this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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News

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Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It calls the Associated Press and Reuters leftist. That’s all you need to know about the bias of the bot.

[–] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 months ago

I think the problem is with the whole concept. Most news organizations have more than one person working there, so unless the bot is measuring the bias of individual journalists it seems really silly. It presupposes that there's someone at the top of a large news organization dictating to the staff to make an article "more left" or "more right" or whatever. Sure at some news organizations (like FoxNews) that may happen, but I doubt that happens at AP or Reuters and many other news organizations.

I've seen many articles where the headline was incredibly biased (to get clicks I guess?) while the article was not. Clearly the editor that wrote the headline had more bias than the person that wrote the article who might've been a freelancer.

And many news articles don't have any bias at all. "Earthquake in California" is that a left or right biased article? I think it's neither. Even a quote from a politician, Kamala Harris said "XYZ" or Donald Trump said "ZYX" is it biased to report on what people said? It's a fact they said those words, is it biased to tell people what someone said? I think it's just treating people like adults who can read what a person said and make their own conclusions.

At the end of the day people have to learn how to spot bias themselves, there's no quick-fix-life-hack-work-around to skip having to build some experience with media literacy. Ground News or a bot or whatever will have their own biases, and if people are trusting someone on the internet to tell them what is biased, they've failed at media literacy from the get go.

[–] ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net 5 points 2 months ago

It called a lot of tabloid trash "left".

These tabloids chase money and will flip for whatever gets them eyeballs.