• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Aka to flag literal propaganda “news” sites.

    Why do I need MBFC to do this when I can just read someone in the comments who claims “This was posted by a Russian bot farm”?

    If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.

    https://lemmy.ml/

    I don’t see any of that on their local front page. In fact, most of lemmy.ml’s front page is reposts from lemmy.world. The only other sources I see are the BBC, BoingBoing.Net, and TheConversation.Com.

    I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist

    The agent flags virtually every mainstream news source as Left or Center-Left. The AP, the Guardian, Reuters, CNN, you name it. The very concept of Left/Right seems to boil down to “Do American Conservatives hate you?” If they’re Zionist on top of that, it’s likely only because these corporate media outlets tend to track with the American foreign policy position of any given moment.

    But don’t actually bother to ask why mainstream news gets consistently flagged as “Left Wing” despite mapping neatly to a right-wing government’s enthusiastic endorsement of various fascist middle eastern state leaders. Hell, don’t ask why mainstream news habitually runs gushy positive news stories about Saudi monarchs and North African military dictatorships.

    To even raise the question… you must be getting your news from all the Russia Today articles on lemmy.ml.