I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.
It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion – let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.
But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it’s the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways…so really no difference).
What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…
It hides the most important stuff behind accordions and there are some sources for bias & reliability checking the community favors.
It’s really annoying and I don’t trust it
I downvote it when its opinion is clearly wack. Like when it tries to give Washington Post a highly trusted rating after all the inflammatory, biased shit they’ve been putting out.
There’s a lot of criticism of the bot implementation and mbfc in this thread but no criticism of why it was implemented.
The whole point of mbfc bot was to reduce the mod workload. By (hopefully) exchanging a bunch of posts examining the source of a link, mods hoped to have fewer fights to wade into.
A person could say that’s just what happens when you run an English language community during American election years, and there’s a degree of truth to that.
I think that the mods of the world communities the bot is in want some way to restrict speech along the lines of their own combination of political axes and see the bot as a way to do so under the guise of “just checking facts”.
I am not invoking free speech as a negative criticism here.
What would be possibly more healthy for the mods is to develop a political line and clearly say “if you speak outside this system of understanding you may be modded upon”.
I hate bots
You can block them
I didn’t say I don’t like seeing them, I said I hate them. they represent nothing but spam as far as my emotional response
I agree with op, It seems to be in your best interest to block them if they are effecting you that badly.
I feel like I really shouldn’t have to. if people genuinely wanted to use your bot, they would opt in
they would need to know about it is my only issue with that. It’s better to know and opt out, that way you know that it exists. Otherwise there was resources that nobody would know existed otherwise. A users personal opinion shouldn’t impact other users, and forcing bots to be opt in would impact the people who would want to use them just are unaware they exist.
No other major platform does bots as opt in, and that’s generally the reason for it
lol so people’s personal opinions should only affect others so long as the effect is one you agree with? just make it one option for all bots. right when you sign up: do you want to see bots? check yes or no.
this isn’t supposed to be like other major platforms. most sites are concerned with driving engagement and retention, and user-made bots is a really cheap and lazy way to do that.
No it would be stupid to think that, however if there is an argument between two ideologies, the side that gives the most Freedom should be the side that’s represented I would have thought the fediverse of all places would agree with that principle.
Secondly that option already exists on at least the three instances I’ve signed up. I figured it was a universal setting, Whether that option actually works or not I’m not sure because I’ve never actually checked it because I don’t mind Bots if there’s one that’s annoying I just block it.
As for your last part, I wouldn’t agree that Bots are a cheap way to drive engagement, most Developers won’t make a bot with the expectation of bringing more users to the platform or drive engagement, they make a bot to fill a gap in utility that the platform is not currently giving, Beit entertainment, moderation, informational. The only platform that I can think actively creates Bots with the intention of increasing monetary value and engagement would be Discord and even then that’s more of a stretch because it’s more Discord forcing the monetary features on the Developers
IIRC, it lists a zionist/anti-Palestine news website as highly trustworthy. I can’t tell which side is right, I have it blocked.
What does Zionist mean? It hasn’t affected my life enough to actually look it up but I see it on every other article in the Israel/Palestine conflict.
wikipedia has a fairly neutral article on it.
Today, it usually refers to one of two groups- the far right political faction in Israel that believe there can be no peace with a two state solution (i.e. no Palestine,) and that it’s their god-given right to murder all palestinians to acheive peace…
Or the christian zionists that support them because their own faith says their god won’t come to save them until they- the jews- rebuild their temple. or something. Fundies get weird.
What? Wasn’t Israel originally the Palestine before a part of Palestine was designated Israel?
No, but that’s a common misconception. Palestine has never previously been a country, but was a region of the Ottoman Empire, then a part of the British Empire that more or less consisted of modern day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.
Under the Ottomans and the British, there was a Jewish minority, mostly in the region of Palestine, but also in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, etc.
Starting in the 1800s, Jews living in Europe began to move to the region in larger numbers (as well as Jews living in other parts of the Middle East and Africa). This was primarily motivated by antisemitic events in Europe, but also similar to the national movements that led to Prussia becoming Germany, the pan-Arab movement, re-establishing Poland, etc.
Here is a photo of the 1931 Palestinian football team that included Palestinian Jews as well as Palestinian Arabs.
Precisely. Wtf.
How far back do you want to go?
If we’re talking Bronze Age, then the exodus didn’t happen. Or rather, only a small handful of refugees showed up and their story eventually became assimilated into Judaea’s and Israel’s cultural narrative.
Tracing ancestry back that far is problematic, but both cultures have equally valid and long standing claims to the region.
It’s like the Hatfield and McCoy feud, except it’s existed since the start of the Bronze Age (or earlier,)
In more modern history, Palestine was a British colony taken during ww1 as the leftovers of the Ottoman Empire, when the Palestine Mandate was done in an attempt to back out, and Jewish militants attacked everyone involved eventually leading to the creation of the current State of Israel.
Zionism is an ideology that believes in a Jewish state consisting of mainly Jews and which claim the land of Palestine. So Zionists want to take over Palestine to extend their Jewish state as they believe that land to be theirs.
(Correct me if I am wrong)
Sites can be biased and tendentious without being factually inaccurate, though.
I’m not saying they can’t. I’m referring to a point that was championed in many a post by some .ml figures calling for the bot’s decommissioning. I don’t use the site (can’t even recall its name), and can’t speak for its credibility.
I guess I didn’t make it clear that it was second-hand information and not my personal informed opinion. In my defense, I was running on 4 hours of sleep.
It’s possible to factually accurate with heavy bias, but since that would require selective reporting to enforce a single worldview I wouldn’t consider that “highly trustworthy”.
