It might not end the Gaza genocide. It will also not cure cancer, end climate change, or stop political violence in the United States. However, electing Harris will produce a hugely better outcome on all of those fronts than will electing Trump.

If you care about the Palestinian people, and you’re risking Trump getting into power again, you don’t actually care about the Palestinian people. You just enjoy grandstanding gestures, and while you’re making your gestures, you’re flirting with making their already horrifying situation absolutely infinitely worse.

Sounds good. If you redid the import, I think you’ll want to make some manual fixes to the .json. Off the top of my head, I think you just need to add bbc.co.uk and aljazeera.com to the URL lists for those sources.

I already sent it. It’s here:

https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip

Edit: You don’t need to do the import initially, since there’s already a sources file with some small modifications. The import is the only complicated part. Use categorize.py to categorize a source, or lookup.py to run a quick command-line test.

On a different topic: It sounds like jordanlund is saying that if he tried to remove the MBFC bot from the politics sub, he might be removed as a moderator, and replaced with someone else, and the bot would come back.

https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768

Is that true? Is the admin team mandating the use of this bot, and if so, why?

Here you go:

https://ponder.cat/wp/wp-sources.zip

It’s in python, suitable for sticking directly into the bot if the bot is in python. There are docs. It’s a first cut. How did you envision this working? I can make a real API, if for some reason that makes things easier, but it’s not immediately obvious how it would get integrated into things.

Running it on the last 50 articles posted to /c/politics, we see:

• https://lemmy.world/post/20739836: Source is unreliable since ownership change
• https://lemmy.world/post/20736298: Source is unreliable for political topics since 2011
• https://lemmy.world/post/20724155: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://lemmy.world/post/20723675: Source is unreliable
• https://lemmy.world/post/20722912: Source is unreliable
• https://lemmy.world/post/20722910: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://lemmy.world/post/20716118: Reliability consensus is mixed
• https://slrpnk.net/post/14127964: Reliability consensus is mixed

It’s more complex to use this than MBFC, because there’s a lot more depth to the rankings, and sometimes human judgement is needed to assign scores. There’s a category “needinfo,” meaning it’s necessary to know what topic is being discussed or when an article was written, because of an ownership change or similar factor. I’ve applied that judgement above. That, to me, is a good thing. It means the bot is grounded in something, and not just blithely spitting out arbitrary scores without bothering to ground them in any reality.

In practice, I think it would be realistic to assign a single reliability ranking to most of the “needinfo” sources. You can manually edit the .json data to do so. Almost all of the posts are going to fit into one of Wikipedia’s categorizations or another. Newsweek is unreliable, The Guardian is reliable, and so on.

I think most of the mixed-consensus sources can be used without a second thought. Mostly, the questions about them boil down to open partisanship of the source, which for a political community is perfectly fine as long as they’re trustable factually.

If you want me to boil this down further, so that it gives a single “yes” or “no” score to each source, I can do that and probably keep almost all of the accuracy of the rankings, now that I’ve looked at it for a little while.

When you talk about “adding” this to the bot, are you proposing to still have MBFC be the main source, with this as a footnote? A lot of the criticism of the bot is on the grounds that MBFC is a very bad source for judging reliability, so I would question the idea of keeping it on as the primary source.

Why is it admin level? Are there admins that tell you what you can and can’t do with the politics community, in this case? Or does the politics moderation team have the ability to ditch the bot if they decide to?

This is such a strange situation. If you’re stuck in that former position, though, it would make a lot of your responses in this comments section make a whole lot more sense.

You don’t have to go back 20 years. They also committed a fairly big oopsie, not that long ago.

The Guardian: I don’t think this one article about renters from 2020 proves its case very well. Personally, I’m not convinced. MIXED

New York Times: You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies? I don’t think so.

I’ll send them a link and an example of how to use it tomorrow.

We’re not roasting the volunteer mods because we can’t ignore the bot. We’re roasting the volunteer mods because the experience of having someone in a position of power over your environment, and having them show callous indifference to how everyone in the community sees it, and what we want them to be doing with their position of power, leads people to start roasting. Sometimes out of all possible proportion to how big a deal the thing being complained about actually is.

It’s part of the healthy interplay of human society that keeps the social contract well-maintained. Take it as a sign of love, that we value this community and want it to function well.

I’m really curious what the response to this is going to be.

How much are you paying for the MBFC API? The page says it isn’t free. I’ll give you an API endpoint which will check sources against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources, if you pay me half of whatever you were paying MBFC previously. That list is quite a lot better than relying on MBFC.

