News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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This. The bot is effectively just propaganda for the author's biases.
Do you think aggregating ratings from multiple factors checkers would reduce that bias?
Keep in mind that if you base your judgements of left bias and right bias on the American overton window, that window has been highly influenced by fascism over the last 10 years, and now your judgement is based on the normalisation of fascism, which your bot is implicitly accepting. That's bad. If you're going to characterise sources as left or right in any form, you need to pick a point that you personally define as center. And now your judgements are all going to implicitly push people towards that point. You could say that Karl Marx is the center of the political spectrum, or you could say Mussolini is. Both of those statements are equally valid, and they are as valid as what you are doing now. If you don't want to push any set of biases, you need to stop calling sources left and right altogether.
No. The problem with your current bot isn't that the website authors have a particular axe to grind, it's that they're just in a rush and a bit lazy.
This means that they tend to say news sites which acknowledge and correct their own mistakes have credibility problems, because it's right there - the news sites themselves acknowledged issues. Even though these are the often most credible sites, because they fix errors and care about being right.
Similarly the whole left-right thing is just half-assed and completely useless for anyone that doesn't live in the US. While anyone that does live in the US probably already has an opinion about these US news sources.
Because these are lazy errors, lots of people will make similar mistakes, and aggregating ratings will amplify this, and let you pretend to be objective without fixing anything.
Adding more biases doesn't remove the initial bias.
Hm... At some point a human will have to say "Yes, this response is correct." to whatever the machine outputs. The output then takes the bias of that human. (This is unavoidable, I'm just pointing it out.) If this is really not an effort in ideological propaganda, a solution could be for the bot to provide arguments, rather han conclusions. Instead of telling me a source is "Left" or "Biased", it could say: "I found this commentary/article/websites/video discussing this aource's political leaning (or quality): Link 1 Link 2 Link 3"
Here you reduce bias by presenting information, instead of conclusions, and then letting the reader come to their own conclusions based on this information. This not only is better at education, but also helps readers develop their critical thinking.
Instead of... You know, being told what to think about what by a bot.