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.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
    3·
    3 months ago

    Although this is a fair point, I think that there is a difference between saying, “the moderation team finds it useful and would like to keep it,” vs “We have already decided that we are keeping it no matter what.”

    This discussion is to help us guide the community’s next steps from an informed position.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      Which of those are you trying to say? Because it very much comes across as the latter when you say stuff like “deleting the bot is not an option” and “off the table”.

      If you guys find it helpful from a mod perspective, it might be more appropriate to develop some mod tooling, like a browser extension, rather than pushing it on the users.

      Edit: so it is the latter, then, got it.