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 💖
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.
Is it your position that criticism of Israel should be censored? Is being pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, or anti-genocide antisemitic?
This is the position of Media Bias/Fact Check. By endorsing their platform, you are also endorsing their radically biased re-definition of antisemitism that is being used to slander holocaust survivors and progressive Jewish voices along with truth speakers of all races and creeds.
Groups like MBFC use their position as gatekeepers of the political spectrum to disguise radical ideas as centrist positions, and it’s ironic that you’re using such a biased propaganda platform to tell your readers what is credible.
Bias is not the same thing as propaganda, propaganda is not the same thing as misinformation. Articles should be evaluated on how factual they are, and there are plenty of platforms that are doing the hard work of verifying information without putting their political ideology above their credibility. This bot is a mistake.
Unfortunately Rooki is not accepting criticism of this decision.
Lmao no comment from the .world Admin on this post.
Oh they did. Just to troll the user’s
You are making a lot of claims, but without any examples or anything to back those claims I am unconvinced.
I’m in the same boat here, commenter brings pretty bold claims with zero proof to back it up, especially concidering I looked it up, and so far propagandic sources that I know of all show low or medium credibility.
in fact the first 5 Isreal based sources I looked up all show little credibility as well. I am curious where the proof is
Another commentator brought up Mondoweiss, which is interesting. I don’t know that I disagree with MBFC’s rating, as Weiss has previously said some pretty out there stuff:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/04/mondoweiss-is-a-hate-site/
But I mean I’m far from an expert in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and in fact I’m pretty ignorant to be honest.
The comments in here feel pretty weird. At best, people are following a trend that I hate, where we are on a link-aggregator platform, but someone assumes that you already have all the context and refuses to post a link. At worst? Well there’s that guy threatening the mods that he’ll spam the community if the mods don’t let him have his way.
I’m prone to agree with you.
Also the person who’s threatened to make a Spam project I blocked, I agree that’s not healthy for the fediverse, I was going to request feedback from them as well regarding it but when I looked at their comment history they don’t usually give any info, and they lead to attacking the commenter which makes me think they’re more trolling people then trying to make actual changes
you get the Lemmy.world Silver for making the longest “feedback” as many would say. About how bad MBFC is.But still no alternative or improvement ideas. So i guess we will have to stick to MBFC if there is no one with any ideas.
Why exactly do you have to stick with it? I’ve not seen that explained.
Why do we need it removed?
sigh
I’m not playing your game.
Removed by mod
Your bot sucks and you should feel bad. Where’s the source?
Then give improvement ideas? Deleting the bot is not an option sry.
Why not?
My guess is $$$
Right? I hate to jump to that conclusion but Rooki is not giving a reason why the bot needs to exist and is refusing to listen to community feedback about its implementation. Unless that feedback is how to make the bot better.
And as I’ve noticed recently the only part always visible is the mbfc donate link and look how nice mbfc is to let us use an api
I mean look at this dumpster fire of a comment section… I don’t think we as a community are really making a good case.
Personally I think the bot is a bad idea because I always hated that kind of shit on Reddit. I’d rather have discussion with real people than just have a bot that always comments.
But the people attacking MBFC are really coming out of left field in my view. If I was a mod, I don’t know if I’d want to listen to feedback either.
Removed by mod
Not open source (yet) we will have to cleanup and then open source it.
It was so annoying I blocked it.
First it takes way to much space, it should be a 1 liner for stating the bias, and then be able to folds out to show the rest.
Second the data is not very useful, for instance it doesn’t say if a source i left or right leaning, although I suppose that trustworthy means left, as we all know facts have a liberal bias. It also doesn’t show the owner of the media, which has become one of the most significant factors to judge media from.
Also I don’t trust the bot to give accurate info, as the source it uses may itself be politicized.Why are you using a bot that rates media unreliable because they are anti-Zionist using literal pro-israel lobby groups as their source?
Overall, we rate Mondoweiss as Left Biased and Questionable due to the blending of opinion with news, the promotion of pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist propaganda, occasional reliance on poor sources, and hate group designation by third-party pro-Israel advocates.
That’s the sanitized version. They re-worded it to hide their endorsement of the redefinition of antisemitism.
The recent version:
This previous version was available while the IDF was engaged in the genocide of Palestinians:
I keep saying “them/they/their” but it’s not really a group. It’s mostly one guy, Dave M. Van Zandt, who has no academic media literacy qualifications. He’s not a social scientist. He should not be running a site that is being used to censor news feeds.
The irony is that he admits that his system for judging ‘bias’ is pseudoscience, but at the same time claims that MBFC’s purpose is to debunk pseudoscience. He appears to have no idea what science is. His methods are not public, repeatable, or by his own admission falsifiable.
