Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot

jeffw@lemmy.worldmod to News@lemmy.world – 141 points –

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.

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How much more feedback do you need to gather on the subject to understand that a bot with a garbage datasource is no use to anyone? Even opening this thread is an insult and a sign of how little you recognize and care for your community. Remove the shit bot already instead of fishing for excuses to keep it active.

Exactly! What a waste. They already got their feedback

Honestly, have a look through the whole thread. There are comments from those who, like yourself, oppose it in any form. However, please also be respectful of the many community members who are saying that it is useful or could be made useful.

The mods will be taking all of these comments into account.

The mods aren't neutral though. They already start with a pretty strong "the bot is here to stay" which is borderline insulting to the community. Then they're asking for ideas to make it better, which already presumes the idea is feasible or a good idea in the first place. Sure, I would make it less spammy, put the details behind a link, etc etc, but they're already committed to the bot as a solution to their stated problem of overloaded mods. Well that could be solved in much better ways. All the energy going to this controversial bot is adding to the mod overburden!