Ask Lemmy

1. People disagree on the bias bot reporting
2. People don't like their biases being made visible
3. People don't realize they have a bias
4. People find the bot noisy

Since you asked:

1. The bot provides little "value" vs the noise it creates.

I don't need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it's a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this "threshold for scamminess" would be very subjective.

2. This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point ("value" vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I'd read.

Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I've done and I'm much happier with my Lemmy experience.

So the answers in this post are mostly that people are downvoting the bot because it is often wrong and then others defending it by saying “it’s not wrong it’s just based on American politics”.

If the bot reported from a range of sources that reflect a number of different political perspectives I’m sure it’d be more useful outside of the scope of American politics, and therefore wouldn’t get downvoted.

As far as I’m concerned the vote system is working as intended.

The internet is not American. There are no nations on lemmy ✌️

Personally my biggest gripe is with the formatting, specifically spoilers tags are a terrible choice when the whole thing could be a single sentence with a link. Spoiler tags aren't uniformly implemented and when pointed out the stance is it's the clients fault for not doing spoilers the way the dev wants rather than the devs fault for not using a more standardized approach which just bugs me. If the goal was concise conveyance of information, they missed the mark.

Because many feel that the bot has a bias itself, making it useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

I have no horse in this race and don't downvote the bot myself, but I have also seen it call sources center left, that are definitely not left of any reasonable center.

Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.

Because it's biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in "right center" to make you think it's equivalent.

Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.

So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.

I really like the idea of the bot.

If the source was independent; and could be trusted. It would be a great tool; the display could be a lot better but the idea is sound.

As others have pointed out, the source is a black box that may or may not be biased itself.

If it's trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).

The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot's reply, you'd think it was the Gaurdian.

Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.

However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well

Two reasons: It's a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias

Have you asked yourself who runs the bot and what their bias is?