Hello World, As many of you have probably noticed, there is a growing problem on the internet when it comes to undisclosed bias in both amateur and professional reporting. While not every outlet can be like the C-SPAN, or Reuters, we also believe that it’s impossible to remove the human element from the news, especially when it concerns, well, humans.
To this end, we’ve created a media bias bot, which we hope will keep everyone informed about WHO, not just the WHAT of posted articles. This bot uses Media Bias/Fact Check to add a simple reply to show bias. We feel this is especially important with the US Election coming up. The bot will also provide links to Ground.News, as well, which we feel is a great source to determine the WHOLE coverage of a given article and/or topic.
As always feedback is welcome, as this is a active project which we really hope will benefit the community.
Thanks!
FHF / LemmyWorld Admin team 💖
This is a bad bot using bad reasoning and it’s only going to hurt the state of discourse. You’re not countering dishonesty, you’re encouraging it.
Can you provide some examples? Is Media Bias problematic or just this bot and how so?
I’m just gonna drop this here as an example:
- https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-jerusalem-report/
- https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-jerusalem-post/
The Jerusalem Report (Owned by Jerusalem Post) and the Jerusalem Post
This biased as shit publication is declared by MBFC as VEEEERY slightly center-right. They make almost no mention of the fact that they cherry pick aspects of the Israel war to highlight, provide only the most favorable context imaginable, yadda yadda. By no stretch of the imagination would these publications be considered unbiased as sources, yet according to MBFC they’re near perfect.
Putting some site in charge of determining what news is valid just means that site controls the bias. I like the wide mix that we get now. Partisan commenters are more of a problem than bias in the sources. It’s best when there are informed commenters who point out issues. Sometimes we have them, though not always.
I think the bot is crap based on this: The Guardian Media Bias Fact Check Credibility: [Medium]
The guardian is one of the best newspapers on the planet and published content exposing such as the Panama Papers.
Thats your opinion. Thats the whole reason we added the bot. To give people a second opinion, if they need to trust it or even read it. Is on your own responsibility.
People like quick answers and barely even read the articles. All you are doing is giving ammunition to those types to easily dismiss anything and drag the conversation because of a private credibility rating.
It’s a bad idea.
Agreed, just came back to Lemmy and I see some wannabe Snopes spamming every post with Authority
Seriously people seem built on the idea that authority to make claims about anything confidently comes from looking at a Wikipedia article or ai breakdown for 5 seconds. It’s making me think they need to be deplatformed just like any other conspiracy theories on the right.
okay, , how does website/bot reach its conclusions on Fact Check Credibility?
Does this consider the bias of who runs MBFC?
Its a human. Like every page.
So no?
I mean the data is all there for you to look at and experts who have looked at it have agreed it is minimally biased. If you want something that is unbiased, then you’re out of luck, every human has bias. If you believe all experts are biased, you’re also right, but they’re way less biased than someone being paid to be biased. So like everything, you can’t wait forever for perfection, and anyone who tells you they are perfect and totally unbiased is likely the most biased, anyway.
What data? They have a methodology but don’t make any of what they actually complie for rates public.
It’s a bias rating system based on 1 guys bias
The data is there, too. The data is there for every rated organization. It has the history and funding of the individual media plus links to related media organizations that are funded and controlled by the same sources. It has political activity and endorsements made by the organization. And it has a list of failed fact checks and other related issues which are links to external fact checkers. If you read the methodology, this is the data it uses for each rating and all of it is there.
They have that listed but they have big bias when doing the final conclusion and overall ranking.
As others have pointed out some sources mbfc don’t like will have high fact checking with no failures, but then lower credibility ratings.
But the information is all there for you to make your own decision. What other outlets are there that have 0 bias? At least this one has all the info gathered and even if you take the ratings themselves with a grain of salt, it is the best source available at the moment.
