Hello fellow Lemmys. The mod team here at [email protected] has been in discussions about the best approach to ensure we stay unbiased with news during the U.S. Election Cycle.
While we can’t say “don’t point out flaws in candidates” - nor would we want to - we do believe that when you excessively post/comment/reply negative things in News about one person, instead of, say mixing it up about topics, this feels like you are using [email protected] as a propaganda machine.
While propaganda is a normal part of elections, by posting only one topic, about one person, you are abusing the NEWS community for politics, and this could even be seen as election interference. There are other communities that this would fit better.
Doing this will result in posts/comments being deleted (with the option to appeal, of course). Repeat offenders may see temporary bans. Keep doing after that, and you may reach our perma-ban list.
As of right now, this only apples to politics. We don’t plan to extend this to other areas, but that will change as needed.
I hope posters consider posting non newsworthy political stuff to politics instead of here. Especially opinion pieces. Some just flood this community with politics, especially US politics, like there’s not tons of politics communities on lemmy. I appreciate the acknowledgement that this flood is occurring. Not everyone wants to drown in US politics when trying to see what’s happening in the world.
I will say that politics is often newsworthy and this community definitely has a US skew. Those things combined mean we do have a lot of US political content.
I acknowledge that a significant volume of the political content comes from a few specific posters (not gonna name them but I think you know at least one of them). That isn’t necessarily a problem, unless all of the content from a given user is about the same topic. That’s when it approaches propaganda and becomes problematic. Opinion pieces should go on politics-specific pages though, per Rule 6.