this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
347 points (89.0% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35742 readers
498 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's not how that works. People stop at the labels. If you want to change that then go after the public education system. That's just like telling people to watch Fox News with an understanding of its bias. It doesn't work. And as pointed out elsewhere, MBFC isn't operating objectively. It whitewashes extreme conservative publications while listing organizations like AP News as biased. It doesn't label American and international sources differently and it doesn't tell you it's labeling everything with their own concept of the American political environment.

For a supposedly objective organization it sure isn't interested in self reflection.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Are you trying to tell me that it's a problem to suggest people use critical thinking with the results of MBFCbot in addition to the post, and instead the solution is to suggest there should be no bot and people should use critical thinking skills for the post itself?

We already know how many people stop at the headlines.

As well, you seem to be focusing on the bias component. I think the reliability/fact-checking component is much more important.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Which is weird because with 3 failed results in 2020 and 1 in 2022 Guardian got a mixed rating. While the New York Times gets a high rating with 3 failed fact checks.

I can smell the objectivity from here.

And yeah it's rather they use whatever critical thinking they're going to use on the source itself rather than have a bot claiming to do it for them. That wouldn't be an issue though if it was actually objective. But it's not. It's a lie. So now you're asking people to use critical thinking skills twice instead of once, and they have to get over the hurdle of realizing the officially sponsored MBFC bot is itself misinformation.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

And yeah it's rather they use whatever critical thinking they're going to use on the source itself rather than have a bot claiming to do it for them.

How does one go about doing that for a brand new source each time they encounter one?

With the bot, the critical thinking needs to be done far fewer times. It's the same bot with the same source. Understand the source's bias and credibility, and then you'll have an idea of how to interpret its results. Not so without the bot -- whatever process needs to be done for each new source every time a new source is encountered.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That's not how that works. You're assuming the people behind MBFC are operating on an objective scale, even if you don't like it. But they clearly are not. This isn't a case of everything being shifted to the right. They don't abide by their own rubric. So there's nothing left but whatever they subjectively rate.

A single arbiter of truth and fact is only good as long as it's actually an objective source. Which has been thoroughly disproven.

If you cannot understand why it's dangerous to rely on an unreliable arbitrator of fact and bias then I can't help you.

[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You're assuming the people behind MBFC are operating on an objective scale

No, I'm not. I'm saying "If we know that they're flawed, we can take their flaws into consideration. But if we have to look at each source independently, we need to do a new investigation for each new source".

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] otp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Many users here, for example, have described the lens through which we should view MBFC.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

That doesn't answer the question.