108
[META] MBFC bot
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
108 points (89.7% liked)
News
23267 readers
1241 users here now
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.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Why do you insist on fixing the bot instead of directing your energy elsewhere? Fixing the media bias bot to not have any bias is a fool's errand.
The last sticky thread actually had some really good feedback, like using a fact checker that is part of the International Fact Checking Network (of which MBFC is not a member) and many other similarly great suggestions.
One of the issues might be in the name. We don’t want to create a bias bot. That seems like a fool’s errand, which is one thing we learned in the process of implementing the MBFC bot. We want to create something that makes people aware of posts that are from medium to low quality sources. Obviously, if the source is super sketchy, we’d delete it, but there’s a lot of grey area where we leave things up.
Mods should take note that this is how you listen to community feedback. Some actual learning is happening here, instead of doubling down we saw in the other thread
The other thread was an attempt to gauge feedback on specific ideas (as this post mentions, they are so in the works) and it precipitated this post
The other thread started from the assumption that the bot is useful and here to stay, even though the overwhelming feedback has been that it sucks and should be removed. It was a transparent attempt to increase support for it instead of an honest attempt at feedback. People still gave their feedback, of course, that the stupid bot should be put out to pasture.
At least now we're seeing the bot is gone until improvements are made, the bias stuff is gone, the bot shouldn't even appear except in select cases. That's totally different than what they're saying in the other thread.
We have been discussing the content of that feedback for about a week now, both with the broader moderator/admin community and within this team, and since most of us aren't online at the same time (we have jobs) it takes a few days for the whole team to see and respond to opinions. Given that many of us disagreed on the best path forward, we had to come to a workable consensus. We have now acted on that feedback in accordance with the wishes of the community, so your claim that we had no intention to do so is significantly off the mark.
Maybe for you, but that's not how I'm reading other people's comments in there.
I'm telling you that the way you're reading the comments has no bearing on what was actually happening behind the scenes.
Could do with out them banning some of the users with top comments though
There's obviously no problem with incorporating other sources as well but, as I pointed out in that other thread, MBFC uses the IFCN for fact-checking per their methodology and Wikipedia page. They also explain why they use IFCN fact-checkers in their FAQ.