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6mo ago

Why does the "Media Bias Fact Checker" - Bot gets downvoted so much lately?

No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.

163 comments

People disagree on the bias bot reporting
People don't like their biases being made visible
People don't realize they have a bias
People find the bot noisy
- Someone just told me that it "labels everything short of fascism as 'left-leaning'" and "tries to shift the Overton window" even further right than it already is in the US.
  And I suppose that is correct if your idea of the spectrum of normal political opinions is restricted to what you see on Lemmy, especially if your instance hasn't defederated from Hexbear yet.
  
  And yet ultimately, MBFC places their center – by their own admission – based on US politics, which is decidedly right of center within the developed world.
  
  Where anyone puts the “center” of the political spectrum is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant. What we should still be able to expect is that it gets the ordering of sources correct—i.e., it doesn’t label Source A as being to the left of Source B if it’s actually to the right. And that relative ordering is still useful, as long as we bear in mind that the actual labels are otherwise arbitrary.
- Personally I find it worthless because it lends credibility to sources that promoted the Iraq war, afghanistan, libya, syria, etc.
  Any source that covered a story where thousands to millions will be/are/were murdered for the profit of the military-industrial complex as anything but an unimaginable crime is instantly non-credible. Yes, that includes 99% of American media.
  Same with every media outlet wringing their hands about Hamas instead of the locking of millions of people in a concentration camp for decades that precipitated the attack.
- The bot is tuned for US bias. Europe bias: US left is centric here.
  
  The bot isn't even tuned for US bias. It's tuned for conservative US bias. The papers of record that work really hard to be objective get listed as "left center".

It's often wrong
It's a bot and yet I still see it with the option to hide bots. Someone said it was flagged properly the other day, but since it's the ONLY self proclaimed bot that isn't filtered by the "block bot accounts" option in Lemmy, I call bullshit.
- I have it blocked so I didn't notice that it slides past the bot filter. That is interesting, but blocking it works.
  
  I might unblock it just to downvote it tbh.

Since you asked:
The bot provides little "value" vs the noise it creates.
I don't need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it's a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this "threshold for scamminess" would be very subjective.
This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point ("value" vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I'd read.
Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I've done and I'm much happier with my Lemmy experience.
- And 3., the blurb it posts is gigantic compared to what you'd actually want to know.
  Also 4. The media bias website has its own bias in that centre right outlets like CNN are classified as left.
  
  Oh so Media Bias is from the USA and believes that anything that isn't Republican is left 😂
  
  The blurb being gigantic is my main gripe. I use Sync, which includes a thumbnail of each link. The bot is wordy as fuck and links 5 different things. So every time I go the comments section, it looks like this:
  
  I’m sorry but CNN being center right is definitely an indication of your own bias in our Lemmy echo chamber. Relative to the masses, it’s about center left but still shows significant pro-left coverage.
  Say what you want about there being a former no-kidding US communist party or that other country’s police systems make the whole US system right wing, but relative to the US (which mediabiasfactcheck is designed for) it is left. I was so impressed by the site many years ago when all the things I thought were centrist turned out to be biased toward my political beliefs. That’s what truth feels like
- Worse it lists BBC as "left-center". Which is weird in itself since the designation is usually lean left or center left. Political scientists don't stress the loaded word first. So much about MBFC exposes the site as a biased amateur project it's hard to imagine how it got as much traction as it did.

Because it's biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in "right center" to make you think it's equivalent.
Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.
So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.
- I only ever hear people mention “far right” (not familiar with this bot).
  Are there any sources that you, yourself, would consider “right center”?
  
  ~~Bloomberg~~, Forbes, and Fox News jump to mind.
  Edit - you know looking at Bloomberg's site again I think you could make an argument for it but it does appear to be mostly concerned with fact based news centered on the finance industry. I'm just used to seeing shit guest opinion articles from them.
  Edit edit - in their place I offer up CNBC with their personal finance propaganda perpetually trying to convince Americans they just aren't budgeting well enough.
  
  Financial times, Newsweek
- Because it’s biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in “right center” to make you think it’s equivalent.
  Source?
  
  You can check the categories on the MBFC website yourself but a couple choice picks in the "right center" category are the Ayn Rand Institute, advocates for self governance, and American Action Network.
  The first two are libertarian and pro Anarcho Capitalism. The second one attempts to masquerade as a non political education tool about politics. And third is a partisan group that runs campaign ads for the GOP.
  Meanwhile in left center we have NYT, WAPO, and BBC.

