Why are people downvoting the MediaBiasFactChecker bot?
I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.
It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion -- let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.
But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it's the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways...so really no difference).
What's the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there's people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don't see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck...
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They should block it.
It gets weird when folks start trying to keep everyone else from having it available as a resource.
Disinformation is dangerous. That's how we got the white "alternative facts" thing in the first place. We shouldn't tolerate it at all.
Nobody in this comment section has provided a single instance of it being disinformation. But people sure are claiming a lot of shit without backing up it one bit. I’m inclined to believe that they’re most likely far right trolls who disagree with their favorite news outlets getting labeled something.
So you missed this comment then? And the ones where they point out any pro Palestinian source is rated badly?
There isn’t a single link or source for literally any of these claims in any of the comments. So yeah I’m still pretty sure it’s just people making shit up until they can back up a claim, even one.
That's because you can check it all on MBFCs own website.
Not if they don’t provide a link to the news source they’re talking about. So yeah, still no proof, source, nothing. Pretty clear it’s your bias at this point.
So you're too lazy to check the cross reference of BBC and the Ayn Rand Institute on MBFC and too lazy to go to their websites and you want to blame me for not giving you the simplest links ever?
Did you press F to doubt when they tried to teach you 1+1 in 1st grade too?
You make a claim, you source it. That’s how debates (and literally any science at all) work dumbass.
No. You source stuff that's not generally available. Academic papers aren't out there sourcing the existence of the universe. Asking for easily available stuff to be sourced is a form of trolling.
It clearly isn’t easily available if you can’t even provide a single fucking instance of it now, is it? Sourcing what you’re fucking talking about is how debates work you fucking dickhead. This has nothing to do with a bibliography. It’s about putting a fucking link referencing the material you’re alluding to.
No I could. I just refuse to do your 2 second Google search for you.
Edit, to be clear I refuse to do several Google searches for you when the recommended course of action is to check their website for yourself
So people can just downvote it instead right? That's literal direct democracy at play - if there's more people that like the bot they'll upvote it and it will have a positive score - saying "just bury your head in the sand if you don't agree with this message" is the reason we're in this political mess in the first place..
Personally I find the downvote/up vote system to be super unproductive, the only thing it accomplishes is squashing the minority opinion, I keep the score system disabled for the comments section as a whole, it makes life easier and prevents me from being effected by populous/bandwagon bias. It still sorts by score for top-level but, it made navigating so much much peaceful.
Over all and in general sure. But for things like bots it's really good feedback.
Sure - do whatever you want. There are users on this very instance that I downvote every post they make rather than block.
I also have comment(s?) in this very thread about when I downvote it.
Unless your goal is to spread misinformation. Anyone that knowingly wants to spread propaganda is going to severely dislike it and be forced to come up with some excuse to be against it, that is more acceptable than "it keeps telling me my russian propaganda is bullshit".
We do have a small pro-Russian contingent on here after all. We also occasionally get a MAGA type.
Personally I do appreciate it, the wikipedia and Ground News links are convenient, I would occasionally manually google those anyway. News consumption is one of the main reasons I'm on here in the first place though, so I might be an outlier in that regard.
Can you even point to a post where the bot calls the source out as propaganda (in whatever choice of words it would use to indicate this) or highly untrustworthy? I've literally never seen it say anything but left, left center, or center on any source and usually always highly trustworthy or trustworthy.
That has more to do with the fact that centre-right/right/far-right sources are seldom posted to lemmy and the communities implementing it generally prefer factual reporting.
Here are some examples of other ratings:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/goteborgs-posten/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-sun-bias/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fria-tider-free-times/
I don't doubt there are far-right sources out there, but the person I replied to stated that 'people are complaining because the bot is calling out their posts as right-wing propaganda' which I've seen zero evidence of here on Lemmy.
No, it will not specifically identify propaganda. Could just check their entry for RT if you wanted, I've never bothered to look. That's a Kremlin funded publication though.
Mmmm yes everyone who wants to get rid of the conservative corporate disinformation bot is themselves trying to spread disinformation.
Projection, that's totally original.
In America, that is not conservative in the slightest, unless you're coming from a hard communist position. What's the corporation?
MBFC
Yeah, it's just owned by one dude named Dave, funded mainly through user donations.
Oh because that's better?
Uh, yea, actually. When people complain about corporations, they're worried about how shareholders, who have no actual emotional or long-term attachment to their ownership of the company, have no real incentive to actually do things in any sort of ethical, or even long-term healthy way.
If they're just going to sell their shares someday, why should they care?
If someone is working on a project of their own, it's much more possible for it to be a passion project, where they care about more than simple short term profitability. You're just more likely to encounter ethical behavior once that fiduciary duty to shareholder profits above all else is removed.
See that's funny though because it's just the other extreme. One guy is rating thousands of websites by himself?
Although we know that's not the case. Their website says there's a team.
Well, sure, it's always going to be run somehow. Things do tend to be owned by people in our system. You could say it should be a nonprofit if you wanted, that'd be fair.
And yes, I'd expect a single person would be unable to handle the workload. In addition to reading and fact checking, there's also the admin stuff, where someone has to run the website, handle expenses, shit like that.
Yes people to help the disinformation.
Uh huh. I think you just like far left propaganda. Your willingness to just whine in vague, general terms about everything without offering anything substantial in the way of criticism sort of betrays you as just participating in some sort of brigading-type thing.
Oh there's been plenty of substantial criticism, with examples. If you're not seeing them in this comment section it's because you don't want to.
EXACTLY
This is why anyone vehemently opposed to it is an instant 🚩for me