The sole moderator doesn’t even follow their own rules: https://lemmy.ca/post/22741340?scrollToComments=true
I’ll just say it - it’s a Russian propaganda community. Is there any reason this community needs to exist on Lemmy.ca? Is there a rule against blatant astroturfing / propaganda / misinformation? I don’t think the 5 rules in the sidebar are going to be enough to stop an army of trolls:
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, > or xenophobia. Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here. No porn. Use the NSFW tag when needed. No Ads / Spamming. Bot accounts need to be flagged as such in their settings.
Maybe time to get ahead of it?
I’m not too knowledgeable about the c/geopolitics community because it wasn’t my cup of tea and I blocked it early on. But I interact with the mod/user in question on [email protected] and [email protected]. I’m pretty confident they’re an individual who follows the Toronto Maple Leafs and lives in Toronto and not a bot account or professional propaganda account or anything like that. You might find their politics view objectionable. I can’t really speak to that. You can block communities you don’t want to see in your feeds
Yeah I blocked him/ them after the mod insisted that Russia is a “down right democratic nation”, and then didn’t meaningfully engage with any of my followup/ clarifying questions.
That’s not a political view, that’s an alternate reality.
I’m actually opposed to banning the community though. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. As you suggest, Just block it and get on with your life.
Literally nobody backs up what they say with any decent reason. You only call it out when you don’t already agree with it.
You don’t have to be a professional to parrot Russian propaganda. How it works is they find a sympathetic ear, and then spoon feed this garbage content with them with the knowledge that someone will post it. Sometimes the content is targeted, other times it’s just pushed through these low quality / fake news sites and then gets picked up on social media and spreads. Sometimes the content starts out neutral-ish, then they build up this pro-Russian slant over time, slowly mixing in all this nonsense. No propaganda feed (for any nation) is 100% propaganda - it’s going to be 20% real news, 20% opinion, 20% opinions parroting Russian state media, etc. etc. It’s similar to the magic mix Facebook gives you in your feed.
Beyond the main issue that this thinly-veiled propaganda community is going to attract the wrong audience and expose the existing/future audience here to utter bullshit, I take specific issue that the end goal is to undermine the security of our fucking country. Russia has been fighting a cyber and information war against us for over a decade and we can’t just look away and pretend it’s harmless. Between allowing state sanctioned cybercriminals to flourish and attack our hospitals with ransomware, to trying to undermine democracy across the globe, we need to step up our game and put our foot down against this shit because it’s going to get a lot worse, and the sooner we nip it in the bud, the better.
And I remember when Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter turned a blind eye to blatant astroturfing and widespread manipulation from around 2015-2020, pretending their sites weren’t overrun with inauthentic behaviour. The lesson from that is that you need to take disinformation and coordinated manipulation seriously if you want to have a viable community on the internet. Lemmy.ca has to get in front of this stuff. (who am I kidding - Reddit and Twitter are still at least 50% bots.)
If everyone on Lemmy thought in such broad, sensationalist strokes and/or identified as a passive consumer of information, then maybe gatekeeping acceptable and unacceptable ideas above and beyond hate speech might make sense (as it might on FB and other mainstream social media platform).
Personally, I don’t need information to be censored to help me identify truth. I take great pride and responsibility in my critical thinking skills. If the range of ideas acceptable to post on Lemmy were restricted to those acceptable to our mainstream media, this would cease being an intellectually engaging platform.
I really hope we don’t need to put up the same kind of cognitive bumpers on here as on other platforms because our userbase lacks critical thinking skills. But the more users who abdicate responsibility for critical thinking, the more we’ll be pushed in that direction
Can you clarify what you perceive as sensationalist about what I wrote? Based on the number of upvotes this thread has, I’m not the only one that thinks this way. (My tax dollars are currently going to fighting cybercrime sponsored by Russia, fighting Russian disinformation campaigns, and providing materiel to fight the Russian military.)
Me too, but as I mentioned in another thread, the issue is that not everybody is gifted with those same critical thinking skills, and the impact on those less equipped can be catastrophic. (see: pizzagate shooting)
I do think we disagree on this here - For me, mainstream media is primarily good journalism where information is fact-checked and vetted. (Don’t forget there’s libel laws that keep journalists in check too in most countries.) Opinions and editorials represent the views of the writers or newspaper. Every organization has a slant in what they choose to cover and find newsworthy, you just need to be aware of it. With this in mind, I don’t see mainstream media as a bad thing at all or something that needs to be rebelled against. It serves a different purpose from Lemmy.
Where I see Lemmy being useful and interesting is as a news aggregator with insightful discourse in the comments that’s not dominated by inauthentic behaviour. Reddit is completely flooded and driven by marketers and bots, where the content and discourse quality have become low and repetitive, which seems to be the end state of 2000-2010 era social media platform.
Blocking and not calling out bullshit is actually a problem because it allows malicious users to freely spread their bullshit without any opposing views. This makes those views seem more widespread and legitimate than they actually are.
You seem very quick to want to censor, and not too concerned with whether the content is malicious or just bullshit. Making baseless positive claims about Russia (for example) is certainly not hate speech. I don’t see how it’s malicious. I agree there’s a good chance it’s bullshit. Wanting to censor rather than block what’s seen as bullshit to some also carries problems for growing a democratic community.
