No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
I take it some people see it as a protest at the way their clients misrender the formatting.
For me it’s because the bias rating specifically is opaque and can be just plain wrong.
I could block it but if everyone who thought it was a bad idea just blocked it then it wouldn’t get downvoted which might lead people to think everyone generally agreed with it.
At least when it’s downvoted people take a step back and are less likely to just accept what it says.
EDIT: Also worth pointing out in my case at least I did go to the effort of actually trying to provide some constructive feedback on the bot through the proper channels rather than just downvoting and moving on.
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.
So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.
I only ever hear people mention “far right” (not familiar with this bot).
Are there any sources that you, yourself, would consider “right center”?
Financial times, Newsweek
Bloomberg, Forbes, and Fox News jump to mind.Edit - you know looking at Bloomberg’s site again I think you could make an argument for it but it does appear to be mostly concerned with fact based news centered on the finance industry. I’m just used to seeing shit guest opinion articles from them.
Edit edit - in their place I offer up CNBC with their personal finance propaganda perpetually trying to convince Americans they just aren’t budgeting well enough.
Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
Source?
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
Do you consider the GOP to be “far right”?
I see how that happened. If you check down thread though you’ll see I would rate a campaign organization for the GOP as right, not far right.
You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the “right center” category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.
Looking through all the sources you mentioned, especially the center-right sources, the ratings tend to be accurate. Did you expect the center right sources to be rated as far right and the center left sources to be rated as right wing?
I expect the fact based objective sources to be rated as center/not biased. And sources calling for a complete destruction of liberal democracy to be far right, yes. The campaign site should be listed under Right as it’s transparently a partisan organization.
The comparison with leftists here would be if they listed Anarcho-Communists as “left center”. But then your response tells me everything I need to know. You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
You’ve gone right into exaggerated rhetoric meant to paint me as someone from the far left.
Your response tell me everything I need to know, that you’re the average far left Lemming that sees everyone you disagree with as a far right incel.
You’ve got an accurate username at least.
Because they don’t want to take 3 seconds and block the user.
I wonder if the same clients that don’t correctly render the collapsed paragraphs also don’t correctly render the block button?
Many people disagree with the bot existing. Blocking it is just a surrender, downvotes show that the disagreement continues and lets others know it exists.
So jihad instead of blocking it? Cool, sounds totally worth it.
Jihad, civilised disagreement. Potayto, potahto
Surrender, get weirdly upset about a bot you can block. Toemato, tohmahto.
- People disagree on the bias bot reporting
- People don’t like their biases being made visible
- People don’t realize they have a bias
- People find the bot noisy
Someone just told me that it “labels everything short of fascism as ‘left-leaning’” and “tries to shift the Overton window” even further right than it already is in the US.
And I suppose that is correct if your idea of the spectrum of normal political opinions is restricted to what you see on Lemmy, especially if your instance hasn’t defederated from Hexbear yet.
And yet ultimately, MBFC places their center – by their own admission – based on US politics, which is decidedly right of center within the developed world.
That’s correct. It’s intended for a US audience.
If it were based on the European Overton window and you were American then there’s a good chance you would complain about its centre being centre-left for you.
It’s not wrong; you’re just not in the intended audience.
It’s not really possible to give internationally correct ratings. What an American considers centre-left is different from what a Frenchman considers centre-left, which is different from what a Pole considers centre-left. You can only report one, and the other two will then complain about it being wrong from their perspective.
This needs to die in a fire. It’s not the US Overton window. You can see that by far right sources listed as right center. Like the Ayn Rand Institute.
Just in curiosity, what is an example of a centre-right (by American standards) source for you? I make no comment about the Ayn Rand Institute as I know nothing about it
Sinclair and Fox News stations would be center right. Fox Opinion TV would be Right to Far right depending on the show and Ayn Rand is far right because it’s anarchy-capitalism.
Center, or least biased are your fact based papers of record. BBC, NYT, WAPO, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, etc.
I think you’re right in terms of the American spectrum. Do you have a link to the bot calling the Ayn Rand institute centre-right? I did some more digging into it.
I will happily retract my comment if you can.
So the bias bot is biased, dammit
It should then refrain from from posting on non US-media sources and/or stories and/or communities.
Of course it won’t. It’s purpose is to promote it’s owners US-centric political window.
It’s spamming political propaganda ,dressing it up as ‘facts’, and it’s getting it’s just deserts.
There is no need for regional tone in a “fact checker” bot. Facts are not regional. There is need for political education in the united states so that right wing things are considered right wing things again and not center positions. Respectively, anything leftist isnt communism.
