I've downvoted it on articles where political bias is completely irrelevant.
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It hides the most important stuff behind accordions and there are some sources for bias & reliability checking the community favors.
There’s a lot of criticism of the bot implementation and mbfc in this thread but no criticism of why it was implemented.
The whole point of mbfc bot was to reduce the mod workload. By (hopefully) exchanging a bunch of posts examining the source of a link, mods hoped to have fewer fights to wade into.
A person could say that’s just what happens when you run an English language community during American election years, and there’s a degree of truth to that.
I think that the mods of the world communities the bot is in want some way to restrict speech along the lines of their own combination of political axes and see the bot as a way to do so under the guise of “just checking facts”.
I am not invoking free speech as a negative criticism here.
What would be possibly more healthy for the mods is to develop a political line and clearly say “if you speak outside this system of understanding you may be modded upon”.
For one, it bases it's bias assessments on American politics. The UK is less right-wing than the US but when this bot comes along it calls a source which we might call centrist, "left".
In a way, it's like an attempt to shift the overton window for other countries closer to the US, and that's not a good thing.
Of course, don't expect this to be addressed by @Rooki@lemmy.world.
I really like it, but I can see people being upset if it doesn't align with their world view.
I use an instance that does not display or parse downvotes or permit them locally.
So I don't see the phenomenon. I don't care about downvotes. I only see the upvotes; which are a far better indicator to me as to how useful a post I made is. If someone posts trash or extremist things; I block them. If they try to argue in bad faith or with far too extremist of a viewpoint, I block them.
The bot doesn't always get the most upvotes but it does have it's uses. As someone who has used the Ground News app in the past; I have a sense of their rating scale and I do find that it helps classify things; although you should always use your own discretion and not just blindly trust the bot.
But most people who downvote this bot, do so for completely wrong reasons. Usually they're upset because they disagree with the assessment of the bot, or do not understand it's scale. Maybe they don't like their viewpoint's position being laid bare for all to see.
Maybe that should be explained more; and there's posts on Ground News' website that EXPLAINS how their rating system works. Perhaps the bot should link them.