Is Lemmy a biased platform?
Is Lemmy a biased platform?
Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the "cars" community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won't show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
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You're getting downvoted and that's proving your point
If you walk into a room and ask "hey, are you shit?", then someone's going to tell you to fuck off. That doesn't prove your point, because you had it coming.
No, it's more like walking into a room and asking, "Hey, is this a place where we can have free open discussions or are you a biased group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote your views?" then getting the door slammed in your face and told something like the commenter who said "There aren’t two sides to every issue, reasonable people can’t differ on everything." A sort of smarmy response implying that there is no bias, only the truth, and this group is just reasonable people who accept the truth and anyone who won't accept their truth isn't reasonable and therefore isn't welcome.
That's fine and it answers the question. It is a group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote their views. They do not want free and open discussion. They are happy to suppress and censor speech they deem "unreasonable" or similar.
Oh no, Lemmy supports images like this? Garbage.
Also reductionist garbage anyway. How about the freedom of religion and being censored for protesting government mandated closure of places of worship while alcohol stores were allowed to remain open? Is that conservative? It's just one example.
I have Twitter blocked at the network level. Whenever I see a screenshot of a Twitter post I know it's literally the stupidest thing you could imagine. You didn't let me down. Also the whole screen shotted Twitted posts making a claim about conservatives that is easily refuted if conservatives were actually allowed to talk is peak Reddit.
Feel good, makes you laugh, hate your neighbor content. Just be sure you don't show it to your neighbor they might say some things that confuse you. Believe me this isn't unique to Democrats the same Twitter screen shot psy ops are run against conservatives. Look, some random person said this, let's talk about it like that is what all X's say and believe. Look, some random person said this, let's talk about it and how it's so true.
Screen shots of comments on Twitter being reposted is.. very disturbing. For reasons that go far beyond the stupidity of American politics.
I feel like you've mistaken "disagrees with you and says as much" for "authoritarian control." You're perfectly welcome to have a different view on whether you should stick your hand into an open flame, but don't be surprised if people say it's not a reasonable opinion. Maybe I'm just biased against sticking hands into fire, though.
Not at all, that's why it is a platform question. Obviously the users are biased that isn't my question.
How is that proving their point?
The question was wherher "Lemmy" was deliberately and unnaturally biased, akin to a car forum that was biased entirely toward Ford and against Chevy.
There is no mechanism by which that could even be accomplished here, since there's over 1,000 individual instances, each subject only to the authority of their individual owners.
So the answer to the OP's question is and can only be "no," simply because it's literally impossible for it to be otherwise - there is no mechanism by which any such lemmy-wide bias could be imposed or enforced nor is there anyone with the authority to do so.
So clearly, if the downvotes prove anything at all it's something else.
I would say that, as far as the OP's thinly veiled concern-trolling goes, it's fairly obvious that what they prove, if snything, is that bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums, even in the absence of mechanisms by which it might be enforced or people with the authority to enforce it.
You might do well to honestly consider why that might be the case.
bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums
Is that why 4chan is the way it is? Is that why Twitter shifted hard to the right when people stopped being banned? I don't think it proved that at all.
All it proved is that Lemmy world is biased to the left which was already known. I found out that Lemmy isn't biased as a platform but also the userbase sadly thinks further fragmentation is the solution. Don't like the left bias here? Go find a right bias instance. Uhh.. No thanks to both? I want impartial authority and diverse participation not ANOTHER layer of bias on top of existing bias promoting mechanisms used in popular social media platforms.
That was the solution offered. Don't like the left bias? Go find the right bias Lemmy instances and some names were dropped. So obviously your theory is garbage if people are outright telling me where to go find "right bias" Lemmy instances.
Thanks, I didn't want to point it out, but yes. The mass downvoting with no response is a hallmark of Reddit and makes me think that yes, Lemmy is modeled almost identically after Reddit, and it will function in the same way as a result.
I remember back when downvoting was considered bad behavior because it was only supposed to be reserved for people breaking rules, spam, etc it wasn't supposed to be used to bury people that said things you don't like. Now not only is burying people with downvote brigades considered the thing to do but the site owners and algorithm actively uses that as a signal to terminate further participation by those users.
This is exactly proving my point. Algorithmically Reddit was designed to produce a biased echo chamber. Not from the start but slowly over time. Lemmy is just copying that design and sure enough it already appears to be a biased echo chamber. What I wonder though is algorithmically how much will this impact a user? Will I be unable to post as freely and as often now that I've been targeted by the hive mind?
I think that without those censorship aspects built into the algorithm impacting individual users then the bias actually can be reversed. It's hard to call people biased and bury them if they can freely respond and defend their positions and cite sources. Reddit relies on burying people so they can not defend themselves or cite sources which is what results in the echo chamber building in intensity.
Believe it or not, lemmy has become less of an echo-chamber. I remember like a month ago it was like x100 times worse at only accepting hivemind opinions and burying any unorthodox one in downvotes
"mass downvoting with no response" except for all the responses, it seems. Oh, but those don't support your victimhood narrative, so I guess those don't count.