Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot
Soliciting Feedback for Improvements to the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot
Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
The !news@lemmy.world mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.
Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.
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I'm not sure what to do here. On my mobile device the compacted media bias fact check post still takes up 50% of my phone screen.
How a post tag if we have a tagging system in Lemmy, instead of a whole long comment?
Maybe the bot could just post a one line summary with a link to more information?
Thanks for the feedback. Can you elaborate a bit about the 50% of your screen thing? Is it the text itself, or is the issue that the app provides links at the bottom of the comment? I’m thinking of my experience on Voyager, where the links are summarized at the bottom of each comment, which does lead to a decent amount of screen being taken up. Would it be better if there weren’t any links?
yep I'm using Voyager on my iPhone. Maybe a super short summary without links. People could open the bot's profile and look at the bot's posts (not comments) if they want to dig deeper to understand a source.
Interesting, so you think the bot should make posts too? Like, a post for each source with a summary of relevant info? Just making sure I understand what you mean
Yeah. It's an idea for a way to create a user repository within Lemmy that could be edited by the bot as needed. I'm sure there are better ways.