What can we do, as lemmy users, to fight fake news being pushed in the platform?

You could remvove all the users. They are usually the problem.

I hope that you're not specifically talking about Israel Palestine because if so that particular issue has so many different people with very strong wildly divergent views that simply trying to define what "fake news is would be a political decision".

Reports from war zones will always be highly suspect, because the belligerents have agendas and third parties don't really have access to provide objective independent accountability.

I don't think there is a way to both have access to war zone reporting, and hold to a objective standard of truth. So the organic propaganda and the astroturfing is just part of modern warfare.

You could run a news community with reporting standards, and moderate away unverified data. But the people with more 'timely' and 'sensational' reporting will get the eye-balls anyway, so you have to educate people on why getting verification is worth it... kinda like how the economist is slow to report, but has lots of depth.

If you see hate-inciting posts, wilful disinformation or egregious misinformation, then be sure to use the report button.

First, you should acknowledge that all sources are biased to a certain degree, some more than others. Any source that claim to always be "Fair and Balanced" like Fox News is usually anything but. When looking at a news article you should always ask yourself these questions:

1. What idea/agenda is the author/source trying to express?
2. Who benefits (monetarily or otherwise) from the expression of this idea?
3. Based on what you know, are there any contradictions in these ideas? (ESPECIALLY self-contradictions.)

Source reliability is only a small part of the equation as appeal to authority is usually overvalued:if Fox News says the Earth revolves around the Sun, that statement doesn't suddenly become false. To determine the veracity of an article is simple, but not easy: you can only derive the truth from hard facts. You should look at the primary source and evidences and ask yourself:

1. Are there any hard verificable evidence such as photos, videos, or other direct documentations?
2. Are there only unverifiable, anecdotal, and/or circumstantial claims and evidences for this?
3. What's the original source from which the claims were made?

This should give you a good framework of spotting fake news.

Make a comment with your conclusion and how you arrived at it.

If applicable, report the post.

Stop depending on Lemmy for news.

The real challenge is "how do users can judge what is a fake news?". In a similar situation it is an extremely difficult task even for newspapers with journalists on the field. See what's happening with the blame-shifting on the bombing of Gaza's hospital.

Even guardian and bbc have trouble understanding where is the truth.

A solution could be filtering the sources (for instance, no unknown blogs, or the sun and fox News, only reputable sources such as guardian and bbc). But important real news might be missed in this case, that are direct testimony of journalists on the field. And supposedly reputable sources such as wsj or similar are also known to have shared fake news, particularly when it comes to this conflict. And also reputable sources are biases.

It is an extremely difficult topic. No one has a definitive answer unfortunately.

I would be in favor of filtering at least the widely known sources of fake news (shady blogs, all Murdock's media and so on)

Edit. An adjective to clarify

Report to mods and give a good explanation. If it's a good reason they will most likely remove it.

Defederate from the tankie instances (including .ml). This Israel thing has really show not only how willing these places are to do straight up information warfare, but also how they've amplified an extremely chilling and alarmingly violent minority.

Maybe we can have a fact-check community. People could post there if they find fake news or they could request fact-checks of information by others. It should be a community with strict rules on referring to sources, creating valid arguments, etc. and content should only be banned if it does not adhere to these rules.

A bit similar to what happens in scientific research. I will reject a paper if there are issues with its methods. I will not reject it based on its conclusions if the methods are fine. I think this works in academia, why wouldn't it work with the right moderators here? There are still a lot of people who value truth above all else and in this way, they would have a space here.

Downvote/report

If there's an agenda, people will lie. Keep that in the back of your mind when browsing. The extent to which people will lie depends on what there is to lose and what there is to gain. There is also mass delusions, which spread because the majority of people aren't willing to take a moment to think critically or be skeptical about things. Short-form content exacerbates this and everyone wanting to be the first to spread something make the whole issue worse. To the point where things get fabricated because that naturally speeds up the production of content, rather than it happening organically and then reporting on it. The Internet as a whole has amplified this a lot.

We do what we always do. We fight the baseless propaganda we hate with the baseless propaganda we like, and then when called out on it, we justify its posting by saying, "Isn't it crazy how easily this could be true though? It's like there's no difference between truth and satire these days!"

/s, obviously

Step 1: Don't get your news from social media.

Post fact-checks (links a bonus) in the comments, which are few enough to scroll and check. That's where I look for paywall bypasses, TLDRs and will post a screed for additional context if I have opinions that everyone should know.

Don't follow news feeds on any social platforms including lemmy. Find a reliable source. These billion dollar platforms like Facebook can't moderate every fake news, lemmy has no chance.

I think the best way to fight fake news is to ensure people know how to recognize, verify, and respond to it. That’s already more work than most people are willing to put into it, but I don’t think it would hurt if someone with the know-how put together a simple tutorial thread and got it stickied to the whole instance somehow.

We gotta develop a culture of verification of facts!

Honestly, I think the only true antidote to this sort of thing is to foster spaces in which people of vastly different opinions and positions can come together and communicate in a civil and genuine fashion. Pushing back on biases and presumptions through antagonistic or challenging conversations seems the only tried and true method we have for getting to the "truth" (or, more realistically, how little we know of or can grasp the actual truth whatever it may be).

It's hard, especially online and many just don't have the behavioural and cognitive muscles for it at all and very few in the world are actually strong at it.

