The news mod team has asked to no longer be a part of the project until we have a composite tool that polls multiple sources for a more balanced view.
It will take a few hours, but FOR NOW there won’t be a bot giving reviews of the source.
The goal was simple: make it easier to show biased sources. This was to give you and the mods a better view of what we were looking at.
The mod team is in agreement: one source of truth isn’t enough. We are working on a tool to give a composite score, from multiple sources, all open source.
The last sticky thread actually had some really good feedback, like using a fact checker that is part of the International Fact Checking Network (of which MBFC is not a member) and many other similarly great suggestions.
One of the issues might be in the name. We don’t want to create a bias bot. That seems like a fool’s errand, which is one thing we learned in the process of implementing the MBFC bot. We want to create something that makes people aware of posts that are from medium to low quality sources. Obviously, if the source is super sketchy, we’d delete it, but there’s a lot of grey area where we leave things up.
Mods should take note that this is how you listen to community feedback. Some actual learning is happening here, instead of doubling down we saw in the other thread
The other thread was an attempt to gauge feedback on specific ideas (as this post mentions, they are so in the works) and it precipitated this post
The other thread started from the assumption that the bot is useful and here to stay, even though the overwhelming feedback has been that it sucks and should be removed. It was a transparent attempt to increase support for it instead of an honest attempt at feedback. People still gave their feedback, of course, that the stupid bot should be put out to pasture.
At least now we’re seeing the bot is gone until improvements are made, the bias stuff is gone, the bot shouldn’t even appear except in select cases. That’s totally different than what they’re saying in the other thread.
We have been discussing the content of that feedback for about a week now, both with the broader moderator/admin community and within this team, and since most of us aren’t online at the same time (we have jobs) it takes a few days for the whole team to see and respond to opinions. Given that many of us disagreed on the best path forward, we had to come to a workable consensus. We have now acted on that feedback in accordance with the wishes of the community, so your claim that we had no intention to do so is significantly off the mark.
Maybe for you, but that’s not how I’m reading other people’s comments in there.
I’m telling you that the way you’re reading the comments has no bearing on what was actually happening behind the scenes.
Could do with out them banning some of the users with top comments though
There’s obviously no problem with incorporating other sources as well but, as I pointed out in that other thread, MBFC uses the IFCN for fact-checking per their methodology and Wikipedia page. They also explain why they use IFCN fact-checkers in their FAQ.