so if you haven’t come across it, see here , here , here and here .

in short, one side says sources are pro-imperialist, the other side believes they’re legitimate sources. then there is one user thinking we have been targeted by troll farms, one accusing others of being conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. it’s one of the most unproductive arguements I’ve seen on Lemmy, something that looks like one those downvoted-to-oblivian threads on reddit. it’s just a mess.

I think we can do a few things to prevent such pointless fights in the future:

  1. my favoriate response would be creating a community of fact-checker Lemmurs. it’ll function similar to a wikipedia talk page, anyone can request a trial for an article shared on c/worldnews , then they will present evidence and sources to challenge the article, while the other side attempts to do the same. personal attacks, accusing of being a troll, asking for a call on jitsi to debate face to face (like seriously?!?!) will be forbidden. both sides will debate untill they reach an agreement. trying to go off-topic, bad faith arguements etc will be forbidden as well.

each time we reach a conclusion, a positive or negative point will be assigned to news source and to the person who posted it. best contributers who show the least bias will get a point as well. overtime it will help us to see if a source is really good or not.

  1. a much easier approch would be to let downvotes and upvotes decide the fate of each post. I understand that this is the whole point of lemmy and similar platforms, but right now we have the problem of each side using downvotes and upvotes like it’s a battle. posts about internet censoreship and tiny pigs are being downvoted because the person who posts them trusts the Guardian and other news outlets.

  2. we can limit the number of posts on c/worldnews to minimize the amount of personal attacks and arguements.

so what do you think? I personally think as more users come to lemmy, we’ll be dealling with more diverse opinions, and people might just engage in behaviors that harms the platform and benefits no one. this will be a real problem considering that Lemmy leans far-left. in my opinion having a fact-checking community will be neccessary if we don’t want fact-based communities turn into battlefields.

ps: am I going too far and overreacting? to be honest I don’t know xD I just think there’s no chance for productive political arguements if we can’t agree on the facts, and i see no point in what’s happening on c/worldnews right now.

    • Helix
      51·
      4 years ago

      a 1.5 hour video with 20+ sources

      Mhk. Most sources are twitter, reddit, other youtube videos and pro-Chinese blogs and media outlets. From clicking through, not a very unbiased discussion of a topic, especially adding that the guy wears a fucking balaclava and the title is clickbait. This is not neutral reporting.

      Small domain name statistics on the google doc with ““sources””:

       24 youtube.com
 16 twitter.com
  8 globaltimes.cn
  4 thegrayzone.com
  3 reddit.com
  2 medium.com
  1 chinese-embassy.org.uk
  1 congress.gov
  1 csis.org
  1 docdroid.net
  1 documents.buzzfeednews.com
  1 historicly.substack.com
  1 i.redd.it
  1 law.cornell.edu
  1 ned.org
  1 quora.com
  1 sydney.chineseconsulate.org
  1 translate.google.com
  1 un.org
  1 xinhuanet.com

      Since they claim themselves

      We did not have time to put the bibliography information on this, but these are the links that appear in the order of the video. We are able to continuously update this list if needed!

      I can’t be arsed to jump to the corresponding parts of the 1.5h video with sources other than social media sites either, since the majority of the video seems to be about youtube and twitter content. Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat.

        • Helix
          31·
          4 years ago

          anti academia

          [posts youtube video with 24 links to youtube, 16 to twitter etc.]

          Other sources:

          Please, show me one proper paper by a Chinese university or proper journalistic outlet who don’t just republish Chinese officials’ statements.

          Oh wait, I found a pretty good article amongst the sources debunking a BBC interview. At least they’re trying to stay with the facts:

          • Breaking down the BBC’s visit to Hotan, Xinjiang – seems like the BBC didn’t find a lot of information and sensationalised their findings. I agree that most of the stuff found there is exaggerated. However, re-education camps are something westerners see with a grain of salt. Let’s assume they’re just that, re-education camps. Why is there not a single non-Uyghur in those camps? I don’t know much about the Uyghurs but even I think that there’s something inherently wrong in specifically targeting a Muslim minority and “re-educating” them into proper Chinese citizens with Chinese beliefs.

          I’m not sure there’s a genocide going on, but your cute youtube video proves nothing, only that the propaganda machine of China works just as well as the western propaganda machine.

          The fact that the youtube video’s creator couldn’t even bother editing the titles in or give a sentence of context or even a timestamp where the source was used speaks for itself, I think.

          I took over an hour to watch most of the video, just to find out my assumptions that this is a badly threwn together circlejerk are mostly correct.

            • Helix
              21·
              4 years ago

              I watched the whole video in the meantime on 1.25-1.5 speed (had to slow down due to the guy mumbling all the time) and most, if not all of the stuff is hearsay. This is not a proper scientific article or even video.

                • Helix
                  11·
                  4 years ago

                  You claim to have an unbiased view and then post only biased media. I didn’t post BBC links either. There’s only one source I found very good (the medium post) and the rest was useless propaganda. Maybe there are some youtube videos with worthy information in it, but I won’t go down the rabbit hole when nobody bothered to properly cite and label their stuff.

                  There’s the scientific method and providing proper sources and there’s plain propaganda. I can spot the latter pretty easily, both in western, eastern and other media, as long as I can understand what they’re saying (so, a translation or good autotranslate). I didn’t dismiss the sources because they’re Chinese, but because they’re from the CCP. The CCP is the body made responsible for those alleged crimes. They’re not an unbiased source.

                  China has >1.4 billion citizens. Surely some of them attended an university where they can provide proper sources. As far as I can see there’s just a single Chinese whitepaper in the “sources” of the video. I’m even sure there are better sources for the claims nothing’s wrong with re-educating Uyghurs as the BBC clearly exaggerated their report and most of the stuff is hearsay. Currently I’m leaning to cultural assimilation and cultural eradication as the measly few hundred deaths due to Uyghur “terrorism” don’t justify re-educating a whole ethnicity in my book. I’m not sure if the word “cultural genocide” is the proper term to use there, as most of the western sources I read (one of them cited above) don’t use that term.

                  I won’t answer any further of those comments, please provide proper sources next time. Proper sources are papers from universities (independent of country of origin, if the methods are proper), articles from independent journalists (like the medium guy seems to be, what he wrote just read as “I’m Chinese and this is wrong” instead of “I’m the CCP and this is wrong”) and studies by third parties not involved in the actual alleged wrongdoings.

                  See how I say “alleged” and only base my comment on facts? You should try that.

    • Lowey
      11·
      4 years ago

      BBC does have bias, but that does not mean they make up Uyghur genocide and the cultural dissemination of the Uyghur people.