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?
I mean I think that’s great. Fair discussion in good faith should always be welcomed.
The problem is when debates in bad faith or based on non-factual information happen.
Consider COVID, which god knows why became politicized - where one side supported taking basic precautions in the form of wearing masks, hygiene, distancing, and getting vaccinated, while other side did not.
Scientific and medical consensus was nearly unanimous in supporting the former - the two sides of this discussion were not factually equal. One side was working off of false information.
In this case trying to foster “balanced” discussion just ends up supporting the spread of misinformation.
This is what the poster who said that “reasonable people can’t differ on everything.”
There are things where it’s ok for everyone to agree on. It’s not always a sign of some algorithmic conspiracy to force an echo chamber.
Just so you know that isn’t particularly true. The media made COVID stuff political at first. A quick check shows 50% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats were vaccinated in 2021. A difference that could be explained by factors like rural vs urban availability. The least vaccinated group was black men.
What mainly became political was the response. Wearing a mask or getting vaccinated were widely done by people in both parties. The only difference was feelings about if the government should be forcing people to do those things. This was spun as “republicans are stupid and anti science” in order to talk past the actual points of contention which were entirely focused on being forced by the government to do things which frankly didn’t have any scientific basis anyway.
Also most of the criticism of the vaccines and mandates was ultimately proven correct. It was, factually, the government that was spreading misinformation while coordinating with social media to ban anyone who ran counter to their narrative. That part is all proven history at this point. The government told everyone this was a safe and effective vaccine that was the only answer to “going back to normal.” In reality it was not safe and several issues were noted with the vaccines after this campaign where anyone questioning safety or efficacy was banned from social media. It was not effective and the people making those statement knew it wasn’t effective and hadn’t been properly tested to support those statements. Also it clearly wasn’t the “only way to go back to normal” since many people just didn’t take it and everything went back to normal.
The whole “misinformation” nonsense being pushed now by the government is merely them being mad that people called their bluff and they would like that to not happen again in the future. The idea that people can’t be trusted to discuss things amongst each other without the government being there to hit the brakes at any moment is scary. We have freedom of the press for the reason.