I already scraped the list. It’ll take around an hour for my script to finish going down the sources and assigning web sites to each one, but I can have a working API endpoint for you tomorrow morning. I can do the bot part also, if you prefer. That’s probably easier than making a new endpoint and hooking it to a bot and debugging the connection and all.

Like I said, I think the idea that readers won’t be able to determine that Breitbart is unreliable is missing a pretty big elephant in the misinformational room. If the issue that’s causing you to keep MBFC is finding a better source that’s programmatic, though, then solving that is almost trivially easy and at least seems like some kind of step forward.

Next, you’ll be telling me that UniversalMonk violates rule 7 pretty much every day.

In what way does having the MediaBiasFactCheck bot help with misinformation? It’s not very accurate, probably less than the average Lemmy reader’s preexisting knowledge level. People elsewhere in these comments are posting specific examples, in a coherent, respectful fashion.

Most misinformation clearly comes in the form of accounts that post a steady stream of “reliable” articles which don’t technically break the rules, and/or in bad-faith comments. You may well be doing plenty of work on that also, I’m not saying you’re not, but it doesn’t seem from the outside like a priority in the way that the bot is. What is the use case where the bot ever helped prevent some misinformation? Do you have an example when it happened?

I’m not trying to be hostile in the way that I’m asking these questions. It’s just very strange to me that there is an overwhelming consensus by the users of this community in one direction, and that the people who are moderating it are pursuing this weird non-answer way of reacting to the overwhelming consensus. What bad thing would happen if you followed the example of the !news moderators, and just said, “You know what? We like the bot, but the community hates it, so out it goes.” It doesn’t seem like that should be a complex situation or a difficult decision, and I’m struggling to see why the moderation team is so attached to this bot and their explanations are so bizarre when they’re questioned on it.

The bot is instituted by the Admins

When did this happen? The admins instituted it for !politics, and the admins changed their minds about having it for !news and friends, but wanted to keep it in !politics?

with good reason

What’s the reason?

It won’t be my fault.

Yes it will.

Come to !rcv@ponder.cat and make a better solution.

If you are waiting for either mainstream political party to suddenly become champions of the people on their own, and you’re refusing to take certain actions even in the face of catastrophic threat until they do, then yes, it will be your fault if the catastrophe comes true.

That outcome may be fine for you, and you may feel virtuous about your participation in that outcome for your reasons. It’s somewhat safe for you if you’re wealthy and white and born in the US and not active in left-wing politics, and confident that that all of that will keep you safe from a second Trump presidency. Of course there’s no way to be sure that it will. But regardless, a lot of people don’t have that luxury.

There is a very real possibility that a person will come to power in this election who will end elections in the United States, end the rule of law, end protest, end socialism, end third parties, end elections in the future, install his hand-picked generals into the military and then turn the inconceivable power of the United States military loose, not just on a handful of victims who have come into our crosshairs from time to time, but wholesale onto anyone and everyone anywhere in the world who it comes into his head to target.

Do you define sending weapons to Israel as “enthusiastically participate?” Wait until US troops are on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon. Wait until Putin gets a green light to invade anywhere in eastern Europe that strikes his fancy. Wait until the US military is directly attacking anyone inside the borders of the United States that dares oppose his rule, or the rule of the person who comes after him, in this or any future election.

Wait until millions of people of the wrong ethnicity inside the United States are dying in concentration camps. Wait until legal immigrants are being deported by federal troops.

Yes, the system in the United States is far from democracy. Making it ten times worse is not a good solution. Pursuing a solution is a good solution.

Like I say, I have no idea where this argument that it is okay if Trump wins the election came into the comments for this article, but it is wrong, wrong wrong. It is not okay if Trump wins this election. If you actually care about the values expressed in this article I posted, you hopefully can see that. Maybe not.

There were no WMD’s.

It’s why we’re helping Israel commit genocide.

It’s why we’re involved in Ukraine.

One of these sentences is not like the others.

If Harris wants my vote, tell me you’re going to cut the military budget, not increase it.

Why is this tying back to refusing to vote for Harris? Am I crazy, or did that come completely out of nowhere at all?

If you care about genocide, destroying millions of lives, and making the rich richer, you should be phonebanking for Harris every day of the week. She may or may not be ideal but it hardly matters. Her opponent is 1,000% worse by any conceivable measurement.

And then, after the election is done: !rcv@ponder.cat to lay a foundation for better candidates beyond that in the future.

I think that over the next few years Sam Altman is going to learn the same lessons that events have been trying to teach Elon Musk since circa 2021.

1. You didn’t build that. The people that work for you did.
2. Being a big hero is contingent on you and your behavior, and can change.
3. Those people who are giving you all this money aren’t your comrades. When your usefulness is at its end, they won’t give you a second thought.