No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
- 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.
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.
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.
