Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
Blacklist will be used for the most egregious offenders such as OANN and Epoch Times.
In the future, I would like to implement submission statements to make sure people actually read the articles they are posting here and acknowledge there that what they are posting might be unreliable. I’m a big proponent of using hard facts and evidence to back up all claims regardless of who wrote the article, and this in my opinion should be the standard going forward.
The point of using credible news sources is that they are expected to do that work to a high journalistic standard before publication. I trust the worst New York Times Reporter a thousand times more than anon111lulz@lemm.wtf, no matter what evidence they might bring to prove or disprove a New York Times article. Making determination of facts and evidence the responsibility of the users, myself included, doesn’t seem like a recipe for anything good. I am not a trained journalist and you shouldn’t expect me as a user to be able to operate to journalistic standards. If we can’t trust journalism, then why are we following a news sharing sub?
The wisdom of the crowd is not the same as mob rule.