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.
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.
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.
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?
Lemmy.ml
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
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:
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:
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.
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.
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!
sticky this post.
Report to mods and give a good explanation. If it's a good reason they will most likely remove it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Downvote/report
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
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.
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.
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.
Step 1: Don't get your news from social media.
We gotta develop a culture of verification of facts!
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.
That's a moderation problem. We don't have a highly moderated news community that's popular yet.
This. We as a community can do our part to downvote bad info (at least on kbin, idk if Lemmy has downvoting or not) and commenting to let people know what's up--but that will only go so far and we're not gonna catch everything. We can also report harmful misinformation that we see, but all the same, plenty of users will still receive and buy into it before it's dealt with. We need well-moderated communities for a reasonable level of peace of mind.
Ban any articles from Fox, WSJ, Daily Wire, Daily Caller, Breitbart, Newsmax, OAN, RT, Epoch Times...
You forgot all the left wing ones. You’d also need to ban MSNBC, Vox, the Huffington Post, Buzz Feed, CNN, Vice, ABC, CBS, The Daily Beast, Salon, Newsweek, The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post, Politico, NBC, The Atlantic, and dozens more.
Or is this not about misinformation, but rather information you like?
If you think those are leftwing news sources then you probably need to educate yourself a bit more on political ideology.
While true, as long as they spread propaganda they shouldn't be allowed to be linked to.
No matter their political bias.
I based it on this research. You can view their methodology here.
I was responding to their comment about political alignment:
The source has nothing to do with credibility.
Their definition of the "left" section of their spectrum:
Even they recognize that liberal and progressive ideas are separate from leftwing ideas, but for some reason have chosen to lump them into a single group. Likely because there are very few leftwing media outlets and none of them have any real name recognition when compared to CNN, MSNBC, etc.
You underscore an issue with the left-right paradigm. Not all conservatives are the same either, yet people feel quite comfortable putting Daily Wire and Breitbart into the same bucket.
The number of Pulitzers in this comment should be enough to make you realize how dumb it is.
It's about the truth, and lies. Buh bye
When I want to read something relatively well verified and unbiased I reach for Wikipedia. They are doing a better job than any other source I found on the internet so far on keeping things clear of BS
Wikipedia articles are supposed to summarize "reliable sources" and be neutral among them, but not give equal weight to "unreliable sources".
Here's the thing: people have by now figured out that if you first define sources that say things you like as "reliable" and sources that say things you don't like as "unreliable", then you can turn Wikipedia into a propaganda organ for whatever you want.
Wikipedia is neither an especially good source nor an especially bad one.
Bias on Wikipedia is very bad now. One of the co-founders of Wikipedia has declared it “propaganda.” It doesn’t get more damning than that. Indeed, I’ve been involved in certain pages which have been butchered beyond recognition over the years thanks to power capture in the mod hierarchy. You wouldn’t BELIEVE how bad it is on many pages. Anything which is even vaguely contentious is guaranteed to be ideologically captured.
You mean that co-founder Larry Sanger that is full on Trump supporter and believer of conspiracy theories that claims Wikipedia has a leftist bias?
That guy that claimed there are "multiple versions of facts"?
Yeah, he isn't a great source, I can tell you that.
Examples?
The way that I do that personally is to only read news that link to reputable sources (Associated Press, BBC, Reuters, UN reports, Guardian to an extent etc). These also make mistakes or, at worst, are biased themselves, but they still hold journalistic values.
My reasoning is that hopefully an editor has done the moderation before the article goes out, so that I don't have to. The issue with my approach is that I'm limited to the outlets that I'm familiar with, where there might be others out there that hold the same standards.
It would be good to have a sub to aggregate only reputable news sources.
Ground.news is a great way to get your news. Don’t rely on any one platform.
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.
Nice.
First step would be tagging posts/comments, to clearly separate ones meant as pure opinion from ones meant as a factual claim. Then tagging for sourced/unsourced/disputed/misleading/omitting crucial details, etc. claims. Then tagging things like how confident the poster feels about what they're saying (e.g. from "I heard it somewhere" to "I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions")
Then you would need easy to inspect metadata showing the sourcing chain all the way to the origin. And ability to comment on that (e.g. if some source's claims are misinterpreted and the source doesn't actually claim the thing).
Then you would need the people to actually care about facts, even if the facts go against their existing beliefs or preferences.
Also people need to be able to think more with varying degrees of uncertainty built-in, not just "this is definitely true"/"this is definitely false" (unless there is enough material to back that up).
Drown it out with even faker news
💀
Maybe one could set up instances that won't allow submission of posts until they have a comment history of X over a Y period of time. The problem could become problematic as the site is trying to build content and users.
Can you give examples of what you’re talking about?
There is a certain compilation of rules/norms (which I'm surprised so many people don't know about) called The Ten E-cepts (written there in the style of the philosopher Philo) which were made for anyone who may be considered a frequent browser. Commandment three points to something vital, that there's no measure for that kind of thing. Regarding this kind of thing, each person must decide the difference and have it held to them.
A funny but also sad story related to this. Now everyone has probably heard of the Guinness book of world records, which holds all the world's records people achieve and was made because drunk nerds in the bars in the UK (hence its name) would argue about world firsts all the time (true story). So I mentioned how I have the world record for the most websites having signed up for, and I got a triad of people at one point say they discredit the program, which turned into an argument over the apologetics and counter-apologetics of Guinness. And at the end of the argument I said something like "to anyone reading this from the Tilted Kilt, drunk arguments may resume", because apparently nobody is safe.
I have written here just a few days ago what we can do:
https://lemmy.world/comment/4402223
Personally, I block anything related to news&politics on the fediverse (same on reddit).
Humans have a structural problem with any system that allows voting on the visibility of headlines. It encourages outrage, populism, attention grabbing headlines while discouraging more refined factual discussions. Kinda like tabloid journalism.
Reddit has the same problem and way worse, but with enough time it will happen here too.
Most users read the headline before giving their own opinion, not many take their time to read a majority of other comments and the least amount of users actually read the linked article (which is to be honest also often the fault of the quality of an article, i.e. being too long, boring and partially ai-generated).
This results in the most lukewarm most agreeable opinions being top comments, while they're also oftentimes being uninformed.
This is just what I gathered from my own personal experience with social media, I don't have any good sources to back up my claims.
It comes back to the same problems we have always had, governments/corporations pushing whatever they can to accomplish what they want.
It is now more apparent than ever that many stories are lies.
Which results in more wars ans censorship, you don't have to believe me on any of this, you just need to look at the leaks of the past decades.
When exposing crimes gets you blacklisted, Julian Assange and many more before him, you know that the government is as corrupt as any other organizations.
Criticial thinking and getting out of your bubble can help expand your views on subjects and topics.
What are people talking about vs. what is not, what is being censored, who is beimg smeared for talking out of the status quo.
In the end, it seems like a means to divide the people into tribal/group disputes. Instead, we should try and come together on what we agree on.
Nothing, you’d have to remove all of the users. There’s way too many viewpoints. People seem to be fine with fake news so long as it’s what they want to hear. If it’s something they don’t want to hear then it becomes fake news to them.
Then is not than. These are different words. No greater annoying mistake trend is out there.