The Tesseract Lemmy app shows a news source ranking from MBFC

MBFC does the opposite of elevate conversations. It's quite frankly a poison pill for conversations. People will apply their prejudices and alter their interpretations based on the 'bias check', typically before or instead of any critical thinking ~~or ant article.~~ of any article.
The last time the MBFC bot was going the user pushing it was very clearly aware of this dynamic. They also knew it was lumping everything to website source, despite authors and opinion pieces, for maximum damage.

Imagine thinking CNN is center-left 😂
- In the Overton Window that is US politics, it is. But that’s because the damn window has been dragged so far to the right that facts themselves are “Liberal Marxism” now (oxymoronic as that label is).
  Edit: And MBFC perpetuates that rightward movement. I prefer Ad Fontes, although it does also label CNN as center-left.

Is this the same media bias checking bot that thinks a Murdoch media owned news site was left leaning?
- As a left-leaning Canadian, this seems crazy to me. There's not even a place for me on this chart.
  It's crazy how normalized right-wing extremism is. Well, it does explain the state of things in the US, though.
- I also don't love that is has least biased in the center. Bias is a trait that is on an almost entirely separate axis.
  
  Yeah, as political compasses, in order to have some reasonableness, have left-right and authoritarian-libertarian, this needs another axis for bias. You can be a leftist organization that still reports on reality without bias. Being in favor of the status-quo is it's own form of bias.
- Also the AP

Oh dear god not this argument again
- Right, I almost forgot about the rage against the MBFC bot that went on for like MONTHS lmao. Seeing it downvoted to hell was hilarious though lol
  
  Tbh I didn’t even mind what the bot was trying to do. I just remember opening what felt like every post and seeing dozens of lines taken up by the bot. I ended up just blocking it and cross-referencing with ground news myself.
- Can you give the rundown on what happened for us newer people.
  
  Some of the news and politics communities added an automatic comment to new posts that linked to fact checking information, and a big portion of the community lost their minds about it. A lot of people found it biased, obtrusive, or unnecessary, and it generated a lot of conflict between the people who liked it or felt neutral. It went through many iterations based on the feedback before being removed entirely.
  The entire saga was fairly disruptive and everyone is glad it's over.
- I guess I had missed it the first time
  
  account age 1 year 8 months
  LOL, not a chance unless you were straight-up absent that whole time.

MBFC is bad. It supports the American overton window, which is, you know, now openly fascist.

From the test that was done with the bot that was not a good source. 1) American focus 2) too much room for debate on the ranking Here some discussion on it https://lemmy.world/post/18073070
- I blocked the bot as soon as I learned how. The ratings are a joke - mostly because of its American bias.
- I suppose we've got to keep at it until we're at a point where doing something is better than doing nothing. Where, of course, doing nothing is somewhat of an acknowledgement of the fact it's hard to do something right enough to be able to apply it to all posts and all articles and all that.
  An analogy comes to mind: it’s like the difference between telling hikers they’re at their own risk and advising them to bring water, good shoes, and a fully charged battery, and they'll be fine. If you can't account for everything, there are arguments to be made with trying to shift responsibility back to people with either more general or more specific warnings.
  
  My impression is that people will be eager to tell in the comments that a news source is bad or biased, or that the specific article is misinformation.
  At the end of the day, if you just trust some rank value that someone tossed in, w.o. knowing who is behind it exactly and how they reached that conclusion, it can be an easy source for disinformation.
  Also some news outlets are providing reliable coverage on some issues, while being biased on others. Often they just repeat texts from Reuters, AP or other agencies. So any single value rating can warn you that the same message is "biased" in one case and in another case it cheers it on as "reliable".
  In other words: You can keep jumping out of the window in different ways, trying to find a way for humans to fly w.o. mechanical help, or you can just accept taking the stairs.
  
