We’ve had some trouble recently with posts from aggregator links like Google Amp, MSN, and Yahoo.
We’re now requiring links go to the OG source, and not a conduit.
In an example like this, it can give the wrong attribution to the MBFC bot, and can give a more or less reliable rating than the original source, but it also makes it harder to run down duplicates.
So anything not linked to the original source, but is stuck on Google Amp, MSN, Yahoo, etc. will be removed.
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Haha, wow you guys really need to work on your PR
There are so many good reasons to block aggregators and you picked the worst one, your bot that no one likes.
Yeah, seriously, aggregators are annoying as fuck, they’re link rot waiting to happen, it’s impossible to tell the quality of the source from the URL…
And the problem is of course the MBFC bot. It’s a change for good, but this is what we’re going with? They chose the one line that would get them backlash for an objective improvement.
MSN is cancerous and was barely usable the last few times I’ve been bamboozled into going there. Yahoo is the same, just easier to avoid. I honestly haven’t run into the Google one.
They literally add nothing to the internet as far as I can tell.
MSN is one of the biggest piece of shit middlemen I’ve seen on the Internet. Good riddance, and to be absolutely clear, I’m glad the mods are doing this.
Glad just also wish it was for reasons other than the shit bot can’t handle it.
Ffs just say it’s because they’re terrible and take away from the actual source not our shit bot has issues finding the actual source
Is that the bot that says how reliable a source is? I blocked that one like a day after they started using it
deleted by creator
Because it is a bot that
- Gives a biased opinion
- Pretends to be objective
- Was not asked for, and does not need to exist
- Forced onto the users despite many objections
One could just block it if they wished, but many users feel that their only way to give real feedback is by downvoting it. The Lemmy World admins have clearly shown they will not remove it no matter how the userbase feels.
If it simply gave the admins/mods feedback about sites, there wouldn’t be very much pushback. But since it’s in every story, giving an opinion of the news organization, it is attempting to influence the conversation.
You and me both! They did have a point when the bot had a donation nag on it, the bot creator heard that complaint and removed it.
Ah yes, people roasting volunteer mods about a thing they could easily ignore. We’re encroaching more and more on Reddit’s turf every day.
We’re not roasting the volunteer mods because we can’t ignore the bot. We’re roasting the volunteer mods because the experience of having someone in a position of power over your environment, and having them show callous indifference to how everyone in the community sees it, and what we want them to be doing with their position of power, leads people to start roasting. Sometimes out of all possible proportion to how big a deal the thing being complained about actually is.
It’s part of the healthy interplay of human society that keeps the social contract well-maintained. Take it as a sign of love, that we value this community and want it to function well.
Suuure. I’ve played this game enough to know that it doesn’t matter what decision you make, someone is going to be loudly unhappy. This is always the case; it’s not a game you can win by appealing to the true will of the shitposters, because that doesn’t exist.
Love has nothing to do with it. Some people enjoy conflict.
Downvote away, my sparkly sluts.
What if the Yahoo article is because the original is paywalled?
You can use an archive link to get around a paywall, that’s always been allowed.
But that’s literally rule 2.
dont use archive to get around paywalls…
Archive links are allowed, and, in fact, if you submit a link from the web interface, it offers to generate an archive link for you.
I specifically clarified that with the Admins when they asked us to crack down on copy pasting full articles.
So then the rule is wrong where it says do not do this on paywalls specifically
I’m really curious what the response to this is going to be.
Betting like my question about if there’s updates on how they’re gonna deal any mod issues, will just be ignored or have a token response.
Like we reviewed the time period after all the issues occurred and found none so it’s all good
If only there was a bot for that.
Next, you’ll be telling me that UniversalMonk violates rule 7 pretty much every day.
Drag thinks the bot smells.
With all the negativity in here, I just wanted to say thanks for all that you do @jordanlund@lemmy.world
Solid rule. 9/10. One point deduction for making me look at Tom Cotton.
I blocked that shitty bot ages ago.
Your bot sucks and you should feel bad.
The bot that everyone (inc. me ) hates?
The bot serves a very important purpose. It teaches users about the block function. I really tried to tolerate it, but it’s just like those pinned automod comments on reddit.
Just hate that it adds to the comment count
“Oooh what thoughtful discussion has taken place on this interesting news article”
“Oh it’s the bot”
That bot is the main reason I’m mostly getting my news from !world@quokk.au instead now.
Thanks for the community link!
