Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
The !news@lemmy.world mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.
Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.
A way to improve the MBFC bot would be to delete it.
Failing that, a way to improve the community would be to ban it.
Would you like to elaborate?
It adds no value to the posts, incites arguments (how is that helping with modding? Why do the mods need to announce MBFC’s rating on every post?), and exports critical thinking to a site that has its own biases while maintaining a veneer of “neutrality”. The ratings often have no justification, making them little better than some dude’s opinion. I can keep going but I think that covers most of it.
Would you like to read 99% of the replies to this thread tbh?
I feel like bots on lemmy get way too much hate in general. There aren’t that many and if you don’t like you can block this one/all bots. I for one find it useful as it is.
Holy moly, people seem to really be upset with this bot. I like it because it can call out when someone is doing something shady with their news sources when people like me (that don’t know news sources by heart) read a posting.
We have a lot of repeat users in here that I personally feel (and I could be wrong) that have ulterior motives, like being a foreign actor spreading misinformation, trying to sew division, and lots of other foreign and domestic actors that are obsessed with one thing and throw the baby out with the bathwater (for example people obsessed with Gaza and Israel war just being nasty in general because they’re angry - I’m not saying that scenario is not wrong and fucked, but this bot can help illuminate patterns in their behavior which can help us regular people tag them accordingly as a single issue participant so they are more informed when engaging that person)
My suggestion is to be very careful about crowd-sourcing the rating process. Nearly every post I go into this bot is super negative on its downvotes. Rather than just simply blocking the bot, people are retaliating against something they don’t agree with. You would likely see that translate to your crowd-sourcing rating also at best. At worst you would see bad actors focused on division and misinformation making a fuckery of it all.
I’m not saying don’t include the community, but brainstorm with this potential pitfall in mind.
I like this community, and want to see it continue to be as factually correct and represented fairly, and appreciate the mods and their ongoing challenges with the people that would seek to upset the apple cart at any opportunity.
I think the bot adds value and applaud the honest effort to make improvements.
The down voting is for several reasons, Jeff laid it out well. The people who don’t like it’s ratings though have a larger worry that blocking it does not help. If MBFC, and thus the bot, are biased then the entire conversation is shifted around that bias. Blocking is useful if you find something an eyesore. It’s not useful in fighting misinformation.
It’s fine to use MBFC as a tool when you are writing a comment calling out a bad source. You don’t need a bot for that.
Get rid of the bot
You don’t need to manufacture an authoritative source of truth as you the mods see it.
Just write down what you see as the truth and that you’ll ban anyone who speaks out against it.
Stop trying to build a machine to do the work of creating an echo chamber for you.
Always appreciate feedback! As a .ml user, I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on echo chambers
Are you removing the bot or are you still following this stunt as if you didnt have enough replies?
My replies were good faith discussions with the users (except for the one joke above). I don’t control the bot but the mod team has been discussing this. By all means, if you want to blame the mod who took the initiative to solicit feedback, go ahead though. It’s worth noting that I can’t force admins to act though, only supply evidence.
Edit: to be clear, this post was always meant for constructive feedback to improve the bot.
The feedback has been loud and clear, the bot is a shit and most people want it gone. Sorry but most of your replies have been very targeted and the good faith more than debatable, they go from naive to outright omitting the point most people is trying to explain to you. Edit: also to be clear, i dont care if you are not the owner of the bot, as a mod you can ban it.
Yes, I could do whatever I want as a mod, if I want to be removed from the mod team within minutes.
What can i say? I really admire your writing comprehension
If news@world had rules that reflected a coherent politics it could be political or even propagandistic.
Because no such rules exist to direct action and development, ideas like the fact checker bot crop up. In lieu of direction, the fact checker bot reflects a laundered western liberal political line back onto the news@world community.
An echo chamber is not an area where everyone says the same things, it’s an environment where a certain type of waves (or just all waves) are reenforced due to structural elements of the chamber.
By using the fact checker bot to do the work of policing speech, you have created a structural element which reenforces certain kinds of speech.
It’s a component of an echo chamber in the metaphor.
