These comments have made me very curious if that exists or how that might be designed.
Comment on The Tesseract Lemmy app shows a news source ranking from MBFC
warmaster@lemmy.world 1 month ago
is there an open source, decentralized alterntative to MBFC ?
I can’t find one.
vatlark@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Eldritch@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
Lemminary@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Not to mention all the domain-specific knowledge you’d need to properly evaluate claims. All the critical thinking skills in the world are worthless if you don’t have contextual knowledge of whatever subject is in the news. It’s just not realistic for everyone to be a policy wonk.
Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
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.
Eldritch@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I never implied that it did. Go ahead and make one. It will always do as much or more damage than it will ever do good. That’s the point. There’s bias in everything. Trusting someone else’s bias to accurately convey the bias of something else, isn’t making you more informed or a better consumer of media. Not in any meaningful way. Not in the way basic critical thinking skills can. It’s just a game of bias telephone. And if you know how the game telephone goes. It should give you an indication to its efficacy.
It’s not hard. There are some basic steps anyone can take to get started. Do not tolerate those who are intolerant of who someone is. Whether it’s ethnicity or sexuality. If accusations are being made against groups. Especially ones that you have very little experience or contact with. Put yourself in that situation. Think about how you would go about things. Because that’s more than likely how they would as well. And for everything else, especially things that are either hard science or factually based. Simply differ to the people who make it their life to study and understand those things. But never give their opinions outside of that field any weight.
Just those few basic things can illuminate a lot of bias and malintent. Leave you far more guarded and protected against misinformation and bias in the future. Which along with basic intellectual curiosity. Something most people have largely never valued. Will serve you far better than any app. Because the Insidious part about misinformation. Is that there’s often some amount of Truth to it. Whether it’s wrong because of malice or because of bias. Critical thinking and intellectual curiosity will always better serve you.
ArtificialHoldings@lemmy.world 1 month ago
There is too much information to process for any one person to just use their critical thinking skills to fact check a news organization as large as CNN, much less every major news organization. No, it’s not enough to teach critical thinking skills and hope every person is able to discern bias in the media they consume, because you’re asking for extremely domain-specific skills and legwork that a single consumer just isn’t capable of.