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 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.
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.
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