Moreover, the moderation task would be monumental, which is why I'd think there'd have to be community buy-in from users/members and a grass roots enforcement of the ideals of the space as well as probably a good amount of gate-keeping unfortunately.

Additionally, I suspect that the technology of the platform actually has a role to play in fostering such a space. The technology is never a complete solution, but I think in such heated environments what's missing from real life are contextual and gestural cues and meta data that we can all use to moderate how reception and reaction to any statement. Social media basically allows for none of that. But there's no reason that we can't try to represent a post/comment/statement in some way that tries to capture the sentimental and gestural context it is being made from. I think this is an example of modern technology actually losing sight of the mission of humanising technology.

EDIT: It would be an interesting idea for a lemmy instance, to try to foster such a space. Maybe it has no users of its own, just communities? When it comes to gate keeping, it'd be cool of lemmy allowed invite only community subscriptions or something similar.

Honestly it makes me want to abandon social media altogether. I don't really trust random people to moderate discussion without favoring their own agenda. It's even worse when it's not random people who have sought out the position to push propaganda, but I think Lemmy is mostly too small for that still.

That's a moderation problem. We don't have a highly moderated news community that's popular yet.

When I want to read something relatively well verified and unbiased I reach for Wikipedia. They are doing a better job than any other source I found on the internet so far on keeping things clear of BS

Ground.news is a great way to get your news. Don’t rely on any one platform.

The way that I do that personally is to only read news that link to reputable sources (Associated Press, BBC, Reuters, UN reports, Guardian to an extent etc). These also make mistakes or, at worst, are biased themselves, but they still hold journalistic values.

My reasoning is that hopefully an editor has done the moderation before the article goes out, so that I don't have to. The issue with my approach is that I'm limited to the outlets that I'm familiar with, where there might be others out there that hold the same standards.

It would be good to have a sub to aggregate only reputable news sources.

conclostion

Nice.

First step would be tagging posts/comments, to clearly separate ones meant as pure opinion from ones meant as a factual claim. Then tagging for sourced/unsourced/disputed/misleading/omitting crucial details, etc. claims. Then tagging things like how confident the poster feels about what they're saying (e.g. from "I heard it somewhere" to "I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions")

Then you would need easy to inspect metadata showing the sourcing chain all the way to the origin. And ability to comment on that (e.g. if some source's claims are misinterpreted and the source doesn't actually claim the thing).

Then you would need the people to actually care about facts, even if the facts go against their existing beliefs or preferences.

Also people need to be able to think more with varying degrees of uncertainty built-in, not just "this is definitely true"/"this is definitely false" (unless there is enough material to back that up).

Maybe one could set up instances that won't allow submission of posts until they have a comment history of X over a Y period of time. The problem could become problematic as the site is trying to build content and users.

Drown it out with even faker news

There is a certain compilation of rules/norms (which I'm surprised so many people don't know about) called The Ten E-cepts (written there in the style of the philosopher Philo) which were made for anyone who may be considered a frequent browser. Commandment three points to something vital, that there's no measure for that kind of thing. Regarding this kind of thing, each person must decide the difference and have it held to them.

A funny but also sad story related to this. Now everyone has probably heard of the Guinness book of world records, which holds all the world's records people achieve and was made because drunk nerds in the bars in the UK (hence its name) would argue about world firsts all the time (true story). So I mentioned how I have the world record for the most websites having signed up for, and I got a triad of people at one point say they discredit the program, which turned into an argument over the apologetics and counter-apologetics of Guinness. And at the end of the argument I said something like "to anyone reading this from the Tilted Kilt, drunk arguments may resume", because apparently nobody is safe.

Can you give examples of what you’re talking about?

I have written here just a few days ago what we can do:

https://lemmy.world/comment/4402223

Honestly? Don't participate. Don't use the platform and just quit with all social media because it cannot be stopped at this point. It takes far too much effort and time to battle all this crap.

Personally, I block anything related to news&politics on the fediverse (same on reddit).

Humans have a structural problem with any system that allows voting on the visibility of headlines. It encourages outrage, populism, attention grabbing headlines while discouraging more refined factual discussions. Kinda like tabloid journalism.
Reddit has the same problem and way worse, but with enough time it will happen here too.

Most users read the headline before giving their own opinion, not many take their time to read a majority of other comments and the least amount of users actually read the linked article (which is to be honest also often the fault of the quality of an article, i.e. being too long, boring and partially ai-generated).

This results in the most lukewarm most agreeable opinions being top comments, while they're also oftentimes being uninformed.

This is just what I gathered from my own personal experience with social media, I don't have any good sources to back up my claims.

It comes back to the same problems we have always had, governments/corporations pushing whatever they can to accomplish what they want.

It is now more apparent than ever that many stories are lies.

Which results in more wars ans censorship, you don't have to believe me on any of this, you just need to look at the leaks of the past decades.

When exposing crimes gets you blacklisted, Julian Assange and many more before him, you know that the government is as corrupt as any other organizations.

Criticial thinking and getting out of your bubble can help expand your views on subjects and topics.

What are people talking about vs. what is not, what is being censored, who is beimg smeared for talking out of the status quo.

In the end, it seems like a means to divide the people into tribal/group disputes. Instead, we should try and come together on what we agree on.

Nothing, you’d have to remove all of the users. There’s way too many viewpoints. People seem to be fine with fake news so long as it’s what they want to hear. If it’s something they don’t want to hear then it becomes fake news to them.