so if you haven’t come across it, see here , here , here and here .
in short, one side says sources are pro-imperialist, the other side believes they’re legitimate sources. then there is one user thinking we have been targeted by troll farms, one accusing others of being conspiracy theorists and stuff like that. it’s one of the most unproductive arguements I’ve seen on Lemmy, something that looks like one those downvoted-to-oblivian threads on reddit. it’s just a mess.
I think we can do a few things to prevent such pointless fights in the future:
- my favoriate response would be creating a community of fact-checker Lemmurs. it’ll function similar to a wikipedia talk page, anyone can request a trial for an article shared on c/worldnews , then they will present evidence and sources to challenge the article, while the other side attempts to do the same. personal attacks, accusing of being a troll, asking for a call on jitsi to debate face to face (like seriously?!?!) will be forbidden. both sides will debate untill they reach an agreement. trying to go off-topic, bad faith arguements etc will be forbidden as well.
each time we reach a conclusion, a positive or negative point will be assigned to news source and to the person who posted it. best contributers who show the least bias will get a point as well. overtime it will help us to see if a source is really good or not.
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a much easier approch would be to let downvotes and upvotes decide the fate of each post. I understand that this is the whole point of lemmy and similar platforms, but right now we have the problem of each side using downvotes and upvotes like it’s a battle. posts about internet censoreship and tiny pigs are being downvoted because the person who posts them trusts the Guardian and other news outlets.
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we can limit the number of posts on c/worldnews to minimize the amount of personal attacks and arguements.
so what do you think? I personally think as more users come to lemmy, we’ll be dealling with more diverse opinions, and people might just engage in behaviors that harms the platform and benefits no one. this will be a real problem considering that Lemmy leans far-left. in my opinion having a fact-checking community will be neccessary if we don’t want fact-based communities turn into battlefields.
ps: am I going too far and overreacting? to be honest I don’t know xD I just think there’s no chance for productive political arguements if we can’t agree on the facts, and i see no point in what’s happening on c/worldnews right now.
Personally, I just gave up on c/worldnews. Yes, someone is posting in c/worldnews, yes, they’re from western sources, but how exactly is an article on climate change causing increases in bacterial infection “pro-imperialist propaganda”? If it’s science based, backed by a report by the CDC, then that’s science. Not once has the primary person posting attempted to influence the conversation on posting. When folks are responding to the articles, the person posting states something like they agree with the post or they disagree with the post.
The problem with fact checkers, if they too can be biased and a lot of world news is going to be difficult to verify.
I just had this conversation about things like Snopes and mediabiasfactchecker. I was just told they weren’t reputable sources, just because. There is almost no chain of trust with news sources it seems. At least not one that everyone will agree on, so what can we do?
If you block someone from posting, what’s to stop them from creating new accounts and getting around it?
If you go by the community up/down votes, same thing.
Sadly this is a fact of life on the internet.
One thing we can attempt to do is attempt to be civilized and let’s have an active discussion and not just “YOU’RE WRONG!” Ok… maybe I am wrong, let’s have a discussion as to WHY I’m wrong and where are the sources?
I don’t have an answer to this problem, so honestly I’m staying out of c/worldnews now, because it’s not worth it. I’ll just get my news elsewhere from Lemmy and that sucks, but if we’re not going to have real conversations then this site and technology will just devolve into the absolute cesspool like other places.
And that’s not to say all of other platforms are perfect or imperfect. There’s beauty and ugliness in everything. The technology isn’t implicitly good or evil. How we decide to use it is.
So can we just be grown ups and have real discussions or is this platform just going to turn into another awful place on the web? It’s up to us.
I’ve seen an interesting argument recently (don’t remember where, sorry), in which the guy says, in his opinion, that the problem with news subbreddits on Reddit (which can be applied also to c/worldnews), is that news posting is directly accompanied with comments, and by doing so you have opinions from readers that didn’t have time to process the information described in the article, which can lead to fights. He thinks that news posting and comments shouldn’t be together, instead be separated.
A solution could be separating c/worldnews with a new community which discusses those news: the post is doubled, with the original one clean and unopinionized, and the second one is full-on Waterloo.
I’m also worried about this as much as you; my opinion is that it should have stricter rules/code of conduct, just because it’s the most important news community
Edit: found the argument, it’s @Jeffrey’s on this post, credit to him/her.
Interesting. Though I worry this would mean people simply go to the Waterloo c/ instead of c/worldnews.
I totaly agree. but i didn’t mean this fact-checking to result in bans, I wanted it to make political discussions less of a fight and name calling, and more of a mature and polite exchange of how we see the world based on the same set of facts. my goal was to have a community where the flow of discussion is similar to a wikipedia talk page, because right now one user calls another one a pro-imperialist, they answer by calling them an anarcho-communist, then one users says maybe “Lemmy is anti-establishment and has attracted troll-farms” and the other one says “come show your face on jitsi if you have anything to say”. it’s freaking awful.
that’s what made me think of this idea, if our fellow lemmurs don’t believe fact-checkers, maybe they should start fact-checking themselves.