Context:
The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.
Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦
Jhrodfun is my fasvorite rapper
This is the mod who shielded UniversalMonk for months and only banned them once like 1000 people loudly harped on it for weeks. Fuck that guy
Nobody shielded me. People don’t get banned just because “1000 people” harp on it. If the person follows the rules of the community, then they should be allowed to stay.
Also, about the OP’s example. He deserved it. Because mint press sucks. But talking about me, in this thread if off topic. I had nothing to do with this OP.
But anyone who isn’t a moron knows that MBFC is an incredibly biased source… Right?
Literally they make it so obvious
They think that because it claims to be accurate, therefore it is. No fact checking of themselves, no matter how it is completely wrong and treats liberal media as far left, and fox news are center right, it’s the godsend for the mods to remove anything they dislike.
Well there’s a lot of morons on Lemmy.
Yes, but I forgive all of you for disagreeing with me sometimes. I can’t expect perfection.
Just obedience when the revolution kicks off.
Christ on a bike.
I have a hard time taking seriously anything or anyone who says “Far-Left Biased” (esp. with that capitalization) unironically.
Lazy PTB on the grounds of (maybe mindlessly) parroting Fox News rhetoric instead of researching themselves.
Far left = center left
Just shift every bias check result to the right a bunch and its correct lol
How dare you be anti-genocide, you extremist?!1!?? /s
“You being against mass murder cost us the election!”
See now even more Palestinians are dead because you didn’t vote for Harris
I hope you enjoy blood on your hands
I literally voted for Harris. Do you want a photo of my ballot I titled on my discord “Go fuck yourself Trump” or do you want the screenshots of my state’s ballot tracker that shows I’ve voted in every election I can since my first one in 2016?
Sorry I don’t like murder when either main party does it, and still vote for her in a solid blue state.
EDIT: Here since I wanna do it while it’s on my mind.
You only voted once, amateur?
That was a hearty laugh. Thanks.
Did you see my edits?
EDIT: Oh i missed the joke, my bad.
TIL Mint Press News.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News
MintPress News supported former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia and Iran.[3][4]
The editor had investors, who Muhawesh claimed were “retired businesspeople”, but she would not name them
Soon afterward, Brian Lambert of MinnPost wrote an article following up on Burke’s challenge to find out where MintPress’s money came from. He reported that emails to them went unanswered, their phone was disconnected, and the original office address in Plymouth, Minnesota, “haven’t been valid in well over a year”. While MintPress listed 20 of its writers, Lambert wrote it did not indicate where the money was “coming from to pay any of these people”.[16]
MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[25][26] and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[27][28][29] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,”[30][31] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[32] MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine’s post-revolution government was “illegitimate”.[33]
Sounds like YDI. MBFC is horrible of course, but it sounds like in this case they got it right (somehow focusing in one of the only things Mint Press gets right, being “anti-Israel”, presumably as a performative cover so they’ll fit in better among other general left wing news. Which of course triggered MBFC, which is part of the whole reason why it’s clever for them to include a whole bunch of “Israel’s the bad guys” in among the “Russia’s the good guys.”)
You can follow sources on mint press. It’s work and I don’t read every article from there or from there. It’s not rocket science, just work and what I’ve read had checked out.
What?
Did something I said sound like “the problem is that it’s rocket science”? I feel like your message was intended to respond to someone else or something. The problem is that it’s Russian propaganda, not that you “can’t follow sources” or whatever.
My point is, they well -source their articles, which is a lot more than can often be said for legacy media. I don’t care if it’s obl if the sources are cited and easily verifiable. Because obl asked us nicely for a long time before Saudi nationals on a plane hit the wtc and the ~W admin invaded checks notes Iraq the second time,
since the issue was, iirc, the president there wanting to fund his state un food-for-oil account with petro_euro_ rather than petro_dollar_.amassed wmd, which legacy media assured us they’d seen proof,which turned out to be manufactured.Plane hit the WTC?
Invaded Iraq?
