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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?

135 comments

  • Your comparison is horrible tbh.

    But what you're asking underneath it all is simple enough.

    Lemmy isn't a single entity. It's dozens of instances (well, dozens of public ones big enough to notice), with multiple communities on each.

    There is a bigger section of users that reject alt-right matters, which is an "oh no. anyway" situation because most instances also reject the left equivalent (tankies) with similar fervor. But there's communities that are quite friendly to non extremists that are what you'd call conservative overall, if you go looking. But the major instances are run by folks that lean liberal, progressive, and/or socialist. It's just a fact.

    I hate to break this next part to you though. Any political based community, subreddit, or forum is going to be a dumpster fire of biased bullshit. And that goes for any segment of political ideology. That's because people that are emotionally invested in identity politics are nigh unto religious zealots. And they're the most likely to make posts and comments in those places. They're also the ones most likely to shoehorn in political bullshit where it doesn't belong.

    That last part is a much bigger issue because it's harder to avoid.

    But, dude, don't get it twisted. The whole trump part is to be expected. Anyone not expecting high vitriol regarding him is silly. Like, he's divisive intentionally. He just got indicted, so it's current news everywhere. This means the posts about him are certainly going to focus on the crimes he's accused of, which is going to be "negative" if you're a supporter. If you're neutral regarding him, it's still going to read negative because the shit he's accused of is pretty fucking negative lol. You can't report on someone accused of serious crimes and it not skew negative unless you ignore anything about the news that's factual.

    But I'm not going to get started on the whole "moderator and suppression" bullshit because it's utter bullshit.

  • That's the cycle of most new platforms. Early adopters are typically tech savvy and highly educated people, who in turn have a strong left tendency and also in general a tendency of questioning the status quo and wanting to improve and change things. It's fundamentally incompatible with conservatism overall, left or right leaning. A big part of conservative ideology is not just the usual fiscal responsibility yada yada, it's also resisting fast change and keeping traditions and existing lifestyles. Adopting bleeding edge platforms is bog change and trying out new things. New platforms also tend to reach the left worldwide before the right comes to it, so there will definitely also be a lot of anti-american bias before it essentially gets taken over by mostly americans. Even on Reddit you'd see people go like "Reddit is an english american site go back to your country" rhetoric that just wasn't there 5-10 years ago.

    Facebook when it came out in the late 2000s also leaned very left, before it became mainstream and right wing people started using it too. Same with Twitter, same with even the very early Internet and BBSes and forums. Right wing people are the last to adopt new platforms, after hating on them for a few years.

    That said, I think Trump is a bad example in this context. He's being charged with a third indictment, and done a lot of crime so even on Reddit and TikTok it's a huge flood of news about it.

    Would also help for the right to not be seen as evil if they stopped attacking basic human rights and their stupid pointless war on "wokeness".

  • Lemmy isn't Reddit - there's no single central website. It's made up of instances that can have a whole range of political leanings (from the alt-right to tankies to no particular angle), if one doesn't suit you then look around for another. What you will find is that the general insurances tend to be more leftwing and anti-corporate because the bulk of members are here because they got tired of big business interfering with the more mainstream social media.

    Also, you are presumably looking at the front page of lemmy.world and, considering Trump is currently in court on serious charges, it's no great surprise there are posts on him that don't show him in a flattering light.

  • And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.

    OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.

  • Is Lemmy a biased platform?

    Yes, but not biased enough IMO

    I'm a trans woman. On the fediverse at large, transphobia isn't tolerated. It gets shut down hard. Here on lemmy and kbin, it can go either way. Some places are happy to let transphobia slide, which means we have to deal with more hate on the day to day than we do with the rest of the fediverse.

    I'd be happy to see more bias towards not indulging transphobes and their hate.

  • Yeah, stay out of political communities. Based on my experience in political communities. Lemmy is biased.

  • "Bias" doesn't mean "I disagree with it". It means the speaker is being dishonest about their motives.

    In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive

    Probably not. But that has more to do with the insanity coming out of the Republican party than any sort of unfair "bias" against them. Lying down with dogs and so forth.

  • It's a cross-section of not of society but of the popular Lemmy instances' respective user bases. You could argue all day about merits of right-wing philosophies and policies and you'd still be heckled into oblivion for this reason.

    I'll second what others have said: if you get heckled into oblivion by people who refuse to listen, go join or create another Lemmy instance and find some who will.

    Welcome to the Fediverse!

  • 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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

135 comments