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.

  • @[email protected]OP
    -1•1 year ago

    Hello, OP here and I just circled back to this. I want to clarify that I personally used the word disinformation and never used the word misinformation. These are different.

    Misinformation is false or inaccurate information—getting the facts wrong. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead—intentionally misstating the facts.

    I think the majority of people are ok with interacting with people who are misinformed. We’ve all been misinformed on various topics at different times in our lives. The community in question, however, and communities like it, exist for the sole purpose of spreading lies to cause harm to individuals or society. I probably should not have used the words “right wing” in my post but the majority of communities spreading harmful disinformation right now tend to be right wing. The admins removed the community and I take that as a sign that they will remove other disinformation communities as well, including but not limited to right wing communities.

    The community in question had links to known disinformation sites. I and others reported these posts. I included links to sources identifying those websites as disinformation sites. The moderator of that community “resolved” the reports without removing the content, which I have since confirmed does remove it from the admin queue. Herein lies a serious problem. A bad actor can conceivably post a bunch of intentionally misleading information and links, then clear reports to hide it from the admins and there is no clear way to report a community or mod who is acting in bad faith. I was also unable to find anything in the instance guidelines that specifically outlined a stance on disinformation, which was concerning especially given that the mod was “resolving” reports in that way.

    I’m not really looking for a lot of further discussion as I think the difference between dis and misinformation is important and that seems to have initially been misunderstood by some people. I would hope that the admins make an official clarification on the issue but since they removed the community I think that makes the position clear and any further discussion, if anyone wants to be on an instance that hosts disinformation communities, should be directed to the admins.

    Again, this isn’t about misinformation as we have all experienced “being wrong”. Anyone who has been misinformed and is interacting with the wider community on good faith will generally listen when someone gives them some valid information to the contrary. People spreading disinformation are acting in bad faith and will continue intentionally spreading known lies. This distinction is important to my original post and I just wanted to clarify for anyone who happens in here.

    • shootwhatsmynameEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      A few things wrong with what you said:

      1. You did use the word “misinformation” in the comment I was replying to:

      We’re talking about a community that is dedicated to posting misinformation and apparently trolling.

      1. The definition of misinformation I used in my previous comment includes “deliberate deception” and matches your definition of disinformation, so if I’m not mistaken we are actually on the same page there and my points are still relevant to the discussion.

      I totally agree there needs to be a good way to report communities to admins. I also think vote manipulation, making multiple accounts, brigading, automated posting, and other ways of manipulating the system to push an opinion should be prohibited.

      What I don’t agree with is removing communities for “disinformation.” What’s happening is:

      1. Those community mods banned you because you posted “disinformation”
      2. You want the community removed because they are posting “disinformation”

      I think there’s an inherent flaw with our definitions of truth here. If you say one thing is truth, and some community mods say another thing is truth, how do we decide which voice is silenced on lemm.ee?

      This might be a hard one to digest, but please genuinely consider it: I think we are mis-labeling opinion and calling it truth without realizing it. Calling your own opinion absolute truth is a very dangerous game to play when you are making decisions for other people (read history to learn more). And, like I initially pointed out, moderating an entire instance based on opinion doesn’t seem to line up with a “general purpose” instance like lemm.ee in my opinion. Do you think that’s plausible?

      I know you said you don’t want to discuss further, but it’s hard to learn from you if you don’t converse or answer questions. If you have specific thoughts or disagreements on any points I’ve made, I’d appreciate hearing them