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Because I don't want other people to be exposed to misinformation and hatred either? I'm not going to pretend people won't get super downvoted in most communities on lemmy for conservative opinions, and if they want a hugbox where they can repeat misinfo and hatespeech they can go ahead, but I don't want some random person coming across a (fake) study about climate change being fake and saying "oh huh I guess this issue really does have 2 sides." It's just literal propaganda, people can seek it out if they want it but imo you should tear it down if you see it.
Disinformation should be met with good information. If you don't want to do that, that's 100% fine, but blocking a community because you think they might spread disinformation isn't the way.
Now, if they're routinely posting disinformation and it seems intentional instead of ignorance, then yeah, maybe we should defederate. But to do that, we need multiple examples of it and reports to their mods/admins that go nowhere. So far, I've seen exactly none of that, so I don't think we should defederate, regardless of how much I disagree with their content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Try fighting that through a calm discussion.
From that article:
With something like Lemmy, I think that means:
What I'm seeing here is:
That's not the right process. Maybe we should defederate, IDK, but I do know we need evidence of bad action before jumping to defederation, and nothing in this post or the linked posts have any evidence.
Like excluding servers that are unambiguously for shrill propaganda.
The whole fucking place explicitly exists to promote misinformation - they are fascists. Stop sanewashing it by pretending there's piecemeal issues to escalate and check up on, when every single post is immediately obvious as dangerous nonsense.
Then prove it. If moderation on their end fails to remove problematic content and users, I'll join you in supporting a ban. But I am unwilling to support a ban based on what I've seen, which is basically my second numbered list.
The name of the fucking site is a fascist slogan.
Hey - has that been working?
Have you checked?
Yeah, I think generally it has. How many people are still taking Hydroxychloroquine for COVID? The vast majority believe the 2020 election was legitimate. For something more recent, the vast majority of people don't agree that Tylenol causes autism. Look at the polls for any wild claim Trump's admin has made and you'll find the American public not buying it.
The average American isn't buying the nonsense the right has spewed under Trump. Look at opinion polls, Trump has been losing what little support he has and is much lower than Biden ever was. Providing good information to combat bad information works.
FORTY PERCENT APPROVE?!
That's your standard for the success of polite naysaying - a slight dip from the majority buying the world's worst liar's reheated horseshit, after he got elected?
And your first example is COVID, a plague which surely killed one hundred thousand more Americans because of right-wing disinformation. Masking alone! Fucking-- enough people bought the lies about the 2020 election that THERE WAS A FAILED COUP, and all the people who participated have been pardoned, because that shit worked.
Thank god we merely tutted and corrected long after people got tricked, instead of actively preventing people from getting tricked in the first place.
The COVID death rate was a bit all over the place. Florida was lower than California and New York, and Texas was between those two. New York and California had much more strict policies than Florida and Texas, yet they had a higher morality rate.
Why? It's not because masks don't work when worn properly, it's because epidemics are complicated. Maybe people in Texas and Florida got more exercise, maybe not wearing masks exposed people to smaller doses sooner so they got natural immunity sooner, or maybe it's something else entirely.
It's a complex subject. I like how my state (Utah) handled it:
We had a lot fewer restrictions than most areas, but there were enough to remind people that things weren't completely normal. And I think it worked well! Utah had among the lowest deaths in the country, partly because of our high percentage of kids and because outdoor recreation stayed open (so people would recreate outside instead of inside with other people).
That wasn't because people bought the nonsense about the election, at least not directly. The people who showed up to the capitol and fought with the police there weren't there because they were mad about the voting system, they were there because they wanted to start something, and this was a good enough excuse. They don't represent the average conservative, these were far right groups looking for an excuse.
Here's an article about perception of the 2020/election:
That's something like 60% believe it was fair weeks after the election. That's pretty low, but I think there's also a fair amount of less than truthful answers, such as people intentionally misinterpreting the question as whether Trump should've won, and of course the people who refuse to say one way or the other.
So it wasn't like all Republicans thought Biden rigged the election, it's just a vocal minority who riled up enough of the quiet majority to answer a survey saying it was rigged to make it more than a blip.
The fattest turd in this punchbowl.
Two in five people are convinced of dangerous horseshit, and the best you've got is verbosely muttering 'but it's not the majority.'
It doesn't fucking have to be!
There's two main responses to dealing with someone who believes a conspiracy theory:
The first is exactly what you'd expect from a conspiracy trying to cover something up, whereas the second is more likely to be genuine.
If this instance is preventing the latter, we should defederate, and that's what happened with the_donald. But if they're open to good faith discussions and their users and mods are respectful of our rules, we should stay federated. I don't think we have enough evidence to say which it is.
The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Some asshole going 'Ah-HA!' does not matter, if they'll do that in response to aaanythiiing. Preventing their nonsense from spreading is the correct answer. You have to protect people from abuse that works.
Abuse that works forty percent of the time, apparently. Thank god a mere plurality is insufficient to ever cause problems.
TD was a successful propaganda megaphone that only got shut down after it shit up millions of people's feeds for most of a decade. It successfully radicalized god knows how many politically interested young minds. The right answer was to ban that shit, immediately. And when they try mewling about how calling reactionary bigots Nazis makes you the Nazi, ban them again.
Some questions have these things called "answers." We do not need to endlessly discuss them, with assholes, on sites by and for their specific brand of reality-denying assholes. Sometimes "both sides" is the right side and the wrong side - and contrarian chin-stroking is poorly distinguished from frothing wackadoodle denialism.
This god damn website is named heil.hitler and you wanna take a wait-and-see approach to whether they'll cause problems. Frothing wackadoodle denialism is their brand. We don't need to federate with flat.earth, or thejews.did.it, or hexbear. You are allowed to recognize when people openly cause problems on purpose, and not sit around waiting for problems to happen, like it's a fucking surprise.
If someone is arguing in bad faith, report them. If mods don't address it, escalate to the admins. If the admins can't resolve it, then we discuss defederation.
Jumping to defederation because an instance seems to share beliefs with groups that use that tactic isn't right.
No, we must always question what we think we know for certain, but also always use the best information we have. Maybe 99% of the time the answer is unchanged, but that 1% of the time makes the exercise worthwhile.
I know that's not quite what you were getting at, I just think it's important to take the contrarian perspective periodically and see where that leads.
Whether that's useful comes down to execution. Basically, is there quality evidence to back up that view? If not, how can we test it?
It's not, and a lot of the MAGA crowd is criticizing the current administration. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene, she had been a long-time mouthpiece for the MAGA movement, and now she's pushing back (see the recent Daily Show piece by Desi Lydic for a comedic summary). She's the last I'd expect to question the president and other Republicans, yet here we are.
Going based on the domain name isn't enough IMO, unless it is literally something like you mentioned. Let the admins show if they'll side with truth or messaging, if it's the former, stay federated, and if the latter, defederate.
We must always question whether woman are people. What if the answer's different, this time?
We must always debate which race is best race. We must always entertain the idea trans people cause hurricanes. We must always seriously consider and politely discuss the blood libel.
If you know that kind of open-ended wank wasn't what I was talking about, why did you fucking say it?
We're not talking about academic criticism of open-ended questions with troubling loose ends. We are discussing bigots. This is a forum of bigots, by bigots, for bigots. The questions they ask are not worth your time or mine, even when they are sincere.