Not everyone hates it, but if it bothers you that much, you can block it.
Aside from the extremely vocal minority who seek it out to downvote it and complain about it constantly, it does seem like people don’t care about it when they don’t need it and appreciate it when they do. Very unscientific observation but obscure sources usually seem to have more upvotes. It doesn’t need to be useful to everyone all the time to have value.
Having quick access to MBFC and Wiki links is great and useful for mods, I assume. I also like that it carves out a thread to discuss sources. Replying to the bot makes it seem much less like you’re attacking the OP, which I always hated pre-bot.
No it’s got a bias problem. They consistently rate sources they perceive as left as less factual, consider conservative anarchists to be mainstream, and rate literal campaign websites as not very biased. They also made up their own terminology that’s loaded, despite the existence of objective terms for decades.
consider conservative anarchists
That sounds like an oxymoron. I mean there are anarcho-capitalists but most other anarchists don’t consider them anarchist.
You know them as their brand name, Libertarians. I’m making the point that they are not a mainstream center ideology as MBFC protrays.
Ok agreed.
You’re wrong. Tons of peer-reviewed research says you’re wrong. There just isn’t any that says you’re right.
Do you have an explanation for why this bias you claim is so pervasive cannot be found when anyone looks for it? Is it… paranormal bias? Is it just really shy bias that hides when it gets scared?
How can that be true and MBFC be in broad consensus across thousands of news sites with different tools from academics, journalists, and other bias monitoring organizations? Both things cannot be true. In fact, whenever someone compares MBFC to any other resource they find almost perfect correlation, not bias. I’d love for you to explain to me where that bias disappears to when under a microscope.
Is there a conspiracy between bias monitoring organizations, journalists, and academics you have evidence of? Are the prestigious journals that published them in on it too? I can’t wait to sketch out this vast global conspiracy to pull the wool over our eyes and convince us that Democracy Now is just… highly factual. Those bastards!
That’s not saying what you want it to say. It’s a top level picture taking great pains to speak in general terms. So no, it’s not a guard against MBFC having a bias where it rates conservative stuff higher.
We’ve found concrete examples of bias in MBFC that would be very hard to see if you’re just smashing 11,000 data points against each other. This requires checking the actual sites by hand, basically doing their self appointed job again and checking their work. Then checking it against MBFCs other ratings for internal consistency.
No, if there were serious, pervasive bias impacting scores, it would lower the correlation and MBFC would be an outlier in the group because they would be in agreement less. If something’s happening at such a low level that it doesn’t impact correlation, it’s just an outlier. Multiple researchers conclude that the differences between monitors is too low to impact downstream analysis which is hard to square with your claim. And, each entry represents about 0.01% of their content, so what percentage of that data is being used to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole?
There is just high agreement about what constitutes high and low quality news sites. The notion that MBFC is somehow inferior to other bias monitors or extremely biased is not supported by evidence. If one of those organizations is better than the others, it isn’t much better. As this study concludes, because the level of agreement between them is so high, it doesn’t really matter which one you use. They’re all fine. Even they think so. Not only do MBFC ratings correlate nearly perfectly with Newsguard, Newsguard’s rating of MBFC is a perfect score. They’re well-respected by each other.
And, really, how could these researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding this stuff have gotten it so wrong? Academia definitely isn’t a hotbed of conservatism. Using awful tools could destroy their careers but MBFC is regularly used in research. Why? How are these studies getting through peer-review? How are they getting published? There are just too many failure points required.
Because there’s a lot that goes into statistics. Notice I didn’t say they would be conservative, just that sometimes they can be wrong. And they take great pains to say this is a general thing. That means there’s a lot of room in the numbers. It’s not at all what you’re trying to say it is.
Looks like that may be a problem with the API, not the site or the bot.
Searching the site for bbc.co.uk correctly points to the BBC:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/?s=bbc.co.uk
I’ll PM Rookie, maybe he needs to escape the search term or something.
https://ponder.cat/comment/588446
One of many examples
Just the overwhelming majority.
People overstate the hatred.
Check this post:
https://lemmy.world/post/20723122
60 upvotes, 4 comments, bot post is at +1.
Doesn’t look like an overwhelming majority, just that most people ignore it entirely.
Selection bias means that a lot of people who actively dislike the bot have it blocked.
Doesn’t mean they don’t think it’s ridiculous and misleading.