That’s significantly different than taking the more difficult route of determining the news@world mod team political line, struggling internally and externally with its contradictions and acting in ways that reflect it because the latter requires that the mod team use judgement rather than just act on voices who are not reenforced by the built structural elements of the news@world community.
The bot has no purpose. Either an article can be posted or not there’s no reason for the bot prompt. It just looks like thought policing using a bias checker which ‘coincidentally’ prefers what the current Democrats position is.
I can hardly imagine the bot stopping any fake news from being posted either.
How about just finally making the bot open source and let people comment or contribute there?
I bet that would be fun for us but a nightmare for @Rooki@lemmy.world
Users: “This bot is absolute trash.”
Mods: “Well, I mean, it doesn’t set your computer on fire, so that’s a win, right guys?”
You just know the guy who coded this bot is probably holed up in his mom’s basement, unloved and ignored, tinkering away on this disaster while muttering to himself in a corner. Bet he’s got some rare genetic condition that makes him think using ChatGPT to write code is a good idea. He’s probably got a conversation open right now, asking for help on how to fix the mess he created, but let’s be real—he’s more likely to ask how to heat up Hot Pockets without burning his hands. This bot’s so bad, it’s like he’s using it as a cry for help.
Delete it, nobody likes it. It is useless and nobody likes it
@jeffw@lemmy.world Why did you stop replying to posts here? Most people is telling you the bot is bullshit. You stopped commenting in this thread while being active elsewhere, are you going to take action or not?
I’m not the admin who created the bot. I’m a mod who is collecting feedback on behalf of the entire mod team.
Just to be perfectly clear: because I am the face of this feedback, you can feel free to say whatever you want to me. It’s odd that you seem to harbor ill feelings towards me in particular just because I pushed for collecting user feedback on this issue.
you can feel free to say whatever you want to me
my cat likes to sit in my window seal but I accidentally knocked the curtain rod down. She has been laying in the bunched up curtain that’s laying on the floor, I think she likes it better than then window seal. However the window is right out the front of the house so anytime I come home after a long day I see her watching me roll up the driveway and it makes me feel good. I don’t know if it would be best to move the bunched up curtain back to the window or let her stay on the floor and not see her when I get home :(
Putting aside the bone apple tea moment… I had to replace blinds because of an overzealous dog who loved watching the street. I just had to permanently keep the blinds open for him. Maybe you could do some sort of compromise solution like that? Ig what I’m saying is leave the curtains where they are and buy new ones?
You seem alright
The bot is basically a spammer saying “THIS ARTICLE SUCKS EVEN THOUGH I DIDN’T READ IT” on every damn post. If that was a normal user account you’d ban it.
This thread is a mess.
users: “bot is awful”
mod: “ok so it’s not terrible so that’s good”
Yeah lol, i cant help but laugh every time i see the mods replies in this thread. i dont understand shit about his train of thought, i dont know if he is denyal or was surprised most people didnt end up aligning with his bias and is in damage control replying nonsense.
The thing I don’t get is why are they so insistent on this change that is so overwhelmingly not wanted?
Who is pushing this and why are so many mods backing it?
$$$$
I apologize if this thread was misunderstood. Perhaps I was not clear that this was meant for improvements, it is not a vote on removal. Should that vote ever happen, the post would be clear about that.
All of my questions were only seeking to gain more information about people’s feelings. I apologize if it came off as a promise to enact anything in particular or an endorsement of any particular stance on the bot.
Yes, you’ve been very clear from the start that you do not want to remove the bot. However, the feedback you’ve consistently received is that it provides no benefit, is misleading, reductive, and the best improvement you could make would be to remove it. You don’t seem willing or able to respond to that.
Correct, I am unable to supersede admin decisions as a mod. I am here collecting feedback on improvements. Again, I am looking for feedback on improvements, as the decision to remove the bot is not in my control.
Then you’re just wasting both your time and ours.
https://lemmy.world/post/19173515?scrollToComments=true
Please show more kindness in the future.
Ok. Sorry you’ve never been on a functional team before.
It clearly seems as though you aren’t either.
The problem is with MBFC, and you have no control over them. Therefore, the only way you can improve the bot is to remove it entirely.