The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot's reply, you'd think it was the Gaurdian.
- It actually rates it significantly higher than the Guardian, which it gives a mixed factual rating and medium credibility, which is the same rating they give the Sun. It's laughable.
  
  Jesus, I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize it was that bad. That's insane.
  
  Ooof. If it gives the S*n even a mediocre rating, it’s shit.
- Thank you for actually providing an example. I've asked and I've seen others ask but no one ever actually provides evidence to back their claim, they just downvote or say "bot bad".
  
  Sure, no problem. Also, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that at least some of this backlash isn't from people who don't like the idea that their beliefs may not be objective facts. I'd be lying if I said I didn't struggle with that from time to time.
  But the real problem I have with these bots is that they can never capture the kind of nuance vetting a source requires. The Raw Story ranks high on credibility because they don't publish lies, but they don't publish anything worthwhile either. Most of their, "stories," are second hand accounts of something someone (who may or may not be credible) said on CNN, or how a politician or pundit got mocked on social media, and then given a title that implies the incident was more significant than it was. It's difficult to judge something like that with an algorithm that simply looks for, "Credibility," and, "Bias."

I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.
If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you're either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.
- And to think, this quote is almost 20 years old! Things have changed a lot since then.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
One should be even more skeptical and demanding of proof for wannabe trust-gatekeepers of the entire Internet, than one should already be for single newsmedia entities - the former place themselves as supervisors of trust in the latter and yet have even less proven trustworthiness than them.
So it's curious that the !world@lemmy.world mods keep on pushing for people reading posts on that community to use this specific self-annointed trust gatekeeper who has repeatedly shown that they themselves are biased (quite a lot to the Right of the political spectrum and pro-Zionistl) as their trust-gatekeeper.
I keep downvoting it because such action reeks of manipulation and is exactly the kind of thing that State Actors and Political Actors would do to shape opinions in the this day and age when people can read articles from anywhere in the World.
- pro-Zionistl)
  Would you have examples? Genuinely curious
  
  Pretty much all Israel sites, for one. Jerusalem Post, etc.

I've had to block it because it takes up two screens of my phone as my client doesn't support spoiler tags properly. I'm not going to change my client over one noisy bot.
Also MBFC seems to be a bit biased (it's definitely not correct on a few in the UK), as most bias rankings are, it's why services like Ground News use several of these services to make up their ratings. At the end of the day only using MBFC data isn't much better than listening to one guy tell you "yeah they're totally fine"
Finally from what little discussion I've seen with the owner of the bot, they don't seem to be very collaborative with the rest of the community and just shut down criticism.
- What app are you even using? In Voyager it’s always collapsed in a spoiler and if you click on it, it’s just some text.
  
  Probably Sync. I'm waiting for the next update too.

The responses the admin who added the bot gave to people's concerns when they announced it, weren't that great. (Link)
The Lemmy.world admin disregarded all criticism and just said people shouldn't complain, after just asking for feedback in the post itself
Example:
What a terrible idea.
MBFC is already incredibly biased.
It should be rejected not promoted.
Admin response:
Ok then tell me an alternative we can use in the scale for free.
None? Then pls dont just complain complain complain… And dont suggest improvements.
- As if removing it wouldn't be an improvement. MBFC themselves admit it's nothing more than pseudoscience. The fact anyone actually takes it seriously is laughable, especially considering some of the sources they consider "highly factual"
- Ah, common LW mod behavior: act like you are open to discussion, but then get upset when people actually criticize you.
  
  Yeah it happens all too often
- A comment there made a very good point. If they only had the American left/right terminology that could be fine but annoying, but they also say left/right lean lowers a site's score. So they're giving websites that would be properly described as center right by the rest of the world artificially higher scores.

So the answers in this post are mostly that people are downvoting the bot because it is often wrong and then others defending it by saying “it’s not wrong it’s just based on American politics”.
If the bot reported from a range of sources that reflect a number of different political perspectives I’m sure it’d be more useful outside of the scope of American politics, and therefore wouldn’t get downvoted.
As far as I’m concerned the vote system is working as intended.
The internet is not American. There are no nations on lemmy ✌️
- Agreed. NYT is center-right from my point of view, and I think it's a pretty neutral assertion. The bot says it's center left. That's the same discrepancy as if they would call Fox News Center.
  In my opinion the bot tries to shift the overtone window to the right. Just because Trumpists call everything leftist media doesn't make it that.
  
