My personal view is to remove the bot. I don’t think we should be promoting one organisations particular views as an authority. My suggestion would be to replace it with a pinned post linking to useful resources for critical thinking and analysing news. Teaching to fish vs giving a fish kind of thing.

If we are determined to have a bot like this as a community then I would strongly suggest at the very least removing the bias rating. The factuality is based on an objective measure of failed fact checks which you can click through to see. Although this still has problems, sometimes corrections or retractions by the publisher are taken note of and sometimes not, leaving the reader with potentially a false impression of the reliability of the source.

For the bias rating, however, it is completely subjective and sometimes the claimed reasons for the rating actually contradict themselves or other 3rd party analysis. I made a thread on this in the support community but TLDR, see if you can tell the specific reason for the BBC’s bias rating of left-centre. I personally can’t. Is it because they posted a negative sounding headline about Trump once or is it biased story selection? What does biased story selection mean and how is it measured? This is troubling because in my view it casts doubt on the reliability of the whole system.

I can’t see how this can help advance the goal (and it is a good goal) of being aware of source bias when in effect, we are simply adding another bias to contend with. I suspect it’s actually an intractable problem which is why I suggest linking to educational resources instead. In my home country critical analysis of news is a required course but it’s probably not the case everywhere and honestly I could probably use a refresher myself if some good sources exist for that.

Thanks for those involved in the bot though for their work and for being open to feedback. I think the goal is a good one, I just don’t think this solution really helps but I’m sure others have different views.

Get rid of the bot

To clarify what MBFC considers “MIXED” factual reporting (the same rating they give known disinformation factory Breitbart):

Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

They list like five fact checks, while The Guardian puts out basically quintuple that every day. And moreover, this is the sort of asinine nitpick that they classify as a “fact check”.

“Private renting is making people ill.” “Private renting is making people ill, but maybe this happens with other housing situations too, we don’t know, so we rate this as false.”

MBFC’s ratings for “factual reporting” are a joke.

I think it should be removed

deleted by creator

You don’t need to manufacture an authoritative source of truth as you the mods see it.

Just write down what you see as the truth and that you’ll ban anyone who speaks out against it.

Stop trying to build a machine to do the work of creating an echo chamber for you.

Ban it and all bots honestly. I hate seeing a comment on a thread just to find out it’s a bot. If not use like this continues we might see a fresh post with 6 new comments, all of them bots that don’t add to the discussion.

I wound up blocking your shitty bot because it spammed pretty much every post.

I’m frankly rather concerned about the idea of crowdsourcing or voting on “reliability”, because - let’s be honest here - Lemmy’s population can have highly skewed perspectives on what constitutes “accurate”, “unbiased”, or “reliable” reporting of events. I’m concerned that opening this to influence by users’ preconceived notions would result in a reinforced echo chamber, where only sources which already agree with their perspectives are listed as “accurate”. It’d effectively turning this into a bias bot rather than a bias fact checking bot.

Aggregating from a number of rigorous, widely-accepted, and outside sources would seem to be a more suitable solution, although I can’t comment on how much programming it would take to produce an aggregate result. Perhaps just briefly listing results from a number of fact checkers?

The bot is basically loud as fuck in a way that disrupts the comment feed.

Imagine how comments should create and add to a conversation. Imagine how various lemmy clients feed or service that conversation….

Now imagine how a double dropdown big as fuck post says “fuck you” to that conversation.

Just please consider how the form of your shit can be just as imposing as the content, which I really appreciate.

Yet somehow your posts always have me thinking “shut the fuck up” which seems antithetical to building a community.

I think this tool, while probably well-intended, only adds to the polarization problem of the world.

Tell the bot to never be the first comment. I find it very frustrating when I see “a comment on this post” and it’s just the bot. I’m here to read what people have to say so it is very annoying when I think someone said something and it’s just the bot.

There was even a front page meme about this last year, but with another noisy bot. Lemmy doesn’t bury new comments like Reddit does, so there’s no real penalty to making the bot wait.

Remove it.

No need for a bot. Obvious misinformation should be removed by the mods. Bias is too subjective to be adjudicated by the mods. Just drop it already. It’s consistently downvoted into oblivion for a reason. The feedback has been petty damn obvious. This whole thread is just because the mods are so sure they’re right that they can’t listen to the feedback they already got. Just kill the bot.

I wish the comment count on a post didn’t include MBFC (or maybe bots in general).

I’m gonna be Left-Center on this with reliable credibility that the bot is useless at best.

It is reporting on the source, not the content, of what is posted which is already going to be a problem for discourse.

If there are media sources that are known or proven to be a problem, I would find it preferable the bot just alert that and ignore anything else.