What the fuck are you talking about? No one is saying they don’t “source” their articles. The problem is they post things like:
Although the United Nations and many Western governments continue to object to Russia’s claims over Crimea
After Ukraine distanced itself economically and politically from Russia on the heels of the Euromaidan protests of 2013, the residents of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine overwhelmingly voted to break away from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Russia announced the annexation of the region soon after, but the move has not been recognized by Ukraine or its NATO allies, leading to months of tense, sometimes violent conflict.
Instead of keeping its end of the bargain, the Ukrainian mainstream opposition executed a coup through the use of violence by organized ultra-nationalist gangs, which some analysts have compared to stay-behinds or secretive militias that were created by NATO during the Cold War.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/syria-ghouta-claim-saudi-supplied-rebels-chemical-attack/168135/
And so on
Because we forget certain things and they go the way of the memory hole doesn’t make them untrue. It’s a mess there, and my country also stirred that up.
Oh yes, that makes perfect sense. I see your point now. Totally.
Emotional? Lol
With those standards basically all mainstream US media should be banned for publishing Israeli and US propaganda that defends their genocide on the Palestinians
Oh i just realized that stupid bias check bot has been gone for a while. Everyone hated it so i guess it was killed or blocked at some point? Anyone know the story?
Yeah people kept complaining so eventually they just quietly turned it off
That thing was utter trash
It wasn’t quiet, we put it up to a vote.
Personally I haven’t seen it for ages because I blocked it, but if I was to guess, the mods finally relented to the overwhelming majority? 🤷
They held a vote after insisting for ages that it was a ‘small minority’ of users that had a problem with it. It wasn’t 90/10, but it wasn’t 50/50 either.
Oh, and they only held the vote after jordanlund claimed he would get demodded by the admins if he removed the bot. And when someone pinged an admin they said they had no idea how he got that impression, lol.
Also, a big part of their argument was that it was the only option, nothing else would do that had an API endpoint and had affordable terms of use. I offered to provide them an API endpoint to Wikipedia’s sources list (which is precisely the same thing as MBFC, just… accurate and detailed) in exactly the same format, and they said no no that won’t do. I wrote code to actually fetch and parse Wikipedia’s list so they could make the bot follow actually-accurate source rankings with additional details and everything. Rooki silently received the message, then there was a long delay, then a little “Wikipedia” line started showing up way down below the awful MBFC rankings that were still front and center.
Wikipedia’s source list is very US biased as wel. They list CIA front Radio Free Asia as trusted source.
Yeah Jordanlund has a history of lying about why he does certain things. The fact that he said that when you can just simply ask the admins if that’s true or not, is enough for me to never trust him.
The dude has recently been saying how much he is against what’s happening in Gaza, but people brought up screenshots of him saying he was a fan of sending more bombs to Israel, and removing posts highlighting the increase in weapons being sent to Israel in the last 4 years.
The dude would have to get his neighbors to call the dogs home because they wouldn’t believe him.
Are you serious? Because I really wanted to give Jordan the benefit of doubt mod decisions were flawed, but a though job on his part. ;(
Edit: NVM jordanlund has removed a thread by @miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar miss_demeanour in politics - He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.
Took me a bit to find it; it was in a direct reply to an admin rather than pinging them. They also give a link to the thread where JL claims the admins would sack him if he got rid of the bot.
Thanks so much. I had to “context” a few times but finally found it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768
Also thanking @https://kbin.earth/u/@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat for standing up in that thread.
That whole conversation is so weird. I went back and reread big sections of it, and it’s just… the conversation is off. Jordan says he can’t remove the bot, because the admins won’t allow it. Rooki says that’s definitely not true, so people ask Jordan about it… and he’s just silent. Not “oh I must have misunderstood” or anything else, just pretending that if he doesn’t say anything, no one will notice that someone asked him a question, and everyone will move on. And then there’s Rooki accepting the code for scanning Wikipedia’s sources… but totally missing the point that the MBFC sources are awful, and the WP reliable sources list is actually quite good, and deciding that MBFC and Ground News are what needs to be positioned front and center. Also seeming totally uninterested in the idea of improving the quality of the ratings in response to the clear consensus of the community with citations.
