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.
One issue with poor media literacy is that I don’t think people are going to go out of their way to improve their literacy on their own just from a pinned post. We could include a link in the bot’s comment to a resource like that though.
Do you think that the bias rating would be improved by aggregating multiple factors checkers’ opinions into one score?
Yeah it’s definitely a good point, although I would argue people not interested in improving their media literacy should not be exposed to a questionable bias rating as they are the most likely to take it at face value and be misled.
The idea of multiple bias sources is an interesting one. It’s less about quantity than quality though I think. If there are two organisations that use thorough and consistent rating systems it could be useful to have both. I’m still not convinced that it’s even a solvable problem though but maybe I’m just being too pessimistic and someone out there has come up with a good solution.
Either way I appreciate that it’s a really tough job to come up with a solution here so best of luck to you and thanks for reading the feedback.