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.
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.
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.”
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 [email protected] 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.
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.
I’m mostly in favor of leaving the comment-clogging bots back on reddit where they can all talk to each other without me.
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.
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.
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.
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 [email protected] 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.
Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.
Two reasons: It’s a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias
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…
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.
EDIT: Also worth pointing out in my case at least I did go to the effort of actually trying to provide some constructive feedback on the bot through the proper channels rather than just downvoting and moving on.
