this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024

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137

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

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

198 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.

(page 4) 50 comments

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

I appreciate the bot. I like to play a game of “guess what the bot will say” before checking. I usually win, but it’s cool to have.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source.

If you'd program something, perhaps this should be the start.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I noticed you got a couple downvotes, so this comment is more for the voters: if you have thoughts on this, please comment them so we can understand why you feel the way you do.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

I feel like bots on lemmy get way too much hate in general. There aren't that many and if you don't like you can block this one/all bots. I for one find it useful as it is.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

This only applies to beautiful geniuses that include MBFC links in their posts, but the bot probably doesn't need to include the MBFC entry for MBFC. It's pretty useless and that could free up a little space. And, hey, that's something people are pretending to care about, right?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 months ago

The bot is pretty accurate and the comments are already pretty short. I feel like if people don't like it they should just block it.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Holy moly, people seem to really be upset with this bot. I like it because it can call out when someone is doing something shady with their news sources when people like me (that don't know news sources by heart) read a posting.

We have a lot of repeat users in here that I personally feel (and I could be wrong) that have ulterior motives, like being a foreign actor spreading misinformation, trying to sew division, and lots of other foreign and domestic actors that are obsessed with one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater (for example people obsessed with Gaza and Israel war just being nasty in general because they're angry - I'm not saying that scenario is not wrong and fucked, but this bot can help illuminate patterns in their behavior which can help us regular people tag them accordingly as a single issue participant so they are more informed when engaging that person)

My suggestion is to be very careful about crowd-sourcing the rating process. Nearly every post I go into this bot is super negative on its downvotes. Rather than just simply blocking the bot, people are retaliating against something they don't agree with. You would likely see that translate to your crowd-sourcing rating also at best. At worst you would see bad actors focused on division and misinformation making a fuckery of it all.

I'm not saying don't include the community, but brainstorm with this potential pitfall in mind.

I like this community, and want to see it continue to be as factually correct and represented fairly, and appreciate the mods and their ongoing challenges with the people that would seek to upset the apple cart at any opportunity.

I think the bot adds value and applaud the honest effort to make improvements.

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