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.

  • rustyfish@lemmy.world
    211·
    2 years ago

    Oha. Can you name a few examples? I browse world news quite often and am kinda worried right now.

    • Serinus@lemmy.world
      206·
      2 years ago

      The mega thread on Israel & Palestine in world news is extremely selective about which opinions they allow.

      • Jackthelad@lemmy.worldEnglish
        91·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
          21·
          2 years ago

          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.

  • Spzi@lemm.ee
    191·
    2 years ago

    Make a comment with your conclusion and how you arrived at it.

    If applicable, report the post.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
    182·
    2 years ago

    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:

    1. What idea/agenda is the author/source trying to express?
    2. Who benefits (monetarily or otherwise) from the expression of this idea?
    3. 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:

    1. Are there any hard verificable evidence such as photos, videos, or other direct documentations?
    2. Are there only unverifiable, anecdotal, and/or circumstantial claims and evidences for this?
    3. What’s the original source from which the claims were made?

    This should give you a good framework of spotting fake news.

  • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
    162·
    2 years ago

    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

    • GillyGumbo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      You say wsj is reputable, and then suggest filtering Murdoch. Murdoch bought wsj in 2007.

      • Zeth0s@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 years ago

        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

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
    143·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    111·
    2 years ago

    Report to mods and give a good explanation. If it’s a good reason they will most likely remove it.

    • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
      315·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • jaywalker@lemm.ee
        82·
        2 years ago

        If you think those are leftwing news sources then you probably need to educate yourself a bit more on political ideology.

            • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
              12·
              2 years ago

              I was responding to their comment about political alignment:

              If you think those are leftwing news sources then you probably need to educate yourself a bit more on political ideology.

              The source has nothing to do with credibility.

          • jaywalker@lemm.ee
            2·
            2 years ago

            Their definition of the “left” section of their spectrum:

            Sources with a Left AllSides Media Bias Rating™ display bias in ways that strongly align with liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.

            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.

            • JasSmith@sh.itjust.works
              12·
              2 years ago

              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.

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
        21·
        2 years ago

        The number of Pulitzers in this comment should be enough to make you realize how dumb it is.

  • geogle@lemmy.world
    41·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Eggyhead@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    2 years ago

    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.