• BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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    4 months ago

    <…> but Media Bias Fact Check-style websites aren’t actually free of bias <…>

    Hence, me including SpinScore link to the articles I post. Not only it evaluates each article content and not the site, but it also removes human bias element from the equation.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      I don’t know how to explain to you that perspective is a problem that can’t be escaped by using machines. It’s like using video in place of vision; yeah, there are obviously plenty of cases where it’s helpful for a specific task, but fundamentally you are going from using a human to using something made by humans.

      From what I can glean immediately, this thing gets its idea of the “truth” from what is published on major new sites, like PBS, NYT, and such. As a result, what it can “verify” from circular citation becomes what is “true.” In essence, it is a media consensus machine with some basic reading comprehension thrown in for people who can’t read English well enough to determine if a statement is, for example, an expression of the authors feelings or a statement on facts of the world.

      • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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        4 months ago

        It’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else out there. Using your own brain will always be required, no tool will ever change that.

        And fact is not subjective, opinion is, and you seem to lump them together. And it uses primary sources for information verification, and those tend to be major outlets purely due to their size. Nobody else can afford to monitor all the governments, companies, and other official bodies and report about them.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          4 months ago

          And fact is not subjective, opinion is, and you seem to lump them together

          You say this about the comment in which I say:

          In essence, it is a media consensus machine with some basic reading comprehension thrown in for people who can’t read English well enough to determine if a statement is, for example, an expression of the authors feelings or a statement on facts of the world.

          Not to mention that “whether something is a fact or not” or, more commonly, “what is the most likely explanation for what we are seeing,” is typically not something you have practical access to, which is why you are reading about it, so what you are left with is not metaphysical truth, but testimony, which is very corruptible. I don’t just mean this as a hypothetical, I mean that most outlets engage in an aggressive battle over a small minority of mostly-social subjects while operating in complete or near-complete agreement on many important topics.

          But even if we want to sidestep the issue of testimony mediating our access to metaphysical truth, there is still the question of which facts to include.

          Low-hanging fruit:

          https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-21/clinton-dnc-speech-harris-endorsement-joy

          ctrl+f “epstein”: 0

          https://spinscore.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fpolitics%2Fstory%2F2024-08-21%2Fclinton-dnc-speech-harris-endorsement-joy

          ctrl+f “epstein”: 0

          Seems like it’s missing important information that it could at least mention in passing about the subject of the piece, but maybe that’s just me. I guess it’s all relative.

          And it uses primary sources for information verification, and those tend to be major outlets purely due to their size.

          Like I alluded to in mentioning “circular citation”, very often news organizations aren’t doing anything resembling original research in their articles. They are just publishing what other articles already said.

          But you are still missing that this is question-begging the correctness of the media, even though they have over and over been shown to be quite willing to work together to push atrocity propaganda and all kinds of nonsense.

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      4 months ago

      Hence, me including SpinScore link to the articles I post. Not only it evaluates each article content and not the site, but it also removes human bias element from the equation

      Those glorified chatbots don’t fall out of coconut trees, the fact that their very existence was designed by human hands explicitly blends human bias into them.

      The belief in unbiasness is a form of ethereal idealism that is unattached to material reality and willing faith in its ephemeral existence blinds the individual to biases that disguise itself as anything but.

      • BrikoX@lemmy.zipOPM
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        4 months ago

        Your generalizations aren’t helpful. I’m not even sure to understand how it works based on your comment.

        If you want to say that SpinScore is a bad tool, you will need to provide some examples.