World News
A community for discussing events around the World
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Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
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Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
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Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
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Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
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Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
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Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
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Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
view the rest of the comments
Dave Van Zandt's site, Media Bias Fact Check puts The Guardian and Breitbart in the same (Factual Reporting: MIXED) category of credibility. Apparently this is because they both have articles where the facts are contested. This ignores the difference in size of the two news sources' publication rate, the number of articles contested, and the seriousness and type of errors. Van Zandt is not a social scientist, and should not be running a credibility gatekeeper when he doesn't understand statistics, science, or bias.
MBFC uses a fundamentally flawed methodology for categorizing bias. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.
Thank you for this public service. This bot is a fucking joke. We use The Guardian all the time as a reliable source on Wikipedia, and rightfully so. Breitbart, on the other hand, is so comically unreliable that it was deprecated (the same exact measure as the Daily Mail), and then on top of that it was added to the spam blacklist due to "persistent abuse".
It's also worth pointing out that from memory more than half the Guardian articles cited by MBFC as having failed fact checks were corrected or removed.
Also there is currently a pinned feedback thread on the news community asking for feedback on the bot so please post your thoughts in there if you haven't already.
I've posted twice in the thread in !politics@lemmy.world, as well as reached out to @Rooki@lemmy.world, and his responses reek of bad faith. I've posted in the pinned thread, but if it has come this far, then politely containing our discontent to the sanctioned channels is not enough.
It's pretty hard to ignore the overwhelming downvotes the bot posts have attracted, and if someone sees that and still thinks MBFC is a good idea, I question their judgement. It's likely they will ignore our well-thought out concerns as well.
My suggestion is to respond directly to the bot so that people observing the spectacle of downvotes have a better understanding of what is going on. We downvote MBFC because we are on the side of fact-checking and media literacy - not against it.
Well said, it's definitely a frustrating situation. I've also done my best through the proper channels, I don't think much in the way of constructive action is likely to come from it but hopefully I'm wrong. At least from the many downvotes it seems like we're far from alone but that also makes it more frustrating in a way.
We are collecting all the feedback here: https://lemmy.world/post/18775630
We are trying to come to a better solution ( except removing fully the bot ).
Why is removal of the bot totally off the table? I agree it's not necessarily the only path forward but why would any particular course be off limits?
Having nothing and being a "trust me bro, this source is lit and unbiased" is better?
By having the bot you're not solving the problem, you're simply moving the "trust me bro" down one level and distracting from the actual discussion.
Granted I'm not a mod so I'm sure I'm missing some perspective here but I don't think the bot is helping at all personally.
Also this is not an answer to the question. I simply asked why the option should be off the table completely. I didn't say there are no better solutions. It just makes it sound like you already made your decision and are not open to feedback which is why I wanted to ask.
The MBFC is not any part of any solution, and failing to acknowledge how the bot is harming media literacy on Lemmy undermines any future solution you might implement.
Having nothing and being a "trust me bro, this source is lit and unbiased" is better?
Yes.
One of the basics of media literacy is that no source is unbiased. This is one of the flaws with MBFC - rating biased news corporations at the center of its spectrum as 'least-biased' sources. This is not a credible position for an organization that wants to be considered something other than a propaganda mill.
Many of your readers are interpreting political bias to mean credibility, and are rejecting sources that might expand their political horizons. MBFC conflates these two things as well, exacerbating the problem. Dave M Van Zandt rates left-leaning publications as less factual than alt-right outlets with even higher and more egregious problems with factual reporting.
If a reader is curious of the bias of a publication, it's better they do their own research rather than poisoning the well before they see the article. Giving them bad information is worse than leaving them to their own devices and letting them develop media literacy on their own.
And it may not be hard to develop something better. But it's difficult to focus attention on that when we're distracted trying to quell the bleeding wound that is MBFC.
Thanks for fighting for accuracy, desperately needed in the modern era.
Can you make a change today so that The Guardian & Breitbart would never appear to be similarly [un]credible at first glance?
If not, a small pause could make sense. Better than damaging credibility not much of established news agencies perhaps but certainly the bot, limiting its impact in the future even if the problem’s corrected (think insta-downvotes from older users once burned by it). Folks respect pauses for refactoring!
Maybe MBFC isn’t tops and there’s some attractive alternative btw!
PS: thanks @Five@slrpnk.net for the alarm