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.
Without looking, I’m going to take a wild guess that the opinions they allow are predominantly pro-Palestine.
Any discussion about Israel-Palestine is a complete waste of time anyway, because people are so entrenched in their views that even if you showed them they were wrong on something, they’d just dismiss it anyway. What’s the point of getting involved in a discussion that’s not going to go anywhere?
I read the modlogs from time to time yesterday. There are people literally advocating for, and up to describing in gruesome and sadistic detail, ways to genocide every Palestinian in Gaza, the West bank and the whole world in general. Some classy fellows extend it to every Arab and Muslin in the world.
I have not read, neither on the modlog nor the posts comments themselves saying anything remotely as bad about Israel. Maybe they are, but I haven’t seen them. The worse was someone saying that Israel needs to not be recognized as a state by the UN. That threw a few people off the deep end, calling the commenters anti-semites along with some other less savory epithets.
A couple of users were also harassing others and flaming on every single top level comment with some colorful language towards Palestine, not Hamas, Palestine.
So, I would say that indeed the allowed opinions were predominantly pro-Palestine, but that’s because they weren’t the ones breaking rules left and right and being uncivil overall. Level headed pro-Israel comments abounded, they were just downvoted to oblivion. Welcome to the internet.
They also have a moderator who told me that Ukraine probably blows up their own buildings, and deleted all comments in the conversation when evidence proved otherwise.
Got banned from worldnews on lemmy.ml without being told why, while trying my utmost to be cordial in expressing my views (that is to say it is complicated and both sides carry fault) and avoiding finger pointing, so I’m not sure the mods are without bias either.
Maybe you’re referring to lemmy.world?
EDIT: “looks like you’re banned for Israeli apologia”. So yeah, this community has taken a formal stance and formal bias. Wouldn’t have commented if I’d have known that beforehand, as it is like going “communism suck Viva la capitalism” in lemmygrad.
re: your edit, I thought lemmygrad was created as literally the politics forum for lemmy.ml (which is the instance run by lemmy devs)? that’s my understanding from reading comments, though no special knowledge of the situation. It seems like most of the tankie takes I see are from lemmy.ml users now that lemmygrad.ml is defederated from lemmy.world.
It is Lemmy mali because the devs looked for a cheap instance, but the natives call it Lemmy Marxist leninist.
Frankly, they’re just authoritarians. You get more from reading Jacques Derrida or listening to solvaj zizek ranting about Barbie if you want to learn about socialism and communism.
Honestly, I think the only true antidote to this sort of thing is to foster spaces in which people of vastly different opinions and positions can come together and communicate in a civil and genuine fashion. Pushing back on biases and presumptions through antagonistic or challenging conversations seems the only tried and true method we have for getting to the “truth” (or, more realistically, how little we know of or can grasp the actual truth whatever it may be).
It’s hard, especially online and many just don’t have the behavioural and cognitive muscles for it at all and very few in the world are actually strong at it.
Moreover, the moderation task would be monumental, which is why I’d think there’d have to be community buy-in from users/members and a grass roots enforcement of the ideals of the space as well as probably a good amount of gate-keeping unfortunately.
Additionally, I suspect that the technology of the platform actually has a role to play in fostering such a space. The technology is never a complete solution, but I think in such heated environments what’s missing from real life are contextual and gestural cues and meta data that we can all use to moderate how reception and reaction to any statement. Social media basically allows for none of that. But there’s no reason that we can’t try to represent a post/comment/statement in some way that tries to capture the sentimental and gestural context it is being made from. I think this is an example of modern technology actually losing sight of the mission of humanising technology.
EDIT: It would be an interesting idea for a lemmy instance, to try to foster such a space. Maybe it has no users of its own, just communities? When it comes to gate keeping, it’d be cool of lemmy allowed invite only community subscriptions or something similar.
I think the best way to fight fake news is to ensure people know how to recognize, verify, and respond to it. That’s already more work than most people are willing to put into it, but I don’t think it would hurt if someone with the know-how put together a simple tutorial thread and got it stickied to the whole instance somehow.
I hope that you’re not specifically talking about Israel Palestine because if so that particular issue has so many different people with very strong wildly divergent views that simply trying to define what “fake news is would be a political decision”.
Honestly it makes me want to abandon social media altogether. I don’t really trust random people to moderate discussion without favoring their own agenda. It’s even worse when it’s not random people who have sought out the position to push propaganda, but I think Lemmy is mostly too small for that still.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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