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
    -1•3 months ago

    Thanks, this was a very informative comment. I assume none of the IFCN signatories have a free API? Just asking since you seem pretty well versed on this

    • FiveEnglish
      1•3 months ago

      I appreciate you reading and responding to my concern instead of censoring me like your fellow mod in !news and !world:

      More than half of these occurred in a community you moderate. Do you approve of this use of the term ‘spamming’ to silence criticism?

      Exposing a free API for anyone to use is not typical trade practice for respectable fact-checking operations. You may be able to get free access as a non-profit organization, and that may be worth persuing. On the other hand, there’s a fundamental problem in the disconnect between the goals of real fact-checking websites and the kind of bot you are trying to create.

      • @jeffw@lemmy.worldOPM
        -4•3 months ago

        Thanks, that tip about being a non-profit is a good suggestion. Do you have any specific fact checkers in mind?

        In terms of the comments, they look like they are off-topic. There are support communities within Lemmy.world that would be more appropriate places to post concerns. Or even other communities focused on things like Lemmy drama and similar topics like that. But copy/pasting the same comment on multiple threads? Doesn’t matter what you’re saying, we’ll delete it as spam. Done it many times myself, even if I didn’t delete your comments in particular.

        • FiveEnglish
          3•3 months ago

          This is not a case of copy/pasting the same comment in multiple threads. Please look closer at the comments and the reports. One comment is repeated once, but that is due to it being topical to MBFC’s take on the BBC, and both articles were from the BBC.

          Also, I’m alarmed you consider contextualization of MBFC in comments that reply to the Bot as ‘off-topic.’ The Bot created the topic of MBFC’s credibility by linking to it as an authoritative source. If a comment about the credibility of the BBC in reply to an article published by the BBC is on-topic, then a comment about the credibility of MBFC as a reply to a review published by MBFC is also on-topic.