Sorry to throw this on everyone in the group, but there has been another mod shakeup and it feels fair to address it publicly.
MightBe has been removed as mod from both World News and Politics.
I also unpinned and removed their rule change posts.
The too long; didn’t read is they were pretty hostile in messages to both myself and little cow, and when asked to join back channel discussions in chat, refused, and instead made unilateral decisions without group discussion.
Moderating a group like this needs to be a collaborative experience, no single voice should be establishing rules without some form of common agreement.
They not only refused to engage in that collaboration, but did so in a manner not fitting for being the new person on the team.
And it is a team. I tend to make more public posts than others, because I value the transparency over privacy, but when I do so, it’s a result of a nice private chat among the group.
For now, their rule changes have been removed from both Politics and World News. Back to the stated way of doing business:
World News is for all News OUTSIDE the United States, that’s what the normal “News” is for.
Politics is for US Politics - Somehow I doubt that’s going to be an issue in 2024.
There ARE things the mod team is discussing, and any rule changes will be made as a group effort, and (hopefully!) for the better health of the group and ALL of our participants!
Happy New Year!
I was told to add my voice here, so here’s my take on Rule 3:
Please keep the MFBC rule. Without that, this sub would be just a repackaged WorldNews@lemmy[dot]ml which is a cesspool where terrible sources and propaganda run crazy. I’ve admin-blocked that community on my instance months ago because of the poor sourcing.
You can’t “both sides” the truth, and sources that habitually lie, distort the truth, or inject heavy bias should not be given a platform. There are plenty of left-, center, and right-biased sources that are credible, so all angles are possible while maintaining standards for the credibility of submissions. If a particular story is only covered by news outlets that are deemed non credible, there’s probably a reason for that.
Even allowing case-by-case submissions from non-credible sources (e.g. they just repackage an AP article) is dangerous as it gives the otherwise non-credible source undeserved legitimacy and only serves to muddy the waters for the other stuff they put out. It also sets a precedent: “Well, you allowed this story from Jim Bob’s Reel Truth News so why not this one?”
Edit: This may be the wrong post? I can’t find the post Little Cow linked to me, but they said it was pinned (lemmy.world/post/10102462).
We’re working with the admins to come up with a bot to automate it.
Agreed, garbage sources are garbage sources.
We’re working with the admins to come up with a bot to automate it.
When I was still developing Tesseract UI (RIP), I incorporated MBFC lookups directly in the client and put credibility badges on posts. I didn’t see that MFBC had a public or private API, but they do export a MIT licensed subset of their data in JSON format in their official browser extension. I was able to bundle that dataset into Tesseract to perform lookups locally.
If the admins want any help with the bot tool and working with the MBFC data, I’m happy to assist.