I checked the last of the stuff that MBFC bot posted, 4 months ago, and the little line where the Wikipedia rating had previously featured had been replaced to a link to the WP article about the source, missing the whole point of categorizing sources cleanly into bullshit/not bullshit or the point that certain sources (Newsweek) had clearly slid into unreliability over time, but were still allowed on the lemmy.world subs for some reason.
It’s just so strange. Someone had a conspiracy theory that one of the admins had an unannounced sponsorship deal with Ground News, and that was the whole reason behind the entire thing to drop a link to Ground News while misdirecting everyone into getting mad at MBFC or something. I have no idea. It was just weird.
I don’t envy the unpaid mod job, especially mods who work hard to be fair and honest. I get your disdain and distrust of mintpress too and I hope you’ll reconsider. They do source their articles very well, because they know their audience and we’re foolable, but not always.
Removed as a duplicate, the same link was submitted 1 hour before and had more comments.
My b
No worries. I think a lot of the problem is that people don’t know how moderation works.
We don’t hang out in the group waiting to pounce on posts looking to fuck with people. Well, I shouldn’t say “we”, I don’t do that. :)
There’s a queue of reports and it looks like this:
So when I look at reports, it’s a matter of “is this true?”
Going to the politics community, I searched for “ICE detention” and sorted by “New”. Boom, there it was #1 and #2, two posts with the same thumbnail, one 6 hours old, one 7 hours old.
Same thumbnail doesn’t necessarily mean anything, same link? Yeah, same link.
Here’s where it gets tricky:
Which one do you remove? The knee jerk is “Well, duh, the newer one.” But in this case, the newer one has more upvotes for some reason.
At that point, I looked at the comments, the newer one had more upvotes, but fewer comments. One of them needs to go, I picked that one. If it had had more upvotes AND more comments, I’d have kept it with a note on the other as “removed for duplicate and lower community engagement.”
Thanks for a detailed and well-explained reply. I understand. A lot of the problem seems that being questionable often enough that everything is sus. It can be corrected with diligence and determination on the moderators’ parts. Which is simple, but not necessarily easy.
There was a public vote on whether to eliminate it or not from the .world news and politics communities, and the vote to remove won, thankfully!
We should really start those dashboards of power tripping per mod
As usual
I’m all for the increased federation of news from .world and .ml to limit the censorship the mod teams enable when it doesn’t paint America or Russia as the perfect golden cows.
I lack any context but if the rule is against questionable sources and a mod is able to document that the source is questionable then surely there other news outlets are reporting on that too that you can use. Unless there’s a big conspiracy against that.
No conspiracy required. The Celtic fans’ antifascist and pro-Palestinian position is not news, so I see no reason to expect non-left outlets to report an equivalent opinion piece. In fact, this second image was reported in news 9 years ago[1].
That said, Manufacturing Consent is an excellent introduction to why mass media bias has emerged.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/love-from-glasgow-to-gaza-why-celtic-fc-fans-support-palestine/289198/
I was going to say that it’s probably just an unsourced opinion-analysis piece, but no it’s pretty thorough, even though it is relatively light news (and not an investigation despite the tag). The site doesn’t seem unreliable to me.
For !world@lemmy.world if you look at the rule, it’s that opinion based articles “MAY” be removed, they aren’t just automatically removed because they’re opinion.
As a rule, I don’t have a beef with opinion articles as long as they are informative and fact based. If they go off the rails into “Well, Ukraine shouldn’t have antagonized Russia!” or some such, I’ll remove it for misinfornation, not because it’s opinion.
Avoiding non-newsworthy content might be a part of intention behind the rule but whether that makes sense depends on how you want to run a community. I try to make an effort to not assume ill intent (not always successful) and this just looks like a mod is using external list not to be critiqued for arbitrary choices and that only works if no exceptions are made.
PTB, not a shocker.
We already know legacy media is heavily biased because it’s owned by the same handful of businesses. And I understand questionable sources such as Breitbart being removed. Yet here we are.
His shameless bias has been throughly exposed … Block the politics and news communities on world folks…
Deny the parasite engagement, let him create a Zionist echo chamber lol
If you think I’m zionist when my personal opinion is Israel needs to be militarily forced into a two state solution then I’m doing my job correctly.
