Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker bot?

Because their methodology is nothing but buzzwords:

The primary aim of our methodology is to systematically evaluate the ideological leanings and factual accuracy of media and information outlets. This is achieved through a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments in accordance with our rigorously defined criteria.

Despite apparently having “rigorously defined criteria”, they don’t actually say what they are.

Same reason I don't trust it - imagine rating fking BBC (the literal pro-state violence, austerity supporting, anti-immigration governmental mouth piece as "left-center")

It just distorts people's perception of what political biases are and makes them complacent by relying on an automated bot to do the important work of using your own judgment for what constitutes as moral or justified.

By letting it platform itself on lemmy, it's basically inserting itself as the de facto expert on the topic - so for example, people overseas might see BBC rated as left-center and highly factual and start believing that wanting to "secure your borders" is a thing that UK leftist want. Well excuse me if I don't want a privately owned (even if open source) US company deciding what political views others should have.

Any thoughts on TLDR (Youtube channel)?

TBH, I just don't think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.

Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.

It's uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you've seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can't really know.

You should use a client that supports all of the text formatting. On Voyager the bot’s comment is smaller than most when collapsed (which it is by default).

And because it uses spoilers, when I click it to collapse the comment, it just expands

You can’t block it?

What client do you use? It looks fine in Thunder. (I agree it's spammy in general, but not because of the formatting.)

Or you can just block it to hide it..

I like the converts to metric bot on Reddit

!remindme 1 week

out of personal curiosity, are you seeing this with the bots setting turned off? I thought that setting was a universal setting that just hide all bot posts for the account

I think the bigger problem with MBFC is they don't have a center category. Until they get one they are forcing themselves to present all news as biased one way or the other. Leaving no room for news organizations that are highly objective.

Reality has a left wing bias.

I'm not going to be surprised when we find out MBFC and Ground News were actually info ops from corporations.

The problem is many people aren't tuned into political ideology. The second they see left or right they sort it by their internal bias. So it's whitewashing a lot of conservative European sources. It's also rating American far right positions as center right, so absolutely whitewashing them, even for someone who understands MBFC is an American site with American prejudices.

Honestly I'm surprised they've lasted 8 years without this getting called out, it should fairly well jump out at anyone who has studied politics.

The libertarian, "drown the government in the bathtub" group are centrists now?

Are you serious? Social issues aren't the only thing you can swing left and right on. This is a massive pro corporate blindspot if MBFC continues that as a trend.

Nobody is saying lean makes something misinformation. We're saying the way the categories are used deceives, "a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American" into believing good objective sources are running biased articles.

And the American left is the center in the rest of the world. Playing into the American idea of centrism only makes the project biased, not some high minded goal. That's some of that good exceptionalism propaganda.

And reframing things to fit our own perspective? From the person defending the end of the federal government as a centrist position.

You put a lot of high minded stuff in there but it comes down to American Exceptionalism trying to force its views on the rest of the world and a shit take on enlightened centrism. The facts on the ground are clear. MBFC plays favorites for conservatives.

We should want analysis to be from the perspective of a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American

Why? Lemmy is a worldwide site.

When I was on in Reddit I used to do it all the time, but writing everything out, organizing it and including citations etc. can be rather time-intensive.

These days, I'll leave a quick comment on a post if I have enough time, but nothing major.

The posts are 4 lines but when each comment includes 3 or 4 sources it checks, you end up with a giant block of spoiler text that usually takes up about a full screen (Sometimes less, sometimes more)

I blocked it a few months back.

I understand that Fox News has so many subsidiaries that might be muddying the "overall" rating. But I agree with you. I'd trust Al Jazeera over Fox News any day.

It is not propaganda if it is true. Al Jazeera has journalists on the ground and many of them have been killed by Israeli forces.

I didn’t know that. You are not thinking of Spacetoon by neighboring Bahrain? The two countries 🇧🇭🇶🇦 can get easily confused. If Al Jazeera did have a kids channel it is news to me.

I'm 99% certain you're from the United States if you think MSNBC is anything beyond center to center left.

We seem to have a different opinion of what is left-wing and what is not. I do not think the Democratic party is left-wing at all. It is centre-right to right (with the Republican party being far-right).

I know of none American left-wing news outlets and the only left-wing bias I know of is truth.

It would be nice if bot comments weren't counted, at least as an option.

