No comments or anything, just lots of Downvotes.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Someone just told me that it "labels everything short of fascism as 'left-leaning'" and "tries to shift the Overton window" even further right than it already is in the US.
And I suppose that is correct if your idea of the spectrum of normal political opinions is restricted to what you see on Lemmy, especially if your instance hasn't defederated from Hexbear yet.
And yet ultimately, MBFC places their center – by their own admission – based on US politics, which is decidedly right of center within the developed world.
That's correct. It's intended for a US audience.
If it were based on the European Overton window and you were American then there's a good chance you would complain about its centre being centre-left for you.
It's not wrong; you're just not in the intended audience.
It's not really possible to give internationally correct ratings. What an American considers centre-left is different from what a Frenchman considers centre-left, which is different from what a Pole considers centre-left. You can only report one, and the other two will then complain about it being wrong from their perspective.
It should then refrain from from posting on non US-media sources and/or stories and/or communities.
Of course it won't. It's purpose is to promote it's owners US-centric political window.
It's spamming political propaganda ,dressing it up as 'facts', and it's getting it's just deserts.
There is no need for regional tone in a "fact checker" bot. Facts are not regional. There is need for political education in the united states so that right wing things are considered right wing things again and not center positions. Respectively, anything leftist isnt communism.
Truthfully the bot gets voted down because it furthers a Zionist agenda, same as the lemmy world administration by pushing it, and many less biased instances and user groups take offense with that.
This needs to die in a fire. It's not the US Overton window. You can see that by far right sources listed as right center. Like the Ayn Rand Institute.
Just in curiosity, what is an example of a centre-right (by American standards) source for you? I make no comment about the Ayn Rand Institute as I know nothing about it
Sinclair and Fox News stations would be center right. Fox Opinion TV would be Right to Far right depending on the show and Ayn Rand is far right because it's anarchy-capitalism.
Center, or least biased are your fact based papers of record. BBC, NYT, WAPO, Baltimore Sun, LA Times, etc.
I think you're right in terms of the American spectrum. Do you have a link to the bot calling the Ayn Rand institute centre-right? I did some more digging into it.
I will happily retract my comment if you can.
You can check this yourself on MBFC's site but sure I'm feeling useless today. Link
So the bias bot is biased, dammit
Where anyone puts the “center” of the political spectrum is arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant. What we should still be able to expect is that it gets the ordering of sources correct—i.e., it doesn’t label Source A as being to the left of Source B if it’s actually to the right. And that relative ordering is still useful, as long as we bear in mind that the actual labels are otherwise arbitrary.
They (MBFC) explicitly state that they rate sources as more credible the closer the sources are to their arbitrarily selected centre.
Which is ridiculous. If Democracy Now or ProPublica take great pains to get all their facts right (which they do), and the New York Post regularly outright makes shit up, they're marked as equally reliable based on that metric, because they're supposedly an equal distance away from the centre.
It puts Reuters as the center and that seems pretty accurate, IMO.
Non-US politics is more complicated than "left vs right".
Definitely—so sources that are close together when projected onto a left-right axis may be far apart in a more multidimensional political space. But the relative ordering along that axis can still be accurate, even if the implied proximity isn’t.
The assumes that the US Democrat-Republican spectrum is indeed a straight line in that space, and they are diametrically opposed.
US politics is too.
Personally I find it worthless because it lends credibility to sources that promoted the Iraq war, afghanistan, libya, syria, etc.
Any source that covered a story where thousands to millions will be/are/were murdered for the profit of the military-industrial complex as anything but an unimaginable crime is instantly non-credible. Yes, that includes 99% of American media.
Same with every media outlet wringing their hands about Hamas instead of the locking of millions of people in a concentration camp for decades that precipitated the attack.
The bot is tuned for US bias. Europe bias: US left is centric here.
The bot isn't even tuned for US bias. It's tuned for conservative US bias. The papers of record that work really hard to be objective get listed as "left center".