  This may have just been an autocorrect issue, but it’s Overton Window
- I asked in another thread complaining about MBFC if anyone knew of alternatives and nobody shared anything. Anyone got any?
  Edit: Fuck me for asking I guess…
  
  Here's an analogy:
  The alternative to drinking bleach is not drinking bleach. As opposed to drinking "diet bleach," or something equally ridiculous.
  Why do you feel it would need to be replaced?
  
  Some people have mentioned https://ground.news. I haven't tried it, this is not a vouch for their credibility.

If it's trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).
- It's getting it's info from Media Bias Fact Check so explain to me how their method is wrong? You prefer All Sides. Or Ad Fontes Media? Both of which also say leaning left.
  
  Who cares where it's getting its info from? The methodology is crap and I don't need a bot or self-appointed gatekeeping organization telling me which something is biased. It's not that the bias isn't there, but I'd rather decide it for myself.
  
  CNN isn't left by any stretch. It's corporate friendly that pays lip service to some liberal culture war issues.

I'm mostly in favor of leaving the comment-clogging bots back on reddit where they can all talk to each other without me.
- Not sure if this is the same on every instance, but on my profile there's an option for "show bot accounts"
  Just uncheck that bad boy and self-identified bot accounts don't even show up.
  
  It's a standard lemmy feature, yes.
  ... that this bot doesn't respect.

Have you asked yourself who runs the bot and what their bias is?

Because it reports sources known to be unreliable (like Jerusalem Post and EuroNews) as Highly Trustworthy
- It definitely doesn't or shouldn't. MBFC rates it as "mostly" trustworthy on their site. Definitely not highly
  And do you have examples of either the source being untrustworthy or another service rating it more towards your perspective of the source?
  
  From your link:

Because it’s literally advertising spam. I can’t believe this person would want to ruin the entire good will of Lemmy by pushing their trash.
It simply serves no purpose.

Maybe because manh people think it's useless and stupid and wish it would go away. Trusting a random bot to tell you the political leaning of an information source so you know whether to trust the information is peak stupidity, IMO.

It is essentially the mods forcing an opinion on the validity of every post's source.
- I didn't know it was the mods. I was wondering how it hadn't been banned yet for being obviously biased.
  
  They had a big metapost a few weeks ago(?) Where they essentially said: "it's staying, we like it, get over it"
- Do you mean admins? Where did they say that?
  How massively disappointing if so.
  
  Mods, not admins. Though there's some overlap in this case.

I really like the idea of the bot.
If the source was independent; and could be trusted. It would be a great tool; the display could be a lot better but the idea is sound.
As others have pointed out, the source is a black box that may or may not be biased itself.

Two reasons: It's a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias
- Oh no, now we need a Media Bias Checker Bot Bias Checker

Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.
However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well
- It's hard to be non-biased. There's not a single person who does not have a bias of some sort. The way people get bent out of shape over the bot makes me sad. It gives a decent starting point for anyone looking to start learning about the different biases and how different outlets report information. Of course it's not a perfect bot or website it's getting the info from, but it's a valuable tool.
  I did block it myself though. Sync gives large previews of links, so it did get a bit spammy. This could be disabled in the app's settings, but it's a feature I like so I can easily get to linked articles or videos. Wish I could turn it off for bots
- The biased bias fact check bot.. LMAOROLFZ..

Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.

For me it's because the bias rating specifically is opaque and can be just plain wrong.
I could block it but if everyone who thought it was a bad idea just blocked it then it wouldn't get downvoted which might lead people to think everyone generally agreed with it.
At least when it's downvoted people take a step back and are less likely to just accept what it says.
EDIT: Also worth pointing out in my case at least I did go to the effort of actually trying to provide some constructive feedback on the bot through the proper channels rather than just downvoting and moving on.

Personally my biggest gripe is with the formatting, specifically spoilers tags are a terrible choice when the whole thing could be a single sentence with a link. Spoiler tags aren't uniformly implemented and when pointed out the stance is it's the clients fault for not doing spoilers the way the dev wants rather than the devs fault for not using a more standardized approach which just bugs me. If the goal was concise conveyance of information, they missed the mark.
- Yes, the posts are absolutely huge and I'm unimpressed with the bot devs response-- dude I am not going to switch Lemmy apps to make your bot less annoying.