If you'd still split hairs about 'real conservatives' like they're not marginal fair-weather whiners when the horrifying shit they proudly voted for harms them - this site is not for them. This site is for the rest of the assholes, the diehards, the reactionary extreme. Hence the fucking name.
Based on what evidence? The name? A handful of posts, that could likely be randos posting to trigger others? It's a small instance with very few posts, we don't have much data on what the users and admin(s) there want.
If it's not worth your time, just ignore them. Block the instance and move on. Until they actually cause harm, there's really no reason to defederate. That's my point.
How aggressively does someone have to announce they're a right-wing crank, before you'll believe them? My guy - if a site tolerates posting reactionary shit "to trigger others," that's the line you want. That's what you think is beyond the pale. That's moderation failure that was entirely predictable by just looking at the site.
We do not need abundant examples of what this niche shitpost factory is about, when it is named shitpost dot factory. Their fucking brand is in the fucking name and I'm yelling this at my screen as I'm typing this because dealing with denialist horseshit is only marginally less tolerable than dealing with denialist horseshit apologism.
Christ.
There was a point where the actual Nazis were just a political party. Where the local consensus on the label, Nazi, was that it was pricks in bad outfits loosely associated with violent agitation. Would you have told me, a century ago, that Der Sturmer should be judged on its merits, until we have sufficient evidence they're not merely biased? I mean surely everyone's biased. Perhaps we should write in to Herr Streicher with corrections, and see if staff writers walk back their vitriolic rhetoric. We should eat the whole turd to be sure it's not a crab cake.
Yes we do. Names don't mean anything.
Look at our instance's name, what does that say about our instance? Should others have defederated because we have profanity in the domain name? No, that's ridiculous. I'm guessing the admin thought the name was funny. That's it.
I'm guessing "maga.place" was picked because it was available, the creator is conservative, and they thought it would annoy the liberals on Lemmy. All of that is fine, and none of it indicates that they're nazis or extreme right-wingers or anything like that.
Yes, and I say that today. I don't dislike The Blaze, Breitbart, or Fox News because of their bias, I dislike them for their poor credibility. Likewise for various leftist "news" sites that we see posted here with dubious credibility. I would similarly reject that rag probably the first time I look at it, because it's obvious that sourcing assertions is not on its priority list.
I believe in free speech, and if Lemmy is going to be an actual competitor to Reddit, it needs to attract people from all ends of the political spectrum, with the caveat that bad behavior is not tolerated. I don't care if someone is from the left wing, the right wing, or some other wing, they should have a seat at the table as long as they're respectful and bring evidence to support their assertions when in communities that expect that.
And that's the thing. If you don't like what maga.place posts, you don't have to sub to their communities. You can even block the entire instance so you don't see their content. That's exactly the same as not buying Der Sturmer, and not shopping at places that sell copies of Der Sturmer. Defederation is more like banning Der Sturmer from the country, and I think that's a violation of the basic expectation of free speech.
Bigotry and swearing are not the same thing, and you fucking know it. A site named We Are Racists™ does not get the benefit of the doubt, unless it's instantly evident that's some kind of joke. This site named for extremist conservative rhetoric proudly declares it's for extremist conservative rhetoric and exclusively contains extremist conservative rhetoric.
They're not acting fascist because it's funny.
Reactionary conservatives 'owning the libs' is fascist behavior. It is extreme right-wing rhetoric. It is rooted in a worldview that's all bad faith, campism, and proudly intolerable behavior. Why the fuck would you ever excuse it.
Why the fuck don't you dislike racist blogs, for their racist bias? They could be doggedly accurate in the specific details of their reporting - and they'd still be doing it from a hateful and divisive worldview, with intent to spread and deepen that over bigotry. Accurate statistics about gang violence and birthrates don't make hyperfixation on those things any less racist!
You are defending the honor of a literal Nazi newspaper, on the basis of 'hey, maybe they did good field work.' We are talking about people tried at Nuremberg. "Don't buy it" was obviously not a solution, despite your diehard libertarian bent. Sometimes problems come and find you.
Nobody needs "all ends of the political spectrum," when that includes Nazis. We don't need Nazis. Bigotry, as a political worldview, is explicitly forbidden on this server, and good fucking riddance. No service needs to be all things to all people, and hey guess what, most people choose services based on what they don't include. Reddit being cool with fascists was a world-changing problem, and a big part of why I fucking left.
You are why bigots spread. 'Nazis should get a voice so long as they act polite and bring evidence' is a literal invitation for bad-faith "scientific racism" horseshit. Free speech means the government won't arrest you for being asshole - not that assholes deserve any better response than "fuck off, asshole."
I didn't claim it was, I also don't claim "maga" is bigotry. I'm saying both are something someone could take offense to.
What matters is the content and the admin/moderation team. Our instance has fantastic admins IMO, and I haven't had issues with mods either. I don't know what the mods/admins look like on maga.place since nobody seems to be interested in that, only the name of the instance and the posts in their conservative community.
I think it's just saying the quiet part out loud. That type of behavior happens all the time from the left side of the aisle as well.
Look at all the people calling anyone remotely conservative "fascist," do you think that comes from a careful review of the facts, or more from tribalism? I think it's the latter. Yes, there are fascists on the right, but that doesn't mean everyone on the right are fascists, just like there are communists on the left but not everyone on the left is communist.
Sure, and the same can be said for leftist content with high factual accuracy (e.g. Mother Jones). I read both, as well as "neutral" news (minimal overall bias) to get a good idea of the facts. Spin is fine, provided I'm aware of it and can find the opposite spin with similar factual reporting.
I'm not talking about honor, I'm talking about freedom of speech. I'll also defend the right for communist, tankie, and other far left content to exist on the same grounds. One of my favorite musical artists is Rage Against the Machine despite never agreeing with their political message, because I love that they can be so blatantly against our current system. I want more speech that I disagree with, not less, because challenging closely held ideas is how we make progress, because we're forced to elucidate why we hold them.
But we do. Nazism was a popular movement, and we need people to understand it or we're doomed to repeat that era of history. If we hide it, people will forget why it was so bad and it'll fester until it gains enough power to cause problems.
I recommend watching some of Peter Thiel's talks, because he makes interesting points, while doing the thing he warns of. It's incredibly interesting to see how blind he is to what he's doing. Basically, he says people are so obsessed with security that they'll give more power to the state, which will bring about the Anti-Christ (i.e. someone like Hitler), who sells "safety" in exchange for absolute control. And then you look at his company, Palantir, which provides the tools to the government to do that exact same thing, provide security in exchange for absolute control.
Being so scared of fascism that we won't allow publication of fascist works is a huge part of this obsession with security in exchange for freedom. I reject that.
I believe the safest society is one where people feel so uncomfortable that they take that responsibility on themselves instead of outsourcing it to someone in power. I believe we need to strip entities from centralized control and provide tools for individuals to make decisions for themselves. I avoid fascist content because I find the ideas bankrupt, not because it's unavailable to me. In the context of Lemmy, it's a decentralized system, so we should be trying to decentralize moderation as much as possible instead of relying on admins to defederate when something looks scary.
That's not why I left. I left because they removed choice by closing their API, which meant I was forced to use their clients. I stayed away because they cracked down on moderators who protested. I was never really happy with the way moderation worked, but I was able to vote with my subscription and move to subs whose moderation I liked, so it worked well while Reddit stayed out of it. The moment they asserted top down control is when I left.
