Meta (lemm.ee)

Hello, OP here and I just circled back to this. I want to clarify that I personally used the word disinformation and never used the word misinformation. These are different.

Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.

I think the majority of people are ok with interacting with people who are misinformed. We've all been misinformed on various topics at different times in our lives. The community in question, however, and communities like it, exist for the sole purpose of spreading lies to cause harm to individuals or society. I probably should not have used the words "right wing" in my post but the majority of communities spreading harmful disinformation right now tend to be right wing. The admins removed the community and I take that as a sign that they will remove other disinformation communities as well, including but not limited to right wing communities.

The community in question had links to known disinformation sites. I and others reported these posts. I included links to sources identifying those websites as disinformation sites. The moderator of that community "resolved" the reports without removing the content, which I have since confirmed does remove it from the admin queue. Herein lies a serious problem. A bad actor can conceivably post a bunch of intentionally misleading information and links, then clear reports to hide it from the admins and there is no clear way to report a community or mod who is acting in bad faith. I was also unable to find anything in the instance guidelines that specifically outlined a stance on disinformation, which was concerning especially given that the mod was "resolving" reports in that way.

I'm not really looking for a lot of further discussion as I think the difference between dis and misinformation is important and that seems to have initially been misunderstood by some people. I would hope that the admins make an official clarification on the issue but since they removed the community I think that makes the position clear and any further discussion, if anyone wants to be on an instance that hosts disinformation communities, should be directed to the admins.

Again, this isn't about misinformation as we have all experienced "being wrong". Anyone who has been misinformed and is interacting with the wider community on good faith will generally listen when someone gives them some valid information to the contrary. People spreading disinformation are acting in bad faith and will continue intentionally spreading known lies. This distinction is important to my original post and I just wanted to clarify for anyone who happens in here.