What can we do, as lemmy users, to fight fake news being pushed in the platform?
I see a lot of posts lately, mainly in ‘world news’ communities, that when I investigate their source, I cannot come to any other conclostion that purposefully spreading of fake news and propaganda on lemmy.
I love this platform and want to see it thrive, but the fact that these kind of posts can so easily populate my feed is disturbing.
When I want to read something relatively well verified and unbiased I reach for Wikipedia. They are doing a better job than any other source I found on the internet so far on keeping things clear of BS
Bias on Wikipedia is very bad now. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia has declared it “propaganda.” It doesn’t get more damning than that. Indeed, I’ve been involved in certain pages which have been butchered beyond recognition over the years thanks to power capture in the mod hierarchy. You wouldn’t BELIEVE how bad it is on many pages. Anything which is even vaguely contentious is guaranteed to be ideologically captured.
Wikipedia articles are supposed to summarize “reliable sources” and be neutral among them, but not give equal weight to “unreliable sources”.
Here’s the thing: people have by now figured out that if you first define sources that say things you like as “reliable” and sources that say things you don’t like as “unreliable”, then you can turn Wikipedia into a propaganda organ for whatever you want.
Wikipedia is neither an especially good source nor an especially bad one.
You forgot all the left wing ones. You’d also need to ban MSNBC, Vox, the Huffington Post, Buzz Feed, CNN, Vice, ABC, CBS, The Daily Beast, Salon, Newsweek, The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, Politico, NBC, The Atlantic, and dozens more.
Or is this not about misinformation, but rather information you like?
Their definition of the “left” section of their spectrum:
Sources with a Left AllSides Media Bias Rating™ display bias in ways that strongly align with liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.
Even they recognize that liberal and progressive ideas are separate from leftwing ideas, but for some reason have chosen to lump them into a single group. Likely because there are very few leftwing media outlets and none of them have any real name recognition when compared to CNN, MSNBC, etc.
You underscore an issue with the left-right paradigm. Not all conservatives are the same either, yet people feel quite comfortable putting Daily Wire and Breitbart into the same bucket.
We do what we always do. We fight the baseless propaganda we hate with the baseless propaganda we like, and then when called out on it, we justify its posting by saying, “Isn’t it crazy how easily this could be true though? It’s like there’s no difference between truth and satire these days!”
There is a certain compilation of rules/norms (which I’m surprised so many people don’t know about) called The Ten E-cepts (written there in the style of the philosopher Philo) which were made for anyone who may be considered a frequent browser. Commandment three points to something vital, that there’s no measure for that kind of thing. Regarding this kind of thing, each person must decide the difference and have it held to them.
A funny but also sad story related to this. Now everyone has probably heard of the Guinness book of world records, which holds all the world’s records people achieve and was made because drunk nerds in the bars in the UK (hence its name) would argue about world firsts all the time (true story). So I mentioned how I have the world record for the most websites having signed up for, and I got a triad of people at one point say they discredit the program, which turned into an argument over the apologetics and counter-apologetics of Guinness. And at the end of the argument I said something like “to anyone reading this from the Tilted Kilt, drunk arguments may resume”, because apparently nobody is safe.
The real challenge is “how do users can judge what is a fake news?”. In a similar situation it is an extremely difficult task even for newspapers with journalists on the field. See what’s happening with the blame-shifting on the bombing of Gaza’s hospital.
Even guardian and bbc have trouble understanding where is the truth.
A solution could be filtering the sources (for instance, no unknown blogs, or the sun and fox News, only reputable sources such as guardian and bbc). But important real news might be missed in this case, that are direct testimony of journalists on the field. And supposedly reputable sources such as wsj or similar are also known to have shared fake news, particularly when it comes to this conflict. And also reputable sources are biases.
It is an extremely difficult topic. No one has a definitive answer unfortunately.
I would be in favor of filtering at least the widely known sources of fake news (shady blogs, all Murdock’s media and so on)
People need to learn to admit to themselves that “I don’t know enough” and “I’ll refrain to the best of my ability from passing judgment when I don’t know enough”.
Yeah, the heavy emotion-inducing nature of propaganda is there to push you into “taking a position” (and real news often also have a strong emotion-inducing component, but if they’re honest it’s not going to be a constant “appeal to emotion” like propaganda) so it’s hard to fight oneself on this on such an emotionally feeble principle as “I shall not take stands on shit I don’t know”, but at least try it.
(And, by the way, this is also a “message to self”).
My own experience in political parties (not in the US, by the way, so don’t presume, dear reader) has shown me things like, for example, in big party conferences when asked to vote on various things almost nobody actually goes for “I abstain” even when some of those things are of the “very few people are qualified to pass judgment on this” kind. I remember this situation of voting for various suggestions to add to the party electoral program, were in an audience of over 1000 people maybe 3 or 4 would actually abstain once in a while.
Having lived in various countries in Europe, I don’t think this difficulty in admiting “I don’t know enough to make a choice here” is a local cultural phenomenon.
I don’t put wsj as reputable. I meant that even a journal considered reputable as wsj has been found publishing fake news in the past. That’s why I say that I am pro filtering all Murdoch’s media
Edit. I added an adjective in the original comment to make it clearer
Maybe one could set up instances that won’t allow submission of posts until they have a comment history of X over a Y period of time. The problem could become problematic as the site is trying to build content and users.
Nothing, you’d have to remove all of the users. There’s way too many viewpoints. People seem to be fine with fake news so long as it’s what they want to hear. If it’s something they don’t want to hear then it becomes fake news to them.
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.
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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