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What can we do, as lemmy users, to fight fake news being pushed in the platform? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by YourEmptyWallet to c/asklemmy

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally, I block anything related to news&politics on the fediverse (same on reddit).

Humans have a structural problem with any system that allows voting on the visibility of headlines. It encourages outrage, populism, attention grabbing headlines while discouraging more refined factual discussions. Kinda like tabloid journalism.
Reddit has the same problem and way worse, but with enough time it will happen here too.

Most users read the headline before giving their own opinion, not many take their time to read a majority of other comments and the least amount of users actually read the linked article (which is to be honest also often the fault of the quality of an article, i.e. being too long, boring and partially ai-generated).

This results in the most lukewarm most agreeable opinions being top comments, while they're also oftentimes being uninformed.

This is just what I gathered from my own personal experience with social media, I don't have any good sources to back up my claims.