World News

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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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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:

For those reporting the bot:

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