Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.

In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.

It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.

You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.

Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.

So what do you end up with?

You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.

Then you get biased Ford stories under the “cars” community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won’t show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.

Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.

Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?

  • whyisitalways@lemmy.worldOP
    23·
    1 year ago

    The scale and severity of the accusations against Trump and those against Biden are on completely different levels.

    No, they’re not. You said accusations. Remember Trump Russia? Well now this is Biden China. If you think Jan 6th was an attempted coup and that is why this is so serious then you can also acknowledge that Biden China is using the legal system to attack his political opponent, Trump, which is just as serious an accusation. It is similarly a coup like situation. Unless I misunderstand what you mean.

    You’re implying the existence of an administrative or algorithmic bias that is somehow censoring right wing talking points while ignoring that several popular right wing talking points are of highly questionable veracity.

    I’m not implying this that is already a proven reality. Both the bias censoring them and many being highly questionable. The tactic for censorship is pointing out what isn’t true and ignoring the things being censored that are true. You could do the same thing for Democrat talking points, grabbing hold of the ones that are nonsense to justify censoring legitimate criticism.

    It’s like if someone says eating toothpaste cures COVID because their friend tried it and it worked but another person says vitamin D cures COVID here are several peer reviewed studies and you just lump all of that into a category called “COVID misinformation.” That is the current situation. Meanwhile the people doing the categorizing are saying “this new experimental untested COVID vaccine will absolutely protect you and you ‘WILL NOT DIE’ if you take it and it’s also the only way we can ever ‘GO BACK TO NORMAL’” but we all know that was also utter garbage misinformation. So the problem is the censorship by those spreading misinformation who are using the toothpaste claim to suppress the vitamin D information. I don’t see the problem as the toothpaste claim. People are supposed to be the most educated of any nation in the world in America they shouldn’t need government backed protection from unsupported claims on the internet.