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Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

199 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hi all!

As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @[email protected]. 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 [email protected] 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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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

While I think it's important to have some sort of media bias understanding, I dislike the bot being the first (and sometimes only) comment on a post. Maybe it should be reserved only for posts that are garnering attention, and has a definitive media bias answer for (the no results comments are just damn annoying to see).

It also has the knock-on effect of boosting the post higher in whichever sorting algorithm users are using. So it often feels artificially controlled whenever something has 100+ upvotes and less than 10 comments, knowing the first comment is always a bot. Like, would it be fair for me to have 10 bots that comment factual information of posts I personally like, just to boost their visibility?