  I agree that this is necessary, but we need to be mindful with the implementation. A decentralized approach might be more effective than relying on a centralized list. As you mentioned, a warning that encourages people to think critically and not take everything at face value is likely the best solution for now.
- I don't see any comments when I click that link
  
  Try this other post https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24920368
  
  Do you have filter? Block community? Like politics 😝

is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can't find one.
https://alternativeto.net/software/media-bias-fact-check/?license=opensource
- These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
- No. And there never should be. And here's why. Bear with me for a moment but consider this. Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that people want their hands held. They want to be told what to think. Not to think critically for themselves. No matter how well intentioned. Such systems will always be sought to be abused. To manipulate people and their opinions. And at best they will always be subject to bias and blindness. The truly keep them from ever being universally useful.
  Basic training and education in critical thinking skills will be far more to help people. Than relying on an app no matter how well intentioned to tell them how to think about something.
  
  Held hands? No. Not everyone has the time, energy or training to evaluate a site's trust comprehensively. I want to see what other people think in case they spot what I missed. I also want to see if people are even taking about the site and why.
  I mean, can you imagine? There are so many sites out there I can't spend three hours fact-checking one for the sake of replying to an argument. And then all that work going to waste for the benefit of nobody else.
  
  These are all valid points but they don't preclude the existence of an open-source alternative to MBFC, which is what the commenter you replied to was asking.

Wow, I decided I would give MBFC a shot. You are greeted with an ad-infested experience with a giant start bar reminiscent of a malware site. After building up enough courage to click it I discovered it not only wanted my email but also my credit card.
After having to fight to see the article I wanted rated I just don't have the fortitude to the fight this horrible experience to probably be told that the following article is left center or left leaning bias.
While I will admit this was a not Fox News praising the Trump Admin, it has an extremely neutral tone and does nothing to pushback against the obviously clownish message that the Trump team provides.
For this reason it, is to me at least, right leaning. I guess I will never know what MBFC would rate it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/15/federal-workers-aid-recipients-reel-trumps-team-says-so-what/
- reminiscent of a malware site
  Well, that's because it is malware.
  it, is to me at least, right leaning
  It's not right leaning.
  It's disinformation malware whose sole purpose is to move the Overton window as far right as possible.
  It labels anything short of outright fascism as far left.
- Firefox and ublock are your friend.
  This site doesn't rate articles. It rates news sources. So you just have to look up what they rated the post as.
  https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/washington-post/
  These ratings appear to b based on US sensibilities and not the rest of the world. So everything skews more to the left than it really is.
  
  It probably rates the NSDAP as leftist since it has socialist in its name.
  
  This site doesn't rate articles. It rates news sources.
  That is an extremely important distinction! Thanks!
  Edit: that wasn’t sarcasm. I honestly think it’s a valuable thing to know and remember.

Whatever the views are about MBFC, Tesseract integrated it better than LW's bot. If you don't like MBFC, it's just an option in your user settings to turn it off for Tesseract, whereas the bot caused a bunch of problems that weren't even related to concerns about accuracy and bias. Drive-by bots can be annoying, because it leads people to believe there's legit content where there isn't, and not every client respected LW's bot use of spoiler Markdown, so they ended up with a massive comment from it that dominated the screen.
- That seems like important nuance for sure.

If you want to potentially sidestep some of people's frustrations you might consider just using the credibility rating and focusing on whether a group provides factual reporting, rather than left or right of center
You can also create a user experience that more carefully manages expectations of the feature by having it be opt in, but presenting the option to users when it becomes available. That gives you the opportunity to give a short blurb acknowledging its imperfections and also highlighting its potential value
As someone fairly to the left wing myself, the fact that lemmy is so left wing is both a blessing and a curse. I don't see Nazis around, but being in an echo chamber isn't great for your ability to engage with perspectives other than your own, and makes you succeptible to narratives that reinforce your existing views regardless of whether they're accurate
I'd love this feature, in spite of its flaws, but it does definitely have them. Its based on the US overton window, which will frustrate folks from other parts of the world who may already feel lemmy sometimes forgets the world beyond the US exists. And the US overton window is changing as a product of the trump administration which may warp mbfc results, which could honestly be really dangerous.
Focussing on the factuality and credibility might help you sidestep those problems and make a feature people would find less frustrating, potentially even to the point that you could make it opt out.
Generally I appreciate efforts to build healthier, less echo chambery discourse, thanks for the work you're doing ❤️
- Yeah I had a similar thought to your first paragraph. I mostly use MBFC for the "factual reporting" rating, because it seems easier to be objective about.
  Just to clarify, I don't develop any fediverse software, I wouldn't want to take any credit from those amazing people.

i think photon does this too
- I removed it because I don't want my app to necessarily depend or be associated with any specific centralized external source, like MBFC. By adding it to my app, I'm implicitly supporting its use, which wasn't necessarily my goal.