Remove MBFC? Yes, that’s part of the discussion and the point of this post. The struggle seems to be over the API, but I’d love to have suggestions to bring to the rest of the team. As I have said multiple times, it is not my decision to remove the bot, I’m simply here for suggestions that the rest of the team would be open to.
Whose decision is it, then?
It’s a team decision and I am the newest mod on the team. The main developer of the bot is an admin, who ultimately would be the one to implement any changes.
So it is in part your decision. I’m pretty sure the admins aren’t forcing you to have it here.
During your next shift, you should do something that nobody on your team or your supervisor wants you to do. Lmk how that goes for you
I think the bot is incredibly useful. The criticism falls under a very specific group of users being very loud about their preferred source not ranking the way they expect.
Linking additional sources will improve it. Wikipedia maintains an active list and has an incentive to do so. Personally, I’d like to see a transparent methodology applied to a source: number of articles retracted silently, corrections issued in last 30 days, etc.
That having been said, I’d rather see efforts invested in other areas rather than inventing yet another “weighing” function for multiple ratings. Let us decide if mbfc is good enough or if we prefer ad fontes or Wikipedia or whoever. Give us two or three options and let us decide on our own.
The criticism falls under a very specific group of users being very loud about their preferred source not ranking the way they expect.
“Any opinions that differ from my own are simply invalid!”
Can you elaborate on what you mean by improvements in other areas?
Improvements to automod, such as checking for opinion articles by regex (and building up that list). Or automatically marking/linking duplicate posts.
Also, regex scanning of comments to autoban would be useful for moderation well outside of the news/politics realm.
Most of the changes I’d like to see would require major changes to Lemmy though. Things like rate limiting posts/comments/votes, and allowing complex conditions for using those quotas. Also more nuanced moderation such as unlisting a post/comment (or potentially rehoming them).
It seems bizarre to me that the only user I have seen actually trying to provide constructive criticism for the bot so far in this thread is the one that already likes it. Especially when others instead advocate for things like the mods taking a political stance to endorse and using mod powers to reinforce it.
I like the bot. It’s valuable to have context for the organization pushing a story. I agree that others are reading too much from the orgs they like being labeled as biased. It’s assumed a news source will have some bias, and trying to avoid acknowledging that is dangerous. The takeaway is simply to be wary of any narrative being pushed (intentionally or not) by framing or omission, and get news from a variety of sources when possible. Instead, people tend to think identifying bias is advocating that the article should be disregarded, which is untrue.
To your suggestion, I do think adding more sources for reliability and bias judgements is a good idea. It would give more credibility if multiple respected independent organizations come to the same conclusion. More insight into their methodology in the comment itself could also be nice. The downside of adding these is that it would make the comment even longer when people have already complained about its size.
Other than that, I have seen people dislike using the American political center as a basis for alignment, but I have yet to see a good alternative. I expect a significant plurality of users are from the US, and US politics are globally relevant, so it seems to be a natural choice.
Nearly every critic I have seen so far just thinks it should be removed entirely because they find it annoying. I would say even if it isn’t considered useful for the majority of users, the amount of value it provides people who do use it justifies whatever minor annoyance it is to others. Anyone who gets really tired of collapsing the comment or scrolling past it can block it in seconds.
Thank you to the mod who created this thread. Even if it’s good to gather feedback, it’s obviously not easy to get bombarded with negative comments. I’m impressed with the patience you have shown in this thread.
While I think it’s important to have some sort of media bias understanding, I dislike the bot being the first (and sometimes only) comment on a post. Maybe it should be reserved only for posts that are garnering attention, and has a definitive media bias answer for (the no results comments are just damn annoying to see).
It also has the knock-on effect of boosting the post higher in whichever sorting algorithm users are using. So it often feels artificially controlled whenever something has 100+ upvotes and less than 10 comments, knowing the first comment is always a bot. Like, would it be fair for me to have 10 bots that comment factual information of posts I personally like, just to boost their visibility?
I think this tool, while probably well-intended, only adds to the polarization problem of the world.
Can you elaborate? Like, do you think the bot would be better if it didn’t label things as “left” or “right” (ie: remove the bias rating) or do you think the reliability/credibility ratings have the same issue?
