Maybe we can have a fact-check community. People could post there if they find fake news or they could request fact-checks of information by others. It should be a community with strict rules on referring to sources, creating valid arguments, etc. and content should only be banned if it does not adhere to these rules.
A bit similar to what happens in scientific research. I will reject a paper if there are issues with its methods. I will not reject it based on its conclusions if the methods are fine. I think this works in academia, why wouldn’t it work with the right moderators here? There are still a lot of people who value truth above all else and in this way, they would have a space here.
The only way I see to fix this issue is to use a different search engine which doesn’t rely on google or bing. I only know of one which is brave but please let me know if there are any others.
The reason I say this is because it will increase competition and is better for users.
Yeah, it’s still totally around, and pretty popular for very low budget meals. And here in the Midwest at least, spam over rice and spam sushi is associated with Hawaiian cuisine.
Yeah. It replaced message boards of old but it doesn’t fill the same purpose. It’s next to impossible to build a knowledge base there, for instance. It is optimised for an endless stream of shitty memes, though.
If there’s an agenda, people will lie. Keep that in the back of your mind when browsing. The extent to which people will lie depends on what there is to lose and what there is to gain. There is also mass delusions, which spread because the majority of people aren’t willing to take a moment to think critically or be skeptical about things. Short-form content exacerbates this and everyone wanting to be the first to spread something make the whole issue worse. To the point where things get fabricated because that naturally speeds up the production of content, rather than it happening organically and then reporting on it. The Internet as a whole has amplified this a lot.
Personally, I block anything related to news&politics on the fediverse (same on reddit).
Humans have a structural problem with any system that allows voting on the visibility of headlines. It encourages outrage, populism, attention grabbing headlines while discouraging more refined factual discussions. Kinda like tabloid journalism.
Reddit has the same problem and way worse, but with enough time it will happen here too.
Most users read the headline before giving their own opinion, not many take their time to read a majority of other comments and the least amount of users actually read the linked article (which is to be honest also often the fault of the quality of an article, i.e. being too long, boring and partially ai-generated).
This results in the most lukewarm most agreeable opinions being top comments, while they're also oftentimes being uninformed.
This is just what I gathered from my own personal experience with social media, I don't have any good sources to back up my claims.
This. We as a community can do our part to downvote bad info (at least on kbin, idk if Lemmy has downvoting or not) and commenting to let people know what's up--but that will only go so far and we're not gonna catch everything. We can also report harmful misinformation that we see, but all the same, plenty of users will still receive and buy into it before it's dealt with. We need well-moderated communities for a reasonable level of peace of mind.
The way that I do that personally is to only read news that link to reputable sources (Associated Press, BBC, Reuters, UN reports, Guardian to an extent etc). These also make mistakes or, at worst, are biased themselves, but they still hold journalistic values.
My reasoning is that hopefully an editor has done the moderation before the article goes out, so that I don’t have to. The issue with my approach is that I’m limited to the outlets that I’m familiar with, where there might be others out there that hold the same standards.
It would be good to have a sub to aggregate only reputable news sources.
It comes back to the same problems we have always had, governments/corporations pushing whatever they can to accomplish what they want.
It is now more apparent than ever that many stories are lies.
Which results in more wars ans censorship, you don’t have to believe me on any of this, you just need to look at the leaks of the past decades.
When exposing crimes gets you blacklisted, Julian Assange and many more before him, you know that the government is as corrupt as any other organizations.
Criticial thinking and getting out of your bubble can help expand your views on subjects and topics.
What are people talking about vs. what is not, what is being censored, who is beimg smeared for talking out of the status quo.
In the end, it seems like a means to divide the people into tribal/group disputes. Instead, we should try and come together on what we agree on.
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