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.
Reports from war zones will always be highly suspect, because the belligerents have agendas and third parties don’t really have access to provide objective independent accountability.
I don’t think there is a way to both have access to war zone reporting, and hold to a objective standard of truth. So the organic propaganda and the astroturfing is just part of modern warfare.
You could run a news community with reporting standards, and moderate away unverified data. But the people with more ‘timely’ and ‘sensational’ reporting will get the eye-balls anyway, so you have to educate people on why getting verification is worth it… kinda like how the economist is slow to report, but has lots of depth.
And not only the modern one. The truth is the first victim of any war.
The new twist is we can see the efforts from both sides, historically we would only enjoy the propaganda of one side at a time until the war was over.