Media Bias Fact Check - Automation

I think having this post isn't a great idea because you are just assuming the websites bias are legit. At the very least there needs to be a lot of warnings in the bots post about the websites biases and the methodology they use so the reader can come to their own conclusion.

Just looking over the methodlogy it's clear that it has it's own biases:

American Bias

The website itself says it’s distinctions of left and right are US based which is very skewed from the rest of the world. There should be a disclaimer or it shouldn't be used in any world news communities.

Centrist Bias

The website follows the idea of “enlightened centrism” since if it determines a website has a left/right lean (again arbitrary) it affects the factual ratings of the sources.

Examples of this are: FAIR only getting the 2nd highest rating despite never having failed a fact check.

The Intercept getting only a “mostly factual” rating (3rd highest) despite their admittance it has never failed a fact check.

Despite my personal opinions on the pointlessness of using a US based left/right bias criteria I'd feel better if it was at least kept it it's own section but when you allow it to affect the factual rating of the source it's just outright wrong. The factual accuracy of the website should be the sole thing that affects this rating.

Questionable Fact Checking

Even just checking some of their ratings raises doubts on the websites credibility.

The ADL is rated as high (2nd highest) and wasn’t found to fail any fact checks.

The ADL was found to be so unreliable on it's reporting of the Israel-Palestine conflict it is considered an unreliable source by Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia’s editors declared that the Anti-Defamation League cannot be trusted to give reliable information on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and they overwhelmingly said the ADL is an unreliable source on antisemitism.”

Maybe Wikipedia editors are a good arbiter of truth and maybe they aren’t but as people can see there isn’t a consensus and so by choosing Media Bias/Fact Check you’re explicitly choosing to align your “truth” with this websites biases.

What a terrible idea.

MBFC is already incredibly biased.

It should be rejected not promoted.

Choosing one organization to be the arbiter of truth and bias gives them way too much power. I think fact checking should be the responsibility of whoever reads the article.

I'm just gonna drop this here as an example:

• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-jerusalem-report/
• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-jerusalem-post/

The Jerusalem Report (Owned by Jerusalem Post) and the Jerusalem Post

This biased as shit publication is declared by MBFC as VEEEERY slightly center-right. They make almost no mention of the fact that they cherry pick aspects of the Israel war to highlight, provide only the most favorable context imaginable, yadda yadda. By no stretch of the imagination would these publications be considered unbiased as sources, yet according to MBFC they're near perfect.

It has been pointed out multiple times that mbfc is ran by a Zionist.

There is no way the mod team is not aware of this by now so it must be on purpose.

Oh, lovely. Ministry of Truth Bots...

This is predicated on the assumption that those organizations are neutral arbitrators of facts, but they aren't.

They might have a better gauge on reality than OAN, or PatriotEagleNews.ru, but that doesn't mean platform moderators should present them as if they are a source of universal truth.

People can be critical of posts, comments, and their sources, without the heavy hand of moderators using a privatized Ministry of Truth.

We don't even have to look very far back to see how platform level "fact checking" systems are used and abused to silence and suppress information that goes against mainstream narratives or is viewed as politically damaging.

I love this, but I would like to state that Media Bias Fact Check seems to have a pro-Israel bias.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mondoweiss/

• Overall, we rate Mondoweiss as Left Biased and Questionable due to the blending of opinion with news, the promotion of pro-Palestinian and anti-zionist propaganda, occasional reliance on poor sources, and hate group designation by third-party pro-Israel advocates.

I feel like “blending of opinion with news” and “occasional reliance on poor sources” is all that really need be said.

That's just introducing 2 more sources of bias

Given the overwhelmingly negative response from the community, what is the justification for leaving the bot in place? Is it because the moderators think they know better than everyone else?

could you have the bot automatically unvote its posts (make it 0) so it goes under new comments when sorted by votes?

the spoiler thing doesn't work on eternity and it kinda hides everything under it being so long

Remove that. It’s too US centric. I don’t want that here.

Bot: Hmm this article reflects reality, thus it is biased to the left.

Using charged language like that constitutes disinformation and is reprehensible. Imagine if viewers started disregarding a source on account of your bot declaring it biased.

Shameful.

Why does the bot spend so much space asking for donations to mediabiasfactcheck.com and thanking them for an api? Especially when it's one of the few areas not in a spoiler block so it's always shown?

So is it time for a new news community then if the admins don't want to listen?

Please get rid of it. I'll figure my own truth from facts I descern are true. I don't need someone else telling me what to believe. Especially with the election coming up...

Media Bias Fact Check is totally meaningless in world news since the overwhelming majority of international news coverage seen in the west is filtered through just three global agencies, AP, AFP and Reuters and they always toe a pro US/Nato line.

We feel this is especially important with the US Election coming up

This is not us news but ok

Hmm. It's not a perfect way of measuring source bias, and bias is only correlated with truthfulness as I think they themselves admit, but I applaud the spirit.

