Hello World, As many of you have probably noticed, there is a growing problem on the internet when it comes to undisclosed bias in both amateur and professional reporting. While not every outlet can be like the C-SPAN, or Reuters, we also believe that it’s impossible to remove the human element from the news, especially when it concerns, well, humans.

To this end, we’ve created a media bias bot, which we hope will keep everyone informed about WHO, not just the WHAT of posted articles. This bot uses Media Bias/Fact Check to add a simple reply to show bias. We feel this is especially important with the US Election coming up. The bot will also provide links to Ground.News, as well, which we feel is a great source to determine the WHOLE coverage of a given article and/or topic.

As always feedback is welcome, as this is a active project which we really hope will benefit the community.

Thanks!

FHF / LemmyWorld Admin team 💖

  • OtterEnglish
    6•5 months ago

    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

    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.
    • @RookiOPAEnglish
      -7•5 months ago

      Thanks for the feedback. With the new format we will think about it, but i think this is pretty good.

      We will discuss this and come back to you. We would love to open sourc ethe bot but the code quality for reading is not in a good state. We will have to clean the code up. But we will be working for that.

      • OtterEnglish
        3•5 months ago

        Sounds great, I’ll keep an eye out :)

      • @sandboxEnglish
        3•5 months ago

        So the reasons against open sourcing the bot is because you’d be embarrassed?