this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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News

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Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


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The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

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Hi all!

As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @[email protected]. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.

The [email protected] mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.

Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Not directly related to MBFC bot, but what's your opinion on other moderation ideas to improve the nature of the discussion? Something Awful forums have strawmanning as a bannable offense. If someone says X, and you say they said Y which is clearly different from X, you can get a temp ban. It works well enough that they charge a not-tiny amount of money to participate and they've had a thriving community for longer than more existing social media has been alive. They're absolutely ruthless about someone who's being tricksy or pointlessly hostile with their argumentation style simply isn't allowed to participate.

I'm not trying to make more work for the moderators. I recognize that side of it... the whole:

This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.

... makes perfect sense to me. I get the idea of mass-banning sources to get rid of a certain type of bad faith post, and doing it with automation so that it doesn't create more work for the moderators. But to me, things like:

  • Blatant strawmanning
  • Saying something very specific and factual (e.g. food inflation is 200%) and then making no effort to back it up, just, that's some shit that came into my head and so I felt like saying it and now that I've cluttered up the discussion with it byeeeeee

... create a lot more unpleasantness than just simple rudeness, or posting something from rt.com or whatever so-blatant-that-MBFC-is-useful type propaganda.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s tricky because we could probably make 100 rules if we wanted to define every specific type of violation. But a lot of what you’re talking about could fall under Rules 1 and 8, which deal with civility and misinformation. If people are engaging in bad faith, feel free to report them and we’ll investigate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Hm

I can try it -- I generally don't do reports; I actually don't even know if reports from mbin will go over properly to Lemmy.

For me it's more of a vibe than a set of 100 specific rules. The moderation on political Lemmy feels to me like "you have to be nice to people, but you can argue maliciously or be dishonest if you want, that's all good." Maybe I am wrong in that though. I would definitely prefer that the vibe be "you can be kind of a jerk, but you need to be honest about where you're coming from and argue in good faith, and we'll be vigorous about keeping you out if you're not." But maybe it's fair to ask that I try to file some reports under that philosophy before I assume that they wouldn't be acted on.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago

Some of what you describe is likely against our community rules. We do not allow trolling, and we do not allow misinformation. We tend to err on the side of allowing speech when it is unclear, but repeat offenders are banned.

When you see these behaviors, please make a report that that we can review it. We cannot possibly see everything.