Yep, and you might get clowned on in the comments, fairly or unfairly, but all you can do in any media aggregate forum is fact check and try to debunk.
Don’t follow news feeds on any social platforms including lemmy. Find a reliable source. These billion dollar platforms like Facebook can’t moderate every fake news, lemmy has no chance.
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t have a need to. Enticing news, fake or otherwise, keeps people engaged, commenting, posting, starting flame wars, and they do all of it on the platform. Somebody at some point noticed that users don’t mind fake news (as in they don’t leave the platform as long as there is fake news posted there), and the potential ‘hit’ to reputation is well balanced by the boost in engagement they see.
Lemmy, on the other hand, might not have the same incentive (yet?) to keep spreading bullshit for the sake of getting firemen and arsonists locked in a neverending game.
“Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache”
First step would be tagging posts/comments, to clearly separate ones meant as pure opinion from ones meant as a factual claim. Then tagging for sourced/unsourced/disputed/misleading/omitting crucial details, etc. claims. Then tagging things like how confident the poster feels about what they’re saying (e.g. from “I heard it somewhere” to “I’ve seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions”)
Then you would need easy to inspect metadata showing the sourcing chain all the way to the origin. And ability to comment on that (e.g. if some source’s claims are misinterpreted and the source doesn’t actually claim the thing).
Then you would need the people to actually care about facts, even if the facts go against their existing beliefs or preferences.
Also people need to be able to think more with varying degrees of uncertainty built-in, not just “this is definitely true”/“this is definitely false” (unless there is enough material to back that up).
This line from Uncle John’s Band by Grateful Dead is really simple and maybe kinda cheesy but it’s given me motivation and kept me in check a few times:
Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry anymore. 'Cause when life looks like easy street there is danger at your door
asklemmy
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