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…
Unless your goal is to spread misinformation. Anyone that knowingly wants to spread propaganda is going to severely dislike it and be forced to come up with some excuse to be against it, that is more acceptable than “it keeps telling me my russian propaganda is bullshit”.
We do have a small pro-Russian contingent on here after all. We also occasionally get a MAGA type.
Personally I do appreciate it, the wikipedia and Ground News links are convenient, I would occasionally manually google those anyway. News consumption is one of the main reasons I’m on here in the first place though, so I might be an outlier in that regard.
Can you even point to a post where the bot calls the source out as propaganda (in whatever choice of words it would use to indicate this) or highly untrustworthy? I’ve literally never seen it say anything but left, left center, or center on any source and usually always highly trustworthy or trustworthy.
That has more to do with the fact that centre-right/right/far-right sources are seldom posted to lemmy and the communities implementing it generally prefer factual reporting.
Here are some examples of other ratings:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/goteborgs-posten/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-sun-bias/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fria-tider-free-times/
I don’t doubt there are far-right sources out there, but the person I replied to stated that ‘people are complaining because the bot is calling out their posts as right-wing propaganda’ which I’ve seen zero evidence of here on Lemmy.
No, it will not specifically identify propaganda. Could just check their entry for RT if you wanted, I’ve never bothered to look. That’s a Kremlin funded publication though.
Mmmm yes everyone who wants to get rid of the conservative corporate disinformation bot is themselves trying to spread disinformation.
Projection, that’s totally original.
In America, that is not conservative in the slightest, unless you’re coming from a hard communist position. What’s the corporation?
MBFC
Yeah, it’s just owned by one dude named Dave, funded mainly through user donations.
Oh because that’s better?
Uh, yea, actually. When people complain about corporations, they’re worried about how shareholders, who have no actual emotional or long-term attachment to their ownership of the company, have no real incentive to actually do things in any sort of ethical, or even long-term healthy way.
If they’re just going to sell their shares someday, why should they care?
If someone is working on a project of their own, it’s much more possible for it to be a passion project, where they care about more than simple short term profitability. You’re just more likely to encounter ethical behavior once that fiduciary duty to shareholder profits above all else is removed.
See that’s funny though because it’s just the other extreme. One guy is rating thousands of websites by himself?
Although we know that’s not the case. Their website says there’s a team.
Well, sure, it’s always going to be run somehow. Things do tend to be owned by people in our system. You could say it should be a nonprofit if you wanted, that’d be fair.
And yes, I’d expect a single person would be unable to handle the workload. In addition to reading and fact checking, there’s also the admin stuff, where someone has to run the website, handle expenses, shit like that.
EXACTLY
This is why anyone vehemently opposed to it is an instant 🚩for me