YDI. Mint press sucks.
Also, ya know, you guys can stop talking about me in this thread now. I’m not the mod that OP is talking about. I had nothing to do with it. Thanks! :)
MintPress News?
Yeah. YDI.
Hey, I agree with you for once! OP deserved it.
You’re putting a lot of effort into defending a shitty source.
To be clear, I DON’T CARE who wrote the article. Shitty sources don’t deserve the traffic.
It could be a nobel prize winner, if it’s on a questionable source, it’s getting removed.
Put on your big boy pants and find a better source.
Edit If you CAN’T find a better source on the same story, it’s an opportunity to step back ask ask why…
You’re putting a lot of effort into defending a shitty source.
Nope. I’m defending the ARTICLE, which has nothing to do with the more reasonable reasons to distrust Mintpress
To be clear, I DON’T CARE who wrote the article.
You REALLY should. Sometimes great journalists don’t have the luxury of being picky about who publishes their work.
The post is about the article and, other than not fawning over Israel, the article doesn’t exemplify any of the “offenses” MBFC accuses it of.
Shitty sources don’t deserve the traffic.
Great articles do. If anything, limiting access to the good things an otherwise questionable publisher posts reduces their incentive to publish more of that kind and less clickbaity mis/disinformation.
It could be a nobel prize winner, if it’s on a questionable source, it’s getting removed
That’s 100% grade A horseshit and against the REASON to have the rule in the first place. It would behoove you to reconsider such an arbitrarily rigid approach.
Put on your big boy pants and find a better source.
Take off your scolding cap and stop censoring good articles for arbitrary reasons.
Edit If you CAN’T find a better source on the same story, it’s an opportunity to step back ask ask why…
If it had been an opinion piece or breaking news making questionable claims, sure. This is neither of that and well-sourced, though, so would be more akin to dismissing a movie for being an exclusive of a streaming service you don’t like.
Shitty sources get removed, full stop.
The author doesn’t enter into it.
The quality of the article doesn’t enter into it.
We aren’t giving traffic to them. Or Fox, or Newsmax or Oann, or, etc. etc. etc.
If you don’t like that, feel free to post elsewhere, we have higher standards.
Shitty sources get removed, full stop.
The author doesn’t enter into it.
The quality of the article doesn’t enter into it.
That’s a bullshit policy and if you didn’t have your “this is how I do it because this is the way I do it” blinders on, you might understand that.
We aren’t giving traffic to them
You ARE aware that a lot of publishers, ESPECIALLY ones that don’t worry enough about quality and reliability, look at number of impressions when deciding what kind of things to post more of, right?
By keeping people away from something GOOD they post, you’re giving Mint a perverse incentive to post less quality journalism about Gaza and more of the kinds that IS bullshit but gets more clicks.
If you don’t like that, feel free to post elsewhere,
I will.
weI havehigherarbitrary and counterproductive standards.Fixed it for you.
No, because if we allow one source that’s questionable, then the next time this comes up it will be “But, but, you allowed this other bullshit source, why not miiiiiiiine??!???” We aren’t opening that door.
We went over this with the legit journalist posting from Substack. Don’t care, Substack isn’t a source.
Read what other people are telling you in this very thread, YDI.
No, because if we allow one source that’s questionable, then the next time this comes up it will be “But, but, you allowed this other bullshit source, why not miiiiiiiine??!???” We aren’t opening that door.
Holy slippery slope fallacy, Batman! 🙄
Read what other people are telling you in this very thread, YDI.
I have, and most either agree with me or disagree based on the irrelevant point you keep harping on.
Rigidly dogmatic mods such as yourself is the reason why most people from other instances avoid .world when possible.
Use a better source and you won’t have this problem. For now?
You shielded universalmonk and routinely banned other people for minor insults
Off topic. I had nothing to do with OP’s situation and I’m not the mod in question. (Also, I was never shielded)
Universal Monk knew right where the line was, when they crossed it, they were gone.
Others didn’t care where the line was.
