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.
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.