There’s a new one suddenly popping up in my feed but obviously the reports are being “resolved” by the mods of that community. They suggested to me that I block their community but I will not because that is how you get a cesspit of an instance. How do we report disinformation communities straight to the admins?
Edit: the admins did remove the community in question so I’m going to take that as the official stance on disinformation communities and also assume that any type of community (right wing, left wing, or other) that are intentionally spreading disinformation will be removed. That makes me feel much better about the situation since this type of thing is pretty much guaranteed to pop up again.
The one problem is, specifically with this type of conversation, anyone even in the center is not welcome in the conversation because the echo chamber is so strong that anything even in the center is instantly labeled “misinformation”. Who decides what the difference between “opinion I disagree with” and “misinformation” is? Far too often it’s left to a person or group, be it on the left or the right, that holds that anything they or the most vocal political users disagree with is “dangerous misinformation”. And I tend to notice that unless it’s a specific right-wing instance like explodingheads, anything that’s not on the far left is either down voted to oblivion or outright removed and anyone who posts or says anything positive about it is effectively driven out, including people who argue such things in good faith. That tends to lead to the creation of such instances as explodingheads and attitudes like the people who reside there.
That is a fair point, but I submit its kind of tangential or maybe orthogonal the core topic. The problem of people not being able to discuss controversial topics maturely is not improved by hosting clear bad-faith conversation. That just poisons the well and makes it even harder to hold the good faith conversations.
You don’t wring your hands about throwing out the baby with the bathwater when you’re faced with a bucket of sewage.
But that’s how what I mentioned happens - the vocal users decide that anything that disagrees with them is that “sewage” or “poison”, even if it is legitimate, and then you end up with that echo chamber situation. I would think that proper moderation of political communities would ensure that polite, good-faith argument, regardless of the political leaning of the view, would be allowed, but that’s not how it often happens because of how moderators and vocal users define what good faith argument is, mostly based on whether the argument agrees with their own view.