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Comment on The Tesseract Lemmy app shows a news source ranking from MBFC

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.

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yunxiaoli@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m awarding you three demerits for a reply that doesn’t make sense. Govern yourself accordingly.
  
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  - yunxiaoli@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Mbfc is funded and run by Nazis. You’re defending a Nazi site. I personally wouldn’t call you a Nazi over doing so in ignorance, but others might.
    
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    damon@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Can you site your sources?
    
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    breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    As the person asking people to fact check the claims of weird conspiracy theorists, I’m gonna have to ask for your sources on that one.
    
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Lemminary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- actioninja@lemmy.4d2.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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
  
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- breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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