Ask Lemmy

Honestly, I think the only true antidote to this sort of thing is to foster spaces in which people of vastly different opinions and positions can come together and communicate in a civil and genuine fashion. Pushing back on biases and presumptions through antagonistic or challenging conversations seems the only tried and true method we have for getting to the "truth" (or, more realistically, how little we know of or can grasp the actual truth whatever it may be).

It's hard, especially online and many just don't have the behavioural and cognitive muscles for it at all and very few in the world are actually strong at it.

Moreover, the moderation task would be monumental, which is why I'd think there'd have to be community buy-in from users/members and a grass roots enforcement of the ideals of the space as well as probably a good amount of gate-keeping unfortunately.

Additionally, I suspect that the technology of the platform actually has a role to play in fostering such a space. The technology is never a complete solution, but I think in such heated environments what's missing from real life are contextual and gestural cues and meta data that we can all use to moderate how reception and reaction to any statement. Social media basically allows for none of that. But there's no reason that we can't try to represent a post/comment/statement in some way that tries to capture the sentimental and gestural context it is being made from. I think this is an example of modern technology actually losing sight of the mission of humanising technology.

EDIT: It would be an interesting idea for a lemmy instance, to try to foster such a space. Maybe it has no users of its own, just communities? When it comes to gate keeping, it'd be cool of lemmy allowed invite only community subscriptions or something similar.

First step would be tagging posts/comments, to clearly separate ones meant as pure opinion from ones meant as a factual claim. Then tagging for sourced/unsourced/disputed/misleading/omitting crucial details, etc. claims. Then tagging things like how confident the poster feels about what they're saying (e.g. from "I heard it somewhere" to "I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions")

Then you would need easy to inspect metadata showing the sourcing chain all the way to the origin. And ability to comment on that (e.g. if some source's claims are misinterpreted and the source doesn't actually claim the thing).

Then you would need the people to actually care about facts, even if the facts go against their existing beliefs or preferences.

Also people need to be able to think more with varying degrees of uncertainty built-in, not just "this is definitely true"/"this is definitely false" (unless there is enough material to back that up).

conclostion

Nice.

Drown it out with even faker news

Maybe one could set up instances that won't allow submission of posts until they have a comment history of X over a Y period of time. The problem could become problematic as the site is trying to build content and users.

There is a certain compilation of rules/norms (which I'm surprised so many people don't know about) called The Ten E-cepts (written there in the style of the philosopher Philo) which were made for anyone who may be considered a frequent browser. Commandment three points to something vital, that there's no measure for that kind of thing. Regarding this kind of thing, each person must decide the difference and have it held to them.

A funny but also sad story related to this. Now everyone has probably heard of the Guinness book of world records, which holds all the world's records people achieve and was made because drunk nerds in the bars in the UK (hence its name) would argue about world firsts all the time (true story). So I mentioned how I have the world record for the most websites having signed up for, and I got a triad of people at one point say they discredit the program, which turned into an argument over the apologetics and counter-apologetics of Guinness. And at the end of the argument I said something like "to anyone reading this from the Tilted Kilt, drunk arguments may resume", because apparently nobody is safe.

Can you give examples of what you’re talking about?

I have written here just a few days ago what we can do:

https://lemmy.world/comment/4402223

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.

It comes back to the same problems we have always had, governments/corporations pushing whatever they can to accomplish what they want.

It is now more apparent than ever that many stories are lies.

Which results in more wars ans censorship, you don't have to believe me on any of this, you just need to look at the leaks of the past decades.

When exposing crimes gets you blacklisted, Julian Assange and many more before him, you know that the government is as corrupt as any other organizations.

Criticial thinking and getting out of your bubble can help expand your views on subjects and topics.

What are people talking about vs. what is not, what is being censored, who is beimg smeared for talking out of the status quo.

In the end, it seems like a means to divide the people into tribal/group disputes. Instead, we should try and come together on what we agree on.

Nothing, you’d have to remove all of the users. There’s way too many viewpoints. People seem to be fine with fake news so long as it’s what they want to hear. If it’s something they don’t want to hear then it becomes fake news to them.