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The tesseract Lemmy app, has a little overview from mediabiasfactcheck.com (MBFC). It seems like a clever way to foster a healthy community.
If you click on the ranking you get details.
EDIT: Sorry to stir up an old hornet's nest.
EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC. Even if there are flaws, I would like to celebrate all attempts at elevating the conversations we are having.
MBFC does the opposite of elevate conversations. It's quite frankly a poison pill for conversations. People will apply their prejudices and alter their interpretations based on the 'bias check', typically before or instead of any critical thinking ~~or ant article.~~ of any article.
The last time the MBFC bot was going the user pushing it was very clearly aware of this dynamic. They also knew it was lumping everything to website source, despite authors and opinion pieces, for maximum damage.
Imagine thinking CNN is center-left π
In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But thatβs because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are βLiberal Marxismβ now (oxymoronic as that label is).
Edit: And MBFC perpetuates that rightward movement. I prefer Ad Fontes, although it does also label CNN as center-left.
MBFC is bad. It supports the American overton window, which is, you know, now openly fascist.
Wow, I decided I would give MBFC a shot. You are greeted with an ad-infested experience with a giant start bar reminiscent of a malware site. After building up enough courage to click it I discovered it not only wanted my email but also my credit card.
After having to fight to see the article I wanted rated I just don't have the fortitude to the fight this horrible experience to probably be told that the following article is left center or left leaning bias.
While I will admit this was a not Fox News praising the Trump Admin, it has an extremely neutral tone and does nothing to pushback against the obviously clownish message that the Trump team provides.
For this reason it, is to me at least, right leaning. I guess I will never know what MBFC would rate it.
Firefox and ublock are your friend.
This site doesn't rate articles. It rates news sources. So you just have to look up what they rated the post as.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/
These ratings appear to b based on US sensibilities and not the rest of the world. So everything skews more to the left than it really is.
It probably rates the NSDAP as leftist since it has socialist in its name.
Probably considering it considers radio free Asia and voice of America news good sources.
This site doesn't rate articles. It rates news sources.
That is an extremely important distinction! Thanks!
Edit: that wasnβt sarcasm. I honestly think itβs a valuable thing to know and remember.
Whatever the views are about MBFC, Tesseract integrated it better than LW's bot. If you don't like MBFC, it's just an option in your user settings to turn it off for Tesseract, whereas the bot caused a bunch of problems that weren't even related to concerns about accuracy and bias. Drive-by bots can be annoying, because it leads people to believe there's legit content where there isn't, and not every client respected LW's bot use of spoiler Markdown, so they ended up with a massive comment from it that dominated the screen.
That seems like important nuance for sure.
is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can't find one.
https://alternativeto.net/software/media-bias-fact-check/?license=opensource
These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
No. And there never should be. And here's why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.
Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.
Held hands? No. Not everyone has the time, energy or training to evaluate a site's trust comprehensively. I want to see what other people think in case they spot what I missed. I also want to see if people are even taking about the site and why.
I mean, can you imagine? There are so many sites out there I can't spend three hours fact-checking one for the sake of replying to an argument. And then all that work going to waste for the benefit of nobody else.
Not to mention all the domain-specific knowledge you'd need to properly evaluate claims. All the critical thinking skills in the world are worthless if you don't have contextual knowledge of whatever subject is in the news. It's just not realistic for everyone to be a policy wonk.
These are all valid points but they don't preclude the existence of an open-source alternative to MBFC, which is what the commenter you replied to was asking.
I never implied that it did. Go ahead and make one. It will always do as much or more damage than it will ever do good. That's the point. There's bias in everything. Trusting someone else's bias to accurately convey the bias of something else, isn't making you more informed or a better consumer of media. Not in any meaningful way. Not in the way basic critical thinking skills can. It's just a game of bias telephone. And if you know how the game telephone goes. It should give you an indication to its efficacy.
It's not hard. There are some basic steps anyone can take to get started. Do not tolerate those who are intolerant of who someone is. Whether it's ethnicity or sexuality. If accusations are being made against groups. Especially ones that you have very little experience or contact with. Put yourself in that situation. Think about how you would go about things. Because that's more than likely how they would as well. And for everything else, especially things that are either hard science or factually based. Simply differ to the people who make it their life to study and understand those things. But never give their opinions outside of that field any weight.
Just those few basic things can illuminate a lot of bias and malintent. Leave you far more guarded and protected against misinformation and bias in the future. Which along with basic intellectual curiosity. Something most people have largely never valued. Will serve you far better than any app. Because the Insidious part about misinformation. Is that there's often some amount of Truth to it. Whether it's wrong because of malice or because of bias. Critical thinking and intellectual curiosity will always better serve you.
There is too much information to process for any one person to just use their critical thinking skills to fact check a news organization as large as CNN, much less every major news organization. No, it's not enough to teach critical thinking skills and hope every person is able to discern bias in the media they consume, because you're asking for extremely domain-specific skills and legwork that a single consumer just isn't capable of. Consumer watchdog organizations are a necessary part of protecting us against unreliable news agencies.
Not really. No more than in the past. The difference is the 24/7 firehose of propaganda and indoctrination. The solution is to step away from the firehouse. Focus on the things that actually impact you. Or that you can influence. If someone is telling you to be afraid of people that you don't know, have never met, or ever had contact with. Ignore them and tune them out. It's legitimately that simple.
If you want to potentially sidestep some of people's frustrations you might consider just using the credibility rating and focusing on whether a group provides factual reporting, rather than left or right of center
You can also create a user experience that more carefully manages expectations of the feature by having it be opt in, but presenting the option to users when it becomes available. That gives you the opportunity to give a short blurb acknowledging its imperfections and also highlighting its potential value
As someone fairly to the left wing myself, the fact that lemmy is so left wing is both a blessing and a curse. I don't see Nazis around, but being in an echo chamber isn't great for your ability to engage with perspectives other than your own, and makes you succeptible to narratives that reinforce your existing views regardless of whether they're accurate
I'd love this feature, in spite of its flaws, but it does definitely have them. Its based on the US overton window, which will frustrate folks from other parts of the world who may already feel lemmy sometimes forgets the world beyond the US exists. And the US overton window is changing as a product of the trump administration which may warp mbfc results, which could honestly be really dangerous.
Focussing on the factuality and credibility might help you sidestep those problems and make a feature people would find less frustrating, potentially even to the point that you could make it opt out.
Generally I appreciate efforts to build healthier, less echo chambery discourse, thanks for the work you're doing β€οΈ
Yeah I had a similar thought to your first paragraph. I mostly use MBFC for the "factual reporting" rating, because it seems easier to be objective about.
Just to clarify, I don't develop any fediverse software, I wouldn't want to take any credit from those amazing people.
i think photon does this too
I removed it because I don't want my app to necessarily depend or be associated with any specific centralized external source, like MBFC. By adding it to my app, I'm implicitly supporting its use, which wasn't necessarily my goal.