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.
Again, I would want submissions to focus on the QUALITY of the content instead of WHERE the content is published.
If you feel that an article is factually incorrect, you should present hard evidence to dispute the part that was factually incorrect instead of appealing to authorities, otherwise, who’s to say you are only agreeing to articles that are confirming to your own biases?
I’m going to 2nd the other guy - flooding the zone with shit is already something I see often in various lemmy communities. If you think commenters will read articles and actually present proof if something’s wrong, you have a much higher expectation from the people here than they’re actually capable of. People barely/never read the actual articles. They look at the title and the vote counts and comment/vote/think accordingly.
MBFC is at least an easy way to remove the obvious bad stuff. Yea, it’s not perfect, but it’s a thousand times better than expecting the community to self-moderate legitimate sources.
I get the idea and understand the appeal but it would be a big victory for state propagandists. Modern propaganda, perfected by Russia, operates by flooding the information space with a mix of fact and bullshit. They want to present numerous opposed but credible sounding versions of events to exhaust efforts to discover truth. Sorting fact from fiction in that pile of shit is impossible by design. They want you to conclude that it’s impossible to know the truth. The accuracy of a particular article has almost nothing to say about the source being a place to discover truth. MBFC is good not because it’s an authority but because it helps answer these questions:
Asking those questions is far more important than fact-checking articles.
If that standard were adopted, I think the community would quickly shift from a news source to a propaganda source. I suspect the community would fail, or least be abandoned by those who genuinely want to understand what’s happening in the world.
We’re already inundated with propaganda from Western sources. The NYT article in question cites almost exclusively from IDF or IDF-backed sources.
I think the “where” does matter as certain publications have standards and editorial review for their publications for journalistic integrity. Major news outlets like The Guardian, the NY Times, etc. should have some assumption of higher merit than say Business Insider or The Hill (not necessarily bad sources, but they lack rigor and often rely on other news orgs reporting as a source).
I also think we should do more to limit articles that use those sources as their primary source. I hate articles from site Y saying site X is reporting blah blah. Usually that is because site Y doesn’t have a paywall, but this community should prioritize primary sources.