The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
It will take a few hours, but FOR NOW there won’t be a bot giving reviews of the source.
The goal was simple: make it easier to show biased sources. This was to give you and the mods a better view of what we were looking at.
The mod team is in agreement: one source of truth isn’t enough. We are working on a tool to give a composite score, from multiple sources, all open source.
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
What I wish we had is a tool for showing which sources tend to be most statistically correlated with each other, without trying to place them on a linear spectrum.
I was thinking of something like the graph of subreddits from this paper—although I think that’s based on active user overlap, and I don’t know if there’s a similar metric that would cover all news sites.
I don’t see an easy way to accomplish this without either pulling in the full text of every article over some period and running something like paragraph/doc/site vectors and then clustering by site vector.
That’s putting a lot of faith into unsupervised learning, and it’s probably just as likely to pick up on stylistic conventions like byline and date formats as it is to cluster by some common thematic pattern like political leaning.
Thank you mods.
The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
Thank you. It is often difficult to change course once it is set. I appreciate the !news team reaching out to the community and acting on their concerns.
Keep it gone. MBFC and others are not a source of truth.
Adding multiple sources of bias does not produce an unbiased result.
Ok. Think your response through.
That means all news outlets are biased as well. This is why we want something that gives a composite score. If all sources say “this news outlet is shit”, maybe we take it with a grain of salt, or maybe we black list it. At a minimum, it helps mods and readers get a context of the content.
I think the problem arises from the fact that I don’t know what you mean by “this news outlet is shit”. Maybe we can define exactly what we mean here and block such news sites from being posted.
I don’t think bias can be correlated with article quality, and we should be engaging with articles and ideas based on the merits within, not some aggregate made up thing like “bias”. I’m not saying it’s not a real thing, just that it’s made up and subjective enough to be in my view a useless measure and a fruitless endeavour to get a meaningful measure in the first place.
If you want a bunch of opinions on the usefulness of an article then we have votes already.
Obviously I don’t have the context of a mod, so if there are specific cases where you need a bias rating, however flawed, to do that job effectively then sure but I think that’s best developed as say a browser extension (or maybe one exists already) so it’s at least opt in.
EDIT: Also want to say I appreciate both the call for feedback and also the decision to opt out of the bot for now.
Sorry for any confusion. We’re moving away from bias - that’s the goal, at least.
News source being “shit” examples:
- A Voice for Men
- The Activist Mommy
- Adams County Times
- Akron Reporter
- Albany Standard
- American College of Pediatricians
- Ames Today
- Antelope Valley Today
- Baltimore City Wire
- Benton Times
- Bloomington Leader
I could go on, but I’m at work right now.
2nd. It’s just not necessary. Frankly what’s more off putting is the outright bizarre insistence on the mods part and outright denial of feedback. If the bot comes back I’m blocking the community, there are other streams for news.
Edit: didn’t realize the “new and improved” bot is back. Good luck yall.
If everyone who doesn’t like the bot blocks it, people entering the community will see the bot upvoted. That will mean they assume the general consensus is that the bot is trustworthy and accurate.