No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.
If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you’re either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.
And to think, this quote is almost 20 years old! Things have changed a lot since then.
We still make fun of conservatives, but it’s much less funny that they’re actually in power. Conservatives are living up to the satire.
It’s like the aliens in Galaxy Quest who think their Star Trek show is a documentary, only it’s conservatives watching The Colbert Report
Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.
So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.
I only ever hear people mention “far right” (not familiar with this bot).
Are there any sources that you, yourself, would consider “right center”?
Bloomberg, Forbes, and Fox News jump to mind.Edit - you know looking at Bloomberg’s site again I think you could make an argument for it but it does appear to be mostly concerned with fact based news centered on the finance industry. I’m just used to seeing shit guest opinion articles from them.
Edit edit - in their place I offer up CNBC with their personal finance propaganda perpetually trying to convince Americans they just aren’t budgeting well enough.
Financial times, Newsweek
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Source?
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
Looking through all the sources you mentioned, especially the center-right sources, the ratings tend to be accurate. Did you expect the center right sources to be rated as far right and the center left sources to be rated as right wing?
I expect the fact based objective sources to be rated as center/not biased. And sources calling for a complete destruction of liberal democracy to be far right, yes. The campaign site should be listed under Right as it’s transparently a partisan organization.
The comparison with leftists here would be if they listed Anarcho-Communists as “left center”. But then your response tells me everything I need to know. You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
Your response tell me everything I need to know, that you’re the average far left Lemming that sees everyone you disagree with as a far right fascist.
You’ve got an accurate username at least.
Do you consider the GOP to be “far right”?
I see how that happened. If you check down thread though you’ll see I would rate a campaign organization for the GOP as right, not far right.
- People disagree on the bias bot reporting
- People don’t like their biases being made visible
- People don’t realize they have a bias
- People find the bot noisy
The bot is tuned for US bias. Europe bias: US left is centric here.
The bot isn’t even tuned for US bias. It’s tuned for conservative US bias. The papers of record that work really hard to be objective get listed as “left center”.
Someone just told me that it “labels everything short of fascism as ‘left-leaning’” and “tries to shift the Overton window” even further right than it already is in the US.
And I suppose that is correct if your idea of the spectrum of normal political opinions is restricted to what you see on Lemmy, especially if your instance hasn’t defederated from Hexbear yet.
Where anyone puts the “center” of the political spectrum is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant. What we should still be able to expect is that it gets the ordering of sources correct—i.e., it doesn’t label Source A as being to the left of Source B if it’s actually to the right.
It puts Reuters as the center and that seems pretty accurate, IMO.
They (MBFC) explicitly state that they rate sources as more credible the closer the sources are to their arbitrarily selected centre.
Which is ridiculous. If Democracy Now or ProPublica take great pains to get all their facts right (which they do), and the New York Post regularly outright makes shit up, they’re marked as equally reliable based on that metric, because they’re supposedly an equal distance away from the centre.
Non-US politics is more complicated than “left vs right”.
US politics is too.
Definitely—so sources that are close together when projected onto a left-right axis may be far apart in a more multidimensional political space. But the relative ordering along that axis can still be accurate, even if the implied proximity isn’t.
And yet ultimately, MBFC places their center – by their own admission – based on US politics, which is decidedly right of center within the developed world.
That’s correct. It’s intended for a US audience.
If it were based on the European Overton window and you were American then there’s a good chance you would complain about its centre being centre-left for you.
It’s not wrong; you’re just not in the intended audience.
It’s not really possible to give internationally correct ratings. What an American considers centre-left is different from what a Frenchman considers centre-left, which is different from what a Pole considers centre-left. You can only report one, and the other two will then complain about it being wrong from their perspective.
There is no need for regional tone in a “fact checker” bot. Facts are not regional. There is need for political education in the united states so that right wing things are considered right wing things again and not center positions. Respectively, anything leftist isnt communism.
Truthfully the bot gets voted down because it furthers a Zionist agenda, same as the lemmy world administration by pushing it, and many less biased instances and user groups take offense with that.
It should then refrain from from posting on non US-media sources and/or stories and/or communities.
Of course it won’t. It’s purpose is to promote it’s owners US-centric political window.
It’s spamming political propaganda ,dressing it up as ‘facts’, and it’s getting it’s just deserts.
So the bias bot is biased, dammit
This needs to die in a fire. It’s not the US Overton window. You can see that by far right sources listed as right center. Like the Ayn Rand Institute.
Just in curiosity, what is an example of a centre-right (by American standards) source for you? I make no comment about the Ayn Rand Institute as I know nothing about it
Sinclair and Fox News stations would be center right. Fox Opinion TV would be Right to Far right depending on the show and Ayn Rand is far right because it’s anarchy-capitalism.
