The tesseract Lemmy app, has a little overview from mediabiasfactcheck.com (MBFC). It seems like a clever way to foster a healthy community.
If you click on the ranking you get details.
EDIT: Sorry to stir up an old hornet’s nest.
EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC. Even if there are flaws, I would like to celebrate all attempts at elevating the conversations we are having.
MBFC does the opposite of elevate conversations. It’s quite frankly a poison pill for conversations. People will apply their prejudices and alter their interpretations based on the ‘bias check’, typically before or instead of any critical thinking
or ant article.of any article.The last time the MBFC bot was going the user pushing it was very clearly aware of this dynamic. They also knew it was lumping everything to website source, despite authors and opinion pieces, for maximum damage.
Imagine thinking CNN is center-left 😂
In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But that’s because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are “Liberal Marxism” now (oxymoronic as that label is).
Edit: And MBFC perpetuates that rightward movement. I prefer Ad Fontes, although it does also label CNN as center-left.
MBFC is bad. It supports the American overton window, which is, you know, now openly fascist.
Whatever the views are about MBFC, Tesseract integrated it better than LW’s bot. If you don’t like MBFC, it’s just an option in your user settings to turn it off for Tesseract, whereas the bot caused a bunch of problems that weren’t even related to concerns about accuracy and bias. Drive-by bots can be annoying, because it leads people to believe there’s legit content where there isn’t, and not every client respected LW’s bot use of spoiler Markdown, so they ended up with a massive comment from it that dominated the screen.
That seems like important nuance for sure.
Wow, I decided I would give MBFC a shot. You are greeted with an ad-infested experience with a giant start bar reminiscent of a malware site. After building up enough courage to click it I discovered it not only wanted my email but also my credit card.
After having to fight to see the article I wanted rated I just don’t have the fortitude to the fight this horrible experience to probably be told that the following article is left center or left leaning bias.
While I will admit this was a not Fox News praising the Trump Admin, it has an extremely neutral tone and does nothing to pushback against the obviously clownish message that the Trump team provides.
For this reason it, is to me at least, right leaning. I guess I will never know what MBFC would rate it.
reminiscent of a malware site
Well, that’s because it is malware.
it, is to me at least, right leaning
It’s not right leaning.
It’s disinformation malware whose sole purpose is to move the Overton window as far right as possible.
It labels anything short of outright fascism as far left.
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It has malicious intent, therefore it’s malware. 🤷♂️
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Any software intended to cause harm is malware. MBFC is software intended to cause harm. MBFC is malware.
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is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can’t find one.
https://alternativeto.net/software/media-bias-fact-check/?license=opensource
These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
No. And there never should be. And here’s why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.
Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.
i think photon does this too
EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC.
Here’s another in my “making friends” series of posts.
Commenters DO NOT have valid criticisms of MBFC. They are universally wrong, have no idea how MBFC works, and are too lazy to look it up. The misinfo ghouls among them are happy to repeat lies over and over until people start to accept them.
Some of these people can be pretty convincing but I urge you to actually fact check their arguments. Most of these people are just parroting bullshit they saw someone else say. The “best” of these are basically artisanal, hand-crafted AI hallucinations: high-confidence, syntactically-correct nonsense. Don’t put that glue on your pizza. If someone posts an MBFC link as evidence, click it and read it. Nearly every single time, the link they posted contradicts them and they just haven’t read it.
And ask yourself why no one ever posts peer-reviewed research backing up their claims. It’s a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Every single piece of academic research on MBFC says they’re wrong. The MBFC conspiracy theorists can’t just ignore that body of research because it’s inconvenient – they need a compelling reason why all research to date is wrong. For their claims to be true, it would require a massive conspiracy between academics, journalists, and media bias organizations because they are all in consensus about what makes good and bad news organizations. It’s loopy, tinfoil hat bullshit.
You’re right, defending Nazi sites doesn’t make you friends, you’re wrong that there’s any peer review of the site though, either way.
I’m awarding you three demerits for a reply that doesn’t make sense. Govern yourself accordingly.
Mbfc is funded and run by Nazis. You’re defending a Nazi site. I personally wouldn’t call you a Nazi over doing so in ignorance, but others might.
As the person asking people to fact check the claims of weird conspiracy theorists, I’m gonna have to ask for your sources on that one.
Edit: For anyone wondering, MBFC is transparent about their funding sources.
Edit2: an MBFC conspiracy theorist just making shit up??? I’m shocked…
you likely won’t find an unbiased opinion regarding that here. Members tend not do their own research and only live to complain about the existence of it.
I share the same opinion as yours, I would rather have a sometimes inaccurate listing than no listing at all. The complaints people have about it are what I enjoy using it for, it lets me know to look for certain things on the article before I enter so I know if I should take it with a grain of salt or not.
Members tend not do their own research and only live to complain about the existence of it.
But then
lets me know to look for certain things on the article before I enter so I know if I should take it with a grain of salt or not.
You are talking about yourself in the first sentence.
that could be true, if I didn’t double check the sources. If that is how you would be doing it then sure, but I use it as a guideline not a rule, and check for facts after.
There’s nothing wrong with using something as a blueprint/template. Seeing a strong lean in credibility or positioning tells me that I should be more serious on fact checking on it as there will be bias.
Is this the same media bias checking bot that thinks a Murdoch media owned news site was left leaning?
As a left-leaning Canadian, this seems crazy to me. There’s not even a place for me on this chart.
It’s crazy how normalized right-wing extremism is. Well, it does explain the state of things in the US, though.
I also don’t love that is has least biased in the center. Bias is a trait that is on an almost entirely separate axis.
Yeah, as political compasses, in order to have some reasonableness, have left-right and authoritarian-libertarian, this needs another axis for bias. You can be a leftist organization that still reports on reality without bias. Being in favor of the status-quo is it’s own form of bias.
From the test that was done with the bot that was not a good source. 1) American focus 2) too much room for debate on the ranking Here some discussion on it https://lemmy.world/post/18073070
I blocked the bot as soon as I learned how. The ratings are a joke - mostly because of its American bias.
I suppose we’ve got to keep at it until we’re at a point where doing something is better than doing nothing. Where, of course, doing nothing is somewhat of an acknowledgement of the fact it’s hard to do something right enough to be able to apply it to all posts and all articles and all that.
An analogy comes to mind: it’s like the difference between telling hikers they’re at their own risk and advising them to bring water, good shoes, and a fully charged battery, and they’ll be fine. If you can’t account for everything, there are arguments to be made with trying to shift responsibility back to people with either more general or more specific warnings.
My impression is that people will be eager to tell in the comments that a news source is bad or biased, or that the specific article is misinformation.
At the end of the day, if you just trust some rank value that someone tossed in, w.o. knowing who is behind it exactly and how they reached that conclusion, it can be an easy source for disinformation.
Also some news outlets are providing reliable coverage on some issues, while being biased on others. Often they just repeat texts from Reuters, AP or other agencies. So any single value rating can warn you that the same message is “biased” in one case and in another case it cheers it on as “reliable”.
In other words: You can keep jumping out of the window in different ways, trying to find a way for humans to fly w.o. mechanical help, or you can just accept taking the stairs.
I agree that this is necessary, but we need to be mindful with the implementation. A decentralized approach might be more effective than relying on a centralized list. As you mentioned, a warning that encourages people to think critically and not take everything at face value is likely the best solution for now.
I don’t see any comments when I click that link
Try this other post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24920368
that worked thanks
Do you have filter? Block community? Like politics 😝
ha, that’s possible.
that’s a smart choice
That’s really cool. Looks great too.