That's really cool. Looks great too.

EDIT2: Commenters have some valid criticisms of MBFC.
Here's another in my "making friends" series of posts.
Commenters DO NOT have valid criticisms of MBFC. They are universally wrong, have no idea how MBFC works, and are too lazy to look it up. The misinfo ghouls among them are happy to repeat lies over and over until people start to accept them.
Some of these people can be pretty convincing but I urge you to actually fact check their arguments. Most of these people are just parroting bullshit they saw someone else say. The "best" of these are basically artisanal, hand-crafted AI hallucinations: high-confidence, syntactically-correct nonsense. Don't put that glue on your pizza. If someone posts an MBFC link as evidence, click it and read it. Nearly every single time, the link they posted contradicts them and they just haven't read it.
And ask yourself why no one ever posts peer-reviewed research backing up their claims. It's a simple reason: it doesn't exist. Every single piece of academic research on MBFC says they're wrong. The MBFC conspiracy theorists can't just ignore that body of research because it's inconvenient -- they need a compelling reason why all research to date is wrong. For their claims to be true, it would require a massive conspiracy between academics, journalists, and media bias organizations because they are all in consensus about what makes good and bad news organizations. It's loopy, tinfoil hat bullshit.
- Yeah, I've also looked into MBFC and found it was more grounded than what Lemmings were saying.
  I always found it suspicious why people here would rather choose no fact checking than some. Is it the old "don't let perfection ruin a good plan" again or other motives? Hmm.
  
  I generally think their overton window skews right and every once in a while I've seen some huge fumbles, but overall they're more pro establishment than anything else. The only thing I've ever seen that could even be seen as pushing misinformation is their bellingcat rating, where they gave them "mostly factual" because they lost a lawsuit IN RUSSIA about how they were making "libelous claims" about the MH17 shootdown and who was responsible because their quite rigorous research showed that the Russian government was lying. inb4 some .ml tankie comes to go "uhm actually bellingcat is cia
  
  I think that very few of these arguments are being made in good faith. For some people, any bias monitor is a barrier to sharing propaganda as news. Others just don't understand how to use the site properly. Or use it in a really stupid way anyway. Like this:
  Look at the ratings.
  If something strikes you as odd, run around screaming like your hair's on fire.
  Instead of:
  Look at the ratings.
  If something strikes you as odd, read the part of the report that explains the rating.
  Decide how important those things are to you and whether it's a deal-breaker.
  Others are like, 'it's telling me what to think, man!' who don't seem to understand that those pages contain a wealth of information that you can include in your decision-making (or not). They've convinced themselves that it's presented as the one and only source of absolute truth, which is really just something they made up to be angry about. No one but them is making that claim.
  There also isn't another free source that has that info in one place. There's no better place to quickly find news org ownership info, the country they're operating in (with links to info about press freedom in that country), and their history of factual reporting. But those people don't care -- they're just viscerally reacting to the ratings, not reading the reports.
- You're right, defending Nazi sites doesn't make you friends, you're wrong that there's any peer review of the site though, either way.
  
  I'm awarding you three demerits for a reply that doesn't make sense. Govern yourself accordingly.

you likely won't find an unbiased opinion regarding that here. Members tend not do their own research and only live to complain about the existence of it.
I share the same opinion as yours, I would rather have a sometimes inaccurate listing than no listing at all. The complaints people have about it are what I enjoy using it for, it lets me know to look for certain things on the article before I enter so I know if I should take it with a grain of salt or not.
- Members tend not do their own research and only live to complain about the existence of it.
  But then
  lets me know to look for certain things on the article before I enter so I know if I should take it with a grain of salt or not.
  You are talking about yourself in the first sentence.
  
  that could be true, if I didn't double check the sources. If that is how you would be doing it then sure, but I use it as a guideline not a rule, and check for facts after.
  There's nothing wrong with using something as a blueprint/template. Seeing a strong lean in credibility or positioning tells me that I should be more serious on fact checking on it as there will be bias.