Not true. You thought you knew just how to defend their disgusting and transparent motives but they were indefensible. A chorus of many people shouted loudly for weeks and it finally had an impact.
How do I know it wasn’t true? From a million miles away that was an obvious troll and that was specifically breaking the rules.
Life has been better for me since I blocked the politics sub.
No, the mods discussed their account multiple times and each time reached the conclusion they were not breaking the rules… until they did, and when they did, they got booted.
There’s a lot behind the scenes that you aren’t aware of.
Life has been better since you blocked politics? Must have happened after you got banned:
https://lemmy.world/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=1413078
This is such a weird point of view. The mods don’t “own” the space. It’s not your server. You’re the representatives of the community. It’s very weird for the community to speak with an overwhelming voice that they want someone banned because they are toxic and unhinged (and also, breaking the objectively stated rules of the community, with things like how many articles posted per day), and for the mods to say, “No, we decided they stay.” Them eventually deciding to ban, after the behavior got even more objectively unacceptable, doesn’t excuse it.
It’s like the difference between how Trump runs the government and how a normal president runs the government. Trump doesn’t “own” the country. He has a responsibility for it. The ownership, but not the responsibility, is what makes someone bad in a leadership position. It’s not to say you need to automatically accede to any loud contingent of the community that’s yelling about something. But UM was about as clear-cut a case as it is possible to get, and I cannot for the life of me understand someone who’s entrusted to keep a community of people a good place, who decides to come out and tell the members of that community “No, we’ve decided that this person needs to stay in the community, and we don’t care what you think about it.” I have no idea who these moderators are who are looking at UM’s behavior and deciding “yeah that’s not rule-breaking,” let alone a consensus of them.
I think it is, in part, a product of the weirdly off-kilter incentives that exist on the modern volunteer internet. I sort of suspect that what’s going on is that every human being kind of has an internal mental model of how much the rest of the community “owes” them, and that colors their behavior and how they adhere to the social contract. In places where someone feels like the community has “given them so much,” that kind of thing, they’ll really have respect and good dealing in almost everything. They’ll fight hard to keep the community as a good place. They won’t fall back on bullshit excuses like “well he’s not breaking any rules (today).”
I do see the other side of it. I think almost any moderator on the modern internet gets put upon by so much thankless crap on a day-to-day basis (some of which you touched on elsewhere ein these comments) that your what-I-owe-the-users meter is absolutely pegged at “0” only because it can’t go lower. I get that. I don’t think it’s really wrong for you to feel that way. I have a lot of sympathy for what mods do and it’s a pretty critical part of keeping the community okay. I’m just saying that it would be hard for be in that position and take at all seriously what any one of “the users” thinks or wants, or even a group of them. That is wrong though. That is your position, to support the will of the community to build a good place to be. Not to lecture the community on what it should be, with whether that is good or bad as irrelevant or subordinate to “the rules.”
I don’t know, man. I don’t really know what the answer is, and I don’t really like the thankless and difficult position that mods on busy communities get put into. But this mindset is wrong.
The mods set and enforce the rules of the community, if someone isn’t breaking the rules, they can be as obnoxious and hated as they can stand.
We looked at them, repeatedly, and were actively waiting for them to cross that line, when they did, we took action.
This happens on the back end a lot, there are a couple of other accounts (which shall remain nameless) under discussion now.
In those two cases, they aren’t in my communities so I approach it as “not my circus, not my clowns”, but provided an opinion. I think they’re ban worthy, but it’s ultimately up to the mods of those communities and admins to make that call.
Yeah you’ve said that a lot but I know what I saw. Dozens minimum were routinely saying things like “this troll hasn’t been banned yet? Wtf?! They are a super obvious troll”
Any discussion that discounted that was not a good one . If you got made the fall guy, that sucks but from the user perspective, you defended an obvious troll.
We don’t moderate based on fee fees. We moderate on rule breaking behavior. UM was right on the line, until he wasn’t.
But this is besides the point here of removing posts from shitty sources, which Monk also was not doing.
You can ignore the point about everyone thinking they are a troll, which breaks rules, but it stands.
YDI, you broke rules you got the post removed, I don’t see anything wrong
