I don’t disagree with your points but I think they apply to pretty specific groups. I doubt that the average person knows or cares that Bluesky is a PBC. The reaction of the average person to ‘open source’ is probably, “I have no idea what that is and please for the love of god don’t explain it to me.”

1. There are more people there.
2. Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
3. Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.

Nailed it

From Mehdi Hassan’s Wikipedia page:

Mehdi Raza Hasan (born July 1979) is a British-American progressive broadcaster, political commentator, columnist, author and co-founder of the media company Zeteo.

. . .

Zeteo was presented as a subscription-based news organization. He announced that the platform will “bring you hard-hitting interviews and unsparing analysis that you won’t find elsewhere”. Hasan presents a new video series on the Zeteo News channel, the first one was called “Debunked! Top seven lies about Gaza”.

Hassan is identified as the founder, CEO, and Editor-in-Chief. His Wiki page says he’s a co-founder but I can’t find mentions of other founders. This is a media company built around Substack newsletters and they generate revenue from subscriptions. This Rolling Stone article says that they also raised $4M in seed money before launch but don’t note the source(s). They just launched in April and there doesn’t appear to be any fact check or bias analysis on them yet.

Prem Thakker is currently listed as a staff reporter for the Intercept, though it says he worked for them “previously.” According to his bio there, he’s also worked for The New Republic, The American Prospect, and CNN. On July 23, he was announced as Zeteo’s “first full-time reporter.”

But it’d be better if they were bringing that to the Fediverse instead of reinventing the wheel with ATP.

Eugen posted that Mastodon (or maybe m.s?) sign-ups from Brazil are up as well, but has anyone posted numbers/analysis?

Edit: “Aug 10, 10 sign-ups from #Brazil. Aug 28, 152 sign-ups from Brazil. Today, 4.2k sign-ups from Brazil. Portuguese (Brazil) has already entered the list of top 8 active languages for the last 30 days.” - Gargron

Huzzah! 🍸

It’s being brigaded by misinfo ghouls.

MBFC are well-respected, including by their peers. There are lot of people spreading misinformation right now and you shouldn’t take them at their word. Every claim in the other reply to you is false. This source is non-US, rated center left, and is most certainly not “right wing at best.” Peer-reviewed research consistently finds that all bias/quality monitors agree with each other to a high degree. That study compared data from academics, journalists, and organizations (including MBFC). Quite a feat for “one guy’s opinion.” Their methodology is public and, contrary to what the misinfo peddlers might say, explains their ratings.

I don’t think so. The closest might be fedilab. They support masto+ forks, pleroma, friendica, pixelfed, peertube, and many of the misskey forks partially (with fuller support promised). No Lemmy/mbin though and I haven’t seen anything saying that support is on the roadmap.

Smart. No HEPA filter over here but I’m keeping my fingers extra crossed!

It’s always done that. It’s weird, though. MBFC doesn’t appear to actually have a page where they rate themselves. The link just goes to their homepage.

We’ve been lucky so far this year though!

They’re wrong that they rate the Guardian and Breitbart the same. First of all, they don’t have the same credibility rating. You also have to ignore the reports to reach that conclusion. Breitbart is a “Questionable Source.”

A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency, and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for profit or influence. Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source.

Reasoning: Extreme Right, Propaganda, Conspiracy, Failed Fact Checks

The Guardian are not listed as a Questionable Source. They’ve linked to sources that have failed fact checks and failed numerous fact checks (mostly in Op-Ed), though 4 have recently dropped off the list in the last month or so (I think). Their fact-checking seems to have improved. They say this about them:

The Guardian holds a left-leaning editorial bias and sometimes relies on sources that have failed fact checks. Further, while The Guardian has failed several fact checks, they also produce an incredible amount of content; therefore, most stories are accurate, but the reader must beware, and hence why we assign them a Mixed rating for factual reporting.

