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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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