this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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Memes of Production
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the “ML” influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Excellent. Even more time left over to share the source of the information – that you know before posting the meme because why else would you post the meme unless you know it's true?
Knowing the source and posting the source are two different things. Posting memes doesn't seem like much effort until you're doing it regularly, at which point digging up a source and posting it in a readable manner becomes much more troublesome. An extra 2 minutes added to a task that takes 3 minutes starts to add up when you're doing 10 tasks per day.
"Be prepared to back yourself up if disputed" is necessary; "You have to pre-emptively post the source" not so much.
Normally I'd agree and wouldn't bitch about it elsewhere if someone were just posting, say, an interesting, innocuous history/science/etc. fact. I routinely try to supplement sourcing on posts where it seems lacking (helps me learn too; it's mostly not altruistic), and in the rare event I criticize sourcing on those kinds of posts, I like to think it's pretty tepid unless it's blatantly egregious like "posting a Discord link to a news community". I still think they should post it pre-emptively/give some context,* but I won't begrudge them for not grasping an importance you kind of have to be "traumatized" into internalizing.
In the case of the OP, I know they're "memes" and that makes it sound innocent, but what they post to Lemmy is a flood of ancom (ansoc?) propaganda – over 30 (not counting normal posts) in the last 24 hours, just as a sanity check that this isn't a cognitive bias seeing more than there are. I align with OP ideologically in a lot of ways, and that won't stop me from holding them to the same standard I'd hold any other propagandist to (which, again, is 90% of the reason they're here). This kind of widespread, coddling, "just memes bro" treatment of digital propaganda leaflets is actively unraveling society; when used by the far-right, in the US alone, "just memes" got Trump elected twice and completely rotted whatever crumbs were left of Republicans' brains. The profound intellectual laziness that this kind of junk food propaganda perpetuates is terrifying to me, and it even seems like the OP is themself a victim of that.
Sourcing isn't just a crutch for the incurious and a shortcut for the curious; it establishes a standard whereby the incurious learn to appreciate sourcing – because they can easily access it if they may not know how, call out the OP if they're wrong instead of blindly accepting, adopt good practices in their own posts, and expect others to do the same. It has a legitimate healing effect in the nigh-apocalyptic media literacy crisis we're all living through. By contrast, not including sourcing in your barrage of political propaganda has a serious harmful effect on that standard – namely, normalizing a subconscious assumption that taking propaganda at face value as long as you agree with it is totally cool and not horrifically, societally dangeorus.
Like I know this sounds dramatic, but also *gestures broadly at the world on fire right now*
* (or slow down the pace of their posts if it's that much of a burden; people vastly underestimate how important verifiability/the ability to dig deeper is, and you [general "you"; you have overall good practices] don't have to spew an avalanche of posts if you can't maintain quality)
See man, I disagree. I know what it is to try to fucking jumpstart a comm on a site that's already lacking in power users. OP is trying to breathe sustainable life into a left-posting comm that isn't leftymemes, wherein disagreeing with tankie orthodoxy will catch you a ban.
Deceptichum isn't posting 30 a day into random comms, or even a variety of comms. It's very clearly an attempt to get the juices flowing in this comm, which itself was founded by Deceptichum earlier this year. This comm, which is for leftist memes (or propaganda, if you prefer) to begin with. Anything that's not disinformation shouldn't have people kvetching for a source, and if it is disinformation, it shouldn't be posted in the first place. If you have examples of the latter not being called out, by all means, call them out - otherwise, this is a request for an unpaid volunteer for the site's activity to take more of their time and energy to cater to a minority audience demand that does not have a significant effect on the local media ecosystem.
I really don't think sourcing does what you claim it does. The people who are incurious will not check the source, nor will they feel it become normalized to check the source. Fuck, man, sourcing in most journalism outlets was not cited long before this media literacy crisis; I'm pretty sure the foundations of it are elsewhere than "They stopped making citations."
My perspective is that it's complicated – not a singular foundation, but a major component in a disastrous feedback loop. Lemmy's news comms, for example, require a (usually quality or quality-enough) source, yet there are constantly comments that aren't just wrong in that they lacked additional outside context, misread part of the article, maybe stopped midway through, think the article is wrong, just have some overriding bias, etc., but that they read the headline, said "fuck it, we ball", and wrote 300 words that are totally disproven by the first 100 words of the article; sources clearly aren't a panacea.
A decade of editing Wikipedia, I think – not remotely some prestigious, exclusive, disciplined experience – has given me a unique perspective on sourcing that's very divorced from the general public's (which at best is usually "yeah, that's a good thing to do because it's a good thing to do") but also somewhat divergent from traditionally citation-heavy fields like academia because of both the target audience and inherently near-zero-trust environment. It's really weird, and the scare quotes around "traumatized" were kind of poking fun at my own experience. Ten years ago, I felt like citations were a tertiary concern that you tacked on at the end out of obligation if someone forced you to; nowadays, for a litany of reasons, sourcing to me is at least coequal with the contents of a work. I don't think I'd be so ardent about it if I hadn't undergone such a huge change.*
It's hard sometimes to keep that passion in, so I try to let it shine through in the form of setting what I think is a positive example (or sometimes taking research way the fuck overboard in a way that's probably an unrealistic example). However, in the case of the OP – for whom I don't think "mainly one comm" holds any water given everything on the threadiverse shows up on 'All' – I don't just hope they do better, but I outright expect them to if they're going to be shoveling dozens of political propaganda leaflets onto the threadiverse's front page every day. Regardless of their beliefs, this isn't some casual "uwu I just want to share my politics" couple posts a day on a toilet break thing; this is a dedicated, months-long, obsessive propaganda effort with hundreds upon hundreds of posts. I wasn't just being smarmy in my earlier comment about them having more time to include a source upon finding out they don't make these. The fact that they're not even creating these themselves makes it simultaneously more imperative they include a source (because I'mma be honest, chief, I don't think they're actually verifying almost any of this shit even for themselves) and even less onerous than it already minimally was.
* I always have to recognize that this is partly because it is much easier for me now to find and cite sources because I'm so much more practiced than I was. I keep that at the front of my mind when I see others' work and think it's undercited.