We’ve had some trouble recently with posts from aggregator links like Google Amp, MSN, and Yahoo.
We’re now requiring links go to the OG source, and not a conduit.
In an example like this, it can give the wrong attribution to the MBFC bot, and can give a more or less reliable rating than the original source, but it also makes it harder to run down duplicates.
So anything not linked to the original source, but is stuck on Google Amp, MSN, Yahoo, etc. will be removed.
Why does everyone have such an issue with something that is so easily ignored? I honestly don’t understand all the outrage over this.
You and me both! They did have a point when the bot had a donation nag on it, the bot creator heard that complaint and removed it.
Ah yes, people roasting volunteer mods about a thing they could easily ignore. We’re encroaching more and more on Reddit’s turf every day.
We’re not roasting the volunteer mods because we can’t ignore the bot. We’re roasting the volunteer mods because the experience of having someone in a position of power over your environment, and having them show callous indifference to how everyone in the community sees it, and what we want them to be doing with their position of power, leads people to start roasting. Sometimes out of all possible proportion to how big a deal the thing being complained about actually is.
It’s part of the healthy interplay of human society that keeps the social contract well-maintained. Take it as a sign of love, that we value this community and want it to function well.
Your bot is bad and you should feel bad
I’m open to making it better, do you have suggestions?
Everytime people try to threads either get locked, ignored or the users banned.
surprisingly admins just stick fingers in ears and yell at users to just ignore the bot
Not seeing any suggestions there to improve the bot, but lots of bannable attacks on other users, mods and admins.
So I’ll say it again, as I’ve told other people complaining, I’m open to making the bot better. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
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It has to be automated, which means accessible through an API.
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It has to be no/low cost. Lemmy.World doesn’t have a budget for this. We met with an MBFC alternative, they wanted 6 figures. HARD no.
You could get rid of it. No automation, API, or cost whatsoever.
I can’t, it’s Admin level.
You could ask them to remove it. Or you could ban it. The other news community doesn’t have it any more. Clearly, it is possible.
Why is it admin level? Are there admins that tell you what you can and can’t do with the politics community, in this case? Or does the politics moderation team have the ability to ditch the bot if they decide to?
This is such a strange situation. If you’re stuck in that former position, though, it would make a lot of your responses in this comments section make a whole lot more sense.
The Admins run lemmy.world, we serve at their pleasure.
Sure, I could ban it, then likely get removed and have the bot re-instated, and what good would that do anyone?
How much are you paying for the MBFC API? The page says it isn’t free. I’ll give you an API endpoint which will check sources against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, if you pay me half of whatever you were paying MBFC previously. That list is quite a lot better than relying on MBFC.
I already scraped the list. It’ll take around an hour for my script to finish going down the sources and assigning web sites to each one, but I can have a working API endpoint for you tomorrow morning. I can do the bot part also, if you prefer. That’s probably easier than making a new endpoint and hooking it to a bot and debugging the connection and all.
Like I said, I think the idea that readers won’t be able to determine that Breitbart is unreliable is missing a pretty big elephant in the misinformational room. If the issue that’s causing you to keep MBFC is finding a better source that’s programmatic, though, then solving that is almost trivially easy and at least seems like some kind of step forward.
To be honest, that’s Rooki’s deal, but I’ll link them to this comment!
I’ll send them a link and an example of how to use it tomorrow.
MBFC API is free as they gave us access for us as a Non Profit.
We already had in mind adding these sources to our bot but we didnt had the time and knowledge how to scrape that. Personally i would like to host it on our own server so that we dont require you to use your own money just for one bot, in what programming language did you write it?
Thanks a lot!
Rooki
So already ignoring. This is why people stopped giving feedback
I can’t ignore suggestions nobody is making. Have a better service in mind? Feel free to present it.
We looked at AllSides, which is good for bias, but has no scoring for credibility.
Stop pretending that “get rid of the bot” doesn’t count as a suggestion. That’s dishonest.
I don’t even care about the bot itself, but at this point I’m just getting pissed off by all the constant distracting bickering about it.
“We have to keep using the ratings website made by a random dude with no background in journalism who makes it available for free because real fact checking services cost money” is perhaps not the argument I would use for why the bot is both accurate and useful.
You don’t have to have a bot at all, especially to replace something like blacklisting Breitbart URLs, but someone thought the idea sounds cool. So “don’t have the bot” has been unnecessarily eliminated as an option. Even though sometimes the best option really is to just not have a bot.
I mean, it’s a great argument for not going with actual fact checkers, unless you’re volunteering to pay.
Not having one is also an option, but for my 2 cents the bot seems accurate enough so far, and it’s easy enough to ignore if you really don’t like it.
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Haha, wow you guys really need to work on your PR
There are so many good reasons to block aggregators and you picked the worst one, your bot that no one likes.