‘Be aware that they publish an avalanche of great news but have failed a few fact checks’ is not nearly the same thing as ‘Questionable source that publishes propaganda and conspiracy theories! You must fact-check each article individually because they’re so unreliable.’ There’s no way you could read those pages and conclude those sources are the same. They say that Breitbart is clearly a much more biased and less reliable source (to borrow a phrase).

You’re wrong. Request denied!

Have a good one though.

There’s nothing wrong with MBFC. The arguments against it are silly. Most of the time people will link one entry that they typically haven’t read that very often says the opposite of what they claim. Even in those cases, it’s a look at about one hundredth of one percent of the content evaluated by MBFC. Serious sample size problem. When researchers use their entire dataset to compare MBFC to other bias monitors (both orgs and academic sources), what they find is consensus.

This study compared 6 organizations and found consensus across thousands of news sites. Another recent study concluded that it doesn’t matter which one you use because the level of agreement between them is so high. One thing you won’t find ‘critics’ doing is citing peer-reviewed research in high-quality journals to support their arguments because it just doesn’t exist. MBFC is used in research all the time by people who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding media/bias/misinfo/propaganda. Those people have real skin in the game and could have their careers damaged or destroyed by using poor resources. And yet. That it’s a good enough resource for serious research but not good enough for our news sharing communities is a pretty laughable idea.

These are some questions that don’t have great answers for those folks:

1. How can 6 independent groups, using different methodologies, arrive at the same conclusions through random chance?
2. If the bias in MBFC is so pervasive, why can’t anyone find it?
3. How is MBFC never shown to be an outlier if it’s ‘one guy’s arbitrary opinion’?

I think the thing of note here is that there are politicians that want an immediate end to the conflict in Gaza (Gantz, for ex.) who are calling for Netanyahu to escalate with Hezbollah. That makes it a bit more complex than the simple black-and-white you’ve drawn. It’s relatively easy to ignore Ben-Gvir and Smotrich – they constantly say horrific/idiotic shit and everyone hates them. Gantz, though, is extremely popular and the most likely person to succeed Netanyahu. He’s probably just looking to score some easy points on Netanyahu but it’s still harder pressure to ignore.

MBFC 😎

Even though this site screams “wordpress blogspam” – no editors listed, all the “authors” are listed as three letters without bios, and those authors cover the Everything beat (or close to it) – they are owned by Wirtualna Polska. According to their Wikipedia page:

Wirtualna Polska (WP [vuˈpɛ]) is a group of companies operating in the media and e-commerce sectors.

The WP Group owns the Wirtualna Polska horizontal portal founded in 1995 and known for being the first internet portal in Poland. It is currently the second largest online news source and one of the most quoted news media in the country. According to the Gemius/PBI surveys around 21 million Poles use WP’s internet products every month.

That’s a lot of Poles! So the parent company at least is big in Poland, apparently. But, not listing the source, authors, or editors is sketch no matter how many Poles use your internet products.

This exact story was published nearly simultaneously on DailyWrap.ca. There it’s credited to “ed. Tomasz Waleński.” Hey, that’s two of the three letters in “TWA,” the “author” of this story! Though it appears he’s the editor not the author. Tomasz Waleński is a real guy who works for WP. Here’s an interview he did with Steve Horrell who is also a real guy. DailyWrap.ca looks identical to EssaNews and is also owned by WP. DailyWrap.uk is another lookalike. They seem to own a few low-quality click harvesters. They don’t mention any of them on their brand page.

The earliest reporting of this story I could find is from WaPo. They mention 8VC but not a connection to Russia. This specific angle looks to be reported exclusively by a number of no-reputation sources possibly because it’s a pretty tenuous connection. Musk probably would’ve been aware of Joe Lonsdale but not individual investors or employees at 8VC. The Forbes article mentioned (but not linked! Dicks.) is an interesting read though.

The criticism is coming from the centre to the far-right, though it’s been most intense from the right.

MBFC

Bias Rating: RIGHT-CENTER; Factual Reporting: HIGH; Country: United Kingdom; MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY)

Wiki

The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain’s quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK (formerly News International), which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes The Times.