this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.

It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion -- let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.

But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it's the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways...so really no difference).

What's the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there's people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don't see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I actually meant to start a thread one of these days if we can't ban it! Glad you started the conversation!

My main concern is that by attributing a tactfulness and political rating to them, we're attaching weight to that. But who does these ratings? Especially when a pop/mainstream mag like the Rolling Stone is classified as "left" the same that explicitly politically left publications like Jacobin are also "left". That just strikes me as odd.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

It thinks that the guardian would have only medium credibility

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It promotes the existing power structure, which some people think is no bueno.

For example, if you post this:

https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/01/30/ret.axis.facts/

the bot will say it is a highly accurate source with highly factual reporting so people will tend to believe with certainty that the U.S. should invade Iraq.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If you actually read the article it seems pretty factual. It lists Bush’s claims and then has a response. Seems to merit the rating.

The reporting of the Bush administration’s position and the response seems fair.

**IRAQ:**

STATUS: Since 1998, the Iraqi government has barred U.N. weapons inspectors from examining sites where some suspect that nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are made and stored. The United Nations has said it will lift sanctions against the Middle Eastern country -- in place since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War in 1991 -- only if inspectors can verify that Iraq has dismantled all its weapons of mass destruction. In an editorial this month in a state-run newspaper, Iraq again denied it has or is developing such weapons.

RESPONSE TO BUSH'S SPEECH: "This statement of President Bush is stupid and a statement that does not befit the leader of the biggest state in the world," Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Wednesday.
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

There’s a lot of criticism of the bot implementation and mbfc in this thread but no criticism of why it was implemented.

The whole point of mbfc bot was to reduce the mod workload. By (hopefully) exchanging a bunch of posts examining the source of a link, mods hoped to have fewer fights to wade into.

A person could say that’s just what happens when you run an English language community during American election years, and there’s a degree of truth to that.

I think that the mods of the world communities the bot is in want some way to restrict speech along the lines of their own combination of political axes and see the bot as a way to do so under the guise of “just checking facts”.

I am not invoking free speech as a negative criticism here.

What would be possibly more healthy for the mods is to develop a political line and clearly say “if you speak outside this system of understanding you may be modded upon”.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's really annoying and I don't trust it

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I downvote it when its opinion is clearly wack. Like when it tries to give Washington Post a highly trusted rating after all the inflammatory, biased shit they've been putting out.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

It's roughly correct about the political leanings of UK newspapers as far as I've seen, but it's way off on the accuracy and factual reporting measures. It seems to give loony papers a pass and the responsible ones a drubbing. It seems to have an American view of politics where liberal and left are conflated and also daring to report what the views of poor people are gets your reliability ratings plummeting.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah anything responsible that reports and corrects mistakes made in past reporting gets a low score for factual accuracy, when these should be getting the highest scores.

It's completely backwards.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Yeah, or when it says The New York Times is leftist.

Helpful for keeping me honest about checking sources, not always very honest itself.

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