hate twitter, but this is something its community notes gets right. it takes all of two clicks for us to see a removed comment and when it’s “Reason: misinformation” that does nothing to combat the misinformation.
like you don’t have to link articles for obvious stuff like antivaxx shit (though that’s appreciated). but when it’s like deep lore on political parties or terrorist groups, or when the comment is like 80 paragraphs long “reason: misinformation” doesn’t really cut it and doesn’t inform the community of what specific point(s) of information were false.
for all but the most egregious misinformation (such as those encouraging or threatening harm, which should be modded anyway for those reasons), if you can’t link an article in the modlog it’s almost better to leave the comment up and let your community do a paragraph by paragraph fact check for you. otherwise it’s just kind of festering out there unchecked, your servers are still hosting the misinformation, just in modlog form.
i think giving info correcting links was more common in the past so no idk why it’s uncommon now. hoping this can be some friendly constructive criticism :)
Sourcing just shifts the problem to having to verify the source though. Antivax people could easily cite thousands of sources. We’d know there bullshit, but some mod would be stuck needing to vet them.
It’s easy for common misinformation like antivax, but more unusual claims could easily be left around just because they have something seemingly relevant linked.
I don’t disagree with the idea, it just isn’t enough of a fix and would still require a lot of work.