News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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What about users who clearly aren't literal bots, but seem clearly to be posting in bad faith? I feel like there's going to be a huge grey area between "this needs mod intervention" and "there's nothing hinky about this user's posting"
I completely get the reason for the rule, as it's not a real productive accusation and there's no way to know. I'm one of the people that talk about the shills a lot, but I actually make a deliberate effort (probably without universal success) to draw a distinction between "there are shills here" versus "I think you are being dishonest in some way, and here is why" versus "you are a shill".
Banning the third sounds pretty sensible. Are the first two statements still allowed? Or are those considered uncivil also?
It is blatantly obvious to me that particular users on Lemmy are being some kind of dishonest about their motives. So like an example: Swearing that you want the Democrats to win the election, and you're bringing up bad things about Biden as constructive criticism / so he can fix it and thus not lose the election, but also publishing objectively false disinformation about the Democrats on a very regular, like absurdly regular basis. There are a lot of users who have that weird type of disconnect or other reasons to specifically think they are propaganda accounts of some description. I think it significantly distorts the discussion here in a way which is very much not a good thing.
I actually don't see it being super common that people jump to the accusation of someone being a shill as soon as there's a disagreement. I do think there's such a clear presence of some kind of shilling effort that it's, more or less, universally accepted that it's happening and distorting the discourse. Are we still allowed to talk about it?
Again, while I completely get the reasons for the rule... I feel like a lot of this stuff is hard for mods to be the ones to make mod-action decisions about because it's impossible for anyone with any level of powers to know which users are being honest about who they are. Upvote bots and things are one thing, but I actually don't see that happening all that much (maybe because the mods are on it any time it happens). Just someone making a real account and posting propaganda 10x per day, though... are we saying the mods are going to let that happen (because it's not a bot account) and we the normal users are not allowed to call out those users as doing anything, if in our opinion they're doing it for purposes of propaganda?
Most of what you describe would be a case by case basis. This post applies specifically to calling another user a bot or a shill. Pointing out intellectual dishonesty or hypocrisy can be a part of normal discourse and can be done in a way that respects the civility of the conversation. Some of what you describe could be in violation of other community rules, depending on the details.
The best thing to do if you're unsure about a particular situation is to report it, and mods will review it. You can always message one of us about a situation if you are not sure or require additional clarification. People are allowed to disagree with one another, even vehemently, as long as they do so within the rules of the community.
Hm
Last question I guess; do you feel that misinformation or propaganda is any kind of issue on Lemmy right now? Like if you look at the posts and comments, does the overall conversation “look right” to you in that regard?
If you are speaking of Lemmy as a whole, that is a pretty philosophical question.
Misinformation is a violation of the rules of this community and will be removed.
I was specifically thinking of /c/politics and /c/news on Lemmy.world; probably should have been explicit about that. Philosophy aside and just in your personal opinion / judgement, would you say the overall discourse in those communities right now looks to have any nontrivial amount of misinformation in it?