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.
Even though, only the winning side would draft the “official” version of the events. The “real” “truth” would appear only decades later, when everyone involved is dead (or almost) and independant research can happen. E.g. a former French “résistant” recently confessed his group summarily executed a bunch of captured German Soldier in 1944. Some of the members went in politics afterwards, preventing any investigation to take place.
Not to excuse those crimes but the resistance weren’t soldiers so they can’t commit “war crimes” as such. They can commit crimes and morally wrong things, they just aren’t bound by the conventions of war unless they are captured by a nation that is bound by international law and even then they can’t be charged for it they just can’t be murdered when captured themselves.
we can see the efforts from both sides
You are right, and it is some kind of improvement. Or at least it feels like it.
But never forget that sides are sides. You still don’t get any balanced (or objective) truth from the center of the battlefield, even if they make it look like it.
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
Which is run by the Lemmy devs who are tankies
Well they’re just a bunch of tankies who watch aljazeera and rt.
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.
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
This is the correct answer
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.
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
Not really. At least here you get various opinions. Crazy or not. Other sources seem to be endless echo chambers.
sticky this post.
The real challenge is “how do users can judge what is a fake news?”. In a similar situation it is an extremely difficult task even for newspapers with journalists on the field. See what’s happening with the blame-shifting on the bombing of Gaza’s hospital.
Even guardian and bbc have trouble understanding where is the truth.
A solution could be filtering the sources (for instance, no unknown blogs, or the sun and fox News, only reputable sources such as guardian and bbc). But important real news might be missed in this case, that are direct testimony of journalists on the field. And supposedly reputable sources such as wsj or similar are also known to have shared fake news, particularly when it comes to this conflict. And also reputable sources are biases.
It is an extremely difficult topic. No one has a definitive answer unfortunately.
I would be in favor of filtering at least the widely known sources of fake news (shady blogs, all Murdock’s media and so on)
Edit. An adjective to clarify
You say wsj is reputable, and then suggest filtering Murdoch. Murdoch bought wsj in 2007.
I don’t put wsj as reputable. I meant that even a journal considered reputable as wsj has been found publishing fake news in the past. That’s why I say that I am pro filtering all Murdoch’s media
Edit. I added an adjective in the original comment to make it clearer
People need to learn to admit to themselves that “I don’t know enough” and “I’ll refrain to the best of my ability from passing judgment when I don’t know enough”.
Yeah, the heavy emotion-inducing nature of propaganda is there to push you into “taking a position” (and real news often also have a strong emotion-inducing component, but if they’re honest it’s not going to be a constant “appeal to emotion” like propaganda) so it’s hard to fight oneself on this on such an emotionally feeble principle as “I shall not take stands on shit I don’t know”, but at least try it.
(And, by the way, this is also a “message to self”).
My own experience in political parties (not in the US, by the way, so don’t presume, dear reader) has shown me things like, for example, in big party conferences when asked to vote on various things almost nobody actually goes for “I abstain” even when some of those things are of the “very few people are qualified to pass judgment on this” kind. I remember this situation of voting for various suggestions to add to the party electoral program, were in an audience of over 1000 people maybe 3 or 4 would actually abstain once in a while.
Having lived in various countries in Europe, I don’t think this difficulty in admiting “I don’t know enough to make a choice here” is a local cultural phenomenon.
Report to mods and give a good explanation. If it’s a good reason they will most likely remove it.
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.
have a fact-check community
Wikipedia tries that for many years now. It works nearly perfect for easy topics, but rather terrible for the really controversial topics.
Shit, we literally only have controversial topics
Well, then at least we can get to view the different viewpoints clearly side by side and with their arguments.
Downvote/report
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.
We do what we always do. We fight the baseless propaganda we hate with the baseless propaganda we like, and then when called out on it, we justify its posting by saying, “Isn’t it crazy how easily this could be true though? It’s like there’s no difference between truth and satire these days!”
/s, obviously
Start a fact-checking community? If you can get members who can leave politics at the door and look at things objectively.
