot accounts” option in Lemmy, I call bullshit.
I have it blocked so I didn’t notice that it slides past the bot filter. That is interesting, but blocking it works.
I might unblock it just to downvote it tbh.
-
For me it’s because the bias rating specifically is opaque and can be just plain wrong.
I could block it but if everyone who thought it was a bad idea just blocked it then it wouldn’t get downvoted which might lead people to think everyone generally agreed with it.
At least when it’s downvoted people take a step back and are less likely to just accept what it says.
Any bot that doesn’t actually use lemmy’s “I’m a bot” protocol (so I can hide it completely) gets downvoted. It’s the only thing I even bother downvoting on Lemmy.
the bot has been marked as bot since the very beginning and is also clearly marked as bot in the screenshot, so your comment does not apply here.
I see you’ve replied this a few times now. Can you please complete this test for me?
I like how you sent a screenshot of a failed attempt
It was a joke but i guess it’s wasted here
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
I really like the idea of the bot.
If the source was independent; and could be trusted. It would be a great tool; the display could be a lot better but the idea is sound.
As others have pointed out, the source is a black box that may or may not be biased itself.
