I’ve found several news communities on Lemmy, and the only ones that I find to be actually well-moderated are the US and World News communities on Beehaw.

Unfortunately, I’ve had random and ongoing federation trouble with Beehaw where posts, and especially comments/replies, would just not appear to/from either side. This has improved with each update to Lemmy, but it still seems to be a problem when Beehaw is busy. Hope it doesn’t sound like I’m throwing shade (I’m not).

Beehaw has also defederated from some larger Lemmy instances because the moderation tools in Lemmy are not sufficient to field such a large number of users. As an instance admin, I totally get that and support their decision. Unfortunately, that leaves those instances without access to a well-moderated, high-standards news feed.

Aside from those on Beehaw, I’ve not been impressed with the moderation and standards other news communities are using. So, in true Lemmy spirit, I started my own.

Fun fact: I contributed to the community rules Beehaw is using for their news communities. I decided to be a little more strict here, though. My reasoning for each rule is explained in detail below.

Let’s just get this out of the way first. I’m not going to say “this source is allowed and that one isn’t” for every possible news entity. That would take forever, and I don’t want to have to cross check every submission against a list.

Sources will be checked against Media Bias Fact Check in order to determine bias and credibility. While this isn’t perfect, it’s a very good and highly rated tool ran by a non-profit organization. If a source’s bias is determined to be too far-left or too far-right or has a low credibility rating, the post will be removed and you’ll be asked to resubmit the story from a more neutral and/or credible source.

Using MBFC as a gauge for each metric, the standards for this community are as follows:

• Bias Rating: Should be no more than left-center or right-center
• Factual Reporting: Should be “High” or “Very High”
• Credibility Rating: Should be “High Credibility” or higher.

All posts must be from a reputable news source that is known to report factually, in good faith, and without significant bias.

I’m not naive, and I would consider very few news sources to be completely unbiased (AP and Reuters are the closest that come to mind). That said, most reputable sources of news will report the facts in good faith and leave the rest up to the reader to decide for themselves.

Reputable sources do not speculate on every topic nor just ask questions™ to the reader. Reputable sources do not tell you how you should feel about a topic or tell you what you should think about it; they merely provide the facts of the situation with the sole purpose of informing the reader.

The good faith part is key here. There are lot of news sources that are technically “news” but are known to operate in bad faith and/or with a highly partisan bias or other agenda. I will not list any specifically, but they are out there, and they are rampant.

Additionally, do not link to tabloids, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media. Those are not news sources. They are rarely, if ever, confirmed or fact checked, have no journalistic standards, and are usually rife with opinion.

If a story is breaking and the only details are coming from a reporter’s social media feed, then the information has likely not been corroborated yet. If they do not link to a full article on their organization’s website, then refrain from linking to the social media post. If the social media post contains a link to an article on their organization’s website, you may link to that so long as it is from a source within the community guidelines for bias, factual reporting, and credibility.

The post title must match the headline, and you should not editorialize in the post body. Any opinions you have about the news story should be in the comments.

Posts must have the original article source as the post URL.

Let’s face it. Many of us are busy and often don’t bother to read the entire article. We’ll just scroll through a news feed, look at the headlines, and add the tidbit of information in the headline to our collective knowledge.

The danger with that is that those headlines may be from a non-reputable news source which is fully aware of that habit and seeks to exploit it with sensationalized titles, misrepresented facts, or bad faith questions.

In the feed, the source URL is directly adjacent to the headline/title, so having an indicator of the headline’s source, front and center, is an easy way to quickly discern where the information is coming from and whether it should be trusted.

If you use an archive or other paywall-bypassing link as the post URL, the source becomes obfuscated. That allows a tabloid headline to carry the same weight as one from a reputable source.

This is what we are seeking to avoid with this rule.

Similarly, do not include your own image even if the post image fails to load. The source URL will be that of the image and not the article which will prevent the source from being apparent.

To include an archive link that sidesteps a paywall, include that in the top of the post body.

Finally, do not link to shortened links that often appear on social media. Those similarly obfuscate the source, though not as badly as archive links. Always open the short link in a browser and use the full URL when posting.

Be civil in the comments. No hate speech, bigotry, racism, “just asking questions™”, or any dog-whistle versions of any of that.

Do not include bot-generated summaries of the article in the post or in the comments. Let people read for themselves.

Bot summaries are hit or miss and often leave out nuance, perspective, or other pertinent details that are important to the story.

If someone prefers a bot to TL;DR things for them, then they’ll likely already have some plugin/process of their own to do that. Leave them to their process and allow the rest of us to read the articles as the authors intended.