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.
Interesting that people say that opinion pieces should not be held to the same standard. I personally see such pieces contribute to fake news going around. Shouldn’t a platform with reach, held accountable for wrong information, they hide behind an opinion piece?
It’s not a question of “should” - an opinion piece is rhetoric, not reporting. You can fact check some of it sometimes but functionally can’t hold it to the same standards as a regular news article. I agree that this can sometimes lead to “alternative facts” and disingenuous arguments, but the only other option is to forbid the publication of them which is obviously an infringement of first amendment rights. It’s messy, and it can lead to people being misinformed, but it’s what we’re stuck with.
Can you explain how a piece with a title like “Helldivers is awesome and fun” can be judged at all for factual accuracy?
The NYT ran an opinion recently where the author pretty clearly was using the NYT along with other outlets as part of a voter demobilization tactic in which the author lied about not voting. The NYT was skewered on twitter, and had to alter the opinion after the fact. It seems like some basic fact checking would have been useful in that situation. Or really, just any amount of critical thought on the part of the NYT in general.
This. Otherwise op-eds get a free pass to launder opinions the paper wants to publish, but can’t.