Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
One of the first I was going to propose. I feel that MBFC is treated as completely neutral and objective when as with every single source, they have their own biases. I think we should be maintaining our own source blacklist here, instead of relying on a third party with, in my opinion, somewhat unscientific methodologies.
Given the example listed is an article by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist representing what appears to be exhaustive reporting for a gold standard news organization, I worry that relaxing the requirement will lead to this community turning into a propaganda factory. Their proposal below that anything that “seems credible” be allowed is certainly a recipe for that. MBFC might not catch every case, but it’s good in most cases. It’s good practice to check there for press freedom, news org ownership, and documented history of deceit, which are all objective pieces of evidence rather than the more subjective assessment of bias. They’re also probably way better at this than mods are, no offense. Trying to replicate their database would be an enormous undertaking and the result would probably be poorer quality anyway.
Maintaining a list of evidence-based exceptions is probably more manageable. I suspect that people mostly want this to have more propaganda included as news though.
Again, I would want submissions to focus on the QUALITY of the content instead of WHERE the content is published.
If you feel that an article is factually incorrect, you should present hard evidence to dispute the part that was factually incorrect instead of appealing to authorities, otherwise, who’s to say you are only agreeing to articles that are confirming to your own biases?
I’m going to 2nd the other guy - flooding the zone with shit is already something I see often in various lemmy communities. If you think commenters will read articles and actually present proof if something’s wrong, you have a much higher expectation from the people here than they’re actually capable of. People barely/never read the actual articles. They look at the title and the vote counts and comment/vote/think accordingly.
MBFC is at least an easy way to remove the obvious bad stuff. Yea, it’s not perfect, but it’s a thousand times better than expecting the community to self-moderate legitimate sources.
I get the idea and understand the appeal but it would be a big victory for state propagandists. Modern propaganda, perfected by Russia, operates by flooding the information space with a mix of fact and bullshit. They want to present numerous opposed but credible sounding versions of events to exhaust efforts to discover truth. Sorting fact from fiction in that pile of shit is impossible by design. They want you to conclude that it’s impossible to know the truth. The accuracy of a particular article has almost nothing to say about the source being a place to discover truth. MBFC is good not because it’s an authority but because it helps answer these questions:
Asking those questions is far more important than fact-checking articles.
If that standard were adopted, I think the community would quickly shift from a news source to a propaganda source. I suspect the community would fail, or least be abandoned by those who genuinely want to understand what’s happening in the world.
We’re already inundated with propaganda from Western sources. The NYT article in question cites almost exclusively from IDF or IDF-backed sources.
I think the “where” does matter as certain publications have standards and editorial review for their publications for journalistic integrity. Major news outlets like The Guardian, the NY Times, etc. should have some assumption of higher merit than say Business Insider or The Hill (not necessarily bad sources, but they lack rigor and often rely on other news orgs reporting as a source).
I also think we should do more to limit articles that use those sources as their primary source. I hate articles from site Y saying site X is reporting blah blah. Usually that is because site Y doesn’t have a paywall, but this community should prioritize primary sources.
MBFC seems like a good minimum standard. I find it usually comes into play as a rule when someone is posting propaganda or sensationalism from fringe websites.
If a story is not being reported in any better quality source then maybe it’s just not factual and newsworthy?
I would prefer a whitelist rather than a blacklist because there are so many low quality “news” blogs out there. But it still begs the question of who will choose and how they will make the decision. It risks placing a big burden on the mods, a lot of unnecessary bans for arguing with mods about decisions that they maybe shouldn’t be in the position to make.
Why pit the users and mods against each other unnecessarily and risk creating an echo chamber rather than a news aggregator. I trust people here to find and elevate interesting stories that I wouldn’t get from just, say, an RSS feed. I would guess that’s a big reason a lot of people follow.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, but only interviews IDF sources.
Classic.
OP: These are the kinds of people that want to toss out MBFC – liars who are happy to fall back on fiction when reality doesn’t serve their agenda.
Oh wow the Pulitzer prize which is awarded by… Colombia University!
Guess what those guys reached the front page of “Democracy Now!” for two days ago? That’s right! Being filthy Zionists!
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/27/campus_palestine_exception
So… all of Columbia University and… all recipients of the Pulitzer Prize are now “filthy Zionists”?
I’m not sure that Gettleman’s reporting on famine and war in East Africa was part of a vast Zionist conspiracy…
What? Did you actually read the article? The top brass of Colombia University are “filthy Zionists”. They actively harassed and censored pro Palestine students. And Zionists are not to be harmed of course that would be anti semitic.
Thus if they are the ones that decide who receive a prize it has influence on their decision making. A Zionist institution giving medals to a Zionist media outlet is meaningless.
Are you one of those people that takes Obamas Nobel “Peace” Prize seriously as well?
I’m not sure how a deny/allow list would work on a site by site basis, considering the post in this example was from The New York Times. Would you propose blocking all submissions from NYT?
Blacklist will be used for the most egregious offenders such as OANN and Epoch Times.
In the future, I would like to implement submission statements to make sure people actually read the articles they are posting here and acknowledge there that what they are posting might be unreliable. I’m a big proponent of using hard facts and evidence to back up all claims regardless of who wrote the article, and this in my opinion should be the standard going forward.
The point of using credible news sources is that they are expected to do that work to a high journalistic standard before publication. I trust the worst New York Times Reporter a thousand times more than anon111lulz@lemm.wtf, no matter what evidence they might bring to prove or disprove a New York Times article. Making determination of facts and evidence the responsibility of the users, myself included, doesn’t seem like a recipe for anything good. I am not a trained journalist and you shouldn’t expect me as a user to be able to operate to journalistic standards. If we can’t trust journalism, then why are we following a news sharing sub?
The wisdom of the crowd is not the same as mob rule.