• Cruxifux@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I really hate when I hear about things getting the media blackout treatment, and the reason I know about them is because I heard about them from mainstream media sources.

      • EdibleFriend@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s always some stupid shitty little website like OP is linking trying to convince people that they’re the only ones sharing the truth. He spammed this shit in a few different subs too.

        • Synnr
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          8 months ago

          Looking further into the website, especially the category descriptions, it’s largely AI written and looks like a propaganda website like masses created and spread during the last 2 American election seasons.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Unfortunately, I’ve seen a lot of this crap on this community.

            Maybe we need a bot to do a cursory search for more trusted sources for a given topic.

            • Synnr
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              8 months ago

              Unfortunately it’s election season in the US, so any sources of conversation will be overtaken by bad actors. That means any politics subs, news subs, and especially US Politics subs. A whitelist could work but it would take a lot of work and make a lot of users mad, they tried on Reddit for a few subs and the list of allowed sites was huge. Then you also have people asking, can Fox News be blacklisted? And if it’s not, the propagandists will shift their strategy from fake websites to websites with low integrity like Fox and make the article fit their ‘opinion’… It’s a neverending cat and mouse game where the only strategy that works is well-trained moderators, and only if the bots (read: bot farms, humans) aren’t vying for a mod position as soon as it opens, which they will be.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                8 months ago

                Yeah, I really liked /r/neutralnews, which had a whitelist (for posts) and a blacklist (for comments), and anything else was taken on a case-by-case basis.

                And the problem isn’t just because it’s election season (but it’ll get worse), it was also a problem when I joined last summer. It’s a “tons of leftists on lemmy.ml” problem posting sketching sources that serves whatever their agenda is.

                That said, I don’t think we should necessarily have a blacklist (and certainly not with lemmy as-is), but a bot with a large whitelist of sources pulled from /r/neutralnews that provides alternatives would be awesome (bonus points if it also archives the relevant pages). It would basically do a search with the given search terms, pull links from the first 10 or so relevant results, and randomly choose 2-3 that have a high correlation with the posted source (and a link for a search query on DDG or similar for more results).

                Maybe I’ll hack on that, idk. I’ve wanted something like /r/neutralnews since coming here, and I haven’t found anything remotely similar.

                • Synnr
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                  8 months ago

                  If you do end up hacking on it, and can remember to come back and say so, please let me know the name of the sub. Or if you make one now I’ll subscribe and hope to see it show up at some point.