This is also why I like sh.itjust.works. The admins have a very hands off approach and only step in when there's actual abuse, and leave the rest to the users. That's how platforms should work IMO.
I am just curious, what do you mean by cause harm?
The big names we defederated from in the past violated some or all of the rules above, such as hexbear and explodingheads.
@sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
Apologies for pinging you, you made a lot of arguments for why we should give MAGA movement member the benefit of the doubt. Those argument don't align with reality in my opinion.
IMO, this is how we get echo chambers. I understand wanting a safe space, but that should be something community moderation should provide, not instance-level defederation.
To be clear, I disagree with the MAGA movement on pretty much everything. I used to consider myself Republican back when I thought Republicans actually want smaller, fiscally responsible government, and I didn't join the Dems because they never seemed to prioritize civil liberties (e.g. gay marriage became legal by court decision, not statute, much like Roe V Wade).
I left largely due to conversations and content online (mix of Reddit and YouTube), and that wouldn't be possible if popular social media sites cut out chunks of the conversion. In fact, I very much disagree with the aggressive stance YouTube took WRT COVID misinformation, not because I think misinformation is acceptable, but because it shut out anyone who was critical of the government's policies. I want to live in a society that values differences in opinion and is okay with that being uncomfortable.
There's a balance to be struck here, and I think that balance point is whether we can work with the admins of an instance to remove problematic content and users. I haven't seen anyone saying that's an issue, the arguments all revolve around the domain name and sometimes posts in communities that are obviously biased.
We defederate Hexbear not because they're tankies, but because their admins refused to take action against trolling. IMO, that should be the standard.
I see, so on-site behaviour.
Is there any situation where MAGA as a movement more broadly can be qualified as causing harm (I get the impression that you don't believe that's the case currently)?
Or is it more that we shouldn't treat a random MAGA supporter as intending to do harm?
I've lived in both russia and the US for multiple years. We left russia as soon our situation allowed us to. We were constantly harassed by police and had to deal with pretty harsh racism (even though our papers were in order and we all speak fluent russian and understand the interpersonal culture very well).
The US has become just like russia with security services harassing non-whites, beating people and jailing people even if their documents are in order (and even jailing and deporting citizens!). My mother is in shock that this is happening in the US (she hasn't lived there, but she has visited many times and has been to multiple cities) and it's becoming like russia.
In this context, why is it wrong to treat MAGA and its supporters as causing harm? Or do you disagree with the framing of the above paragraph?
Then there is the international context; promotion of corruption, promotion of far right parties (including criminals and open racists).
Why shouldn't that qualify as causing harm?
One could argue that the rank and file MAGA supporters don't know about this or didn't intend to cause harm. But my answer would be that alleged intent or lack of knowledge is not important. It's outcomes that count.
Mind you, this is not meant as a gotcha. I have friends of 15-20 years that I am still very close with from both sides of the US political aisle (i.e. one group supports Trump, albeit with exceptions on some issues).
I've had people on Lemmy call me a bad person for continuing to be close with the group that supports Trump. To which I replied that they are not bad people, they are not fascists or nazis or whatever (it would make no sense considering my mixed ethnic background) and they will come about.
So there is a measure of nuance to my perspective. I will add that MAGA is not the same thing as conservative in the broader context. The fact that most people who call themselves conservatives in the US are supporters of the MAGA movement speaks more about the US than conservatism in general.
Conduct should be the only measure we use for deciding whether to federate. And not even just conduct of their users, but conduct of their admins and mods. If their users are consistently causing problems, but their admins and mods are consistently banning them, then we should stay federated because we can work with them. The moment we can't work with them is when we defederate.
Maybe that's the case right now, IDK, I haven't seen evidence either way, just people disagreeing with what little content they have and the domain name they used. I'm against this petition because it and the comments seem to day we should defederate purely based on political ideology.
You'll need to expound on this a bit. What exactly does this say about America? All this shows, IMO, is that people are tribalistic (what country isn't?) and don't trust the establishment (who does?).
If you ask conservatives if they agree with the way Trump is going about things, they'll likely say no, buy he has the right objectives in mind. They don't like how ICE is acting, but they do want illegal immigrants to leave and only return through legal means. They don't like that Trump is unilaterally setting trade policy, but they do want to see manufacturing jobs return and for the US to have a dominant trade position. They don't want the government to be shut down, but they seem to believe that Republicans actually want to cut spending. All "MAGA" means in their eyes is ths slogan Trump uses to pursue policies that will make their lives better.
I personally disagree both with Trump's priorities and the way he goes about them, but that doesn't mean I think his supporters should be shut out of the conservation. I believe the opposite, in fact. I want to talk to Trump supporters to understand what they think and why, and to have the opportunity to show how that doesn't match what Trump says and does. I used to be registered Republican and left when it became clear that they never do what I want (smaller, fiscally responsible government) and prioritize what I don't want (e.g. anti-immigration). I didn't join the Democratic Party for the same reason, they prioritized big government spending initiatives instead of expanding personal freedoms; we still don't have legalized gay marriage, we're relying on a court decision just like Roe V Wade...
No, the difference is we still have the freedom to criticize the government and we actually have free and fair elections. So whatever you don't like about the US can change. The downside is it probably won't because you need to break through the tribalism to get people to agree on anything.
Russia became the way it is because of authoritarianism (Putin wanted control), the US became the way it is due to fear. The first can't be solved with conversation, the latter can.
How can we solve the problems in our democracies if we shut down conservation between tribes?
Thank for taking the time to reply. I too am interested in understanding perspective on this issue because I have American friends in both political camps (centre-right and far-right).
I see your logic and I think your arguments have weight and are done in good faith. That being said the gulf in our perspectives and experiences is simply too far apart, where it may almost seem like we are talking about different things (and we are from different sides of the planet).
I don't see why I or other any SJW member should be subject to bad faith, corporate spam. I am not interested in "demagogue destroys [political opponent]", "[political opponent] is a member of Al-Qaeda] or "[US Oligarch says some a propaganda]". All found in the first two pages of maga.place. What is this point of this?
I do not believe in "safe spaces" or "echo chambers". The latter in particular is a loaded, polemical term that means nothing. You can very much be open to new experiences and perspective without wanting malicious goons shitting up a forum that you use. There is a beautiful irony that US conservatives claim to oppose echo chambers when they are the biggest enablers of this concept. Is it unreasonable to claims that almost all US conservatives oppose real regulation of social media (other than to dictate and force their own interpretation of moderation policies on others) to address harmful engagement algorithms?
Just recently Facebook was found to have earned $16.5 B in 2024 from commissions on fraud and scams. Am I acting in bad faith by stating that most conservatives in the US would oppose true action (not words) against FB's leadership and those who implemented this policy? Real action; prison, asset seizure, breakup of criminal organizations.
I don't believe in American polemics about "big government spending". First of all, fiscal policy is a pretty complicated thing, "I want lower taxes no matter what" is not a serious policy proposal (and that is the sole prerogative of US conservatism). Legitimate reform approaches (even more technocratic proposals) are rejected outright by US conservatives. Secondly, there is the moral imperative. US is a very a rich country and is more than capable of providing healthcare for all, not to mention there are economic reasons why such a system allows for more efficiency (purchasing economies, remove of massive insurance company and healthcare administration bureaucracy). My friend works in healthcare in the US, from my discussions with him it seems clear (to me), that the current US healthcare system is simply a local scheme for corruption and criminality. Third, from the research I did, US conservatives are more than happy to be the beneficiaries of government spending (e.g. farming, certain conservative states/regions de facto existing on government initiatives).