Is that the bot that says how reliable a source is? I blocked that one like a day after they started using it
Yeah, seriously, aggregators are annoying as fuck, they’re link rot waiting to happen, it’s impossible to tell the quality of the source from the URL…
And the problem is of course the MBFC bot. It’s a change for good, but this is what we’re going with? They chose the one line that would get them backlash for an objective improvement.
MSN is cancerous and was barely usable the last few times I’ve been bamboozled into going there. Yahoo is the same, just easier to avoid. I honestly haven’t run into the Google one.
They literally add nothing to the internet as far as I can tell.
The bot that everyone (inc. me ) hates?
Not everyone hates it, but if it bothers you that much, you can block it.
Just the overwhelming majority.
People overstate the hatred.
Check this post:
https://lemmy.world/post/20723122
60 upvotes, 4 comments, bot post is at +1.
Doesn’t look like an overwhelming majority, just that most people ignore it entirely.
Selection bias means that a lot of people who actively dislike the bot have it blocked.
Doesn’t mean they don’t think it’s ridiculous and misleading.
https://ponder.cat/comment/588446
One of many examples
Looks like that may be a problem with the API, not the site or the bot.
Searching the site for bbc.co.uk correctly points to the BBC:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/?s=bbc.co.uk
I’ll PM Rookie, maybe he needs to escape the search term or something.
The bot serves a very important purpose. It teaches users about the block function. I really tried to tolerate it, but it’s just like those pinned automod comments on reddit.
Just hate that it adds to the comment count
“Oooh what thoughtful discussion has taken place on this interesting news article”
“Oh it’s the bot”
That bot is the main reason I’m mostly getting my news from [email protected] instead now.
Thanks for the community link!
I blocked that shitty bot ages ago.
Your bot sucks and you should feel bad.
Really? That’s your compelling argument?
It’s to difficult for your bot, that’s universally hated in this community, to work with?
The bot is instituted by the Admins and with good reason.
But yes, this has been the problem that pops up recently. The bot sees “Oh, MSN, they’re reliable…” but the OG source is not.
i think a better bot would be one that shows the financial/managerial ties a publisher has in a tree format so people can make the decision themselves about political bias
The bot is instituted by the Admins
When did this happen? The admins instituted it for !politics, and the admins changed their minds about having it for !news and friends, but wanted to keep it in !politics?
with good reason
What’s the reason?
Heightened misinformation through the election season.
In what way does having the MediaBiasFactCheck bot help with misinformation? It’s not very accurate, probably less than the average Lemmy reader’s preexisting knowledge level. People elsewhere in these comments are posting specific examples, in a coherent, respectful fashion.
Most misinformation clearly comes in the form of accounts that post a steady stream of “reliable” articles which don’t technically break the rules, and/or in bad-faith comments. You may well be doing plenty of work on that also, I’m not saying you’re not, but it doesn’t seem from the outside like a priority in the way that the bot is. What is the use case where the bot ever helped prevent some misinformation? Do you have an example when it happened?
I’m not trying to be hostile in the way that I’m asking these questions. It’s just very strange to me that there is an overwhelming consensus by the users of this community in one direction, and that the people who are moderating it are pursuing this weird non-answer way of reacting to the overwhelming consensus. What bad thing would happen if you followed the example of the !news moderators, and just said, “You know what? We like the bot, but the community hates it, so out it goes.” It doesn’t seem like that should be a complex situation or a difficult decision, and I’m struggling to see why the moderation team is so attached to this bot and their explanations are so bizarre when they’re questioned on it.
Well, for example, just today (or maybe it was yesterday? Things get blurry after a while) somebody posted a Breitbart link.
Now, most of the Lemmy audience is smart enough to know Breitbart is bullshit, and I did remove the link when I saw it, but until I removed it, it was up with the MBFC bot making it clear to anyone who did not know that it was, in fact, bullshit.
We can’t catch everything right away, so it’s good having a bot mark these things.
Wouldn’t the fact that the Breitbart article had – if I recall correctly – a 25:10 upvote-downvote ratio by the time it was removed suggest that the MBFC bot was functionally useless in counteracting a disinformation source? Presumably because most people simply read a headline about Zelensky that wasn’t negative, said “oh cool”, upvoted without reading the article or looking at the source, and continued scrolling? And I can hardly imagine any of the 10 downvoters actually checked the MBFC bot; instead they noticed that it was Breitbart and downvoted because of its notoriety.
We discussed boiling the bot down to a tag on the posts, but apparently there was some technical limitation doing that? Frankly, it’s a little over my head.
Overall, we rate Breitbart Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, the publication of conspiracy theories and propaganda, as well as numerous false claims. (M. Huitsing 6/18/2016) Updated (01/29/2022)
Yeah mbfc really doing heavy work showing how bad it is…
Misinformation like the website MBFC, which equates the level of factual accuracy of The Guardian to Breitbart?
No it’s okay, I checked the rating for MBFC on MBFC and they rated themselves very well.
Don’t forget how highly they ranked Radio Free Asia
I don’t hate Radio Free Asia as much as some people, but even I recognize that MBFC is on crack when talking about it compared to – as I keep bringing up – The Guardian.
