Who would do such a thing? And why? The poor little fella is just doing it’s job…
Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.
I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes
It all just suddenly clicked into place for me.
I think there’s a strong possibility that you’re right. It would explain all the tortured explanations for why the bot is necessary, coupled with the absolute determination to keep it regardless of how much negative feedback it’s getting. Looking at it as a little ad included in every comments section makes the whole thing make sense in a way that, taken at face value, it doesn’t.
I could buy this. Also, the fonts are very jarring and intrusive. I rarely want to view what’s behind the spoiler tag, just give me a line for bias and a line for credibility, no need to be bold and a smaller font if anything, and hide the rest behind the spoiler tag if I’m interested. I already know where MBFC’s bias is, and I can adjust that to get an idea that when they say left, I think center or maybe left-center.
All of that seems pretty reasonable to me, but not if your goal is advertising…
I’m also running under the asumption someones paying for it to be there. Makes no sense otherwise. Literally the start of enshitification. Id urge people to drop instnces that host it as their homes and find a reasonable home instance.
I’ve been getting a lot of ads for Ground News lately in other media that I consume, to the point where it makes me think most of their revenue is going right back into marketing.
I would not be surprised at all if they’ve tossed some money at the mods here for the purpose of boosting their signal even further.
Can’t you hide bot accounts from your settings?
Because it’s annoying to think there’s a comment on a thread, open it, and see that it was only a bot.
It also screws with post sorting on the front page since Lemmy still doesn’t have a high enough rate of new posts/comments.
Why not block it and never worry about it again?
It still shows as a comment, except now you see nothing when you click the post.
Oh well today I learned.
I block it because it’s garbage. Copypasta-ing myself:
https://lemmy.ml/post/12705767/8913172
But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/
Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. >Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.
Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.
The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:
The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.
The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
https://lemmy.ml/post/13566156/9605612
I said “these kinds of graphs,” of which there are many https://duckduckgo.com/?q=media+bias+chart&iax=images&ia=images
But you’ve sparked an idea for an interesting project: use MBFC’s API to create one of these graphs from t>heir own data. Doing a little googling, it seems that scripts and data dumps aren’t hard to come by.
I think armchair media analyst Dave M. Van Zandt is going on vibes. I don’t think he understands corporate & think tank media. Does he know who Walter Lippman or Edward Bernays were, or what the Council on Foreign Relations (“least biased” 🤡) is or made note of its prominent media members? Does he know about the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?
No results found for
site:mediabiasfactcheck.com "manufacturing consent".I’ve seen The Grayzone debunk the New York Times’ lies many times, and yet:
Also, in what universe is the neoliberal, anti-labor NYT center-left? And if the Grayzone in the ultraviolet territory, where does that leave the explicitly Communist Monthly Review, outside of MBFC’s Overton window? Surprise, it’s to the right of it:
https://lemmy.ml/post/17665401/12094932
The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.
The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.
This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.
The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”
None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.
I’ll down vote it when it says “I have nothing to add” because it could just not say anything.
Most people don’t want the bot to be there, because they don’t agree with its opinion about what is “biased.” It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don’t agree with the author’s biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author’s biases.
In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they’re just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn’t want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.
Maybe I’m misreading your comment (coffee hasn’t kicked in yet), but are you saying the bot is incorrect or that people view the bot as incorrect because it doesn’t support their biases?
I’m saying that the bot is incorrect. Look up any pro-Palestinian or -Arab source on it, and you’ll find a pretty bald-faced statement that it is factually suspect, because its viewpoint is anti-Israel. Look up the New York Times, which regularly reports factually untrue things, including one which caused a major journalistic scandal near the beginning of the war in Gaza, and check its factual rating.
Every report of bias is from somebody’s point of view. That part I have no issue with. Pretending that a source is or isn’t factual depending on whether it matches your particular bias is something different entirely.
Also, this is pure pet peeve, but have you ever seen that MBFC has a rating for itself? It pops up if someone links to it in the body of the post.
The highest possible scores in both categories, of course. 🙄
I rarely see it, but MBFC is an atrocious website that defines bias by distance from the center. It’s just nonsense.
people who disagree with its particular brand of propaganda or its forced inclusion, most likely
I do. I don’t need a bot telling me what to think.
If there’s one moderate critique, it doesn’t say much when it comes to political bias ratings, which are often U.Sian centric
Like here are the 3 axes of politics to me
Economic Policy (Base)
{Domestic} Culture and Government Structure Policy (Superstructure)
Foreign Policy (Western or Eastern Alignment
But I can’t understand anything when it merely comes to left and right, like in what way are they leftist or rightist, are they economically socialist/capitalist and anti-western/pro-western in foreign policy in such way too, or merely when it comes to culture and gov’t policy?
Because if I wanted bots to interact with I would have stayed on Reddit. The only good ones were the LotR character bots in the first place and even those got tired.
Some people just want it at the bottom of the comment section instead of floating in the middle somewhere. If we could pin its comments to the bottom that would address this.
I downvote it to lower it in the comment rankings. Acknowledging that it is imperfect, I still like it because it gives a clue as to whether I should verify the article elsewhere. It’s not there to be the final arbiter on what truth is and I think any mod that treats it as such is woefully mistaken.
The same people who are downvoting you, I guess. I’m not really sure what the objection is but they are very consistent. I’ve actually wondered if someone set up some bots to downvote all the MBFC bot posts for some reason.
They have not. I just did some analysis of it, and there is one person whose account has downvoted almost every comment that the bot has left. They have around a thousand other votes, so it’s unlikely to be a single-issue votebot account, but they also have no posts or comments, which is suspect. It seems plausible that there’s something mechanical going on which might be concerning. On the other hand, it’s only one person. There is one other person who has given so many downvotes to the bot that it’s suspicious, also.
Aside from those two accounts, it all looks like real downvotes. There are accounts which have given hundreds of downvotes to the bot, but they’re all recognizable as highly active real accounts, so it makes sense that they would give mass downvotes to the bot.
People just don’t like the bot. Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they’ve given in this comments section as to why?
Have you considered listening to the pretty extensive explanations they’ve given in this comments section as to why?
I was just entertaining a notion as I lack the skills to do an analysis like you did.
As for reading the other comments here, I have read them now, and they are interesting, but when I first commented, there were no other comments here and the post stood at -3.
Reasonable. I wasn’t trying to jump down your throat about it. I was a little annoyed at the comments which are positing some sort of fantasy scenario where the bot is useful, but where people hate it for irrational reasons. But yours was a reasonable question, definitely, in particular because for at least one account, it looks like what you described is exactly what’s happening.
some folks don’t like it and for some reason don’t just block it.
In addition to the explanations already posited, I’d also think there most likely are some people who want to lie, argue disingenuously, and a fact-checker tends to get in the way of their rhetoric.
Can you give an example of someone who ever posted something disingenuous that MediaBiasFactCheck got in the way of?
No I cannot give you an example. I was postulating that it could be a demographic that hates the bot. I don’t think an example cited is necessary to consider this a possible contributor. Relax.
This comment has big “Haitians are eating cats” energy.
I don’t have any proof, but just think about it, man!
Big if true.
Removed by mod
No it’s more like “It’s possible that Haitians could be eating cats” energy.
Which, when presented without a shed of evidence, is equally dangerous (as these last few weeks have very clearly demonstrated).
Removed by mod
Counterpoint: “Fact checkers” with an institutional bias are an excellent way to cover for lies promoted by those institutions