19 hours later it’s at -7. You did get good feed back. You need more sources because MBFC itself is either bad at it’s job or specifically a project to whitewash libertarian and conservative sources.
Oh no, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience the mbfc bot that that literally everyone hates and wants gone. That would be awful.
I like the bot, and I also hate amp links and url forwarders that can literally take you anywhere but where it’s supposed to.
How dare you have a different opinion. It’s not hard to block the bot, I don’t see why everyone gets their jimmies so rustled about it.
Your bot is bad and you should feel bad
I’m open to making it better, do you have suggestions?
Everytime people try to threads either get locked, ignored or the users banned.
surprisingly admins just stick fingers in ears and yell at users to just ignore the bot
Not seeing any suggestions there to improve the bot, but lots of bannable attacks on other users, mods and admins.
So I’ll say it again, as I’ve told other people complaining, I’m open to making the bot better. If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
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It has to be automated, which means accessible through an API.
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It has to be no/low cost. Lemmy.World doesn’t have a budget for this. We met with an MBFC alternative, they wanted 6 figures. HARD no.
You could get rid of it. No automation, API, or cost whatsoever.
I can’t, it’s Admin level.
You could ask them to remove it. Or you could ban it. The other news community doesn’t have it any more. Clearly, it is possible.
How come !news@lemmy.world was able to remove it?
The Admins removed it there.
Why is it admin level? Are there admins that tell you what you can and can’t do with the politics community, in this case? Or does the politics moderation team have the ability to ditch the bot if they decide to?
This is such a strange situation. If you’re stuck in that former position, though, it would make a lot of your responses in this comments section make a whole lot more sense.
The Admins run lemmy.world, we serve at their pleasure.
Sure, I could ban it, then likely get removed and have the bot re-instated, and what good would that do anyone?
Ok, i’ll bite. I don’t value the bot (in part because it rates sites/newspapers and not authors or articles. Good news sites have the occasional shit article and vice versa), so please reduce the precious space it takes up on my mobile device. A one liner with a link would be enough.
I feel your pain. Some readers, like mine (Boost) don’t handle the spoiler tag markup correctly and it ends up bigger than designed.
So already ignoring. This is why people stopped giving feedback
I can’t ignore suggestions nobody is making. Have a better service in mind? Feel free to present it.
We looked at AllSides, which is good for bias, but has no scoring for credibility.
“We have to keep using the ratings website made by a random dude with no background in journalism who makes it available for free because real fact checking services cost money” is perhaps not the argument I would use for why the bot is both accurate and useful.
You don’t have to have a bot at all, especially to replace something like blacklisting Breitbart URLs, but someone thought the idea sounds cool. So “don’t have the bot” has been unnecessarily eliminated as an option. Even though sometimes the best option really is to just not have a bot.
I mean, it’s a great argument for not going with actual fact checkers, unless you’re volunteering to pay.
Not having one is also an option, but for my 2 cents the bot seems accurate enough so far, and it’s easy enough to ignore if you really don’t like it.
Stop pretending that “get rid of the bot” doesn’t count as a suggestion. That’s dishonest.
I don’t even care about the bot itself, but at this point I’m just getting pissed off by all the constant distracting bickering about it.
When the question is “how do we improve it?” the answer “get rid of it” is not a genuine suggestion.
The GOOD news is, we DO have a genuinely good suggestion here and the bot creator will be reaching out.
How much are you paying for the MBFC API? The page says it isn’t free. I’ll give you an API endpoint which will check sources against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, if you pay me half of whatever you were paying MBFC previously. That list is quite a lot better than relying on MBFC.
I already scraped the list. It’ll take around an hour for my script to finish going down the sources and assigning web sites to each one, but I can have a working API endpoint for you tomorrow morning. I can do the bot part also, if you prefer. That’s probably easier than making a new endpoint and hooking it to a bot and debugging the connection and all.
Like I said, I think the idea that readers won’t be able to determine that Breitbart is unreliable is missing a pretty big elephant in the misinformational room. If the issue that’s causing you to keep MBFC is finding a better source that’s programmatic, though, then solving that is almost trivially easy and at least seems like some kind of step forward.
To be honest, that’s Rooki’s deal, but I’ll link them to this comment!
I’ll send them a link and an example of how to use it tomorrow.
MBFC API is free as they gave us access for us as a Non Profit.
We already had in mind adding these sources to our bot but we didnt had the time and knowledge how to scrape that. Personally i would like to host it on our own server so that we dont require you to use your own money just for one bot, in what programming language did you write it?
