Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
The real challenge is "how do users can judge what is a fake news?". In a similar situation it is an extremely difficult task even for newspapers with journalists on the field. See what's happening with the blame-shifting on the bombing of Gaza's hospital.
Even guardian and bbc have trouble understanding where is the truth.
A solution could be filtering the sources (for instance, no unknown blogs, or the sun and fox News, only reputable sources such as guardian and bbc). But important real news might be missed in this case, that are direct testimony of journalists on the field. And supposedly reputable sources such as wsj or similar are also known to have shared fake news, particularly when it comes to this conflict. And also reputable sources are biases.
It is an extremely difficult topic. No one has a definitive answer unfortunately.
I would be in favor of filtering at least the widely known sources of fake news (shady blogs, all Murdock's media and so on)
Edit. An adjective to clarify
You say wsj is reputable, and then suggest filtering Murdoch. Murdoch bought wsj in 2007.
I don't put wsj as reputable. I meant that even a journal considered reputable as wsj has been found publishing fake news in the past. That's why I say that I am pro filtering all Murdoch's media
Edit. I added an adjective in the original comment to make it clearer
People need to learn to admit to themselves that "I don't know enough" and "I'll refrain to the best of my ability from passing judgment when I don't know enough".
Yeah, the heavy emotion-inducing nature of propaganda is there to push you into "taking a position" (and real news often also have a strong emotion-inducing component, but if they're honest it's not going to be a constant "appeal to emotion" like propaganda) so it's hard to fight oneself on this on such an emotionally feeble principle as "I shall not take stands on shit I don't know", but at least try it.
(And, by the way, this is also a "message to self").
My own experience in political parties (not in the US, by the way, so don't presume, dear reader) has shown me things like, for example, in big party conferences when asked to vote on various things almost nobody actually goes for "I abstain" even when some of those things are of the "very few people are qualified to pass judgment on this" kind. I remember this situation of voting for various suggestions to add to the party electoral program, were in an audience of over 1000 people maybe 3 or 4 would actually abstain once in a while.
Having lived in various countries in Europe, I don't think this difficulty in admiting "I don't know enough to make a choice here" is a local cultural phenomenon.