For me, it's not good enough to say "I don't like what ICE is doing, but I will tolerate their actions because I want to remove illegal immigrants". Security services beating people up, arbitrarily arresting people and deporting citizens is unacceptable. Excuses don't count. When you ignore such things, you get russia.
Russia became the way it is because the people were willing to tolerate putin because they thought he was doing the right thing. I lived in russia in the 90s, you could criticize the government and there was some hilarious satirical shows (sometimes very high quality subtle satire). There partially free elections. They lost it all that because they thought putin was doing the right thing.
I also disagree that the US has fully free elections. There are parts of the country where people aren't allowed to vote (and US conservatives largely support this). The approach to districting is also clearly malicious and strongly suggests US conservatives oppose real democracy (districting is just one example, there are many others).
When I mentioned the distinction between the conservative movement in general (on a global scale) and US conservatives I was referring to the above points. You can be a conservative in other countries and not support security services setting up check points for non-whites, beating up people and deporting your own citizens.
It is also the height of arrogance to think it is impossible for a political movement to be fundamentally flawed and lacking in any real positives. There are more than enough political movements in world history (both left and right) that have been completely discredited. To believe this is impossible in the US is how you get putin and your country turning into russia.
I have no issues with conservative perspectives, you need a balance to keep both sides honest, but that doesn't mean I must believe an American political movement cannot be rotten to the core by the virtue of being American. And that's why I think it is legitimate to preemptively ban oligarch propaganda and borderline degenerate spam "demagogue destroys [political opponent]" from what I consider to be a fundamentally malicious movement.
Apologies for the rather negative tone, but this is my perspective.
Then don't sub to their communities, or even block the whole instance.
I think it's pretty clearly defined. Here's the Wikipedia definition, which fits my understanding perfectly:
It's the equivalent of what Trump does by surrounding himself with yes-men and eliminating dissent. It's what happens on lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml when moderation decisions are made to ban people critical of China or Russia, or sympathetic to western liberalism.
I personally am proactive about avoiding echo chambers. I consider myself libertarian, I live in a conservative area, and I spend a lot of time on liberal Lemmy, all so I get exposure to a diverse set of ideas. I watch and listen to liberal, conservative, and libertarian media I consider high quality, so I don't silo myself into one way of looking at things.
I want social media to reflect my ideals, which means every idea is subject to challenge by providing good information and reasoned arguments. So, when there's a suggestion that an instance be defederated, I default to "no" and must be convinced of ill intent before changing that to a "yes". Differing ideals does not automatically mean they have ill intent, even if vocal people in the media with those ideals have ill intent.
Projection is a well known trait of narcissists, and has very little to do with political bias (source, conclusion: "Overall, we find those on the left and right are equally narcissistic. However, liberals and conservatives differ in which dimensions drive their narcissism").
No, that's an opinion.
However, I think both liberals and conservatives in power oppose "real action" (arrests and whatnot) because they want power. In essence, they get more political capital by slapping companies like Meta on the wrist instead of actually holding them accountable.
If a side opposes one group more than the other side, that's because they think it'll harm the other side more than their side. It's rarely about doing the right thing, it's about doing the thing that makes them look good and their opponents look bad.
Hence why we have protests, lawsuits, and media coverage. In Russia, you won't get far doing any of those things. People know what's going on with ICE because of those freedoms, we don't really know what's going on in Russia or with the Uyghurs in China because they don't have the same freedoms.
The day the opposition to ICE stops is when we've become similar to Russia.
Trump has negative political support (approval is below 50%), he isn't like Putin.
That's just not true, do you have a source?
To vote, you need to be a citizen and register to vote before the deadline. The deadlines are clearly posted, and the process is very easy (just fill out a form and either mail it or drop it off). You only need to register once, and you're good for life, though you'll need to update registration if you move (at least for mail voting or between states, not sure about within states for in-person voting, I've never voted in person). The stages I have lived in all do registration online as well, so it's trivial to do on a work break or something. There are even non-profits who go around to help people sign up.
There are problems, such as not every state allows mail voting (which helps for busy people, e.g. those who work multiple jobs) and no day off to vote, but the voting registration process is simple and accessible.
Gerrymandering isn't unique to conservative, liberals do it too. It's a problem nationwide, not just in red states. Both parties like the status quo, otherwise we'd see legislative action.
And you can be a liberal in the US or elsewhere and support it. The TSA was expanded under Obama, and Obama could have ended it entirely and returned security to airports and airlines. But he didn't. Why? Both parties like having more power.
I 100% agree. The book It Can't Happen Here is about exactly that, fascism happening in the US.
The closest we got was actually a Democrat: FDR. He famously broke the pattern of serving two terms and won four terms, and is the reason we have the 22nd amendment limiting presidents to 2 terms. He also incarcerated ~120k people in the Japanese internment camps, about 2/3 of which were US citizens. That's far worse than the handful of US citizens ICE has wrongly arrested (most of which were quickly releases).
I'm not saying this to imply Trump is less bad (IMO, he's worse in many ways), but to demonstrate that we've been close to fascism before from the opposite direction, so it could totally happen here.
Thanks for the honest perspective.
I too agree that propaganda should be eliminated, but that should go through the community/instance it's on. So the proper process is:
AFAIK, we skipped all of those steps and went straight to 4.
Alright meet this with good information and I'll argue as a maga person. Vaccines cause autism. Also Tylenol. Also climate change is a hoax and all studies that point to it being real are liberal propaganda. Trans people are also mentally ill and not real. Leftists are extremely violent. Immigrants are violent and taking all our jobs. Immigrants mooch off the system. Guns keep people safe. Sandy hook was a false flag operation. Protestors are paid off by George soros.
I will now repeat this 50 times + 50 other conspiracy theories in the time it takes you to get a source for one of these claims, and once you get a source I will say "that source is liberal" and move on to another 20 conspiracies. This is literal poison for your brain. Whether you consciously realize it or not, hearing something objectively false enough times you start to believe it more.
This doesn't even mention the hate spread on that sub. Some examples: https://maga.place/c/LiberalLunatics
Dogwhistle that leftists are violent https://maga.place/post/18102
More divisiveness... https://maga.place/post/19232 +500 mentions of "woke liberal gets destroyed!!"
Here is about 20% of the posts from the last 30 days. 1/5 posts are propaganda.
https://maga.place/post/14921 Misinfo, she said "it's a common lie," did not dodge the question but did not answer it how they wanted.
https://maga.place/post/13936 Misleading at best, some people donated from abroad but they frame it as he is funded by some Arab investor and thats the only reason he's winning
https://maga.place/post/13207 misinfo again, all he talks about is fighting against authoritarianism
https://maga.place/post/12023 Hey this one is a perfect example, I wouldn't know this is fake except I personally got a ballet and know this person just hole punched through the envelope!
https://maga.place/post/10435 More fake news, they interviewed SOME people and implied this represents all of California.
