- US occupying forces in northern Syria are continuing to plunder natural resources and farmland, a practice ongoing since 2011
- Recently, US troops smuggled dozens of tanker trucks loaded with Syrian crude oil to their bases in Iraq.
- The fuel and convoys of Syrian wheat were transported through the illegal settlement of Mahmoudia.
- Witnesses report a caravan of 69 tankers loaded with oil and 45 with wheat stolen from silos in Yarubieh city.
- Similar acts of looting occurred on the 19th of the month in the city of Hasakeh, where 45 tankers of Syrian oil were taken out by US forces.
- Prior to the war and US invasion, Syria produced over 380 thousand barrels of crude oil per day, but this has drastically reduced to only 15 thousand barrels per day.
- The country’s oil production now covers only five percent of its needs, with the remaining 95 percent imported amidst difficulties due to the US blockade.
- The US and EU blockade prevents the entry of medicines, food, supplies, and impedes technological and industrial development in Syria.
Thing is, even if he is good at media criticism, there’s no stakes for him. Nobody knows who he is, what he looks like, he has nothing on the line, and his credibility in his primary occupation cannot be harmed if he is wrong.
Nevermind that he lacks the credentials nor any legitimate scientific expertise, and yet claims that his Bachelor’s in Physiology was sufficiently advanced to teach him everything he needs to know about the scientific process.
The dataset is seen in academia as being accurate enough to train machine learning models for or to make aggregate claims on. Machine learning models are not the bastions of truth, nor are their datasets.
Machine learning has nothing to do with this. I am referring to academics who study journalism, communication, political science, or sociology.
And it’s doesn’t really matter who he is at this point, the product he created works well and continues to be a reliable source to interrogate media sources.
I am happy that a person is able to create such a useful product, maintain it and continue to prove reliability in the product, and maintain anonymity. I certainly would want to remain anonymous if I was creating something that actively worked to check people’s information bias.
But it’s an irrelevant discussion: who he is doesn’t really matter when evaluating the work of the site itself.
“[MBFC’s] subjective assessments leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in. Compared to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the five to 20 stories typically judged on these sites represent but a drop of mainstream news outlets’ production.” - Columbia Journalism Review
“Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific.” - PolitiFact journalists
MBFC is used when analyzing a large swathe of data because they have ratings for basically every news outlet. There, if a quarter or a third of the data is wrong, you can still generate enough signal to separate from noise.
It absolutely matters who is running a site because there’s an inherent accountability for journalism. There’s a reason you don’t see NYT articles from “Anonymous Ostrich.”