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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.
Is this the same media bias checking bot that thinks a Murdoch media owned news site was left leaning?
As a left-leaning Canadian, this seems crazy to me. There's not even a place for me on this chart.
It's crazy how normalized right-wing extremism is. Well, it does explain the state of things in the US, though.
Also the AP
Oh dear god not this argument again
Right, I almost forgot about the rage against the MBFC bot that went on for like MONTHS lmao. Seeing it downvoted to hell was hilarious though lol
Tbh I didn’t even mind what the bot was trying to do. I just remember opening what felt like every post and seeing dozens of lines taken up by the bot. I ended up just blocking it and cross-referencing with ground news myself.
Ground News makes you think American conservatives are centrists.
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.
From the test that was done with the bot that was not a good source. 1) American focus 2) too much room for debate on the ranking Here some discussion on it https://lemmy.world/post/18073070
I blocked the bot as soon as I learned how. The ratings are a joke - mostly because of its American bias.
I suppose we've got to keep at it until we're at a point where doing something is better than doing nothing. Where, of course, doing nothing is somewhat of an acknowledgement of the fact it's hard to do something right enough to be able to apply it to all posts and all articles and all that.
An analogy comes to mind: it’s like the difference between telling hikers they’re at their own risk and advising them to bring water, good shoes, and a fully charged battery, and they'll be fine. If you can't account for everything, there are arguments to be made with trying to shift responsibility back to people with either more general or more specific warnings.
My impression is that people will be eager to tell in the comments that a news source is bad or biased, or that the specific article is misinformation.
At the end of the day, if you just trust some rank value that someone tossed in, w.o. knowing who is behind it exactly and how they reached that conclusion, it can be an easy source for disinformation.
Also some news outlets are providing reliable coverage on some issues, while being biased on others. Often they just repeat texts from Reuters, AP or other agencies. So any single value rating can warn you that the same message is "biased" in one case and in another case it cheers it on as "reliable".
In other words: You can keep jumping out of the window in different ways, trying to find a way for humans to fly w.o. mechanical help, or you can just accept taking the stairs.
I agree that this is necessary, but we need to be mindful with the implementation. A decentralized approach might be more effective than relying on a centralized list. As you mentioned, a warning that encourages people to think critically and not take everything at face value is likely the best solution for now.
Imagine thinking CNN is center-left 😂
In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But that’s because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are “Liberal Marxism” 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.
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.
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.
reminiscent of a malware site
Well, that's because it is malware.
it, is to me at least, right leaning
It's not right leaning.
It's disinformation malware whose sole purpose is to move the Overton window as far right as possible.
It labels anything short of outright fascism as far left.
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.
This site doesn't rate articles. It rates news sources.
That is an extremely important distinction! Thanks!
Edit: that wasn’t sarcasm. I honestly think it’s a valuable thing to know and remember.
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.
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 ❤️
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.
That's really cool. Looks great too.
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.