They are very upfront about the bot describing bias against the American center and not the global or whatever “objective” standard people try to insert. By that metric, center-left perfectly describes NYT. Their editorial board has posted multiple times describing Trump as an unfit candidate and they have historically endorsed the democratic candidate. They’re obviously not even American leftist and they’re not center-left on the global scale, but it’s all relative.
I personally like the extra information and those who don’t are free to block the bot. I have seen commentor twisting themselves into absolute pretzels to avoid admitting that they can simply block the bot.
I think the distributed nature of Mastodon keeps government control from being an issue. It would be kind of cool as a space for citizens to ask for assistance or air grievances while giving the politicians an officially owned space for things like announcements.