overview for Five

I really like this short video (4:43) that Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

Israeli forces fire on UN food agency’s team in Gaza in c/world@lemmy.world

[-] Five@slrpnk.net 25 points 1 week ago

The !news team has recently changed course and opted out of the bot. AFAIK it will still operate in !world and !politics, but I want to share the news and thank everyone who has given feedback, downvoted, and protested the bot. This isn't over, but I feel we've reached an inflection point.

More than 60 reported killed in northeast Sudan dam collapse in c/world@lemmy.world

[-] Five@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 week ago

Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as "Credibility: Medium" and "Factual Reporting: Mixed"; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

On Dave's page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they've produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

Dave's personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.

Millions in Bangladesh stranded in flood disaster and many are blaming neighboring India in c/world@lemmy.world

[-] Five@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

MBFC claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. An example of this right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of 'undecided voters'.

If you want to understand bias, learn the five filters of the propaganda model.

According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn't "an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years." She suggests it could be "a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television." - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are the first and third filters of the propaganda model.

Palestinian Healthcare Workers Chained, Starved, Sexually Abused: New Report in c/world@lemmy.world

[-] Five@slrpnk.net 14 points 1 week ago

Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated a great short about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

Zelensky: Diplomacy 'not at the expense of 30% of our territory' in c/world@lemmy.world

[-] Five@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I'm quite certain if I ignored the warning, I would earn a ban. The difference isn't between the World and ML mods, it's between me trying to play nice with their inconsistent bullshit rules, and the people getting banned from ML not respecting the predictable bullshit rules of that instance.

It's obviously more than a disagreement about how to define 'spamming.' The MBFC bot is now the most downvoted account in Lemmy history, and it is now more unpopular than the most popular Lemmy account is popular. It appears in every !news, !world, and !politics thread where it is experienced as spam by the vast majority of users.

But the harm it does is greater than merely taking up pagespace. It distorts the discussion in favor of MBFC's author's right-wing views, and gives the World mods the pretense of neutrality when removing left-wing voices from their communities. The MBFC has been widely discredited. For example, Wikipedia's Reliable Sources Noticeboard rates sources as generally reliable (green), no consensus (yellow), mostly unreliable (red).

Giving this joke of a resource an institutional place in the flagship communities of the Lemmy's largest instance are an embarrassment to the entire Threadiverse project. Due to WP's policy of neutrality, it's even more damning when you look under the hood and read the specific criticisms that lead its policy of not linking MBFC in its pages. I am being threatened by the mods for reposting excepts from those criticisms in reply to the MBFC bot spam.