The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
It will take a few hours, but FOR NOW there won’t be a bot giving reviews of the source.
The goal was simple: make it easier to show biased sources. This was to give you and the mods a better view of what we were looking at.
The mod team is in agreement: one source of truth isn’t enough. We are working on a tool to give a composite score, from multiple sources, all open source.
I liked it. Even a biased MBFC that is consistent in it’s bias has value, as you can take the bias into perspective on interpreting the rating.
Good riddance.
Why do you insist on fixing the bot instead of directing your energy elsewhere? Fixing the media bias bot to not have any bias is a fool’s errand.
The last sticky thread actually had some really good feedback, like using a fact checker that is part of the International Fact Checking Network (of which MBFC is not a member) and many other similarly great suggestions.
One of the issues might be in the name. We don’t want to create a bias bot. That seems like a fool’s errand, which is one thing we learned in the process of implementing the MBFC bot. We want to create something that makes people aware of posts that are from medium to low quality sources. Obviously, if the source is super sketchy, we’d delete it, but there’s a lot of grey area where we leave things up.
Mods should take note that this is how you listen to community feedback. Some actual learning is happening here, instead of doubling down we saw in the other thread
The other thread was an attempt to gauge feedback on specific ideas (as this post mentions, they are so in the works) and it precipitated this post
The other thread started from the assumption that the bot is useful and here to stay, even though the overwhelming feedback has been that it sucks and should be removed. It was a transparent attempt to increase support for it instead of an honest attempt at feedback. People still gave their feedback, of course, that the stupid bot should be put out to pasture.
At least now we’re seeing the bot is gone until improvements are made, the bias stuff is gone, the bot shouldn’t even appear except in select cases. That’s totally different than what they’re saying in the other thread.
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Maybe for you, but that’s not how I’m reading other people’s comments in there.
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Honestly; I think the “Negative” reactions to the bot are overblown and only done by a vocal minority who are sockpuppeting followed by a few people who are irrationally angry that the bot can be, GASP! Dare I SAY IT???!!11, Wrong.
Personally I don’t find the bot problematic at all; and I think it could easily be blocked or ignored by people who find it too inaccurate. So I find it extremely disappointing that the mods are listening to the vocal minority about this.
That being said; I do understand why Mods want to make the bot more accurate. It’s assessments and information can easily make obvious extremists and trolls more obvious to the naked eye; and can help people consume media with some grains of salt. More sources of data are good for accuracy.
Sockpuppetting? You have any indication of that?
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These people were specifically trying to get the bot removed? Must have hit quite a nerve. I know it was biased in favor of Israel, but it must have been even worse. That bot sucks so bad people make mass sockpuppet accounts just to tell you they want it gone
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I was joking. Just like you can’t be seriously claiming there is no consensus that the bot sucks and that all the net downvotes for that bot are due to a small minority of sockpuppeteers?
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What point does a “bias” bot serve if it can be incorrect? And if it can be incorrect then why should we trust it at all?
You may as well write a bot that posts “remember, don’t trust everything you read online and use critical thinking when you’re doing your own research” to every post.
The question is how much is it incorrect? Because the bot isn’t AI or anything. MBFC’s database is used in research and has been compared with other independent sources and deemed reputable enough.
Honestly, the bias piece was never the important piece for us. It was the credibility piece.
Just trying to give some insight into why we used it in this community.
Then you understand the negative reactions. Especially regarding controversial topics such as Gaza where the bot preferred sources on one side to the conflict
No one wants this bot. In the last thread asking for feedback there was an overwhelming majority that did not want it. You’re attached to it because you made it. People don’t want it. It happens. Stop it.
I didn’t make the bot. I’m working on the aggregate tool, which isn’t developed yet.
The votes were overwhelmingly more positive than negative about it. We had the vocal minority against it, but the ones who wanted it let it be known.
Seems like we’re not reading the same thread https://lemmy.world/post/18775630
About half of the unique comments by my count are suggestions for improvements or expressions of support. The 10 posts with the most downvotes are all requests to remove the bot.
Let’s be realistic - this is far from consensus.
166 upvotes, 27 down. Same thread.
Nope, that’s not how it works.
There are instances that only allow up votes. There are people that will up vote any post by a dev as a show of appreciation for the effort, without necessarily thinking about or agreeing with the changes.
If you want a poll, then you have to do a proper poll. Up- and down votes are not it.
This is some extremely willful ignorance.
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
Go home, dude. You’re drunk. Oh. That’s me.
“Check yourself.” —The MBFC bot
I’m absolutely for the bot and I know I’m not alone. I like having it and I find it useful. I don’t know why other people think it’s “a source of truth” like I’m some mindless sheep who can’t think on my own. I can and do take its rating with a grain of salt.
I don’t like sports but you don’t see me asking admins to remove those subs. It’s selfish of people to ask for it to take it down for everyone. A good aspect of using Lemmy is being able to customize your experience–so do that. If you don’t like bots, hide them all in the settings or block them individually. It’s that simple.
Now that I think of it, maybe Lemmy should ask new users how they want to experience the site when creating their accounts.
IMO no need for any bot. As long as articles are factually correct there should be no problem where they are from.
I know someone spent a lot of time writing a cool bot, but sometimes less is more.
What I wish we had is a tool for showing which sources tend to be most statistically correlated with each other, without trying to place them on a linear spectrum.
Can you give me an example? I may be able to code it
I was thinking of something like the graph of subreddits from this paper—although I think that’s based on active user overlap, and I don’t know if there’s a similar metric that would cover all news sites.
I don’t see an easy way to accomplish this without either pulling in the full text of every article over some period and running something like paragraph/doc/site vectors and then clustering by site vector.
That’s putting a lot of faith into unsupervised learning, and it’s probably just as likely to pick up on stylistic conventions like byline and date formats as it is to cluster by some common thematic pattern like political leaning.
Maybe you could use a source site’s posts and upvotes in different fediverse communities as a proxy (assuming you could find representative communities with a similar range of biases).
That’s…actually not a bad idea. Take the user-domain name pairs and weigh the edges between domains by the number of unique users who posted from both domains.
For producing clusters from the resulting graph should be easy, but aside from just saying “these are similar websites” does it really say much?
You could do something similar with comment/upvote/downvote based linkages - maybe they’ll have some deeper semantic meaning