Center, or least biased are your fact based papers of record. BBC, NYT, WAPO, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, etc.
I think you’re right in terms of the American spectrum. Do you have a link to the bot calling the Ayn Rand institute centre-right? I did some more digging into it.
I will happily retract my comment if you can.
Personally I find it worthless because it lends credibility to sources that promoted the Iraq war, afghanistan, libya, syria, etc.
Any source that covered a story where thousands to millions will be/are/were murdered for the profit of the military-industrial complex as anything but an unimaginable crime is instantly non-credible. Yes, that includes 99% of American media.
Same with every media outlet wringing their hands about Hamas instead of the locking of millions of people in a concentration camp for decades that precipitated the attack.
I wish it looked like your screenshot. On Boost, I get everything folded out, occasionally with unclickable links.
Dang. I didn’t realize how bad Sync is at rendering posts. It’s a giant unformatted mess for me as well. That screenshot is a far more tolerable presentation.
The best apps for rendering are: Alexandrite, Connect, Jerboa, Photon, Quiblr, Summit, and Voyager. Sync and Boost are pretty poor at it despite being paid apps.
The spoilers look like crap on connect too. The bot takes a huge amount of screen real estate. I wouldn’t mind it as much if it was like 2 lines instead, but it takes up a whole screen.
Boost is free, but yeah.
I don’t consider free with ads or buy for no ads on the same level as the rest of the free Lemmy apps. I hate ads, won’t tolerate them.
Sync is free too.
I love how the shittiest apps are the paid ones.
Long live Voyager!
I take it some people see it as some kind of protest at the way their clients misrender the formatting.
Because they don’t want to take 3 seconds and block the user.
I wonder if the same clients that don’t correctly render the collapsed paragraphs also don’t correctly render the block button?
Many people disagree with the bot existing. Blocking it is just a surrender, downvotes show that the disagreement continues and lets others know it exists.
So jihad instead of blocking it? Cool, sounds totally worth it.
Jihad, civilised disagreement. Potayto, potahto
Surrender, get weirdly upset about a bot you can block. Toemato, tohmahto.
If you need a bot to tell you a source is or isn’t biased, then you shouldn’t be reading the news in the first place.
This comment seems rather ableist.
The Media Bias Fact Checker bot helps people who have autism understand biased language which may not be readily apparent without an outside source warning us about the biases.
The problem is that the intentions of the bot author aren’t fair and unbiased. They purposely label sites and articles that tilt in favor of their zionist opinions as reliable and trustworthy without regard to the reality of whether they are or are not.
Then it should at least be accurate.
Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.
However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well
The biased bias fact check bot… LMAOROLFZ…
It’s hard to be non-biased. There’s not a single person who does not have a bias of some sort. The way people get bent out of shape over the bot makes me sad. It gives a decent starting point for anyone looking to start learning about the different biases and how different outlets report information. Of course it’s not a perfect bot or website it’s getting the info from, but it’s a valuable tool.
I did block it myself though. Sync gives large previews of links, so it did get a bit spammy. This could be disabled in the app’s settings, but it’s a feature I like so I can easily get to linked articles or videos. Wish I could turn it off for bots
It is essentially the mods forcing an opinion on the validity of every post’s source.
I didn’t know it was the mods. I was wondering how it hadn’t been banned yet for being obviously biased.
They had a big metapost a few weeks ago(?) Where they essentially said: “it’s staying, we like it, get over it”
Hmm. Is it just world@lemmy.world or the whole instance?
That is the instance. Other instances like lem.ee aren’t doing it. At least I don’t think they are.
Do you mean admins? Where did they say that?
How massively disappointing if so.
Mods, not admins. Though there’s some overlap in this case.
Any bot that doesn’t actually use lemmy’s “I’m a bot” protocol (so I can hide it completely) gets downvoted. It’s the only thing I even bother downvoting on Lemmy.
the bot has been marked as bot since the very beginning and is also clearly marked as bot in the screenshot, so your comment does not apply here.
I see you’ve replied this a few times now. Can you please complete this test for me?
I like how you sent a screenshot of a failed attempt
It was a joke but i guess it’s wasted here
The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot’s reply, you’d think it was the Gaurdian.
Thank you for actually providing an example. I’ve asked and I’ve seen others ask but no one ever actually provides evidence to back their claim, they just downvote or say “bot bad”.
Sure, no problem. Also, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that at least some of this backlash isn’t from people who don’t like the idea that their beliefs may not be objective facts. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t struggle with that from time to time.