Truthfully the bot gets voted down because it furthers a Zionist agenda, same as the lemmy world administration by pushing it, and many less biased instances and user groups take offense with that.
Where anyone puts the “center” of the political spectrum is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant. What we should still be able to expect is that it gets the ordering of sources correct—i.e., it doesn’t label Source A as being to the left of Source B if it’s actually to the right. And that relative ordering is still useful, as long as we bear in mind that the actual labels are otherwise arbitrary.
They (MBFC) explicitly state that they rate sources as more credible the closer the sources are to their arbitrarily selected centre.
Which is ridiculous. If Democracy Now or ProPublica take great pains to get all their facts right (which they do), and the New York Post regularly outright makes shit up, they’re marked as equally reliable based on that metric, because they’re supposedly an equal distance away from the centre.
It puts Reuters as the center and that seems pretty accurate, IMO.
Non-US politics is more complicated than “left vs right”.
US politics is too.
Definitely—so sources that are close together when projected onto a left-right axis may be far apart in a more multidimensional political space. But the relative ordering along that axis can still be accurate, even if the implied proximity isn’t.
The assumes that the US Democrat-Republican spectrum is indeed a straight line in that space, and they are diametrically opposed.
The bot is tuned for US bias. Europe bias: US left is centric here.
The bot isn’t even tuned for US bias. It’s tuned for conservative US bias. The papers of record that work really hard to be objective get listed as “left center”.
Personally I find it worthless because it lends credibility to sources that promoted the Iraq war, afghanistan, libya, syria, etc.
Any source that covered a story where thousands to millions will be/are/were murdered for the profit of the military-industrial complex as anything but an unimaginable crime is instantly non-credible. Yes, that includes 99% of American media.
Same with every media outlet wringing their hands about Hamas instead of the locking of millions of people in a concentration camp for decades that precipitated the attack.
I wish it looked like your screenshot. On Boost, I get everything folded out, occasionally with unclickable links.
The best apps for rendering are: Alexandrite, Connect, Jerboa, Photon, Quiblr, Summit, and Voyager. Sync and Boost are pretty poor at it despite being paid apps.
Boost is free, but yeah.
Sync is free too.
I don’t consider free with ads or buy for no ads on the same level as the rest of the free Lemmy apps. I hate ads, won’t tolerate them.
The spoilers look like crap on connect too. The bot takes a huge amount of screen real estate. I wouldn’t mind it as much if it was like 2 lines instead, but it takes up a whole screen.
That’s weird, I use summit and it renders like the screenshot. I don’t use connect but maybe yours needs to be updated. Only one or maybe two apps had a 10 originally before the post but it has been updated since then to reflect changes devs have made after the post.
I love how the shittiest apps are the paid ones.
Long live Voyager!
Dang. I didn’t realize how bad Sync is at rendering posts. It’s a giant unformatted mess for me as well. That screenshot is a far more tolerable presentation.
I’m mostly in favor of leaving the comment-clogging bots back on reddit where they can all talk to each other without me.
Not sure if this is the same on every instance, but on my profile there’s an option for “show bot accounts”
Just uncheck that bad boy and self-identified bot accounts don’t even show up.
It’s a standard lemmy feature, yes.
… that this bot doesn’t respect.
the bot has been marked as bot since the very beginning and is also clearly marked as bot in the screenshot as @blackn1ght@feddit.uk already mentioned.
i also just checked on db0 in case there was some federation issue that would have the account not be marked as bot over there and it’s also clearly marked as bot when viewed on db0.
Ah… I’ve heard more than one person saying they can see it despite having blocked bots and not seeing other bots. Sounds like there’s a technical issue somewhere.
It shows a B in the screenshot and a bot icon on my client next to the username that says it’s a bot so I assume it must be identifying itself as a bot.
Two reasons: It’s a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias
Oh no, now we need a Media Bias Checker Bot Bias Checker
Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.
However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well
It’s hard to be non-biased. There’s not a single person who does not have a bias of some sort. The way people get bent out of shape over the bot makes me sad. It gives a decent starting point for anyone looking to start learning about the different biases and how different outlets report information. Of course it’s not a perfect bot or website it’s getting the info from, but it’s a valuable tool.
I did block it myself though. Sync gives large previews of links, so it did get a bit spammy. This could be disabled in the app’s settings, but it’s a feature I like so I can easily get to linked articles or videos. Wish I could turn it off for bots
The biased bias fact check bot… LMAOROLFZ…
If it’s trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).
