News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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There's no such thing as an objective left or right. It's a relative scale. You shouldn't have a bot calling things left or right at all.
Also don't push Ground News. They already get plenty of press from their astroturfing.
This. The bot is effectively just propaganda for the author's biases.
Do you think aggregating ratings from multiple factors checkers would reduce that bias?
Keep in mind that if you base your judgements of left bias and right bias on the American overton window, that window has been highly influenced by fascism over the last 10 years, and now your judgement is based on the normalisation of fascism, which your bot is implicitly accepting. That's bad. If you're going to characterise sources as left or right in any form, you need to pick a point that you personally define as center. And now your judgements are all going to implicitly push people towards that point. You could say that Karl Marx is the center of the political spectrum, or you could say Mussolini is. Both of those statements are equally valid, and they are as valid as what you are doing now. If you don't want to push any set of biases, you need to stop calling sources left and right altogether.
No. The problem with your current bot isn't that the website authors have a particular axe to grind, it's that they're just in a rush and a bit lazy.
This means that they tend to say news sites which acknowledge and correct their own mistakes have credibility problems, because it's right there - the news sites themselves acknowledged issues. Even though these are the often most credible sites, because they fix errors and care about being right.
Similarly the whole left-right thing is just half-assed and completely useless for anyone that doesn't live in the US. While anyone that does live in the US probably already has an opinion about these US news sources.
Because these are lazy errors, lots of people will make similar mistakes, and aggregating ratings will amplify this, and let you pretend to be objective without fixing anything.
Hm... At some point a human will have to say "Yes, this response is correct." to whatever the machine outputs. The output then takes the bias of that human. (This is unavoidable, I'm just pointing it out.) If this is really not an effort in ideological propaganda, a solution could be for the bot to provide arguments, rather han conclusions. Instead of telling me a source is "Left" or "Biased", it could say: "I found this commentary/article/websites/video discussing this aource's political leaning (or quality): Link 1 Link 2 Link 3"
Here you reduce bias by presenting information, instead of conclusions, and then letting the reader come to their own conclusions based on this information. This not only is better at education, but also helps readers develop their critical thinking.
Instead of... You know, being told what to think about what by a bot.
Adding more biases doesn't remove the initial bias.
Honestly, the first time I had heard of Ground News was in a discussion about implementing it with the bot. Do you have any thoughts on alternatives or would you prefer that bit just removed from the bot’s comment?
Someone else in this thread said to link to media literacy resources and I agree with them.