this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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News

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136
Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by jeffw@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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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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[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 41 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

To clarify what MBFC considers "MIXED" factual reporting (the same rating they give known disinformation factory Breitbart):

Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

They list like five fact checks, while The Guardian puts out basically quintuple that every day. And moreover, this is the sort of asinine nitpick that they classify as a "fact check".

"Private renting is making people ill." "Private renting is making people ill, but maybe this happens with other housing situations too, we don't know, so we rate this as false."

MBFC's ratings for "factual reporting" are a joke.

[–] hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 6 points 3 months ago

This is my problem with MBFC, and which seems to consistently get ignored by the admins and mods pushing for the bot.

MBFC seems to rate every even slightly "left wing" news source as "mixed factual reporting" for absolutely any excuse whatsoever. The fact that they deem The Guardian as reliable as Breitbart should really tell you something.