It’s getting it’s info from Media Bias Fact Check so explain to me how their method is wrong? You prefer All Sides. Or Ad Fontes Media? Both of which also say leaning left.
Who cares where it’s getting its info from? The methodology is crap and I don’t need a bot or self-appointed gatekeeping organization telling me which something is biased. It’s not that the bias isn’t there, but I’d rather decide it for myself.
Ah so you have a methodology, which is experience based, uses your individual knowledge? Can you explain how you judge political bias, so others can use it?
I applaud your interest in self-reliance, but how do you determined you are not being manipulated by either side?
CNN isn’t left by any stretch. It’s corporate friendly that pays lip service to some liberal culture war issues.
In general I don’t disagree that CNN a corporation which has a fiduciary bias to it’s peers in the news it promotes. That is a bias of corporate person hood.
Many other issues there, but I’m curious on a spectrum in the US and in comparison to other similar organization in the US, how you would place CNN? Right leaning? Center? Far right?
The point being made is that “where does it sit on the current US political spectrum” doesn’t matter. Why should I care is CNN sits slightly left or right of the current American Overton window? Why is a news organisation more credible if one guy judges it to be in the centre of that window? How does Judging the BBC or NHK based on where they would sit if they were American do anything other than cement the ridiculous idea that the current US status-quo is an inviolable constant of the universe?
Because many feel that the bot has a bias itself, making it useless at best and actively harmful at worst.
I have no horse in this race and don’t downvote the bot myself, but I have also seen it call sources center left, that are definitely not left of any reasonable center.
Maybe because manh people think it’s useless and stupid and wish it would go away. Trusting a random bot to tell you the political leaning of an information source so you know whether to trust the information is peak stupidity, IMO.
Any bot that doesn’t actually use lemmy’s “I’m a bot” protocol (so I can hide it completely) gets downvoted. It’s the only thing I even bother downvoting on Lemmy.
the bot has been marked as bot since the very beginning and is also clearly marked as bot in the screenshot, so your comment does not apply here.
I see you’ve replied this a few times now. Can you please complete this test for me?
I like how you sent a screenshot of a failed attempt
It was a joke but i guess it’s wasted here
My problem with the downvotes and the criticisms is that they don’t provide any proof or comparison, they simply say that it’s biased and wrong.
At the very least you should be linking examples and comparing against other bias checking sites.
For instance, I immediately disliked biasly.com because the rating system is -100 (Liberal) to 100 (Conservative). I’ve only compared a single site so far but the rating system alone makes me inclined to believe that the site is biased towards conservative views.
I strongly disagree. The burden of proof lies with the one making the claim and this bot has zero transparency regarding its benchmark, database or other criteria. That combined with the fact that it’s usage (apparently exclusively) seems to be highly pushed is enough to stay sceptical.
Personally I just blocked it but I have full understanding for anyone downvoting it, simply to communicate “I disagree with the existence of this bot in this context”
Whenever someone gives some good evidence, it gets removed almost immediately. Someone named “Linkerbaan” had two posts about this with actual evidence and it got twice removed.
I tried to search for the one where, I myself commented on and guess? It got removed.
That’s really sketchy. Thanks for sharing.
Check out how they rate Guardian and how they rate the Ayn Rand Institute. Then check the fact checking difference between Guardian and NYT. It just gets worse the more you look at it.
I’ve seen several replies to the bot pointing out bias. There’s nobody dedicated to writing a bot to follow around the bias bot and replying every time.
That makes sense, I just hadn’t seen a single post. In a comment above it was stated that posts criticizing the bot are removed, which is possibly why I haven’t seen any.
I haven’t observed that, but I didn’t often visit a comment section twice and I’m certainly not clever enough to notice things missing.
I’ve had to block it because it takes up two screens of my phone as my client doesn’t support spoiler tags properly. I’m not going to change my client over one noisy bot.
Also MBFC seems to be a bit biased (it’s definitely not correct on a few in the UK), as most bias rankings are, it’s why services like Ground News use several of these services to make up their ratings. At the end of the day only using MBFC data isn’t much better than listening to one guy tell you “yeah they’re totally fine”
Finally from what little discussion I’ve seen with the owner of the bot, they don’t seem to be very collaborative with the rest of the community and just shut down criticism.
What app are you even using? In Voyager it’s always collapsed in a spoiler and if you click on it, it’s just some text.
Probably Sync. I’m waiting for the next update too.