I'm curious if I were spreading constant lies about how it was actually your friends and family that were raping and killing people and ruining America and do not deserve a trial, would you still champion my right not only to say that, but be seen by a wide audience? All you need to do is prove the first 5 lies false, while I make 20 more up.
Btw can you believe the democrats shut down the government?
And what percent of people actually believe that nonsense? Very few! Why? Because we do a reasonably good job educating the public.
There will always be people who believe some crazy conspiracy, but they're usually very much in the minority.
Posts you linked
There are three posts. Three. And none of them have any votes.
I could find so many examples of the opposite (hurt durr conservatives) on this instance and others and instances federated with it.
No comments and it's just a picture.
Is this the right post? This is just an article about shoplifting.
This is all pretty typical political mudslinging. If I had a nickel for every piece of misinfo I saw about Trump or Johnson, I'd have a few dollars. The same is true when Democrats are in power.
Yeah, that's pretty bad, but I would give the benefit of the doubt because it's easy to assume someone is right online, esp when you don't live in the area. My state has a similar hole (one, not two), so I always double check nothing is visible. If this was the case, it's pretty easy to just flip the ballot around...
This is a pretty typical strategy of finding a few people and claiming a trend. It happens on all political sides, and isn't really indicative of anything other than a crappy source, which Fox News is.
The first, yes, the second, no. You have a right to say whatever you want, I have a right to not listen or platform you. The only time your right to say what you want should be curtailed is if your speech amounts to an actual threat of violence, or a call for violence.
But this has nothing to do with whether we should federate or not. What you showed me is a bunch of conservative talking points and slanted news. There's plenty of liberal talking points and slanted news posted here and on federated instances, yet I don't see a call to defederate from those instances.
Yes. Both parties are responsible here. It's their constitutional duty to pass a budget. Republicans control the House, so it's more in their court than the Dems, but both have a shared responsibility to pass a budget.
Republicans will likely get the worst of it in the midterms.
Only sh.itjust.works accounts may cast a vote.
If you think very few people believe these conspiracies I'm glad you don't have to be around maga supporters. https://climate.uchicago.edu/news/2025-poll-americans-views-on-climate-change-and-policy-in-15-charts/ 40% of Republicans think climate change is false. 65% think it's not human caused. This is PROBABLY false. Most maga STILL think the 2016 election was stolen, despite all the investigations and interviews and recounting.
https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/poll-trust-in-public-health-agencies-and-vaccines-falls-amid-republican-skepticism/ 30% of Republicans now don't keep up on vaccinations and that number is increasing. If we are educating people and propaganda isn't winning, what's your explanation for this? These aren't fringe ideas, MAGA is not the republican party from 2012.
About the posts not having many votes... there are very few users on the instance. It's to show what type of people are posting on it, and the language they use (democrats get their utopia of crime and lawlessness!). The whole instance has maybe 70 posts in total as of now, so those 3 posts are about 5% of all posts. If you want to see what it a large maga community looks like go look at the_donald, it was filled with posts with thousands of upvotes saying "leftist loonies lose again," "leftists who hate America get what's coming to them." Go look on archive.org or just Google the_donald to see what % was pure misinfo. Then they banned people trying to debunk it, because their free speech support is just RP. It's already documented what these communities turn into. Why do we have to repeat it again?
I'm pointing out that while you can find posts about misinformation on other instances, it's not 1/5 posts being INARGUABLE misinformation and propaganda. Also msnbc abc etc don't interview 5 people and then say "California is turning blue," these aren't the same level.
I DO call out misinformation when I see it, and most of the time it's the top comment is someone saying "can we stop lying like the right? I hate this guy too but this is just false." And the difference is I see that 1/40 posts that it's inarguably false, not 1/5. Slanted news (trump did something evil) is not the same as making things up (aoc dodges question).
That part about the government is also propaganda, many Republican senators literally left and will not discuss anything, which is... their job. You can argue if they're right or wrong, but the right is literally not even talking, so how are they going to have a budget?
But I do. I live in a conservative part of a conservative state: Utah (my district goes something like 70-80% for the GOP). Utah conservatives are a bit different than in other states (Trump was dead last in the 2016 primaries), but we still have our fair share of MAGA nuts. I also have some antivax neighbors to round out the bunch. My boss seems to like Trump (though they're an immigrant and can't vote).
That's where I'm coming from.
I think that tracks. Climate change was politicized in the 90s, so it makes sense the opposition wouldn't buy in until the evidence was overwhelming. That seems to have happened, and now the discussion is about whether people caused it (people in my area seem to say yes) and whether we need to do something about it (many believe scientist estimates are sensationalized).
Here's an article about local perceptions:
For reference, Utah votes 60-70% Republican.
It's 26%, vs 17% for the general population. From the article you linked:
I think this is largely due to a lack of trust in the CDC since Fauci's tenure (mostly stemming from misinterpretations of things he said). I mostly blame sloppy news reporting and government officials misrepresenting actual guidance.
That said, the vast majority of Americans still trust and follow their doctor's advice, according to the article you cited.
Well yeah, that's on a community explicitly for conservatives. You see similar headlines in the opposite direction in liberal communities.
And that's when it became a problem. If that happens here, we should defederate, but until they do anything more than post slanted news, I think we should leave things as they are.
Why do we have to repeat it? Innocent until proven guilty, that's why.
Sure, the ratio will be much different because those are more popular instances. But those other instances will have much more quantity as well, despite the ratio being smaller.
This instance seems to be a reaction to the majority of Lemmy instances being very leftist. So it makes sense they'd post mostly political stuff for their side, and political stuff tends to be heavily biased and loaded with rhetoric, regardless of side.
Well, MSNBC is slightly more reputable than Fox News, but not by a ton. Fox News is "news entertainment" and is closer to a tabloid than an actual news source.
I'm talking about random leftist rags that get posted here where they pull quotes out of context to make conservatives look even worse (not that they need much help...). I don't have a list right off because I tend to ignore stuff that's obviously biased, but I'll keep an eye out the next time I see one.
Wasn't that the House? I haven't been following the shutdown nonsense since it's all posturing and whatnot. All of my state reps are voting in lockstep with the GOP, so there's not much I can conceivably do here.
So you're saying the evidence for climate change is so overwhelming that... the propaganda swapped to saying it's real but oversensationalized and it's not much human caused, so there's no reason to worry. In other words, the propaganda is still winning. We just canceled a huge solar farm and most maga Republicans don't bat an eye.
Dude wtf are you talking about, they rate their doctors advice as the same as Trump and Dr oz LOL that is not trust in the medical system that is trust in the person they meet personally because everyone is a skeptic until they're sick, and blind cult loyalty. And evidently if a growing number are vaccinating less, they are clearly NOT following their doctors advice, even if most trust their doctor. And if it was because of fauci you would see the number increase in 2020, not in 2023...
Yes you can find bad faith liberal communities. Do you want me to go on c/politics and see if I can find one post in 10 pages that has a title as idiotic and divisive as almost every post on maga.place talking about democrats or the politicians? Or find a link to NBC where the headline is "idiot trump and his conservative buddies get what they deserved!!!" I VERY rarely see something like that unless it's a commentor who is upset at something trump did PERSONALLY affecting them or their friends/family.
