News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
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.