Consider the following hypothetical headlines:
“Teen Killed by Islamic Group During Shooting”
“Terrorist Shooting at Mosque, 20 Dead”Both are technically factually accurate ways to describe a hypothetical scenario where a teen shoots up a place of worship before being stopped by one of the victims, but they both paint very different pictures. Would you consider both sources “highly trustworthy”?
It promotes the existing power structure, which some people think is no bueno.
For example, if you post this:
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/01/30/ret.axis.facts/
the bot will say it is a highly accurate source with highly factual reporting so people will tend to believe with certainty that the U.S. should invade Iraq.
Trash. Bot. Is trying to take control of the narrative on Lemmy.
Those are my 3 reasons.
I actually meant to start a thread one of these days if we can’t ban it! Glad you started the conversation!
My main concern is that by attributing a tactfulness and political rating to them, we’re attaching weight to that. But who does these ratings? Especially when a pop/mainstream mag like the Rolling Stone is classified as “left” the same that explicitly politically left publications like Jacobin are also “left”. That just strikes me as odd.
It suggested Al Jazeera has a leftist bias, despite Al Jazeera being funded by Qatar the furthest thing from being a leftist government. It is biased against any non-Western sources.
They had a children’s channel that unfortunately no longer exists. I was lucky enough to watch it when I had the chance.
Yes, it was THAT Al Jazeera.
I didn’t know that. You are not thinking of Spacetoon by neighboring Bahrain? The two countries 🇧🇭🇶🇦 can get easily confused. If Al Jazeera did have a kids channel it is news to me.
No, it’s not Spacetoon. Everyone and their dog knows that by this point.
Just put jcctv.net in the Wayback Machine (find an archive before 29 March 2013) and you’ll see what I mean.
I believe Baraem was one of its sister channels?
TIL, thanks
Always glad to help.
I guess that is also a shortcoming of the left/right scale. Al Jazeera is super popular among leftists on Lemmy, as they do a lot of Anti-Israel propaganda.
It is not propaganda if it is true. Al Jazeera has journalists on the ground and many of them have been killed by Israeli forces.
The term propaganda makes no implications about true or false. This is not a discussion about truth but bias. Propaganda is when you push your ideology using communicative methods like loaded language.
News agencies like Al Jazeera do exactly this. This is not unexpected as it sits in Qatar and wants to be the mouthpiece of the arab world. Saying they do propaganda is not a bad thing per se, but readers should be aware of this.
They can report only one side over and over again and focus on the emotional impact, include “people say” or qualify rumors or speculations or exaggerations so that it’s still factual reporting, while completely ignore the other side. That is what you see Israel and US MSM doing. Humans have biases and can easily be manipulated.
I suspect that Al Jazeera is still mostly on it’s “best behavior” trying to establish itself but ultimately it’s controlled by Quatar and not free. That still makes it incredibly valuable because it’s not controlled by US empire.
It is not propaganda if it is true.
Something can be true and propaganda. If reporting is misrepresenting a situation using purely true information and events, then it’s propaganda. It’s misrepresentation that makes something propaganda, not truthfulness.
Note: This is not a comment on whether I think Lemmy/Al Jazeera is doing propaganda.
Your link states Israel says they’re a Hamas operative. Al Jazeera says that isn’t true.
I’m gonna err on the side of the journalists that Israel is actively targeting instead.
The Al Jazeera and Fox News comparison is why I don’t trust that site. I don’t think Al Jazeera isn’t a biased organization, but I do consider them somewhat factual. I also think I’m not the only one because you often see people linking to Al Jazeera. However when it comes to Fox News I think most people would agree that Fox news is far from accurate. It’s not exactly Newsmax, but if someone linked Fox News I think most people would definitely question the facts of the article.
And then we get to mediabiasfactcheck where Al Jazeera is considered just as factual as Fox News. It’s one of those situations where you have to question who exactly is in the wrong? Is Al Jazeera really that factually incorrect? Is Fox news more factual than people believe? Or is mediabiasfactcheck wrong? I’m not against being wrong but from my years of being on the web I’d say it’s the last option.
I understand that Fox News has so many subsidiaries that might be muddying the “overall” rating. But I agree with you. I’d trust Al Jazeera over Fox News any day.
It thinks that the guardian would have only medium credibility
I use an instance that does not display or parse downvotes or permit them locally.
So I don’t see the phenomenon. I don’t care about downvotes. I only see the upvotes; which are a far better indicator to me as to how useful a post I made is. If someone posts trash or extremist things; I block them. If they try to argue in bad faith or with far too extremist of a viewpoint, I block them.
The bot doesn’t always get the most upvotes but it does have it’s uses. As someone who has used the Ground News app in the past; I have a sense of their rating scale and I do find that it helps classify things; although you should always use your own discretion and not just blindly trust the bot.
But most people who downvote this bot, do so for completely wrong reasons. Usually they’re upset because they disagree with the assessment of the bot, or do not understand it’s scale. Maybe they don’t like their viewpoint’s position being laid bare for all to see.
Maybe that should be explained more; and there’s posts on Ground News’ website that EXPLAINS how their rating system works. Perhaps the bot should link them.
For one, it bases it’s bias assessments on American politics. The UK is less right-wing than the US but when this bot comes along it calls a source which we might call centrist, “left”.
In a way, it’s like an attempt to shift the overton window for other countries closer to the US, and that’s not a good thing.
Of course, don’t expect this to be addressed by @Rooki@lemmy.world.
It’s really fucking annoying. I blocked it so I don’t have to see it anymore.
