The Tesseract Lemmy app shows a news source ranking from MBFC
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It probably rates the NSDAP as leftist since it has socialist in its name.
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reminiscent of a malware site
Well, that's because it is malware.
it, is to me at least, right leaning
It's not right leaning.
It's disinformation malware whose sole purpose is to move the Overton window as far right as possible.
It labels anything short of outright fascism as far left.
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Members tend not do their own research and only live to complain about the existence of it.
But then
lets me know to look for certain things on the article before I enter so I know if I should take it with a grain of salt or not.
You are talking about yourself in the first sentence.
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Imagine thinking CNN is center-left
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Impressive post count??
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Ok well nothing as impressive as yours. Averaging 15 posts a day for the last 19 months is a full time job.
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Iām against MBFC for many reasons but it isnāt actually malware. Itās a shitty site that wants your info and has dark patterns galore, but it isnāt malware.
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is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can't find one.
https://alternativeto.net/software/media-bias-fact-check/?license=opensource
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It has malicious intent, therefore it's malware.
ā
ļø -
These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
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Thatās not what malware means and you know it. Again, I donāt like MBFC. I donāt support or use then at all. But malware is a specific thing. Letās stick to the facts as the facts about them are bad enough on their own.
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No. And there never should be. And here's why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.
Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.
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These are all valid points but they don't preclude the existence of an open-source alternative to MBFC, which is what the commenter you replied to was asking.
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Any software intended to cause harm is malware. MBFC is software intended to cause harm. MBFC is malware.
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In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But thatās because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are āLiberal Marxismā now (oxymoronic as that label is).
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I never implied that it did. Go ahead and make one. It will always do as much or more damage than it will ever do good. That's the point. There's bias in everything. Trusting someone else's bias to accurately convey the bias of something else, isn't making you more informed or a better consumer of media. Not in any meaningful way. Not in the way basic critical thinking skills can. It's just a game of bias telephone. And if you know how the game telephone goes. It should give you an indication to its efficacy.
It's not hard. There are some basic steps anyone can take to get started. Do not tolerate those who are intolerant of who someone is. Whether it's ethnicity or sexuality. If accusations are being made against groups. Especially ones that you have very little experience or contact with. Put yourself in that situation. Think about how you would go about things. Because that's more than likely how they would as well. And for everything else, especially things that are either hard science or factually based. Simply differ to the people who make it their life to study and understand those things. But never give their opinions outside of that field any weight.
Just those few basic things can illuminate a lot of bias and malintent. Leave you far more guarded and protected against misinformation and bias in the future. Which along with basic intellectual curiosity. Something most people have largely never valued. Will serve you far better than any app. Because the Insidious part about misinformation. Is that there's often some amount of Truth to it. Whether it's wrong because of malice or because of bias. Critical thinking and intellectual curiosity will always better serve you.
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There is too much information to process for any one person to just use their critical thinking skills to fact check a news organization as large as CNN, much less every major news organization. No, it's not enough to teach critical thinking skills and hope every person is able to discern bias in the media they consume, because you're asking for extremely domain-specific skills and legwork that a single consumer just isn't capable of.
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EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC.
Here's another in my "making friends" series of posts.
Commenters DO NOT have valid criticisms of MBFC. They are universally wrong, have no idea how MBFC works, and are too lazy to look it up. The misinfo ghouls among them are happy to repeat lies over and over until people start to accept them.
Some of these people can be pretty convincing but I urge you to actually fact check their arguments. Most of these people are just parroting bullshit they saw someone else say. The "best" of these are basically artisanal, hand-crafted AI hallucinations: high-confidence, syntactically-correct nonsense. Don't put that glue on your pizza. If someone posts an MBFC link as evidence, click it and read it. Nearly every single time, the link they posted contradicts them and they just haven't read it.
And ask yourself why no one ever posts peer-reviewed research backing up their claims. It's a simple reason: it doesn't exist. Every single piece of academic research on MBFC says they're wrong. The MBFC conspiracy theorists can't just ignore that body of research because it's inconvenient -- they need a compelling reason why all research to date is wrong. For their claims to be true, it would require a massive conspiracy between academics, journalists, and media bias organizations because they are all in consensus about what makes good and bad news organizations. It's loopy, tinfoil hat bullshit.
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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