As I mentioned above, there’s no such thing as an unbiased person, product, or organization. You take what is least biased, apply common sense, and consume responsibly. No one is going to force feed you all the information without bias on any subject, even if they do their best to be unbiased. Expecting perfection or nothing at all, gives you nothing at all in almost all aspects of life.
expert to have looked at it have a greed it is minimally biased
Who are these experts? Source please
Bot: Hmm this article reflects reality, thus it is biased to the left.
Using charged language like that constitutes disinformation and is reprehensible. Imagine if viewers started disregarding a source on account of your bot declaring it biased.
Shameful.
That’s not how the bot works.
You’re right, it just copies a right-wing human’s opinion, and blurts it out in a format that takes way too much space, and pretends to be without bias.
You know, ban material.
I hate this and have already blocked the bot.
Comments are obscenely long, and I see no reason to trust your source.
Thats yours, we endoresed every to block it when you dont like it.
Browsing world after a few weeks:
I think this is so stupid.
I swear it’s a “centrist” libertarian idealism that you are gonna find all the biases of the publication so that you feel superior for not falling for any of them.
To a degree things should make you feel an emotional response and to not and think yourself better for not, makes you falsely superior.
I get it for making sure that propaganda isn’t posted but that’s more of what general community moderation is for is it not?
I dunno, I definitely don’t think it should be so prominent. I barely think it’s needed. Maybe people could call to the bot to check for them? But putting privately decided political leaning on every post just seems like needless segregation that allows for people to immediately ignore that and the conversation that can be had from it.
A timely article about why this type of “rating” is a really bad idea:
The most chilling words today: I’m from NewsGuard and I am here to rate you by Jonathan Turley.
The guy is a Trump / Musk supporter, he’s half the problem as it is.
While I have criticized Trump in the past, I have also objected to some of the efforts to impeach or convict him on dubious legal theories.
Yeah, those 34 duuuuubious felony convictions!
Turley has written a lot about the NY trial and his analysis looked ok to me. IANAL of course. But, those convictions didn’t seem to change Trump’s polling noticeably. We will see what happens with Harris.
The “footer” section is very long, and the spoiler tags don’t seem to do anything on the Boost app. This makes the bot comment take up an entire screen on mobile.
Yeah that is sadly bad implemented on the apps.
We put the “footer” that could go into a spoiler into a spoiler.
After seeing the comment on a few posts, the length is really bothering me. I don’t want to block the bot since it’s useful information. What about a single line of text with a link to “read more”?
Example with explanations:
404 Media is rated with High Creditability by Media Bias Fact Check. (change Media Bias Fact Check to a link that goes to a post explaining what they do, the reason for the bot, and a link to their donation page)
Check the bias and credibility of this article on ground.news. (change “this article” to be a link instead of displaying link in plain text)
How it might look:
404 Media is rated with High Creditability by Media Bias Fact Check.
Check the bias and credibility of this article on ground.news.
the length is really bothering me
I think this is my main challenge. It seems a little intrusive. Maybe I just read a bit from The Guardian and don’t need to see the full monty again.
Another idea. What about not posting the comment when the rating is “high credibility”?
Because then you don’t know if the bot is not working or is behind or if the post is actually credible. Better to have it on everything, though it definitely could put less info on high credibility posts if it can’t be condensed across the board.
I love the info it provides. I agree with many here that it’s too long. I think putting everything behind a spoiler tag that simply shows the rating would be a step in the right direction.
Everything that can be hid behind a spoiler is already in there. The rest is partially because of an agreement with MBFC.
What kind of agreement?
That if we use their api (for free) we need to have a link to MBFC.
Ty for clarifying this.
I think it’s a bad move to automatically throw mbfc links under every post. It will cause people not to engage with the substance of a link and instead provide a (literal) shortcut to that links trustworthiness. Further, mbfc itself has a bias against Palestine as other replies have pointed out among other markers of a problematic source of truth.
There is no need for an alternative to mbfc either, because even if there existed some site which perfectly aligned with the political moment and lemmy world position on that moment it would still be bad idea to have a bot replying to every thread with weather the mods agree or not.
