Ask Lemmy

1. People disagree on the bias bot reporting
2. People don't like their biases being made visible
3. People don't realize they have a bias
4. People find the bot noisy

1. It's often wrong

2. It's a bot and yet I still see it with the option to hide bots. Someone said it was flagged properly the other day, but since it's the ONLY self proclaimed bot that isn't filtered by the "block bot accounts" option in Lemmy, I call bullshit.

Since you asked:

1. The bot provides little "value" vs the noise it creates.

I don't need a bot to tell me that the BBC is a legit news source. Maybe if you flip it around and only publish a message if it's a known scammy website, this might be less spammy. However, this "threshold for scamminess" would be very subjective.

2. This bot is everywhere. This is closely related to the first point ("value" vs noise). It just sprang up one day and I saw it in every single thread, I'd read.

Fortunately, most Lemmy clients allow blocking users - which I've done and I'm much happier with my Lemmy experience.

Because it's biased itself. They whitewash far right conservative sources while listing anything that tries to remain neutral and fact based as having a left bias. Left center to be exact. Then they put far right stuff in "right center" to make you think it's equivalent.

Their factual rating is largely subjective as well. With similar amounts of failed fact checks getting different ratings.

So basically the guys who want to be the guardians of fact and bias are themselves acting in a biased manner instead of an objective one.

The bot is crap. This is how it rates Raw Story, a clickbait factory that churns out shallow articles with dramatic, misleading headlines. It just produces slop for liberal Boomers to fill up their Facebook feed, but based on the bot's reply, you'd think it was the Gaurdian.

I downvote it everytime because of its rightwing bias.

If you say the mainstream corporate news is center left, you're either stupid or you have a right wing agenda.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

One should be even more skeptical and demanding of proof for wannabe trust-gatekeepers of the entire Internet, than one should already be for single newsmedia entities - the former place themselves as supervisors of trust in the latter and yet have even less proven trustworthiness than them.

So it's curious that the !world@lemmy.world mods keep on pushing for people reading posts on that community to use this specific self-annointed trust gatekeeper who has repeatedly shown that they themselves are biased (quite a lot to the Right of the political spectrum and pro-Zionistl) as their trust-gatekeeper.

I keep downvoting it because such action reeks of manipulation and is exactly the kind of thing that State Actors and Political Actors would do to shape opinions in the this day and age when people can read articles from anywhere in the World.

I've had to block it because it takes up two screens of my phone as my client doesn't support spoiler tags properly. I'm not going to change my client over one noisy bot.

Also MBFC seems to be a bit biased (it's definitely not correct on a few in the UK), as most bias rankings are, it's why services like Ground News use several of these services to make up their ratings. At the end of the day only using MBFC data isn't much better than listening to one guy tell you "yeah they're totally fine"

Finally from what little discussion I've seen with the owner of the bot, they don't seem to be very collaborative with the rest of the community and just shut down criticism.

The responses the admin who added the bot gave to people's concerns when they announced it, weren't that great. (Link)

The Lemmy.world admin disregarded all criticism and just said people shouldn't complain, after just asking for feedback in the post itself

Example:

What a terrible idea.

MBFC is already incredibly biased.

It should be rejected not promoted.

Admin response:

Ok then tell me an alternative we can use in the scale for free.

None? Then pls dont just complain complain complain… And dont suggest improvements.

So the answers in this post are mostly that people are downvoting the bot because it is often wrong and then others defending it by saying “it’s not wrong it’s just based on American politics”.

If the bot reported from a range of sources that reflect a number of different political perspectives I’m sure it’d be more useful outside of the scope of American politics, and therefore wouldn’t get downvoted.

As far as I’m concerned the vote system is working as intended.

The internet is not American. There are no nations on lemmy ✌️

I'm mostly in favor of leaving the comment-clogging bots back on reddit where they can all talk to each other without me.

If it's trying to tell people that CNN is center-left, who knows wtf else is questionable (or outright wrong).

Have you asked yourself who runs the bot and what their bias is?

Because it reports sources known to be unreliable (like Jerusalem Post and EuroNews) as Highly Trustworthy

Maybe because manh people think it's useless and stupid and wish it would go away. Trusting a random bot to tell you the political leaning of an information source so you know whether to trust the information is peak stupidity, IMO.

Because it’s literally advertising spam. I can’t believe this person would want to ruin the entire good will of Lemmy by pushing their trash.

It simply serves no purpose.

It is essentially the mods forcing an opinion on the validity of every post's source.

I really like the idea of the bot.

If the source was independent; and could be trusted. It would be a great tool; the display could be a lot better but the idea is sound.

As others have pointed out, the source is a black box that may or may not be biased itself.

Two reasons: It's a spammy bot, and it has a right-wing bias

Ironically, bias fact checkers are also subject to biases so it could be that the bias fact checker was simply not that great in this instance.

However, I think jet explained the most likely situations well

Even if you like the bot you should be downvoting it because that puts it in a predictable spot: at the bottom, without getting in the way of real comments.

For me it's because the bias rating specifically is opaque and can be just plain wrong.

I could block it but if everyone who thought it was a bad idea just blocked it then it wouldn't get downvoted which might lead people to think everyone generally agreed with it.

At least when it's downvoted people take a step back and are less likely to just accept what it says.

EDIT: Also worth pointing out in my case at least I did go to the effort of actually trying to provide some constructive feedback on the bot through the proper channels rather than just downvoting and moving on.

Personally my biggest gripe is with the formatting, specifically spoilers tags are a terrible choice when the whole thing could be a single sentence with a link. Spoiler tags aren't uniformly implemented and when pointed out the stance is it's the clients fault for not doing spoilers the way the dev wants rather than the devs fault for not using a more standardized approach which just bugs me. If the goal was concise conveyance of information, they missed the mark.

I wish it looked like your screenshot. On Boost, I get everything folded out, occasionally with unclickable links.

Because many feel that the bot has a bias itself, making it useless at best and actively harmful at worst.

I have no horse in this race and don't downvote the bot myself, but I have also seen it call sources center left, that are definitely not left of any reasonable center.