This thread has conflated a legitimate question of whether our sidebar rules are appropriately worded with do we like the community in question or not.
Perhaps a good focus is on misinformation. Can we define it, do we want to handle it in a certain way on this instance? Perhaps imagining how we’d want to handle a community/user/mod that posts baseless conspiracy theories in general is a good thought experiment
Ah. Just to clarify, I was not talking about this specific community in OP’s post, but the practice of blocking in general. There have been studies showing the negative effects of blocking on communities by allowing negative / malicious content to go unchecked
“Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
I’ll post a longer reply later when I have time, but I agree with you.
I don’t think his posts are Russian troll farm style, they’re just not anti russian. I personally am strongly anti censorship, and would rather people engage in discussion instead of just being “ban this community cause I don’t agree with them”. If that’s the way someone feels, they can block at the account level. I don’t want lemmy.ca to turn into yet another echo chamber, we all win when diverse ideas and opinions come together.
Sidebar rules are something we’re talking about now as a result of this, I think the “no misinfornation” rule is a good idea but I worry about how difficult it may be to implement.
I didn’t see any misinformation in the geopolitics community when I looked, but if I missed something then please feel free to flag it to me.
Your comments about anti censorship in the past have helped me form my thoughts about what makes the most sense on Lemmy. Banning certain ideas here that aren’t hateful or malicious is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
Reminding people that they can ban communities and users is a good idea.
I imagine there could be a pre-existing taxonomy for online moderation of what’s misinformation vs low-quality posts vs hate speech that we might be able to use. If I find something useful, I’ll share it.
I don’t know if there’s any value to this, but would a stickied thread about the community in question where people can hopefully describe their objections a little better help? Like, what beyond being pro-Russian and having low-quality information do you find problematic with the community? Is deception involved? If the content is just YT videos that others (ie, not the community mod) have created, I don’t see that as deception. Even though I would block it, I wouldn’t be in favour of banning a pro-Donald Trump community (as an example).
If 50, 75, or 90% of users on an instance block a community, would that hinder moderation to catch instances of misinformation that did pop up? (I’m just asking as some have raised that as a concern, and I don’t know if that’s legitimate or not)
All I’m going to say is: Does having this community/content around, on Lemmy.CA (the defacto Canadian instance), make this a better community? Is this going to attract the audience we want on the site? Is this the type of content we want to expose that audience to?
I don’t think the lemmy.ca admins or most of it’s users want the instance to take on the responsibility/experience of being an instance where there’s a prescribed view of acceptable and unacceptable (banned) content, above and beyond objectively objectionable stuff. Curb appeal as an argument doesn’t sway me. But if curb appeal or who we’re attracting is a concern, I’d point out that most of the posts in that community are very downvoted, so to some extent Lemmy’s existing checks and balances are working as intended to limit newcomers’ exposure to a less popular community
I can respect this take. I do worry that burying problematic content isn’t enough these days though. Even if only 2% of the visitors on this site see the content, all it takes is one person to believe there’s a demonic child trafficking ring and then you have someone shooting up a pizza joint. Not everyone who uses the internet has all their faculties and I think that’s an argument for going further than just burying the content. (I suspect we’ll start seeing more pressure on YouTube and Facebook to go further than they have too with regards to problematic content like this.)
Edit: I also think that as platforms have become more strict about their community guidelines, the effectiveness of grand, overt disinformation campaigns has diminished, so bad actors’ strategies are switching to more subtle, softer disinformation campaigns.
Some random thoughts on this for a second…
Is lemmy.ca a community? Or is it just a grouping of communities?
Is lemmy.ca the community or is it all of federated lemmyverse that’s the community?
I would lean towards all of lemmy being the community, since a users likely lean towards browsing all rather than local. I know the regular users I interact with are global, not just our users. They all contribute to the sense of community in a larger sense than just our instance.
Given the community feeling is maybe not specific to an instance, does every /c/ needs to contribute to that specific instances sense of community?
Here’s a test somebody performed on Reddit. While not 100% the same mechanics, it illustrates how lack of opposition affects how a post is perceived.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/sdcsx3/testing_reddits_new_block_feature_and_its_effects/
The problem isn’t about moderation, the problem is with moving the Overton window, as neutral parties start seeing a lack of viewpoints from one side of the discussion, and viewpoints from the other side getting upvoted and significantly more visibility.
We can agree to disagree. I don’t want to see any policing of an Overton window on Lemmy. I just want hate speech and credibly malicious actors removed
Your hate speech is somebody else’s Overton window
There are hundreds of legal documents from around the world (with a fair amount of consistency) that we could use to define hate speech with legal precision. Overton window is a political concept a few decades old that is not without its criticism. “It’s all relative” doesn’t meaningfully apply here.
Hearing your thoughts has given me ideas on how personal characteristics relate to a preference of leaning in favour of removing content over protecting free speech. So, I appreciate the dialogue. You might enjoy this related paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2210666120
How do you block communities? I’ve just been blocking users
Depends on whether you’re using an app or website, but there should be a way regardless
I use the web interface. The block button is at the top right of a community’s page. If you use an app it might be in a slightly different place