Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the "cars" community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won't show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
“I don’t care about politics, but it really bothers me that you guys don’t like Republicans” lol
Maybe don’t cry about people shitting on the party trying to erase people from existence and force women to make health choices they don’t want?
Dehumanising your "enemy" is the first step to be able to kill them
Yeah and that is what I'm talking about. It is frankly disgusting to have to read all this dehumanzing one sided garbage. The comments in this thread are perfect examples of dehumanizing people and using that as a justification for bias. "No reasonable person supports Republicans" and "Republicans have never done anything to garner support from rational people." It is the shift from "we disagree about things that impact our lives" to "you are completely crazy and wrong about everything so you deserve whatever I do to you."
Biased Republicans would say similar things. That you shouldn't complain if Republicans are shitting on Democrats because they're the party that wants to let drag queens molest children and start WW3 in Ukraine or whatever. Normally when two people talk they can realize that the other person is in fact just a person like them and you can be empathic towards each other. This isn't happening though because the people working themselves into a frenzy about "the other" are kept isolated and encouraged to keep going down that path of irrational hatred.
We have social media platforms actively separating people and promoting their thinking that the other side are deranged lunatics who need to be exterminated or severely restricted using the power of the government. This is really wrong and I'm hoping Lemmy can offer an alternative similar to the origins of social media where people could share and talk, that's it, we didn't have heavy handed moderators, admins, and algorithms getting in the middle of everything and creating isolated bubbles of people dehumanizing each other.
It's a false equivalency to compare Republicans saying Democrats support drag queen child molestations or WWIII in Ukraine or whatever and Democrats claiming Republicans want to force women to make health choices.
Because Democrats haven't passed any laws which would allow drag queen child molestation or induce WWIII in Ukraine, while Republicans actively campaigned for and managed to successfully repeal Roe vs Wade.
Like, do you see how one side's accusation has more concrete evidence than the other?
The law hasn't seemed to matter much lately. You could use illegal immigration as an example. The law says it's illegal but Democrats as a party have openly supported people who break this law and generally ignore that it is being broken. Sometimes even encouraging people to break the law in public forum. You could use drug laws as another example. Democrats openly supporting people who use or abuse drugs from a health, safety, social care perspective but ignoring that they're the ones supposedly writing the laws they claim to be protecting people against. Republicans, including Trump, have sort of rebranded into the "party of the law" because of this.
This is relevant because Republicans, as the party of the law, use the law to effect change. The Democrats, as a party that promotes caring for people over the letter of the law, often does not use the law explicitly to effect change. They use interpretation. Therefore your response is that Republicans are passing laws that hurt certain people so it can't be possible that Democrats are similarly bad. Except that ignores things like Biden even having the privilege to deploy troops in Ukraine. It ignores all the things that happen outside of the law and within interpretation of the law and how the courts work in the real world that isn't simply "passing a new law."
Illegal immigration, for the vast majority of our history, has been a misdemeanor. Our nation is founded on white people stealing land. Who are we to refuse others?
I have no idea what you mean about Dems not changing laws though.
There is a difference between "refusing others" and allowing people to illegally enter the country and participate in society getting identification, holdings jobs, etc. In fact I find Democrats support of this disgusting because it is exploitative. They love to have illegal immigrants come here and give them just enough so they can go work on a farm or in a factory but not actually make them citizens capable of obtaining labor protections and not just being fodder for corporations.
Weird, the Dems I know are all talking about those issues of expediting a path to citizenship. Idk which Dems you’re talking to
He isn’t talking to any. He’s regurgitating right wing talking points. His entire argument is in bad faith. He’s a troll.