cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18073105

Media Bias Fact Check - Automation

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 💖

    • threelonmusketeersEnglish
      5•3 months ago

      Are there alternatives, or is the idea of an unbiased media bias bot inherently infeasible?

      • @[email protected]
        4•3 months ago

        🤷

        On some level it does feel like it might be infeasible, but also that even though it might be fundamentally infeasible on some level, a bias checker might be worthwhile anyhow – MBFC just might not be the best choice. They do have a really odd way of categorizing trustworthiness for example, and they categorize a lot of sources as “mixed” instead of eg “mostly factual” even though they only have a tiny handful of inaccurate articles compared to their output

      • slazer2auEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        I am firmly in the camp of you can not have an unbiased bot because bots are made by humans who are by nature bias. Even if we don’t recognise our actions as bias.

      • @[email protected]
        6•3 months ago

        Yeah it is a bit. Like I just said in another comment, their “factual reporting” scale also seems a bit fucky and they seem to have a real tendency of categorizing especially “left leaning” sources as “mixed” despite inaccuracies being uncommon in general, see eg their page for the Guardian https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/

        I liked the idea of the bot but I’m very much not enthusiastic about how MBFC does things, and I just blocked it outright after a while as I realized their categorizations are often fairly useless for actually checking the bias of some source