I wish it looked like your screenshot. On Boost, I get everything folded out, occasionally with unclickable links.
- The best apps for rendering are: Alexandrite, Connect, Jerboa, Photon, Quiblr, Summit, and Voyager. Sync and Boost are pretty poor at it despite being paid apps.
  https://lemmy.world/post/18159531
  
  The spoilers look like crap on connect too. The bot takes a huge amount of screen real estate. I wouldn't mind it as much if it was like 2 lines instead, but it takes up a whole screen.
  
  I love how the shittiest apps are the paid ones.
  Long live Voyager!
  
  Boost is free, but yeah.
- Dang. I didn't realize how bad Sync is at rendering posts. It's a giant unformatted mess for me as well. That screenshot is a far more tolerable presentation.

Because many feel that the bot has a bias itself, making it useless at best and actively harmful at worst.
I have no horse in this race and don't downvote the bot myself, but I have also seen it call sources center left, that are definitely not left of any reasonable center.

Any bot that doesn't actually use lemmy's "I'm a bot" protocol (so I can hide it completely) gets downvoted. It's the only thing I even bother downvoting on Lemmy.
- the bot has been marked as bot since the very beginning and is also clearly marked as bot in the screenshot, so your comment does not apply here.
  
  I see you've replied this a few times now. Can you please complete this test for me?

I take it some people see it as a protest at the way their clients misrender the formatting.

If you need a bot to tell you a source is or isn't biased, then you shouldn't be reading the news in the first place.
- This comment seems rather ableist.
  The Media Bias Fact Checker bot helps people who have autism understand biased language which may not be readily apparent without an outside source warning us about the biases.
  
  Then it should at least be accurate.
  
  The problem is that the intentions of the bot author aren't fair and unbiased. They purposely label sites and articles that tilt in favor of their zionist opinions as reliable and trustworthy without regard to the reality of whether they are or are not.

Because they don't want to take 3 seconds and block the user.
- Many people disagree with the bot existing. Blocking it is just a surrender, downvotes show that the disagreement continues and lets others know it exists.
  
  So jihad instead of blocking it? Cool, sounds totally worth it.
- I wonder if the same clients that don’t correctly render the collapsed paragraphs also don’t correctly render the block button?

Wait, I haven't seen this bot around?

My problem with the downvotes and the criticisms is that they don't provide any proof or comparison, they simply say that it's biased and wrong.
At the very least you should be linking examples and comparing against other bias checking sites.
For instance, I immediately disliked biasly.com because the rating system is -100 (Liberal) to 100 (Conservative). I've only compared a single site so far but the rating system alone makes me inclined to believe that the site is biased towards conservative views.
- I strongly disagree. The burden of proof lies with the one making the claim and this bot has zero transparency regarding its benchmark, database or other criteria. That combined with the fact that it's usage (apparently exclusively) seems to be highly pushed is enough to stay sceptical.
  Personally I just blocked it but I have full understanding for anyone downvoting it, simply to communicate "I disagree with the existence of this bot in this context"
- Whenever someone gives some good evidence, it gets removed almost immediately. Someone named “Linkerbaan” had two posts about this with actual evidence and it got twice removed.
  I tried to search for the one where, I myself commented on and guess? It got removed.
  
  That's really sketchy. Thanks for sharing.
- I've seen several replies to the bot pointing out bias. There's nobody dedicated to writing a bot to follow around the bias bot and replying every time.
  
  That makes sense, I just hadn't seen a single post. In a comment above it was stated that posts criticizing the bot are removed, which is possibly why I haven't seen any.
- Check out how they rate Guardian and how they rate the Ayn Rand Institute. Then check the fact checking difference between Guardian and NYT. It just gets worse the more you look at it.

Because your average lemming is a wingnut who thinks anyone to the right of Stalin is a fascist.

Many on lemmy don’t like non-emotional driven facts because it makes it harder for them to manufacture the outrage.
- Says an attempt to manufacture outrage.
  
  Yeah, that's the person's usual mo in any thread
- The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it's emphasis. It's quite easy to manufacture outrage without lying if you can pick which facts the consumer sees and how they're contextualized.
  Here's a PDF of Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent.
  
  You've ironically demonstrated the need for a bias checking bot. People will cite biased sources without contextualizing things like that Chomsky has a notable left leaning.

163 comments