The tesseract Lemmy app, has a little overview from mediabiasfactcheck.com (MBFC). It seems like a clever way to foster a healthy community.
If you click on the ranking you get details.
EDIT: Sorry to stir up an old hornet’s nest.
EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC. Even if there are flaws, I would like to celebrate all attempts at elevating the conversations we are having.
Imagine thinking CNN is center-left 😂
In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But that’s because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are “Liberal Marxism” now (oxymoronic as that label is).
Edit: And MBFC perpetuates that rightward movement. I prefer Ad Fontes, although it does also label CNN as center-left.
Oh dear god not this argument again
Right, I almost forgot about the rage against the MBFC bot that went on for like MONTHS lmao. Seeing it downvoted to hell was hilarious though lol
Tbh I didn’t even mind what the bot was trying to do. I just remember opening what felt like every post and seeing dozens of lines taken up by the bot. I ended up just blocking it and cross-referencing with ground news myself.
I guess I had missed it the first time
account age 1 year 8 months
LOL, not a chance unless you were straight-up absent that whole time.
Relative to your impressive comment and post count, it appears I was.
Impressive post count??
Ok well nothing is as impressive as yours. Averaging 15 posts a day for the last 19 months is a full time job.
Ew.
“Ew” what? The fighting over MBFC was a big deal for a long time. If he was here, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have noticed it.
I blocked a lot of news communities, because it was just consuming my feed, so I also missed when this happened.
Not everyone sees everything. It feels like gate keeping to assume everyone has to have seen everything based on their join date.
From the test that was done with the bot that was not a good source. 1) American focus 2) too much room for debate on the ranking Here some discussion on it https://lemmy.world/post/18073070
I blocked the bot as soon as I learned how. The ratings are a joke - mostly because of its American bias.
I don’t see any comments when I click that link
Try this other post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24920368
that worked thanks
Do you have filter? Block community? Like politics 😝
ha, that’s possible.
is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can’t find one.
https://alternativeto.net/software/media-bias-fact-check/?license=opensource
These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
No. And there never should be. And here’s why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.
Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.
Held hands? No. Not everyone has the time, energy or training to evaluate a site’s trust comprehensively. I want to see what other people think in case they spot what I missed. I also want to see if people are even taking about the site and why.
I mean, can you imagine? There are so many sites out there I can’t spend three hours fact-checking one for the sake of replying to an argument. And then all that work going to waste for the benefit of nobody else.
Not to mention all the domain-specific knowledge you’d need to properly evaluate claims. All the critical thinking skills in the world are worthless if you don’t have contextual knowledge of whatever subject is in the news. It’s just not realistic for everyone to be a policy wonk.
Wow, I decided I would give MBFC a shot. You are greeted with an ad-infested experience with a giant start bar reminiscent of a malware site. After building up enough courage to click it I discovered it not only wanted my email but also my credit card.
After having to fight to see the article I wanted rated I just don’t have the fortitude to the fight this horrible experience to probably be told that the following article is left center or left leaning bias.
While I will admit this was a not Fox News praising the Trump Admin, it has an extremely neutral tone and does nothing to pushback against the obviously clownish message that the Trump team provides.
For this reason it, is to me at least, right leaning. I guess I will never know what MBFC would rate it.
Firefox and ublock are your friend.
This site doesn’t rate articles. It rates news sources. So you just have to look up what they rated the post as.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/
These ratings appear to b based on US sensibilities and not the rest of the world. So everything skews more to the left than it really is.
It probably rates the NSDAP as leftist since it has socialist in its name.
If you want to potentially sidestep some of people’s frustrations you might consider just using the credibility rating and focusing on whether a group provides factual reporting, rather than left or right of center
You can also create a user experience that more carefully manages expectations of the feature by having it be opt in, but presenting the option to users when it becomes available. That gives you the opportunity to give a short blurb acknowledging its imperfections and also highlighting its potential value
As someone fairly to the left wing myself, the fact that lemmy is so left wing is both a blessing and a curse. I don’t see Nazis around, but being in an echo chamber isn’t great for your ability to engage with perspectives other than your own, and makes you succeptible to narratives that reinforce your existing views regardless of whether they’re accurate
I’d love this feature, in spite of its flaws, but it does definitely have them. Its based on the US overton window, which will frustrate folks from other parts of the world who may already feel lemmy sometimes forgets the world beyond the US exists. And the US overton window is changing as a product of the trump administration which may warp mbfc results, which could honestly be really dangerous.
Focussing on the factuality and credibility might help you sidestep those problems and make a feature people would find less frustrating, potentially even to the point that you could make it opt out.
Generally I appreciate efforts to build healthier, less echo chambery discourse, thanks for the work you’re doing ❤️
Yeah I had a similar thought to your first paragraph. I mostly use MBFC for the “factual reporting” rating, because it seems easier to be objective about.
Just to clarify, I don’t develop any fediverse software, I wouldn’t want to take any credit from those amazing people.
That’s really cool. Looks great too.
EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC.
Here’s another in my “making friends” series of posts.
Commenters DO NOT have valid criticisms of MBFC. They are universally wrong, have no idea how MBFC works, and are too lazy to look it up. The misinfo ghouls among them are happy to repeat lies over and over until people start to accept them.
Some of these people can be pretty convincing but I urge you to actually fact check their arguments. Most of these people are just parroting bullshit they saw someone else say. The “best” of these are basically artisanal, hand-crafted AI hallucinations: high-confidence, syntactically-correct nonsense. Don’t put that glue on your pizza. If someone posts an MBFC link as evidence, click it and read it. Nearly every single time, the link they posted contradicts them and they just haven’t read it.
And ask yourself why no one ever posts peer-reviewed research backing up their claims. It’s a simple reason: it doesn’t exist. Every single piece of academic research on MBFC says they’re wrong. The MBFC conspiracy theorists can’t just ignore that body of research because it’s inconvenient – they need a compelling reason why all research to date is wrong. For their claims to be true, it would require a massive conspiracy between academics, journalists, and media bias organizations because they are all in consensus about what makes good and bad news organizations. It’s loopy, tinfoil hat bullshit.
Yeah, I’ve also looked into MBFC and found it was more grounded than what Lemmings were saying.
I always found it suspicious why people here would rather choose no fact checking than some. Is it the old “don’t let perfection ruin a good plan” again or other motives? Hmm.
I think that very few of these arguments are being made in good faith. For some people, any bias monitor is a barrier to sharing propaganda as news. Others just don’t understand how to use the site properly. Or use it in a really stupid way anyway. Like this:
- Look at the ratings.
- If something strikes you as odd, run around screaming like your hair’s on fire.
Instead of:
- Look at the ratings.
- If something strikes you as odd, read the part of the report that explains the rating.
- Decide how important those things are to you and whether it’s a deal-breaker.
Others are like, ‘it’s telling me what to think, man!’ who don’t seem to understand that those pages contain a wealth of information that you can include in your decision-making (or not). They’ve convinced themselves that it’s presented as the one and only source of absolute truth, which is really just something they made up to be angry about. No one but them is making that claim.
There also isn’t another free source that has that info in one place. There’s no better place to quickly find news org ownership info, the country they’re operating in (with links to info about press freedom in that country), and their history of factual reporting. But those people don’t care – they’re just viscerally reacting to the ratings, not reading the reports.
