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.
You could remvove all the users. They are usually the problem.
I think I found the biggest brain on Lemmy and I’m in awe.
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”.
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.
is just part of modern warfare.
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.
First, you should acknowledge that all sources are biased to a certain degree, some more than others. Any source that claim to always be “Fair and Balanced” like Fox News is usually anything but. When looking at a news article you should always ask yourself these questions:
- What idea/agenda is the author/source trying to express?
- Who benefits (monetarily or otherwise) from the expression of this idea?
- Based on what you know, are there any contradictions in these ideas? (ESPECIALLY self-contradictions.)
Source reliability is only a small part of the equation as appeal to authority is usually overvalued:if Fox News says the Earth revolves around the Sun, that statement doesn’t suddenly become false. To determine the veracity of an article is simple, but not easy: you can only derive the truth from hard facts. You should look at the primary source and evidences and ask yourself:
- Are there any hard verificable evidence such as photos, videos, or other direct documentations?
- Are there only unverifiable, anecdotal, and/or circumstantial claims and evidences for this?
- What’s the original source from which the claims were made?
This should give you a good framework of spotting fake news.
Make a comment with your conclusion and how you arrived at it.
If applicable, report the post.
Yep, and you might get clowned on in the comments, fairly or unfairly, but all you can do in any media aggregate forum is fact check and try to debunk.
Oha. Can you name a few examples? I browse world news quite often and am kinda worried right now.
The mega thread on Israel & Palestine in world news is extremely selective about which opinions they allow.
which community of worldnews?
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.
Was it the same mod that did an AMA and was super duper chill with the tankies? God, what an insufferable thread looking back
Well they’re just a bunch of tankies who watch aljazeera and rt.
Which is run by the Lemmy devs who are tankies
Stop depending on Lemmy for news.
Why? I feel it’s better than reading media owned by governments or large corporations and it often presents an alternate view.
The why was answered in the OP
Ironically not sourcing their claims!
The whole Internet is lying to you!
It’s like you have to be constantly vigilant and fact check everything!
Not really. At least here you get various opinions. Crazy or not. Other sources seem to be endless echo chambers.
sticky this post.
Defederate from the tankie instances (including .ml). This Israel thing has really show not only how willing these places are to do straight up information warfare, but also how they’ve amplified an extremely chilling and alarmingly violent minority.
Report to mods and give a good explanation. If it’s a good reason they will most likely remove it.
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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.
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Downvote/report
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Post fact-checks (links a bonus) in the comments, which are few enough to scroll and check. That’s where I look for paywall bypasses, TLDRs and will post a screed for additional context if I have opinions that everyone should know.
If you see hate-inciting posts, wilful disinformation or egregious misinformation, then be sure to use the report button.
The issue is that some communities are run by mods who think these are real news
Find new communities when that happens, or bring it up with the admins so those mods are replaced
Find communities with mods who will seriously look into reported fake news
Don’t follow news feeds on any social platforms including lemmy. Find a reliable source. These billion dollar platforms like Facebook can’t moderate every fake news, lemmy has no chance.
It’s not that they can’t, it’s that they don’t have a need to. Enticing news, fake or otherwise, keeps people engaged, commenting, posting, starting flame wars, and they do all of it on the platform. Somebody at some point noticed that users don’t mind fake news (as in they don’t leave the platform as long as there is fake news posted there), and the potential ‘hit’ to reputation is well balanced by the boost in engagement they see.
Lemmy, on the other hand, might not have the same incentive (yet?) to keep spreading bullshit for the sake of getting firemen and arsonists locked in a neverending game.