K I scrolled through about 7 pages, 90% was factual information such as "ice moves into Portland, local governance is worried." The rest was "Americans worried about xyz trump policy" with polls of Americans. https://sh.itjust.works/post/49051824 The most not factual thing I saw in those 7 pages
True innocent until proven guilty, except they're supporting someone who is guilty, which they would only believe is doing a great job due to propaganda, which is all they consume and spread... it's like if I'm in a nazi parade and then I get sent to jail with them and say "Hey! I'm not a nazi I just liked some of the stuff in the parade!"
Dude what cmon go browse c/politics 99% of it is literally normal news, not crazy opinion pieces and propaganda, and the crazy ones nearly always have a comment at the top saying "don't be like this, downvote this garbage." You're comparing "new study says climate change to be fake!" To "trump says he hates people who take snap" and his actual quote is "I'm not a big fan of snap users, no." These are different universes of misinformation. Them having 1/5 posts be hateful or misinformation is not excused by "well they're posting a lot about politics so of course they would spread false information." I can see posts that I don't think are fair to Republicans and still recognize maga Republicans are absolutely firehosing false information and hatred.
Yeah it was the house I meant the senators are just chilling at home https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/mike-johnson-shutdown-house-republicans-away-rcna238797 Paid public servants btw definitely a both sides issue, holding snap hostage and refusing to discuss like children
The number who trust their doctor is around 84%. The number who are delaying vaccinations changed from 4% to 7%. The most reasonable takeaway is that 7% probably aren't part of the 84%.
Why?
People didn't have access to information about Fauci's claims until well after he made them. There were congressional hearings during his tenure, and another in 2024, so it makes sense for trust to deteriorate between his stepping down and the post-tenure congressional hearing.
That community is locked, so only mods can create posts. That user seems to do a good job of posting high quality sources, but they pretty universally are critical of the current administration, and they'd probably be less critical if a dem was in power. And that's fine, I think Politics is an example of a well run community.
I don't keep track of which communities/instances these are from (I mostly sub to communities here and on lemmy.world), but I have had several occasions where I commented on a controversial post (pointing out issues, for example), and it gets removed. I assume that means someone reported it and the mods removed it.
Maga.place is a small instance where most posts don't have any comments or upvotes, so it's likely nobody bothered to report problematic content or the mods aren't very active. That was absolutely a thing when I first joined Lemmy, and it wasn't grounds for defederation back then, nor should it be now. However, if we cannot work with the mods or admins, that's absolutely a problem and is grounds for defederation (and we've done that due to concerns about CSAM and whatnot).
Ok I guess agree to disagree, when 81% of Republicans trust antivax foundation founder Fauci, who says Tylenol and vaccines cause autism, that tells me the propaganda is winning. Maybe not the ONLY cause of vaccine rates going down, but when the head of the FDA is antivaxxer who has 81% support of maga, that means something.
Idk what politics sub you're looking at, politics@lemmy.world is not locked and is the biggest politics sub on lemmy. I'm fine with being politically biased (saying biden is bad for the country) but not with literal fake news (someone misreading a study saying it proves climate change is fake)
Yes your point is exactly right, and I block subs that do that. If there were an entire INSTANCE that firehosed bad information and/or banned people for discussing and was hateful, I would want to defederate from them (as I voted for when this instance voted to defederate from hexbear!)
The problem is this is not an instance that just has misinformation. The entire MAGA movement is based on misinformation. To support someone who removes all protections for climate change, wants to save the economy by giving tax breaks to billionaires, says law and order while breaking the constitution nonstop... it's just a propaganda based movement. If they want to come actually discuss something, then they can ask a legitimate question in another community (and people need to stop being nasty to them if it's a real question), but I don't want to help them spread propaganda and hate just in the hopes that one person might change their mind (they won't, trump still has about 90% approval rating from MAGA).
I think you mean RFK Jr? Fauci was and probably still is very much in favor of vaccines.
If you trust two doctors and they give different medical advice, and you only accept one as accurate, does that mean you stop trusting the first doctor? No. People can be wrong sometimes, so it's fine.
RFK Jr isn't even a doctor, he was a lawyer turned politician. I think it's reasonable to trust that he's doing his best even when he misinterprets medical studies, especially when he's under the gun to get an answer by a specific date (he said he'd "solve" autism by September, and that announcement was made at the end of September).
To be clear, I don't trust RFK Jr or Trump, I'm merely providing what I think is a reasonable explanation of the survey results. I think it's logically reasonable to trust your local doctor for your personal medical needs, and also trust RFK Jr for setting nationwide policy, even if he's wrong sometimes on specifics.
!politics@sh.itjust.works. That's the instance we're on, and without any further information, that's what I'm going to assume since this discussion is about sh.itjust.works policy.
Here are some sources that I find sketchy on !politics@lemmy.world:
That's just from the first page or two of results. A "mostly factual" post here and there is probably fine, but having several posts in the first page or two is concerning. Maybe mods remove even worse posts, idk, I don't sub there.
And honestly, this is fine, because generally speaking, the mods seem to do a good job removing the worst of it.
We don't know if maga.place will be run that way, or if they'll be a firehose of misinformation.
I don't know if that's actually fair. The MAGA movement is large, and a lot of them are frustrated with the current administration that's the face of the MAGA movement, so there's more division than cohesion IMO. The only thing they seem to agree on is "owning the libs," but they get mad when there's collateral damage to themselves.
That said, we don't know where on the spectrum of "MAGA" this instance is. Maybe they just picked the name because they thought it would be funny to "own the libs," or maybe they're actually a psyop. Until we know, I don't think we should defederate.
Ok but my point is they give the same credence to rfk's opinion on something as their doctor. That is literal insanity that could only happen through propaganda. Not ONE thing he has said has been legitimate or factual. https://www.health.com/rfkjr-beef-tallow-seed-oils-8744688 There are about 100 more examples like this https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/08/28/rfk-cdc-director-susan-monarez-fired/ Cdc leaders and experts say rfk is going to damage public health https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/09/rfk-jr-cdc-panel-vaccines.html There are z e r o legitimate studies that support vaccine skepticism, yet here he is. The fact that he said he'd solve autism is also literally insane! It's a complete misunderstanding of what autism is, again, based on propaganda. It's not a disease, it's a neurodivergence, and the "epidemic" of autism as he says is people actually being diagnosed. Which people would know if not for the propaganda telling them otherwise.
I'm using the biggest politics community on lemmy because that should give an idea of politics posts the general leftist makes, as compared to the average MAGA post.
The friendlyaetheist post was reporting what happened, so I don't know why you'd even mention it. It lists the sources it uses as it says them, credibility is irrelevant.
I'm not sure why you're smuggling in the implication that those sites aren't undeniably 100% factual? If I say "trump flounders after his tarrifs hurt the economy" this is 100% factual reporting, with biased language. I would not complain if the maga posts said "Biden flounders over war in ukraine." But they don't. They verifiably lie. Thedailybeast is CLOSE, but still nowhere near the level of the maga posts. And interesting you bring that up as the biased source, because under every slightly unfactual post from the daily beast the first comment is always stop posting this biased trash!
We have evidence that 1/5 posts are misinformation. The others were "person x says y about person z." If ANYONE in my life 1/5 things they said was propaganda meant to fool me, I would tell everyone I knew to stay away, he's trying to trick you. I also didn't verify the quotes, and I didn't count things like "former CIA director loses his cool about hunter Biden laptop" which is a dogwhistle that this is a real controversy and shows democrats are corrupt and trying to hide it. On the second page right now, you have:
CIA director loses his cool (dogwhistle, tries to make you believe hunter Biden laptop is important to distract from trumps constant crimes)
2 normal posts
2nd amendment pros outweigh the cons - contains lots of verifiably false information about how carrying guns prevents crime.