A better way to implement what this new practice seems to be aimed towards is to drop the pretense of impartiality, develop a platform and line and use the mod tools against people who don’t align with it.
We alligned with the mods. Thus we activated it only on certain communities.
There is sadly required or the “discussion” will end like a bomb hit the comments.
With a third party they can at least have a reference and wikipedia + ground news
yeah the problem seems to be that during an election year news and politics discussion boards wither need a huge mod staff or a very clear platform and party line in order to avoid being overwhelmed by people discussing things.
i don’t think any amount of leaving a smattering of links in the comment section is gonna stop that. at best it will derail every post into a discussion of how screwed up mbfc is and how underhanded it is to include it by default.
since world already has a huge mod staff my comments recommended dropping the pretense of impartiality and just outright saying “this is the understanding of the world youre expected to have in order to comment here. if you don’t you can be subject to moderation.”
Another idea I’ve been thinking about that would help get the wall of text “out of the way”…:
If the credibility is “High” or higher, have the bot downvote itself to allow other comments to float to the top
If it’s “Mostly Factual” or lower, have the bot upvote itself to help call attention to the possible issue.
…alternatively, if “High” or higher, wait for the first reply before having the bot comment.
I don’t know if any of this is even possible with bots; just spitballing…
The wall of text we will reduce in the next update. The others we will discuss with the team.
Cool - I’d love to know the outcome of the discussion even if it’s just “Not technically possible” or “No; it’s a terrible idea because <X>”
Just testing how many checks it makes and on what and where. Not sure what triggers it or where.
Edit: forgot to say, thank you!
It triggers on posts, not on comments.
Very cool. I would also recommend Wikipedia’s perennial news list as a source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
It will be a little bit difficult to automate fetching that list.
Could just hardcode it and let the community voice their opinions on additions/changes
While I think the current method is a great idea, there’s already people complaining
But then the issue arises what the people complain, the human bias.
Because the user x from instance b accuses the user y from instance a be a bigot because they added SomeRandomNewsPage as biased into there. And it repeats and repeats.
So we chose to use the available option to use MBFC and ground.news for 2 seperate options.
We all know the downside of a human maintained list / service (like MBFC) because you can not remove the human part.
It’s an interesting suggestion, however, I can see a few potential challenges:
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The methodology is determined by Wikipedia editors’ consensus alone. It’s unclear what the ultimate basis for inclusion/exclusion may be, or whether there is a uniform standard applied.
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The list is far less comprehensive than MBFC and other rating sites.
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The scope/purpose of the Wikipedia list is very different from ours. Although we are both ultimately interested in factual, verifiable truth, news/current event aggregation is not the same purpose as encyclopedic archiving.
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The list is sometimes too granular, and sometimes too broad to be useful for live content moderation. For example, some sources are categorized differently based on the type of content, and others are grouped together.
We would want to discuss and navigate these issues prior to incorporating this list into our communities.
Atleast the consensus of wikipedians is more open and checkable than a closed door analysis like MBFC
I was not aware of that. Can you please share a link to their methodology so I can update my comment?
It looks like you shared the same information page above. Unfortunately it does not show the methodology on this page.
“This list summarizes prior consensus and consolidates links to the most in-depth and recent discussions from the reliable sources noticeboard and elsewhere on Wikipedia.”
Its explained. If you read the body.
Its done by consensus reached on conversations. It links to the sources board.
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Mods, I appreciate this bot!
Deciphering media bias is tough, and finding 1 site that will ‘perfectly’ identify biases is an impossible task, but at the minimum having this bot show up on posts ‘gets people thinking’ about the credibility of their news sources.
MBFC doesn’t have to be the ultimate arbitrator either. If it is missing something about a specific article people can call it out in the comments. At the end of the day, the worst thing it does is add more data about a news source and I’m not gonna complain about that.
Thanks! MBFC isnt perfect, its made by humans and in their free time.
It’s not perfect, why is this being pushed as an arbiter of truth?
