No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
Because they don’t want to take 3 seconds and block the user.
Many people disagree with the bot existing. Blocking it is just a surrender, downvotes show that the disagreement continues and lets others know it exists.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
If you need a bot to tell you a source is or isn’t biased, then you shouldn’t be reading the news in the first place.
This comment seems rather ableist.
The Media Bias Fact Checker bot helps people who have autism understand biased language which may not be readily apparent without an outside source warning us about the biases.
My problem with the downvotes and the criticisms is that they don’t provide any proof or comparison, they simply say that it’s biased and wrong.
At the very least you should be linking examples and comparing against other bias checking sites.
For instance, I immediately disliked biasly.com because the rating system is -100 (Liberal) to 100 (Conservative). I’ve only compared a single site so far but the rating system alone makes me inclined to believe that the site is biased towards conservative views.
Whenever someone gives some good evidence, it gets removed almost immediately. Someone named “Linkerbaan” had two posts about this with actual evidence and it got twice removed.
I tried to search for the one where, I myself commented on and guess? It got removed.
I strongly disagree. The burden of proof lies with the one making the claim and this bot has zero transparency regarding its benchmark, database or other criteria. That combined with the fact that it’s usage (apparently exclusively) seems to be highly pushed is enough to stay sceptical.
Personally I just blocked it but I have full understanding for anyone downvoting it, simply to communicate “I disagree with the existence of this bot in this context”
I’ve seen several replies to the bot pointing out bias. There’s nobody dedicated to writing a bot to follow around the bias bot and replying every time.
That makes sense, I just hadn’t seen a single post. In a comment above it was stated that posts criticizing the bot are removed, which is possibly why I haven’t seen any.
If it’s trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).
It’s getting it’s info from Media Bias Fact Check so explain to me how their method is wrong? You prefer All Sides. Or Ad Fontes Media? Both of which also say leaning left.
CNN isn’t left by any stretch. It’s corporate friendly that pays lip service to some liberal culture war issues.
In general I don’t disagree that CNN a corporation which has a fiduciary bias to it’s peers in the news it promotes. That is a bias of corporate person hood.
Many other issues there, but I’m curious on a spectrum in the US and in comparison to other similar organization in the US, how you would place CNN? Right leaning? Center? Far right?
Who cares where it’s getting its info from? The methodology is crap and I don’t need a bot or self-appointed gatekeeping organization telling me which something is biased. It’s not that the bias isn’t there, but I’d rather decide it for myself.