1 biased but factual post
Gen z candidate storms out of interview after being shown clip of her menacing federal officers - discrediting the younger generation, discrediting people who oppose ICE, you could argue this but I can ask any MAGA person I know and they will say everything I just did
4 normal ish posts
1 post on how people flee socialist countries, implying it's because they're socialist (arguable if its misinfo)
Kamala harris snaps at... no she did not. At no point in the text does it have one quote where she is responding aggressively or angrily.
1 normal post
1 post implying Biden overused executive powers, to signal trump doing it is fair play.
So in 1 page you have 7 normal posts, 1 hateful "owned the libs" post, 2 arguably misinformation posts, and 2 blatant disinformation posts. If I gave you the option of that as your homepage, would you say that's positive or negative? Even take out the other stuff, if I gave you a homepage of 10 normal posts and 2 blatant disinformation posts, and you didn't know which was which, would you find that acceptable? What about for your friends and family?
84% of MAGA still supports Trump. The only way you could still support trump is based on misinformation, full stop. Hate the democrats sure you can do that, but not SUPPORTING trump, saying he's doing a good job on the economy on health, it is IMPOSSIBLE to do that factually.
Bias is different than factuality. I linked Media Bias Fact Check, which has a credibility score.
Bias has its own issues, since a biased source is less likely to post info that goes against the narrative, and likely to focus on things that support the narrative. IMO, a good community will have a mixture of high credibility sources from multiple biases.
That's obviously an opinion piece, and there's no clear consensus on the studies.
Most studies against permissive gun laws look at "gun violence" statistics, which includes suicides, and suicides are often opportunistic, so more guns available means suicidal people will use guns more often. Studies in favor of permissive 2A laws point to incidents where an armed citizen stops a crime or cherry picks areas and date ranges, and obviously you'll have more armed citizens with permissive laws. In short, the body of research Is inconclusive.
The link in question was to a specific "guns" community, where only one user posted, and they aren't even a user on that instance. So pointing to this as an example of misinformation is iffy.
That's typical clickbait, I've seen plenty of similar nonsense on the politics community on Lemmy world.
He did though. So did Trump 1.0, Obama, and Bush. It's a problem, and each time we have a change in the White House, the new admin uses it as an excuse to escalate.
I'm not a conservative, nor am I a user on that instance, so it's an irrelevant question. Nobody on sh.itjust.works will have that as their homepage unless they join only those communities, and we'll only see that content in all if someone here subs to them.
The communities there are clearly labeled with their bias. The two main ones you pointed out are Conservative and Guns, so you SKG should expect to see slanted posts in each.
You are downplaying "verifiably false information" as bias. I don't care your political leaning, you are not allowed to post undeniable lies. I don't think it's possible to convince you based on general instances of misinformation so I will just look at 1 page of misinfo from maga.place. If you can find anywhere near this level of blatant disinformation or hatred in 10 pages of c/politics, I will agree it's unfair to defederate.
https://maga.place/post/28015 Trump with his 2 democratic opponents as trash bags. Quality content that we need. What did I learn from this post other than Republicans good democrats bad
https://maga.place/post/28008 HAHA LOL SOCIALIST POLICIES ARE TERRIBLE!! (spreading propaganda that they themselves saw)
https://www.breakingthenews.net/news/details/65119109 No sources anywhere, just trust them
https://maga.place/post/26968 Posting a quote from the CEO of fox news knockoff Newsmax, not misinformation just a meaningless post quoting a far right commentator. Who gets paid more to have this opinion.
https://maga.place/post/26971 Hmm tucker Carlson is the leader of modern day Hitler youth. Because he is critical of Israel. Interesting thing to post! I also like hearing how people who think Israel should be criticized as the Hitler youth!
https://maga.place/post/27153 More misinfo, implying he got booted for his comments and not because trumps fcc head threatened to take action if he was not fired, also says "for his incendiary comments" when his quote, as he said himself, meant "they are trying to make it seem like it was a leftist and not a rightist, whether it's true or not." You can argue the 2nd point, 1st is blatant misinformation.
This is not even 1 page. If I saw any of this trash in my feed I would instantly block the whole community. 6/14 posts were either extremely biased trash with no information, or literally just false. Go ahead and find me anywhere close to that ratio of blatant garbage on ANY lemmy community (besides the already defederated tankie instances). Find me even 1 thing in 10 pages that is so clearly false or hateful or divisive. And keep in mind these are their N E W S sources doing this, not some random person.
Side note, I saw a post I thought was actually really high quality from maga.place, but I realized while reading it I really can't trust any facts in it because most of the things posted there are just false or misrepresented, so it's not unlikely what I'm reading now is too. I have almost never had that feeling in c/politics, and when I do I look at the comments and people call it out (and say to stop posting it unlike the MAGA instance)
Not disinformation, it's merely political speech.
Not disinformation, it's merely political speech.
Seems to be pretty reputable. The article is three sentences, so it's not really something I'd expect sources on.
Here's a Reuters article that says the same thing.
Sure, I've seen plenty of meaningless posts across Lemmy. /c/conservative does not appear to be a news community, just a space for conservatives to hang out. So it's similar to something like Occupy Democrats.
This is a quote from a conservative about another conservative. Makes sense.
I agree with you on this one. NYPost is awful, and the Jimmy Kimmel situation had a bunch of misinformation all around. Trump admin claimed he was dropped due to his comments, others claim it was due to credible FCC threats. I don't think there's enough evidence to say it constitutes jawboning, but some lawyers think there is, so IDK. If ABC was truly concerned about retribution, why would they reinstate Kimmel?
Regardless, it's an awful source.
/c/politics is reasonably well moderated, check out the modlog.
Maga.place doesn't have the same quality rules, so who knows what their standards are going to be. The Modlog is a mess from stuff from other instances, and it seems like the mods don't really do anything.
But I also don't know if reports were made. I don't see any real harassment going on, so IDK, maybe their mods are just AFK. That happens fairly often in smaller communities.
The first two are examples of negativity/brainrot and divisiveness. If those were in isolation I wouldn't complain, but it's just adding to the list of bad posts.
I'm not arguing the veracity of the claims on that site, but if you look at all their articles they NEVER list sources. Why link this over anything else? Compare that to the Time article https://time.com/7329777/trump-xi-meeting-korea-us-china-trade-deal-tariffs-takeaways/ Sources everywhere and it's better fuller information. Again not misinformation, but it's a garbage website with no sources and no context.
As an aside, we may wonder why they didn't post the Time article instead? Hmm....
Ok sure, but you're comparing instances that are not very popular to something that is the identity of that instance i.e. being a conservative. Either way at best it's preaching to the choir or ragebait depending on your leaning, so just not a good post.
The quote is not only about the conservatives. He is saying those who support tucker Carlson for criticizing Israel are the Hitler youth. Go watch the video the guy basically says people who support hamas and criticize Israel are evil. I don't want to see this hateful garbage why are they posting it? It's not even relevant to politics it's just some random guy spreading hate. I can criticize Israel and agree with tucker Carlson on that point, he didn't even say anything about hamas but just criticizing Israel = antisemite and nazi like wtf...
