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?
“I don’t care about politics, but it really bothers me that you guys don’t like Republicans” lol
Maybe don’t cry about people shitting on the party trying to erase people from existence and force women to make health choices they don’t want?
Dehumanising your “enemy” is the first step to be able to kill them
I mean if it’s a contest about dehumanising groups of people I think the right-wing is doing a far superior job to the left…
It seems a bit silly to bring this quote up against the side that is actually angry about demographics getting dehumanized
Yes, I know the right in your country thinks of the other half of the country as screaming soyjaks, and no, I never said it was good. I’m seriously surprised at how you didn’t fall into civil war after both halves seeing the other as monsters that must be exterminated for being “Anti-American”
Well, there were scuffles between so-called ANTIFA-BLM and Proud Boys.
But what does it have to do with my point?
I mean if it’s a contest about dehumanising groups of people I think the right-wing is doing a far superior job to the left…
Deflecting and politicizing the discussion. My point is people should stop being segmented and separated into echo chambers and I want to know if Lemmy can help with that or if it’s merely copying the playbook from sites like Reddit. It doesn’t matter who is doing it worse both “sides” are doing this and they say the EXACT same things about each other.
The reason it’s polarized is because of what Republicans stand for though. It’s not possible to coexist with people who want other people dead just because of their skin color, gender, or sexual orientation. I’m not gonna play nice with people who want my friends dead just because they exist.
When did half of the country want people dead? Maybe that’s just a distortion of reality
Sensational nonsense and Republicans have similar sensational nonsense to say about Democrats. Both political parties are in favor of less rights for you and more money for themselves. That’s about it. I even called this years ago when I told a friend that BOTH gun rights AND abortion would be successfully attacked in the near future and used as a wedge to further erode rights. One party wants you to have less of this right, the other wants you to have less of that right, no one is talking about expanding people’s rights or reigning in government power. You just argue about which rights are more important than others and how the ones you don’t care about should be gotten rid of or at least it’s okay that your party wants to get rid of them because you don’t care about “the other” who thinks it is important to them.
The site presents posts based on user upvotes/boosts. The bias you see is the bias of the userbase. You wanna counter it? Vote and add to discussions. You just want it magically balanced? Curate your subscribed content like hell, or use multiple different websites with different biases. Forum style sites will always lean one way or the other, because whatever gets upvoted becomes the front page and attracts like minded people when they visit.
I mean I think that’s great. Fair discussion in good faith should always be welcomed.
The problem is when debates in bad faith or based on non-factual information happen.
Consider COVID, which god knows why became politicized - where one side supported taking basic precautions in the form of wearing masks, hygiene, distancing, and getting vaccinated, while other side did not.
Scientific and medical consensus was nearly unanimous in supporting the former - the two sides of this discussion were not factually equal. One side was working off of false information.
In this case trying to foster “balanced” discussion just ends up supporting the spread of misinformation.
This is what the poster who said that “reasonable people can’t differ on everything.”There are things where it’s ok for everyone to agree on. It’s not always a sign of some algorithmic conspiracy to force an echo chamber.
Just so you know that isn’t particularly true. The media made COVID stuff political at first. A quick check shows 50% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats were vaccinated in 2021. A difference that could be explained by factors like rural vs urban availability. The least vaccinated group was black men.
What mainly became political was the response. Wearing a mask or getting vaccinated were widely done by people in both parties. The only difference was feelings about if the government should be forcing people to do those things. This was spun as “republicans are stupid and anti science” in order to talk past the actual points of contention which were entirely focused on being forced by the government to do things which frankly didn’t have any scientific basis anyway.
Also most of the criticism of the vaccines and mandates was ultimately proven correct. It was, factually, the government that was spreading misinformation while coordinating with social media to ban anyone who ran counter to their narrative. That part is all proven history at this point. The government told everyone this was a safe and effective vaccine that was the only answer to “going back to normal.” In reality it was not safe and several issues were noted with the vaccines after this campaign where anyone questioning safety or efficacy was banned from social media. It was not effective and the people making those statement knew it wasn’t effective and hadn’t been properly tested to support those statements. Also it clearly wasn’t the “only way to go back to normal” since many people just didn’t take it and everything went back to normal.
The whole “misinformation” nonsense being pushed now by the government is merely them being mad that people called their bluff and they would like that to not happen again in the future. The idea that people can’t be trusted to discuss things amongst each other without the government being there to hit the brakes at any moment is scary. We have freedom of the press for the reason.
I can’t tell if you’re saying I’m dehumanizing the GOP or agreeing that the GOP is trying to dehumanize and erase trans people from existence.
Me no American, me no weird acronyms, making sure trans people really meant it before transitioning is not a genocide
Excellent concern trolling!
