The Tesseract Lemmy app shows a news source ranking from MBFC
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Yeah, I've also looked into MBFC and found it was more grounded than what Lemmings were saying.
I always found it suspicious why people here would rather choose no fact checking than some. Is it the old "don't let perfection ruin a good plan" again or other motives? Hmm.
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i think photon does this too
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Held hands? No. Not everyone has the time, energy or training to evaluate a site's trust comprehensively. I want to see what other people think in case they spot what I missed. I also want to see if people are even taking about the site and why.
I mean, can you imagine? There are so many sites out there I can't spend three hours fact-checking one for the sake of replying to an argument. And then all that work going to waste for the benefit of nobody else.
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I removed it because I don't want my app to necessarily depend or be associated with any specific centralized external source, like MBFC. By adding it to my app, I'm implicitly supporting its use, which wasn't necessarily my goal.
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I think that very few of these arguments are being made in good faith. For some people, any bias monitor is a barrier to sharing propaganda as news. Others just don't understand how to use the site properly. Or use it in a really stupid way anyway. Like this:
- Look at the ratings.
- If something strikes you as odd, run around screaming like your hair's on fire.
Instead of:
- Look at the ratings.
- If something strikes you as odd, read the part of the report that explains the rating.
- Decide how important those things are to you and whether it's a deal-breaker.
Others are like, 'it's telling me what to think, man!' who don't seem to understand that those pages contain a wealth of information that you can include in your decision-making (or not). They've convinced themselves that it's presented as the one and only source of absolute truth, which is really just something they made up to be angry about. No one but them is making that claim.
There also isn't another free source that has that info in one place. There's no better place to quickly find news org ownership info, the country they're operating in (with links to info about press freedom in that country), and their history of factual reporting. But those people don't care -- they're just viscerally reacting to the ratings, not reading the reports.
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Not really. No more than in the past. The difference is the 24/7 firehose of propaganda and indoctrination. The solution is to step away from the firehouse. Focus on the things that actually impact you. Or that you can influence. If someone is telling you to be afraid of people that you don't know, have never met, or ever had contact with. Ignore them and tune them out. It's legitimately that simple.
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that could be true, if I didn't double check the sources. If that is how you would be doing it then sure, but I use it as a guideline not a rule, and check for facts after.
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You're right, defending Nazi sites doesn't make you friends, you're wrong that there's any peer review of the site though, either way.
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I'm awarding you three demerits for a reply that doesn't make sense. Govern yourself accordingly.
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Mbfc is funded and run by Nazis. You're defending a Nazi site. I personally wouldn't call you a Nazi over doing so in ignorance, but others might.
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As the person asking people to fact check the claims of weird conspiracy theorists, I'm gonna have to ask for your sources on that one.
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I generally think their overton window skews right and every once in a while I've seen some huge fumbles, but overall they're more pro establishment than anything else. The only thing I've ever seen that could even be seen as pushing misinformation is their bellingcat rating, where they gave them "mostly factual" because they lost a lawsuit IN RUSSIA about how they were making "libelous claims" about the MH17 shootdown and who was responsible because their quite rigorous research showed that the Russian government was lying.
inb4 some .ml tankie comes to go "uhm actually bellingcat is cia -
Can you site your sources?
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Probably considering it considers radio free Asia and voice of America news good sources.
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If you want to potentially sidestep some of people's frustrations you might consider just using the credibility rating and focusing on whether a group provides factual reporting, rather than left or right of center
You can also create a user experience that more carefully manages expectations of the feature by having it be opt in, but presenting the option to users when it becomes available. That gives you the opportunity to give a short blurb acknowledging its imperfections and also highlighting its potential value
As someone fairly to the left wing myself, the fact that lemmy is so left wing is both a blessing and a curse. I don't see Nazis around, but being in an echo chamber isn't great for your ability to engage with perspectives other than your own, and makes you succeptible to narratives that reinforce your existing views regardless of whether they're accurate
I'd love this feature, in spite of its flaws, but it does definitely have them. Its based on the US overton window, which will frustrate folks from other parts of the world who may already feel lemmy sometimes forgets the world beyond the US exists. And the US overton window is changing as a product of the trump administration which may warp mbfc results, which could honestly be really dangerous.
Focussing on the factuality and credibility might help you sidestep those problems and make a feature people would find less frustrating, potentially even to the point that you could make it opt out.
Generally I appreciate efforts to build healthier, less echo chambery discourse, thanks for the work you're doing
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Yeah, as political compasses, in order to have some reasonableness, have left-right and authoritarian-libertarian, this needs another axis for bias. You can be a leftist organization that still reports on reality without bias. Being in favor of the status-quo is it's own form of bias.
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Not to mention all the domain-specific knowledge you'd need to properly evaluate claims. All the critical thinking skills in the world are worthless if you don't have contextual knowledge of whatever subject is in the news. It's just not realistic for everyone to be a policy wonk.
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Yeah I had a similar thought to your first paragraph. I mostly use MBFC for the "factual reporting" rating, because it seems easier to be objective about.
Just to clarify, I don't develop any fediverse software, I wouldn't want to take any credit from those amazing people.
