Context:
The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.
Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦
Oh i just realized that stupid bias check bot has been gone for a while. Everyone hated it so i guess it was killed or blocked at some point? Anyone know the story?
Yeah people kept complaining so eventually they just quietly turned it off
That thing was utter trash
It wasn’t quiet, we put it up to a vote.
Personally I haven’t seen it for ages because I blocked it, but if I was to guess, the mods finally relented to the overwhelming majority? 🤷
They held a vote after insisting for ages that it was a ‘small minority’ of users that had a problem with it. It wasn’t 90/10, but it wasn’t 50/50 either.
Oh, and they only held the vote after jordanlund claimed he would get demodded by the admins if he removed the bot. And when someone pinged an admin they said they had no idea how he got that impression, lol.
Also, a big part of their argument was that it was the only option, nothing else would do that had an API endpoint and had affordable terms of use. I offered to provide them an API endpoint to Wikipedia’s sources list (which is precisely the same thing as MBFC, just… accurate and detailed) in exactly the same format, and they said no no that won’t do. I wrote code to actually fetch and parse Wikipedia’s list so they could make the bot follow actually-accurate source rankings with additional details and everything. Rooki silently received the message, then there was a long delay, then a little “Wikipedia” line started showing up way down below the awful MBFC rankings that were still front and center.
Wikipedia’s source list is very US biased as wel. They list CIA front Radio Free Asia as trusted source.
Yeah Jordanlund has a history of lying about why he does certain things. The fact that he said that when you can just simply ask the admins if that’s true or not, is enough for me to never trust him.
The dude has recently been saying how much he is against what’s happening in Gaza, but people brought up screenshots of him saying he was a fan of sending more bombs to Israel, and removing posts highlighting the increase in weapons being sent to Israel in the last 4 years.
The dude would have to get his neighbors to call the dogs home because they wouldn’t believe him.
Are you serious? Because I really wanted to give Jordan the benefit of doubt mod decisions were flawed, but a though job on his part. ;(
Edit: NVM jordanlund has removed a thread by @miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar miss_demeanour in politics - He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.
Took me a bit to find it; it was in a direct reply to an admin rather than pinging them. They also give a link to the thread where JL claims the admins would sack him if he got rid of the bot.
Thanks so much. I had to “context” a few times but finally found it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768
Also thanking @https://kbin.earth/u/@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat for standing up in that thread.
That whole conversation is so weird. I went back and reread big sections of it, and it’s just… the conversation is off. Jordan says he can’t remove the bot, because the admins won’t allow it. Rooki says that’s definitely not true, so people ask Jordan about it… and he’s just silent. Not “oh I must have misunderstood” or anything else, just pretending that if he doesn’t say anything, no one will notice that someone asked him a question, and everyone will move on. And then there’s Rooki accepting the code for scanning Wikipedia’s sources… but totally missing the point that the MBFC sources are awful, and the WP reliable sources list is actually quite good, and deciding that MBFC and Ground News are what needs to be positioned front and center. Also seeming totally uninterested in the idea of improving the quality of the ratings in response to the clear consensus of the community with citations.
I checked the last of the stuff that MBFC bot posted, 4 months ago, and the little line where the Wikipedia rating had previously featured had been replaced to a link to the WP article about the source, missing the whole point of categorizing sources cleanly into bullshit/not bullshit or the point that certain sources (Newsweek) had clearly slid into unreliability over time, but were still allowed on the lemmy.world subs for some reason.
It’s just so strange. Someone had a conspiracy theory that one of the admins had an unannounced sponsorship deal with Ground News, and that was the whole reason behind the entire thing to drop a link to Ground News while misdirecting everyone into getting mad at MBFC or something. I have no idea. It was just weird.
I don’t envy the unpaid mod job, especially mods who work hard to be fair and honest. I get your disdain and distrust of mintpress too and I hope you’ll reconsider. They do source their articles very well, because they know their audience and we’re foolable, but not always.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/2/
Look at page 98, they literally have an org chart of Russian disinformation campaigns within this one particular network that they analyzed, and where Mint Press fits into it.
I also sent some examples of open propaganda articles elsewhere in these comments. They don’t source their stuff “very well,” by definition, since they are posting open propaganda and disguising the fact that it’s sourced indirectly from Russian intelligence, but that’s not even the point. It has nothing to do with “disdain,” although I applaud your consistent efforts to remove the discussion from a factual domain and into an emotional one through the use of charged words (or into a domain where “sourcing of articles” is the issue.)
Removed as a duplicate, the same link was submitted 1 hour before and had more comments.
https://lemm.ee/post/58586482
My b
No worries. I think a lot of the problem is that people don’t know how moderation works.
We don’t hang out in the group waiting to pounce on posts looking to fuck with people. Well, I shouldn’t say “we”, I don’t do that. :)
There’s a queue of reports and it looks like this:
So when I look at reports, it’s a matter of “is this true?”
Going to the politics community, I searched for “ICE detention” and sorted by “New”. Boom, there it was #1 and #2, two posts with the same thumbnail, one 6 hours old, one 7 hours old.
Same thumbnail doesn’t necessarily mean anything, same link? Yeah, same link.
Here’s where it gets tricky:
Which one do you remove? The knee jerk is “Well, duh, the newer one.” But in this case, the newer one has more upvotes for some reason.
At that point, I looked at the comments, the newer one had more upvotes, but fewer comments. One of them needs to go, I picked that one. If it had had more upvotes AND more comments, I’d have kept it with a note on the other as “removed for duplicate and lower community engagement.”
Thanks for a detailed and well-explained reply. I understand. A lot of the problem seems that being questionable often enough that everything is sus. It can be corrected with diligence and determination on the moderators’ parts. Which is simple, but not necessarily easy.
It’s easier when there’s not a lot in the queue. I’ve had times where I wake up in the morning and there are 20+ or 30+ unresolved reports and I’m like “Oh, what fresh hell is this?”
Generally it’s either:
or 2) Two people getting into an internet slap fight, arguing back and forth and reporting all the other persons comments.
At that point, I go up the chain, find the last rational comment one of them made, keep that, nuke the rest and ban them both for 24 hours. Too much of modding is like parenting siblings. “I don’t CARE who started it, you’re BOTH grounded.”
There was a public vote on whether to eliminate it or not from the .world news and politics communities, and the vote to remove won, thankfully!