Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot
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.
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210 comments
You don’t need to manufacture an authoritative source of truth as you the mods see it.
Just write down what you see as the truth and that you’ll ban anyone who speaks out against it.
Stop trying to build a machine to do the work of creating an echo chamber for you.
Always appreciate feedback! As a .ml user, I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on echo chambers
Are you removing the bot or are you still following this stunt as if you didnt have enough replies?
My replies were good faith discussions with the users (except for the one joke above). I don’t control the bot but the mod team has been discussing this. By all means, if you want to blame the mod who took the initiative to solicit feedback, go ahead though. It’s worth noting that I can’t force admins to act though, only supply evidence.
Edit: to be clear, this post was always meant for constructive feedback to improve the bot.
The feedback has been loud and clear, the bot is a shit and most people want it gone.
Sorry but most of your replies have been very targeted and the good faith more than debatable, they go from naive to outright omitting the point most people is trying to explain to you.
Edit: also to be clear, i dont care if you are not the owner of the bot, as a mod you can ban it.
Yes, I could do whatever I want as a mod, if I want to be removed from the mod team within minutes.
What can i say? I really admire your writing comprehension
If news@world had rules that reflected a coherent politics it could be political or even propagandistic.
Because no such rules exist to direct action and development, ideas like the fact checker bot crop up. In lieu of direction, the fact checker bot reflects a laundered western liberal political line back onto the news@world community.
An echo chamber is not an area where everyone says the same things, it’s an environment where a certain type of waves (or just all waves) are reenforced due to structural elements of the chamber.
By using the fact checker bot to do the work of policing speech, you have created a structural element which reenforces certain kinds of speech.
It’s a component of an echo chamber in the metaphor.
That’s significantly different than taking the more difficult route of determining the news@world mod team political line, struggling internally and externally with its contradictions and acting in ways that reflect it because the latter requires that the mod team use judgement rather than just act on voices who are not reenforced by the built structural elements of the news@world community.