I worry that people will put too much stock in it's assessment, and as far as I can tell propaganda posting is already pretty controlled, on .world specifically. Did you code this yourselves? Is there some way one of us could request to push to the source, like if I figure out some way it could be better? In particular, it would be good to add notes on the specific sources commenters have described as having issues not covered by MBFC.

Good, one should always refer to the Ministry of Truth before deciding what is true or false for The Party.

I appreciate having this bot, and I also think that it can be tweaked to be better. Are there other services that do something similar (ex. I see ground.news in the bot comments). What might be better is if there was a bot that linked to a few different options, so that people can benefit from the extra information. I seem to remember a Lemmy bot that was doing something like that last year, but I can't find it now.

For example, a format like this might get the benefits of the bot while also addressing the concerns people have:

Information for News Source Name

• Media Bias Fact Check: Centre-Left Bias, Mostly Factual, Germany
• Wikipedia: Left Bias, Privately Owned, High Factuality
• See the Ground News page for this article to compare bias and credibility with other sources

See this page to learn about this bot, and how you can support the tools above.

If the bot was open sourced somewhere, then people could contribute improvements to formatting and add/remove sources as appropriate. It doesn't need to be a fully democratic process, as the maintainers would get the final say, but it would make people trust the tool a lot more.

Other small tweaks / bugs

• The links need an https:// at the start, else it breaks and shows https://instance/LINK
• If the data can be condensed some more, with inline links as opposed to full ones. Yes we should recommend that developers fix their apps/frontends, but with federation it's likely that there will be breakages in a lot of places. Improvements to comment format will help.
• I'm not sure if the thank you and donation link is appropriate in the comment, since it feels like an advertisement / endorsement. Having that information on a separate link would be more fair. For example, ground.news also has a donation page, but it's not in the comment.

While I'm not as concerned with MBFC as many others are, why not use Wikipedia's RSP as the datasource? Made by the most reliable user-generated platform in the world, it's a great list of controversial sources and is completely open. Changes are also infrequent enough so that adding to the database by hand would be quite easy.

I also echo the concerns raised below on the uselessness at a glance due to the accordion hiding the only information and purpose the bot was created to serve.

But seriously, this is pretty great. Thanks for putting that together.

This about about to spawn so many sidebar threads xD

It's either going to be awesome, or hilarious. Probably both.

Any guesses for how long until the "we've disabled the bot for further testing and review" post? My bet is a month.

If the bot doesn't go away, I'll write one that counter spams with how much of a piece of shit MBCF website is. The difference is that I will run it off my own instance where you'll have to defederate to get me to stop. And even then, a simple hostname change and a re-spin of the docker composer will create me a brand new instance. ActivityPub has no defense against this, and as far as I know nothing in the pipeline to combat bad instance admins.

So challenge accepted, I guess....

I think it's a great addition, but it sure does eat up a lot of space. Any way it can be condensed to the absolute basic information?

This is what it looks like for me on Boost:

What has it come to - bots will be hunting bots. I hope you see this too.

Removed by mod

A whole lot of people here don't read MBFC each day and it shows. They tend to take a single and testable claim and make a decision. It's really easy to see if the claim is true or false if the claim is specific. They don't have a habit of taking a big claim and ruling it false because of one small detail like Snopes does.

Classic stupid lemmy world move

Rip microwave

I actually like it. Thanks.

Mods, I appreciate this bot!

Deciphering media bias is tough, and finding 1 site that will 'perfectly' identify biases is an impossible task, but at the minimum having this bot show up on posts 'gets people thinking' about the credibility of their news sources.

MBFC doesn't have to be the ultimate arbitrator either. If it is missing something about a specific article people can call it out in the comments. At the end of the day, the worst thing it does is add more data about a news source and I'm not gonna complain about that.

Shit coded bot. Closed source. Biased yeah fits here

This will be great to have. Thanks!

Media Bias Fact Check is a fact-checking website that rates the bias and credibility of news sources. They are known for their comprehensive and detailed reports.

Thanks to Media Bias Fact Check for their access to the API.
Please consider supporting them by donating.

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Thanks for this Rooki!

Great idea

A lot of the criticism I've seen thus far falls into two categories:

1. Users complaining that their favorite source is scored poorly
2. Users complaining that the ratings have various sources of statistical bias

The ones in the first group I think should take it as a wakeup call that they are either headline shopping or missing out on other perspectives of current events. This is especially important on the international stage where armed conflicts will naturally produce two opposing accounts (and lots of propaganda).

The second group have a point - MBFC isn't the end all be all, but it's certainly better than nothing. Having meaningful bias measurements for each relevant scale would be impressive but way beyond what MBFC aims to do.

So all in all - I see this as a very positive change

While I love the idea, I KNOW that there are certain groups that will refuse to accept that factual information. Tankies, for instance, will refuse to accept any criticism of their preferred sources. (As will Russian-asset Jimmy Dore.) Far-right conservatives will do the same, only on the other end of the spectrum.

For those reporting the bot:

We know! We worked with the Admins to enable it. :)

I for one support this. Sure it's not perfect and the bias checker had its own bias, but it's merely am advisory, you can disregard it if you want.