Who downvotes the MediaBiasFactCheck bot?

Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.

It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.

I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.

Because it's annoying to think there's a comment on a thread, open it, and see that it was only a bot.

I block it because it’s garbage. Copypasta-ing myself:

https://lemmy.ml/post/12705767/8913172

But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/

Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. >Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.

Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.

The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:

The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.

The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine

https://lemmy.ml/post/13566156/9605612

I said “these kinds of graphs,” of which there are many https://duckduckgo.com/?q=media+bias+chart&iax=images&ia=images

But you’ve sparked an idea for an interesting project: use MBFC’s API to create one of these graphs from t>heir own data. Doing a little googling, it seems that scripts and data dumps aren’t hard to come by.

I think armchair media analyst Dave M. Van Zandt is going on vibes. I don’t think he understands corporate & think tank media. Does he know who Walter Lippman or Edward Bernays were, or what the Council on Foreign Relations (“least biased” 🤡) is or made note of its prominent media members? Does he know about the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?

No results found for site:mediabiasfactcheck.com "manufacturing consent".

I’ve seen The Grayzone debunk the New York Times’ lies many times, and yet:

Also, in what universe is the neoliberal, anti-labor NYT center-left? And if the Grayzone in the ultraviolet territory, where does that leave the explicitly Communist Monthly Review, outside of MBFC’s Overton window? Surprise, it’s to the right of it:

https://lemmy.ml/post/17665401/12094932

The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.

The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.

This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.

The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”

None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.

• Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
• Propaganda model
• Edward Bernays
• Walter Lippmann
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Powell Memorandum
• The Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of >Democracy

I'll down vote it when it says "I have nothing to add" because it could just not say anything.

Most people don't want the bot to be there, because they don't agree with its opinion about what is "biased." It claims factually solid sources are non-factual if they don't agree with the author's biases, and it overlooks significant editing of the truth in sources that agree with the author's biases.

In addition, one level up the meta, opposition to the bot has become a fashionable way to rebel against the moderation, which is always a crowd pleaser. The fact that the politics moderators keep condescendingly explaining that they're just looking out for the best interests of the community, and the bot is obviously a good thing and the majority of the community that doesn't want it is getting their pretty little heads confused about things, instigates a lot of people to smash the downvote button reflexively whenever they see its posts.

I rarely see it, but MBFC is an atrocious website that defines bias by distance from the center. It's just nonsense.

people who disagree with its particular brand of propaganda or its forced inclusion, most likely

I do. I don't need a bot telling me what to think.

If there's one moderate critique, it doesn't say much when it comes to political bias ratings, which are often U.Sian centric

Like here are the 3 axes of politics to me

Economic Policy (Base)

{Domestic} Culture and Government Structure Policy (Superstructure)

Foreign Policy (Western or Eastern Alignment

But I can't understand anything when it merely comes to left and right, like in what way are they leftist or rightist, are they economically socialist/capitalist and anti-western/pro-western in foreign policy in such way too, or merely when it comes to culture and gov't policy?

Because if I wanted bots to interact with I would have stayed on Reddit. The only good ones were the LotR character bots in the first place and even those got tired.

Some people just want it at the bottom of the comment section instead of floating in the middle somewhere. If we could pin its comments to the bottom that would address this.

The same people who are downvoting you, I guess. I'm not really sure what the objection is but they are very consistent. I've actually wondered if someone set up some bots to downvote all the MBFC bot posts for some reason.

I downvote it to lower it in the comment rankings. Acknowledging that it is imperfect, I still like it because it gives a clue as to whether I should verify the article elsewhere. It's not there to be the final arbiter on what truth is and I think any mod that treats it as such is woefully mistaken.

some folks don't like it and for some reason don't just block it.

In addition to the explanations already posited, I’d also think there most likely are some people who want to lie, argue disingenuously, and a fact-checker tends to get in the way of their rhetoric.