Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
The bot has no purpose. Either an article can be posted or not there's no reason for the bot prompt. It just looks like thought policing using a bias checker which 'coincidentally' prefers what the current Democrats position is.
I can hardly imagine the bot stopping any fake news from being posted either.
I wound up blocking your shitty bot because it spammed pretty much every post.
Get rid of the bot
Probably not an issue with the bot itself, but just FYI, it appears the spoiler tags don't work on Boost.
Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.
The proposed solution of a home-brewed open-source methodology of determining bias without the Overton influence would be a very welcome improvement in my opinion.
Credibility isn't subjective. It should be a hard value.
Orientation is indeed subjective and unless in the extremes should (imo) not be defined
Personally I'm in favor of the bot. One complaint I've seen that I agree with is that it doesn't need to float high up in the comments. If it was simply made to not upvote itself, it would stay nearer to the bottom naturally, which I think would be preferable.
Although I do see that that bot has a very slight right wing bias I like it. It prevents the normalization of the use of literal propaganda outlets as news sources.
I have a suggestion that might be a good compromise.
The bot only comments on posts that are from less factual news sources or are from extreme ends of the spectrum.
On a post from the AP the bot would just not comment.
On a post from Alex Jones or RT the bot would post a warning.
That way there is less “spam”, but people are made aware when misinformation or propaganda is being pushed.
Also with such a system smaller biasses are less relevant and therefore become less important.
I don't trust MBFC to tell me anything useful about left-leaning sources, or discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but if a right-biased credibility gatekeeper tells me a site I've never encountered before is far-right, I do consider that useful.
I hate that I have to expand the section to see the rating. If that could be fixed, it'd be better.
Not directly related to MBFC bot, but what's your opinion on other moderation ideas to improve the nature of the discussion? Something Awful forums have strawmanning as a bannable offense. If someone says X, and you say they said Y which is clearly different from X, you can get a temp ban. It works well enough that they charge a not-tiny amount of money to participate and they've had a thriving community for longer than more existing social media has been alive. They're absolutely ruthless about someone who's being tricksy or pointlessly hostile with their argumentation style simply isn't allowed to participate.
I'm not trying to make more work for the moderators. I recognize that side of it... the whole:
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.
... makes perfect sense to me. I get the idea of mass-banning sources to get rid of a certain type of bad faith post, and doing it with automation so that it doesn't create more work for the moderators. But to me, things like:
... create a lot more unpleasantness than just simple rudeness, or posting something from rt.com or whatever so-blatant-that-MBFC-is-useful type propaganda.
Bias ratings will always be biased. So aggregate or having multiple sources briefly used in a single small post would work best.
How about just finally making the bot open source and let people comment or contribute there?