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.

  • Aatube
    7•4 months ago

    For example, if we retain MBFC, the layout could look something like this:

    Rolling Stone Bias: Left, Credibility: High, Factual Reporting: High - United States of America

    MBFC report | bot support | Search topics on Ground.News

    in which “Rolling Stone” is linked to the Wikipedia article.

    With RSP, it could look something like this:

    Rolling Stone is generally reliable on culture

    There is consensus that Rolling Stone has generally reliable coverage on culture matters (i.e., films, music, entertainment, etc.). Rolling Stone’s opinion pieces and reviews, as well as any contentious statements regarding living persons, should only be used with attribution. The publication’s capsule reviews deserve less weight than their full-length reviews, as they are subject to a lower standard of fact-checking. See also Rolling Stone (politics and society), 2011–present, Rolling Stone (Culture Council).

    Rolling stone is generally unreliable on politics and society, 2011–present

    According to a 2021 RfC discussion, there is unanimous consensus among editors that Rolling Stone is generally unreliable for politically and societally sensitive issues reported since 2011 (inclusive), though it must be borne in mind that this date is an estimate and not a definitive cutoff, as the deterioration of journalistic practices happened gradually. Some editors have said that low-quality reporting also appeared in some preceding years, but a specific date after which the articles are considered generally unreliable has not been proposed. Previous consensus was that Rolling Stone was generally reliable for political and societal topics before 2011. Most editors say that Rolling Stone is a partisan source in the field of politics, and that their statements in this field should be attributed. Moreover, medical or scientific claims should not be sourced to the publication.

    RSP listing | bot support | Search topics on Ground.News

    Both examples with everything necessary linked, of course

      • Aatube
        2•4 months ago

        Would you open source that on launch? What about the nuances of reporting from the same source on different topics?

        • @JonsJava@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          -2•4 months ago

          The distance will be open source day one. As to the other question: still in the planning phase