Yeah and that is what I’m talking about. It is frankly disgusting to have to read all this dehumanzing one sided garbage. The comments in this thread are perfect examples of dehumanizing people and using that as a justification for bias. “No reasonable person supports Republicans” and “Republicans have never done anything to garner support from rational people.” It is the shift from “we disagree about things that impact our lives” to “you are completely crazy and wrong about everything so you deserve whatever I do to you.”
erase people from existence and force women to make health choices
Biased Republicans would say similar things. That you shouldn’t complain if Republicans are shitting on Democrats because they’re the party that wants to let drag queens molest children and start WW3 in Ukraine or whatever. Normally when two people talk they can realize that the other person is in fact just a person like them and you can be empathic towards each other. This isn’t happening though because the people working themselves into a frenzy about “the other” are kept isolated and encouraged to keep going down that path of irrational hatred.
We have social media platforms actively separating people and promoting their thinking that the other side are deranged lunatics who need to be exterminated or severely restricted using the power of the government. This is really wrong and I’m hoping Lemmy can offer an alternative similar to the origins of social media where people could share and talk, that’s it, we didn’t have heavy handed moderators, admins, and algorithms getting in the middle of everything and creating isolated bubbles of people dehumanizing each other.
It’s a false equivalency to compare Republicans saying Democrats support drag queen child molestations or WWIII in Ukraine or whatever and Democrats claiming Republicans want to force women to make health choices.
Because Democrats haven’t passed any laws which would allow drag queen child molestation or induce WWIII in Ukraine, while Republicans actively campaigned for and managed to successfully repeal Roe vs Wade.
Like, do you see how one side’s accusation has more concrete evidence than the other?
The law hasn’t seemed to matter much lately. You could use illegal immigration as an example. The law says it’s illegal but Democrats as a party have openly supported people who break this law and generally ignore that it is being broken. Sometimes even encouraging people to break the law in public forum. You could use drug laws as another example. Democrats openly supporting people who use or abuse drugs from a health, safety, social care perspective but ignoring that they’re the ones supposedly writing the laws they claim to be protecting people against. Republicans, including Trump, have sort of rebranded into the “party of the law” because of this.
This is relevant because Republicans, as the party of the law, use the law to effect change. The Democrats, as a party that promotes caring for people over the letter of the law, often does not use the law explicitly to effect change. They use interpretation. Therefore your response is that Republicans are passing laws that hurt certain people so it can’t be possible that Democrats are similarly bad. Except that ignores things like Biden even having the privilege to deploy troops in Ukraine. It ignores all the things that happen outside of the law and within interpretation of the law and how the courts work in the real world that isn’t simply “passing a new law.”
Illegal immigration, for the vast majority of our history, has been a misdemeanor. Our nation is founded on white people stealing land. Who are we to refuse others?
I have no idea what you mean about Dems not changing laws though.
There is a difference between “refusing others” and allowing people to illegally enter the country and participate in society getting identification, holdings jobs, etc. In fact I find Democrats support of this disgusting because it is exploitative. They love to have illegal immigrants come here and give them just enough so they can go work on a farm or in a factory but not actually make them citizens capable of obtaining labor protections and not just being fodder for corporations.
Weird, the Dems I know are all talking about those issues of expediting a path to citizenship. Idk which Dems you’re talking to
Explain to me how a Republican would say Democrats are trying to erase people from existence.
Democrats are trying to groom children into being gay by letting drag queens molest them Democrats are trying to start WW3 in Ukraine
You do remember that our Democrat administration is pushing for cluster bombs in Ukraine? How does that compare to transgender rights in America?
This is a common tactic to demonize your opponent and it was widely demonstrated during the BLM protests. It was repeated all over the nation at these protests whenever anyone criticized something like burning down buildings. “How can you care about burning down buildings when black bodies are being killed in the streets?”
This emotional appeal to DEATH. People are DYING. We can’t be RATIONAL because people are DYING and THEY are the ones causing it! Meanwhile the people saying this turn a blind eye to the forever wars America is engaged in resulting in millions of death. Literally cluster bombs are being rolled out and you don’t hear a beep suddenly about “people are dying.”
If I point things out like this I become a Republican in the mind of the deranged Democrat biased poster. That’s fine but it works the same for biased moderators and admins who start to thumb the scales. It also works the other way if you go point out legitimate criticism of Republicans in biased Republican forums.
This is a discussion of bias not political beliefs.
Except democrats are not trying to groom children, whereas the GOP has enacted anti-trans and anti-healthcare policies. One statement is a conspiracy, the other is based on facts. You’ll find more facts on Lemmy
Also, the GOP is traditionally the more hawk-ish party lol. Just because a few loud voices are pro-Putin doesn’t make them doves.
Because I’m right and they’re wrong. Also even though Democrats are committing war crimes usually it is the Republicans.
There is one party from where I stand partner.
No. What I said is I don’t like biased stories on my front page. If I see 7/20 stories hating on Trump I have to wonder, where are the Biden stories? I’d prefer to see 0/20 stories hating on Trump and 0/20 stories hating on Biden. I’d tolerate seeing 4/20 stories hating on Trump and 4/20 hating on Biden (or some ratio that isn’t 100% biased in one way). I do not want one sided political propaganda being intermixed regularly into my feeds.
I mean if Biden was also being indicted for multiple felonies and being accused of basically selling out his country, you’d probably also see a few more stories hating on him no?
