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.
Holy moly, people seem to really be upset with this bot. I like it because it can call out when someone is doing something shady with their news sources when people like me (that don’t know news sources by heart) read a posting.
We have a lot of repeat users in here that I personally feel (and I could be wrong) that have ulterior motives, like being a foreign actor spreading misinformation, trying to sew division, and lots of other foreign and domestic actors that are obsessed with one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater (for example people obsessed with Gaza and Israel war just being nasty in general because they’re angry - I’m not saying that scenario is not wrong and fucked, but this bot can help illuminate patterns in their behavior which can help us regular people tag them accordingly as a single issue participant so they are more informed when engaging that person)
My suggestion is to be very careful about crowd-sourcing the rating process. Nearly every post I go into this bot is super negative on its downvotes. Rather than just simply blocking the bot, people are retaliating against something they don’t agree with. You would likely see that translate to your crowd-sourcing rating also at best. At worst you would see bad actors focused on division and misinformation making a fuckery of it all.
I’m not saying don’t include the community, but brainstorm with this potential pitfall in mind.
I like this community, and want to see it continue to be as factually correct and represented fairly, and appreciate the mods and their ongoing challenges with the people that would seek to upset the apple cart at any opportunity.
I think the bot adds value and applaud the honest effort to make improvements.
The down voting is for several reasons, Jeff laid it out well. The people who don’t like it’s ratings though have a larger worry that blocking it does not help. If MBFC, and thus the bot, are biased then the entire conversation is shifted around that bias. Blocking is useful if you find something an eyesore. It’s not useful in fighting misinformation.
It’s fine to use MBFC as a tool when you are writing a comment calling out a bad source. You don’t need a bot for that.