The MBFC Credibility Rating for RFA is “HIGH CREDIBILITY”, while for The Guardian, it’s “MEDIUM CREDIBILITY”. For factual reporting, RFA gets “HIGH” while The Guardian gets “MIXED” – which is two ranks down from RFA and is – again – on the same level as Breitbart. Meanwhile, didn’t RFA run an anti-China story using a picture from a Reddit thread as their only source?
Qnr that damn left-leaning, uh, Associated Press.
No, no, you see, they have a left-center bias because they… Report the news factually and dispassionately. Seriously, this article titled “AP exclusive: Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin” is cited by MBFC as “utiliz[ing] moderate-loaded language in their headlines in their political coverage”.
They specifically cite: “However, in some articles, the author demonstrates bias through loaded emotional language such as this: “PUSHED Ukrainian officials to investigate BASELESS corruption allegations against the Bidens.””
Yeah, no fucking shit it was completely baseless and no fucking shit Trump pushed for this. How dare they present reality the way it actually is instead of fucking both-sidesing an obvious lie. Clearly left-center bias.
MBFC does NOT equate the Guardian with Breitbart:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/
Overall, we rate The Guardian as Left-Center biased based on story selection that moderately favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks over the last five years.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/breitbart/
Overall, we rate Breitbart Questionable based on extreme right-wing bias, the publication of conspiracy theories and propaganda, as well as numerous false claims.
If you check their list of questionable sources, Breitbart is listed, the Guardian is not:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/
Really weird it is rated “Reliable” when the New York Times wrote and reported on literal fake news weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which manufactured consent for an illegal invasion and overthrow of Iraq and killing literally MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.
On what planet is the newspaper of the establishment of the New York elite, literally wall street, “Left” I don’t think they support putting all the corporate board members in prison and establishing workers co-ops and replacing the neoliberal status quo with socialism.
You don’t have to go back 20 years. They also committed a fairly big oopsie, not that long ago.
The Guardian: I don’t think this one article about renters from 2020 proves its case very well. Personally, I’m not convinced. MIXED
New York Times: You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? I don’t think so.
The New York Times is a special class of paper called a “Newspaper of Record” until or unless that changes, nobody will question their reliability.
Jordan, please look at the ‘Factual Reporting’ metric. They consider both of them to be ‘MIXED’, and as @[email protected] correctly points out, the sorts of few-and-far-between “fact checks” performed on The Guardian are complete nitpicks, while Breitbart is outright a disinformation outlet, peddling climate denialism, anti-vaxx, and other things that make it – based on what you said earlier – a source that isn’t credible enough to be posted to this very community.
The Guardian is much more factually accurate than “MIXED”, and Breitbart is much less factually accurate than “MIXED”, yet somehow they elevate Breitbart while dragging The Guardian’s credibility through the mud.
(To be clear, though, I still think what you guys are doing with this change is a huge improvement.)
That’s not the overall rating though, which is why Breitbart is Questionable and the Guardian is not.
Example of a “failed” fact check for The Guardian:
“Private renting is making millions of people ill with almost half of England’s 8.5 million renters experiencing stress or anxiety and a quarter made physically sick as a result of their housing, campaigners have said.”
OUR VERDICT
A survey found almost a quarter of private renters agree that housing worries have made them ill in the past year. This doesn’t mean the sickness was specifically caused by renting privately as opposed to any other type of housing situation.
This was an article entirely about stress and anxiety. Ignoring that stress and anxiety have physical effects on the body, the only way someone could conclude that the article was about like, toxic apartments and not stress and anxiety was if they failed to read the article at all and instead just read the headline and made up an article in their head.
Such obviously agenda driven nitpicky bullshit is why people don’t respect the bot.
Correlation is not causation. I had my first heart attack when I was renting. It wasn’t BECAUSE I was a renter. You literally cannot say someone is experiencing stress because they’re a renter, that’s a stretch.
They could be experiencing stress by their overall socio-economic status which is also a reason they are renting, not the other way around.
I had my 2nd heart attack as a home owner. Again, my status as a renter or owner has nothing to do with it.
So it will be removed after the election, right?
Lol no then it’s shown it’s worth and has to stay
It’s Rooki’s pet project, and so it has to stay.
Solid rule. 9/10. One point deduction for making me look at Tom Cotton.
What if the Yahoo article is because the original is paywalled?
You can use an archive link to get around a paywall, that’s always been allowed.
But that’s literally rule 2.
dont use archive to get around paywalls…
Next, you’ll be telling me that UniversalMonk violates rule 7 pretty much every day.
Archive links are allowed, and, in fact, if you submit a link from the web interface, it offers to generate an archive link for you.
I specifically clarified that with the Admins when they asked us to crack down on copy pasting full articles.
So then the rule is wrong where it says do not do this on paywalls specifically
I’m really curious what the response to this is going to be.
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
LMFAO
May the most useful the bots been