But the real problem I have with these bots is that they can never capture the kind of nuance vetting a source requires. The Raw Story ranks high on credibility because they don’t publish lies, but they don’t publish anything worthwhile either. Most of their, “stories,” are second hand accounts of something someone (who may or may not be credible) said on CNN, or how a politician or pundit got mocked on social media, and then given a title that implies the incident was more significant than it was. It’s difficult to judge something like that with an algorithm that simply looks for, “Credibility,” and, “Bias.”
It actually rates it significantly higher than the Guardian, which it gives a mixed factual rating and medium credibility, which is the same rating they give the Sun. It’s laughable.
Ooof. If it gives the S*n even a mediocre rating, it’s shit.
Jesus, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. That’s insane.
Since you asked:
- The bot provides little “value” vs the noise it creates.
I don’t need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it’s a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this “threshold for scamminess” would be very subjective.
- This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point (“value” vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I’d read.
Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I’ve done and I’m much happier with my Lemmy experience.
Worse it lists BBC as “left-center”. Which is weird in itself since the designation is usually lean left or center left. Political scientists don’t stress the loaded word first. So much about MBFC exposes the site as a biased amateur project it’s hard to imagine how it got as much traction as it did.
And 3., the blurb it posts is gigantic compared to what you’d actually want to know.
Also 4. The media bias website has its own bias in that centre right outlets like CNN are classified as left.
Oh so Media Bias is from the USA and believes that anything that isn’t Republican is left 😂
How i wish that was true.
It’s not even on point for American politics. It’s clearly a conservative viewpoint.
I’m sorry but CNN being center right is definitely an indication of your own bias in our Lemmy echo chamber. Relative to the masses, it’s about center left but still shows significant pro-left coverage.
Say what you want about there being a former no-kidding US communist party or that other country’s police systems make the whole US system right wing, but relative to the US (which mediabiasfactcheck is designed for) it is left. I was so impressed by the site many years ago when all the things I thought were centrist turned out to be biased toward my political beliefs. That’s what truth feels like
Apology accepted
The blurb being gigantic is my main gripe. I use Sync, which includes a thumbnail of each link. The bot is wordy as fuck and links 5 different things. So every time I go the comments section, it looks like this:
You can disable the big block previews in the sync settings. Or just block the bot. Or use the Lemmy option to just not show you bot accounts.
Genuinely not trying to be an asshole, those are all options. I like the bot but I understand how not everyone might. These are options to prevent dealing with it without yanking it out of everyone’s hands.
Yeah, I get those are options. I just like having thumbnails for most everything else, since I hate clicking little text links on mobile. I used to use RiF back in the day and that was always painful for me.
That looks like a terrible app. Voyager shows it as a collapsed post with like 1-2 lines of text unless you click on it.
It’s configurable. I personally think Sync is the best Lemmy app out there. I started with Jerboa then Voyager, and feel that Sync is by far the most polished. It’s not FOSS though, so I get that it has a bad rep here. Personally I’m happy to pay a bit to the dev to support his awesome work for something I use for far too many hours every day.
Personally my biggest gripe is with the formatting, specifically spoilers tags are a terrible choice when the whole thing could be a single sentence with a link. Spoiler tags aren’t uniformly implemented and when pointed out the stance is it’s the clients fault for not doing spoilers the way the dev wants rather than the devs fault for not using a more standardized approach which just bugs me. If the goal was concise conveyance of information, they missed the mark.
Yes, the posts are absolutely huge and I’m unimpressed with the bot devs response-- dude I am not going to switch Lemmy apps to make your bot less annoying.
If it’s trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).
It’s getting it’s info from Media Bias Fact Check so explain to me how their method is wrong? You prefer All Sides. Or Ad Fontes Media? Both of which also say leaning left.
CNN isn’t left by any stretch. It’s corporate friendly that pays lip service to some liberal culture war issues.
In general I don’t disagree that CNN a corporation which has a fiduciary bias to it’s peers in the news it promotes. That is a bias of corporate person hood.
Many other issues there, but I’m curious on a spectrum in the US and in comparison to other similar organization in the US, how you would place CNN? Right leaning? Center? Far right?
The point being made is that “where does it sit on the current US political spectrum” doesn’t matter. Why should I care is CNN sits slightly left or right of the current American Overton window? Why is a news organisation more credible if one guy judges it to be in the centre of that window? How does Judging the BBC or NHK based on where they would sit if they were American do anything other than cement the ridiculous idea that the current US status-quo is an inviolable constant of the universe?
Who cares where it’s getting its info from? The methodology is crap and I don’t need a bot or self-appointed gatekeeping organization telling me which something is biased. It’s not that the bias isn’t there, but I’d rather decide it for myself.
Ah so you have a methodology, which is experience based, uses your individual knowledge? Can you explain how you judge political bias, so others can use it?
I applaud your interest in self-reliance, but how do you determined you are not being manipulated by either side?
