D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle.
In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations, researchers and government officials say, meant to mimic actual news organizations to push Kremlin propaganda by interspersing it among an at-times odd mix of stories about crime, politics and culture.
And it is quite likely to work; only a tiny fraction of people click a link, let alone try to figure out if the site is legit.
Yep. That’s why I’m glad a lot of the news communities require headlines to match the article title, forbid link shorteners, and have credibility minimums.
Granted, we’re a tiny subset of social media.
Also why I added MBFC badges to the Lemmy UI I maintain.
@jordanlund@lemmy.world might not be a bad idea to set up a bot to automatically post MBFC evals of post link domains, in the interest of helping to quickly draw attention to sort of thing on this community. And even if it’s not a serious problem, I don’t think it’s a bad idea to do something like that by default for communities like this.
The key thing I’ve found with a lot of questionable sites is they are such a low profile, they fly under the radar. MBFC and other sites don’t have a rating on them because they are too new or too low profile.
Lately, our big challenge has been spam. Bots spamming links to central24 dot online. I don’t want to give them even an unintentional link. ;)
But if you look them up, they kind of came out of nowhere with no bias or reliability rating. The parent company is something called “ZwadTech” so same there.
There was another one that hit World News that looked OK, even though the design looked like a crappy blog site. I initially allowed it because we don’t get a lot of news out of Africa and it’s underserved. I was able to vet the story, which was well written and accurate. Same deal, tiny site, nothing on the bias sites.
Then it turned out it was just copy/pasted from another source, so, yeah, that got removed.
For what it’s worth, it’s great to hear that you guys are doing your best to stay on top of this stuff. I appreciate it, and I’m sure the vast majority of the community does as well.
I also use Biasly if MBFC doesn’t have a record for a particular source. They don’t cover everything, either, and they’re not as comprehensive (and are AI-based), but it’s a somewhat decent second source.I need to re-evaluate Biasly. On further review, it’s not entirely clear how they arrive at their ratings for factual reporting and credibility besides “a magic AI does it”.
I’ve started using https://ground.news a lot. They use MBFC for accuracy/bias, and also group news articles on the same news item, so you can see the differences in bias cross the spectrum (as well as the variable titles used). That shows if only one side is reporting on an issue, or how editorialized the article titles are.
(I’m not a marketing person for ground.news, I just like them)
This is what got me to finally leave Facebook. The amount of times I felt the need to fact check something a friend or family member posted was getting out of hand. Most of the time they’d ignore me or delete my comment.