Thanks a lot!
RookiHere you go:
https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip
It’s in python, suitable for sticking directly into the bot if the bot is in python. There are docs. It’s a first cut. How did you envision this working? I can make a real API, if for some reason that makes things easier, but it’s not immediately obvious how it would get integrated into things.
Running it on the last 50 articles posted to /c/politics, we see:
- https://lemmy.world/post/20739836: Source is unreliable since ownership change
- https://lemmy.world/post/20736298: Source is unreliable for political topics since 2011
- https://lemmy.world/post/20724155: Reliability consensus is mixed
- https://lemmy.world/post/20723675: Source is unreliable
- https://lemmy.world/post/20722912: Source is unreliable
- https://lemmy.world/post/20722910: Reliability consensus is mixed
- https://lemmy.world/post/20716118: Reliability consensus is mixed
- https://slrpnk.net/post/14127964: Reliability consensus is mixed
It’s more complex to use this than MBFC, because there’s a lot more depth to the rankings, and sometimes human judgement is needed to assign scores. There’s a category “needinfo,” meaning it’s necessary to know what topic is being discussed or when an article was written, because of an ownership change or similar factor. I’ve applied that judgement above. That, to me, is a good thing. It means the bot is grounded in something, and not just blithely spitting out arbitrary scores without bothering to ground them in any reality.
In practice, I think it would be realistic to assign a single reliability ranking to most of the “needinfo” sources. You can manually edit the .json data to do so. Almost all of the posts are going to fit into one of Wikipedia’s categorizations or another. Newsweek is unreliable, The Guardian is reliable, and so on.
I think most of the mixed-consensus sources can be used without a second thought. Mostly, the questions about them boil down to open partisanship of the source, which for a political community is perfectly fine as long as they’re trustable factually.
If you want me to boil this down further, so that it gives a single “yes” or “no” score to each source, I can do that and probably keep almost all of the accuracy of the rankings, now that I’ve looked at it for a little while.
When you talk about “adding” this to the bot, are you proposing to still have MBFC be the main source, with this as a footnote? A lot of the criticism of the bot is on the grounds that MBFC is a very bad source for judging reliability, so I would question the idea of keeping it on as the primary source.
Nice work, thanks for contributing!
By “adding” i mean adding it into the field higher than MBFC ( as i personally think wikipedia is a little bit better for that ).
new:
Wikipedia: Reliability consensus is mixed…l ( whatever the scrapper scrapes ) MBFC: Right-Center - Credibility: High - Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual - United States of America
Search Wikipedia about this sourceI would like to implement your code into the bot myself so i can learn how you would do it. If you are willing to share your code, please send me a github link ( or invite me if you want it to be private between you and me ) or if its super simple just send it in the dms.
Since it’s a MediaWiki page you can get Markdown source of the page with appending
action=rawquery to the URL.On a different topic: It sounds like jordanlund is saying that if he tried to remove the MBFC bot from the politics sub, he might be removed as a moderator, and replaced with someone else, and the bot would come back.
https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768
Is that true? Is the admin team mandating the use of this bot, and if so, why?
No, i dont get it from where he would get that idea, because see c/politics mods wanted the bot gone and we removed it no question asked.
@jordanlund@lemmy.world if you really dont want the bot here we can remove the bot and shut the bot down ( please consult other c/world mods too )
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https://kbin.melroy.org/m/news@lemmy.world/t/411778/-/comment/3689270
I’m glad that the gist of the Wikipedia thing has finally been implemented, but it currently has major glean issues
The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
May the most useful the bots been
LMFAO
Tell me, whos paying so that the admins continue to use the bot against all feedback? There’s nothing short of money that makes people stick to hated ideas more. Is this how y’all try to secure server contributions?
I’ve got to wonder why you guys are so insistent on the bot? Personally I just ignore it but the amount of noise it generates for you as mods cannot be worth the tiny amount of value it brings to a handful of users.
It generates a lot of noise in a thread like this, but it’a largely ignored in practical use.
If it’s usually ignored isn’t that a sign to remove it because it provides no value?
It’s definitely as value, it provides clear markers for other users before mods can intervene.
It generates a lot of noise in a thread like this, but it’a largely ignored in practical use.
provides clear markers for other users before mods can intervene.
As others have said, work on PR
Good rule. Thanks for working for it.
Mostly aggregators make it more of a pain for humans trying to read and find out the source.
