Hi all!

As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. 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 !news@lemmy.world 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.

  • @jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
    18•3 months ago

    Thanks for this. As a mod of /c/news, I hadn’t really thought about that. We don’t allow opinion pieces, but this is very relevant if we roll out a new bot for all the communities that currently use the MBFC bot.

    • geekwithsoulEnglish
      13•3 months ago

      No problem. Specifically came to my attention about a week ago on this post where the bot reported on an opinion piece as if it was straight news.

      BTW, I actually do appreciate the bot and think it’s doing about as well as it can given the technical limitations of the platform.

    • @FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      6•3 months ago

      Hi. I have a suggestion:

      Try to make it more clear that this is not a flawless rating (as that is impossible).

      Ways to implement:

      • Make sure the bot says something along the lines of “MBFC rates X news as Y” and not “X news is Y”.
      • Make a caveat (collapsable) at the bottom, that says something along the lines of “MBFC is not flawless. It has an american-centric bias, is not particularly clear on methodology, to the point where wikipedia deems it unreliable; however, we think it is better to have this bot in place as a rough estimate, to discourage posting from bad sources”
      • If possible, add other sources, Like: “MBFC rates the Daily Beast as mostly reliable, Ad Fontes Media rates it as unreliable, and Wikipedia says it is of mixed reliability”
      • Remove the left right ratings. We already have a reliability and quality rating, which is much more useful. The left-right rating is frankly poorly done and all over the place, and honestly doesn’t serve much purpose.