Wut the fcc head literally said "if he's not dealt with there will be consequences" that is about as explicit of a threat as you can get, am I misunderstanding something? Trump admin lying doesn't make it any less obvious why it happened.
Sure if the instance mods remove all the misinfo and hatred, I'm all for an actual debate on immigration, universal healthcare etc. But right now there is less than 0 value on that instance. Those posts were not funny, they were not informative, they were not thought provoking. Every post that wasn't garbage was just a less informative source or something some right wing person said (besides the 5ish posts about green party and how 2 party is bad, legitimately good posts). That mixed with a healthy dose of misinformation (not bias, pure undeniable falsehoods and misrepresentation) makes me not want to ever see a single post from it. Maybe they will change in the future and we refederate, I wouldn't oppose that. But right now it's just not good. You said it yourself nypost is garbage, go look how many posts are from there and imagine some random lemmy user reading it not knowing it's garbage.
If you want to go down that direction, I can point to a half-dozen or more communities that allow those types of posts, just in the other direction.
It has the right headline for the message they want to discuss in their community.
Look at the sketchy articles I've linked, or sketchy articles in explicitly biased communities on this instance and others federated with it, and that's the exact same trend. People link things because the headline says what they'd like to discuss.
How many people in !occupydemocrats@sh.itjust.works looks into the sources from stuff they post? What about !politicalmemes@lemmy.world? They're remarkably similar to how !conservative@maga.place works, accuracy of reporting takes a backseat to headlines.
Sure, and that's the type of source I'd expect in a news or politics community. It's not what I'd expect in a "liberals" or "conservatives" community.
Preaching to the choir is the point.
I actually kind of agree here. I support Palestinians, I don't support Hamas. I also criticize Israel.
Supporting terrorist groups is evil.
I agree, and that would be something I'd report a post over, and maybe report a user, not defederate from an instance.
Maybe? Without a lawsuit where evidence is compiled, I just don't think we have enough evidence to say what actually happened and what the understanding actually was.
Whether there's value for you is irrelevant. You can easily just not look at their content, or even block the instance if you want to make sure you don't see their content. We have solutions for that.
We have zero evidence that the mods aren't responsive. Literally nobody has posted anything to that effect, nor any evidence that their users are causing problems. So why should we defederate? Because we don't like their speech? That's about as closed minded and anti-free speech as I can think of. So many want to shut out the instance merely because of their domain name, as in, they don't want to have that discussion whatsoever.
That never happens. Why would anyone look at their instance if we're defederated from them? There's zero chance that we'd actually get around to considering it.
Sure let's check the sub I have never seen a single post from. Oh I can block the community there we go. Oh 15 different misinfo posts from 15 different maga.place communities, I guess I just have to block every single community. (i.e. block the instance). The difference is you can FIND those communities. I am seeing MAINLY these kinds of terrible posts on maga.place.
Here's some undeniable misinfo posts from the NEWS community usanews https://maga.place/post/13207 https://maga.place/post/13643 Yes the shadowy antifa organization just like the shadowy blm organization. I've gone to these protests, I'm still waiting to get in contact with the antifa leaders and get my paycheck.
Also yes, you can find brainrot/divisiveness, but very rarely actual hatred, unless it's a trans person saying "wow this administration quite literally took away my rights!" Or someone saying "I will actually die if they take away my healthcare." This is not the same as "they hurt the economy and had stupid policies, let's call them garbage." Again I am not saying you WILL NOT FIND THIS ON THE LEFT. but it is a FIREHOSE vs a faucet. One of conservatives favorite shows fox news just repeats hatred towards democrats 24/7, and that is what they are used to.
Alright let's compare to c/politicalmemes then
Mamdani didn't just beat cuomo, he beat the establishment
The cruelty is the point (Republicans voting against snap, holding snap recipients hostage. Arguable that this is legitimately just true because it makes their bargaining better, but I could give you this one)
Post about the epstein files (nonpartisan even Republicans want it)
Everyone has lost their minds (nonpartisan)
Joke about how trump can't read (I could argue hes proven this but ill give this to you)
Image of mamdani turning away from autocracy to democracy, with an angry trump. Biased but just a standard political cartoon
Joke about fox news saying liberals are losing by winning
Post about someone saying Mike Johnson won't open the government because he doesn't want to release the epstein files
Post about disabled rights being human rights
So 1 post about trump not being able to read, and 1 post about how the Republicans who are voting to not fund snap actually WANT people to not have snap. The rest are nonpartisan or positive messages all around. I felt better reading c/politicalmemes because among the brainrot there were positive messages and nonpartisan "hey guys this sure is crazy." Waiting for the post on c/conservative where they say "hey guys protect your legal Mexican neighbor from ICE, there's been a lot of false deportations." Again I am not arguing that it DOESN'T happen, but maga.place is 50% EXTREMELY biased, hateful, or misinformation. Not comparable to 8/10 posts on a VERY heavily leftist site being apolitical, and the other 2 having a grain of truth if hyperbolic.
From: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/after-jimmy-kimmels-show-was-suspended-a-key-question-is-does-the-fcc-have-the-power-to-regulate-speech
"I mean, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take actions, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Carr likened Kimmel’s comment to “news distortion,” which is against FCC’s rules for broadcasters.
And then a couple hours later he is suspended. I guess it's possible the FCC threatened to take action against people hosting Kimmel. Then, independently with no influence from the threat of their broadcast license being revoked, they removed Jimmy Kimmel. That is one possibility.
Ok sure I would agree. I would also say they are misinformed, so I would not use hateful language against my fellow Americans, saying they are the Hitler youth. I do not want someone who is misinformed to be CALLED Hitler youth because it will PROVABLY make it harder to change their mind and cause more divisiveness. Literally less than 0 reason to post it.
I am not saying they have 0 value for me. I'm saying objectively they have less than 0 value since many of their posts are hateful and divisive, or straight up misinformation. Someone being around misinformation and hatred makes them a more hateful person who also spreads that misinformation. I would block the instance regardless, but I don't want the average joe thinking "hm maybe these guys have a point, I never see anyone discussing these (completely discredited) studies about climate change! They must be too radically leftist to do so." and then start hanging out in conservative communities. This is literally how many people get radicalized, is through propaganda and fake news.
I could point out more blatant examples, such as lemmygrad, or many communities on Lemmy.ml. Often the post itself isn't as blatant, but the top comments certainly are, and the moderation backs it up.
The main difference is that Fox News is more popular. The same misinformation and aggressive rhetoric exists elsewhere, it just doesn't have the same funding or reach as Fox News.
What's funny is that other fox-named news orgs (local fox stations) tend to be among the best wrt accuracy and lack of rhetoric. In my area (Utah), the local fox station is way better than the large, independent, conservative station and news org (KSL and Deseret News, both owned by the dominant church here). They're unaffiliated with Fox News, but many get them confused.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. ABC stations were involved in a merger which was close to the edge of violating antitrust. Determining whether it does or not could take a long time in the courts, which could cause complications when negotiating contracts and whatnot. Kimmel's remarks implied that Republicans were to blame, which could be considered a violation of certain agreements for OTA transmission. Again, that would take a long time to sort out in the courts.
Maybe what the FCC said amounted to intimidation. Maybe ABC was looking for an excuse. Idk.