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There’s just way too many articles being posted where at best the headline only implies something that isn’t actually true and at worst just plainly lies.
The funny thing is, even the article itself is often already correcting the headline, but I can’t imagine that more than 10% are actually reading every one, which means there’s a constant stream of misinformation being broadcasted. Not every one of these has high stakes, but still.
Here’s two examples that I just came across:
- Signal Denies Existence of Zero-Day Vulnerability on the App | Post. In the article: Someone posted unfounded claims about a vulnerability, Signal investigated but didn’t find anything, the person apologized and took the tweet down.
- Goldman Sachs exec reportedly said Apple Card savings account was a ****ing mistake | Post. In the article: "Mistake" isn't even part of the quote. A person is saying this before it started and that person may not have even been involved in the project after.
And because people are only reading the title, they upvote and move on. Even though the comments set it straight as well. There’s a lot more that I’ve come across. It’s infuriating.
The solution here is actual moderation on news communities, but unfortunately it feels as though 90% of Lemmy subs aren't actively moderated or the mods don't give a shit. So many of them have no rules and no mod presence.
Hi - Beehaw mod here - we very much give a shit. We try to stay on top of things as much as we can, but we're all volunteers with lots of other things going on, and !Technology is our most active community. If you see something that you feel needs attention, please report it with an explanation in the report reason so that we can take a look at it. We don't always take action, but we always look at and evaluate user reports.
What if users find the article itself to be misinformative, is that something moderators will look at if reported with evidence?
I can pretty much guarantee that on beehaw at least, at least one mod will look at any report. As far as what the mod action would be, I think it would depend on the situation. For misinformation that is deceptive and harmful in some way, we have and likely would continue to remove it. For something that is not intending to be deceptive and/or isn't actively harmful, I think I would be more inclined to leave it up and leave it to the community to hash out in the comments. For example, I'd be likely to remove disinfo about Covid vaccines or conspiracy theories about 5g or something, but I probably wouldn't remove a post just because somebody called Linux an OS instead of "GNU plus Linux" or something. But that's just how I would tend to treat this sort of thing. For most mod actions that aren't straightforward, we tend to try and discuss them and get multiple perspectives.
Wanna play media bias bingo?
From https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias
I see a little...
- Spin
- Unsubstantiated Claims
- Sensationalism
- Slant
- Omission of Source Attribution
- Bias by Story Choice and Placement
- Subjective Qualifying Adjectives
- Word Choice
Ok, some of those are a stretch...
Either way, the editors are probably happy, they are clickbaity headlines.
I feel like there was a big push for quantity of content on Lemmy, so everyone set up bots to push content to Lemmy and now we're stuck with a bunch of shitty content on Lemmy lol.
The posts I’ve come across didn’t seem like bot posts