News from the left-leaning journalists should not be categorized with the same qualifiers as AI-generated Russian fake news sites. LGBT advocacy and lobbying organizations that have no economic intersectionality are not “Left” – LGBT sexual identities are not inherently political. CNN is a corporate news network, not a socialist organization. It’s pretty obvious the deeply flawed simplification of the political spectrum to a continuum is based on an American moderate Republican capitalist’s narrow understanding of politics, and Van Zandt admits as much:
He is actively harming media diversity and LW should be ashamed for taking this charlatan seriously.
Great summary thanks for this
Don’t know a lot about Mondoweiss, but I found this article that cites Weiss saying some pretty out there stuff:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/04/mondoweiss-is-a-hate-site/
I don’t know that I like it if MBFC is just taking pro-Israel advocate at their word, but another commentator said they rated other pro-Israel sources as questionable as well. Example:
TheGrayZone wrote a great article about how Wapo operates for israel as they wrote a smear piece filled to the brim with lies about them recently.
The article you linked basically describes AIPAC and the israel lobby. The Wapo author just tries to conflate Zionism with Judiasm and quotes a paragraph out of context. The paragraph isn’t worded great but in context of the article it’s clearly not what the Wapo author tries to portray.
I don’t know if I would take thegrayzone.com as a good source, personally:
https://www.axios.com/2020/08/11/grayzone-max-blumenthal-china-xinjiang
And therein lies the problem. The article I linked by TheGrayzone is 100% factual and every fact is traceable yet all people can do it pull up attacks from other news sites.
Instead of pulling up with more "fact checks’ I’d rather people read the linked article like I did for the Wapo one about Mondoweiss and have an opinion about that. Great journalists like Ryan Grim agree with Max Blumenthal instead of Wapo in this case.
Look, honestly I don’t really know who Ryan Grim is, but I googled “Ryan Grim” and “The Gray Zone” and apparently “the grayzone crowd comes after [him] all the time”.
https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1696331666980053126
I also don’t know enough to really get into a discussion about Israel / Palestine, and I don’t know anything about the drama with WaPo in the article you linked so I can’t say whether or not it’s 100% factual as you say.
Maybe in this specific instance, The Gray Zone is correct, and in agreement with Ryan Grim. I don’t know. But the thing is, you are I are in a discussion about bias and source quality. And I’m saying to you that, in my view, The Gray Zone doesn’t pass the smell test.
That’s the whole point of MBFC: to get a smell test of whether a source is worth considering or not.
What I am saying is, I’m not going to spend hours of my life going through your source to check it out, and possibly verify it, or refute it point by point. Especially when the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on it is:
Coverage of The Grayzone has focused on its misleading[25][26] and false reporting,[27] its criticism of American foreign policy,[1][4] and its sympathetic coverage of the Russian, Chinese and Syrian governments.[4][21][28][29] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the persecution of Uyghurs in China,[33] and been accused of publishing conspiracy theories about Xinjiang, Syria and other regions,[34][35][36] and publishing disinformation about Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which some have described as pro-Russian propaganda.[32][36]
The article about Xinjiang that I linked to you was just from a random source I clicked from Wikipedia.
I realize that I am probably coming across in a rather dismissive way, but honestly I think that’s the point – if I can convince myself this quickly that a source looks suspicious, it’s in my interest to dismiss it just as quickly. In the past I’ve spent dozens of hours doing deep dives on random sources that friends have sent me, and in every case it’s been a waste of time because I ended up coming to the same conclusion that I did in 5 seconds of reading Wikipedia.
I know some people love doing these deep dives, but I’ve realized for myself – like back in 2010 when one particular person was sending me crap from Natural News – that unless I truly get “this needs the benefit of the doubt” vibes, all that time I spend just makes me feel bitter and angry at the world, and I end up having gained nothing and learned nothing from the experience.
So again, I’m sorry. Your source may be correct. But it looks seriously suspicious. Personally, I’m not willing to look any deeper than that.
I was referring to the GrayZones article about Wapo spouting false allegations being factually correct and easily fact checkable. It’s not required to know any media or person in advance.
Thanks. On voyager it’s a little clumsy. The header, body, and footer takes up a lot of space. Trying to close/collapse the comment just expands the comment more.
There’s no reason this needs to be large or in your face. It should be small, like a reference. I’d try to reduce word count, lines, and just overall how much space it uses.
We reduced it a bit. It will take affect after next deployment ( tomorrow )
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
This is fantastic news! I’ve been using Ground News for a while now, and it’s fantastic for spotting propaganda/bias/etc. Very well done!
Ground news is sooo good
Thanks for this Rooki!
This is fantastic!!! Thank you so much for this.
deleted by creator
This bot uses MBFC to check context comments and adds a simple reply to show bias.
What does the bot check? It checks the comments to determine bias? What “context?”
How does the autoreply show bias?
E: Okay I went and looked at one of the autoreplies and I get what it does and I’m excited about it. That sentence could use a little work. Rest of your post is great. You could have done better! I await your revisions.
Yeah i just reread that and yes it doesnt make fully sense. I edited it bo a little bit clearer
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