Probably, still remains that out of all the bots I've seen this is the only one with format issues. I believe a minimalist approach to be preferable for bots since their goal is spreading information over a large userbase with various client, from CLI to native web page.

Downvoting definitely makes your opinion on it known though. Otherwise we wouldn't be here reading all this.

Yeah anything responsible that reports and corrects mistakes made in past reporting gets a low score for factual accuracy, when these should be getting the highest scores.

It's completely backwards.

Same

It bothers me too, but often I'll see the bot at -5 and there's still no comments. So I guess most of us just come in, see just the bot, and don't actually have anything to say and don't want to comment first, lol

It's possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn't consider that "highly trustworthy".

Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
"Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting"
"Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead"

Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources "highly trustworthy"?

I'm not saying they can't. I'm referring to a point that was championed in many a post by some .ml figures calling for the bot's decommissioning. I don't use the site (can't even recall its name), and can't speak for its credibility.

I guess I didn't make it clear that it was second-hand information and not my personal informed opinion. In my defense, I was running on 4 hours of sleep.

wikipedia has a fairly neutral article on it.

Today, it usually refers to one of two groups- the far right political faction in Israel that believe there can be no peace with a two state solution (i.e. no Palestine,) and that it's their god-given right to murder all palestinians to acheive peace...

Or the christian zionists that support them because their own faith says their god won't come to save them until they- the jews- rebuild their temple. or something. Fundies get weird.

Zionism is an ideology that believes in a Jewish state consisting of mainly Jews and which claim the land of Palestine. So Zionists want to take over Palestine to extend their Jewish state as they believe that land to be theirs.

(Correct me if I am wrong)

I agree with your statement here, the person who is calling it malware is misusing the term.

In order for it to be classified as malware you need to prove that it's intentionally being malicious, which from the provided evidence is unable to be done. in fact every step of evidence has been in the opposite direction, just because it gives potentially invalid information from its source doesn't mean that the bot is malware, the intent is noble, regardless if the information is fully valid or not. You can call the website malware if you like(although that's still a hard stretch) but the bot wouldn't be malware, it's working as intended and doing the job exactly as it described it would be,which is using the website to determine credibility of articles.

Malware is ill intentioned software.

The bot is a bot, i.e., software.

It's intended to drive the overton window right until fascism is perceived as mainstream, and probably beyond, either as a means of imposing fascism on society or to cause chaos and destabilisation, which is evidently ill intentioned in any case.

It's ill intentioned software, i.e., malware.

It's also pushing its ill intentioned disinformation onto the community's users against our will, so it's also spam, if being malware wasn't enough.

(As for the website, it's clearly a disinformation psy-op with the same ill intentions; whether a website counts enough as software to count as malware is open to debate, though, even if its ill intentions are not.)

FWIW, there's a reason I prefer mbin instances.

I feel like some amount of variation among fediverse software is exactly how we should try to suss all this out.

I just vote to keep comment sections for humans.

(I realize I can block and I do and I will, still want to shout my opinion into the storm for a second.)

Their judgement of what's left, what's right, and what's center is arbitrary and misleading.

An airplane is a means of travel not a tool. The bot osnt even a tool, it's a biased shortcut.

It's like just going to cnn to see if something is true because you respect their opinion.

Disinformation is dangerous. That's how we got the white "alternative facts" thing in the first place. We shouldn't tolerate it at all.

So people can just downvote it instead right? That's literal direct democracy at play - if there's more people that like the bot they'll upvote it and it will have a positive score - saying "just bury your head in the sand if you don't agree with this message" is the reason we're in this political mess in the first place..

Unless your goal is to spread misinformation. Anyone that knowingly wants to spread propaganda is going to severely dislike it and be forced to come up with some excuse to be against it, that is more acceptable than "it keeps telling me my russian propaganda is bullshit".

We do have a small pro-Russian contingent on here after all. We also occasionally get a MAGA type.

Personally I do appreciate it, the wikipedia and Ground News links are convenient, I would occasionally manually google those anyway. News consumption is one of the main reasons I'm on here in the first place though, so I might be an outlier in that regard.

So because spammers exist you created an eveng greater spammer?

What does "third opinion" mean? That its supposedly "neutral" or "unbiased"?

Agreed, it was a good move

I think it belongs at the very bottom of the page.