Those stories are occurring. See the Chinese bribery stuff or whatever. No, I’m not inviting a discussion about if this is equivalent or not. I am merely pointing out there you can go to a biased right wing social media site and it’s the same thing in reverse. There is no absence of stories about corruption with Biden that are supported just as much as any stories about Trump but those stories are absent here.
Again, the Chinese bribery stuff is a conspiracy. Why would a conspiracy get upvotes from rational people?
It’s “a conspiracy”? That doesn’t really mean anything. You didn’t even say it’s a conspiracy theory. Is Trump not being tried for a conspiracy at the moment? Not a conspiracy theory, the crime, it has conspiracy in the name. Your comment is just muddying the water. It’s pretty obvious the Bidens are involved in bribery with the CCP to some degree and that is by the facts. No different than Ukraine and Burisma. Ukraine was branded the most corrupt country in the world and the Bidens just happened to be all mixed up in their energy sector and governance. This is before the latest events even.
Here is a simple example.
Biden said he never got involved with his sons business dealings. That was his cover when all the Burisma stuff came out. Well, we know factually that is a lie now. Where is the story about this specific example on the politics community here? It’s a factual story illustrating Biden lied about business dealings with his son when he was questioned if these dealings could make him impartial. He lied in response to be asked if he could be impartial about Ukraine or if he might be involved financially in the situation. Where’s the coverage here historically when this story broke?
It’s just one of many examples of what is valid political news story about the current US President but where is it on Lemmy? Yet what I do see is 10 submissions on my front page about the same Trump story and he isn’t even the current President. That is the bias and if you’re not intentionally being a blind shill you can see it plainly. The question was not if Lemmy USERS are biased, obviously they are, the question is about the platform itself.
Find me one legitimate news source that states it’s “likely” that the CCP is bribing Biden.
If you are even entertaining the thought that the Trump shit is a conspiracy, you’re a joke. Listen to the tapes.
Any news source I found you would merely dismiss as not being legitimate. You don’t seem to know that conspiracy is a word that means something. This is different from “conspiracy theories” the popular phrase. Trump is being charged with conspiracy… it’s kind of hilarious to me you saying I’m a joke if I think the “Trump shit is a conspiracy” he’s being charged with conspiracy! I think that makes you the joke because it’s funny to me at least.
But you are literally inviting a discussion about equivalency when you claim that a discussion board with a left wing bias is simply the “same thing in reverse” as a discussion board with a right wing bias.
The scale and severity of the accusations against Trump and those against Biden are on completely different levels. Trying to claim that they should be discussed or compared on similar levels is outright disingenuous.
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.
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.
Who are you fuckin thanos? The world isn’t balanced, both sides aren’t equally shitty. Obviously you disagree, so if you don’t like seeing opinions you disagree with make your own instance, or leave lol. Why you still here whining when you made up your mind the moment you posted? You can do what you want but this is just silly.
“Hey guys I don’t like the content on the front page”
“Ok uh, well thats what users wanted to see so… You’re outvoted”
“But I don’t like it”
“You can curate your communities I guess?”
“But so many people disagree with me and I don’t like it, it must be site wide collusion to manipulate the content because that’s way more likely than people just generally disagreeing with me”
“… Ok bud well bye”
“But wait I don’t like it it challenges my preconceived notions”
Well, that isn’t at all what happened, but okay. This was a platform discussion and probably beyond most users here even understanding. Not because they’re stupid but because they don’t really understand how social media algorithms and rules work to curate content in certain ways.
If you wanted to ask about algorithms or if mods/admins can manipulate content then you can just ask that. Instead you asked if the platform was biased, and brought up negative trump posts as an example. Of course people thought you were upset because the dear leader was being smeared. Just ask the damn question without all the “ok but the biden stuff is just as bad and also this isn’t about politics, now lets talk about politics as an example of the bias I’m seeing”
Can you see how taking the question of “does this website allow vote manipulation by admins or have algorithms biased against certain viewpoints” and framing it around “I see a lot of negative posts about the man being indicted for an attempted coup, and that feels wrong” might give people the impression your just upset people are shitting on trump?
We know how social media works that’s why many of us are here. To avoid the algorithm rage baiting bullshit. And you walked in like “hey folks do you guys just manipulate information here? I feel like you do. Here’s a highly controversial example where I feel you are. But please don’t bring up my example, because its not about politics”
It feels like you’re fishing for a “go fuck yourself, and your poorly disguised concern trolling” comment. Congrats, you’ve caught one.
Borderline comment. I’ll leave it here, but tone it down please.
Why is telling a troll to go fuck themselves borderline? That’s exactly what everyone should do.
Will do. My apologies.
Actually I’m asking what I asked and interacting with Lemmy for the first time. Did I know it would be contentious? Yes, but that is part of the point. I wanted to see how contentious content is treated so you’re somewhat right.
It looks pretty good actually. I was able to post and comment with a new account without being restricted 100 different ways even while posting something that might upset some people. I don’t want platform level restrictions being driven by stupid group think and brigade activity. That’s about it.
Lemmy is not a single site owned by a single group. Each Lemmy instance is in effect its own website and they can communicate with each other which Is the federation part. Some instances cater to certain kinds of people and communities will skew towards a political direction.
If you are a hardcore right winger there are instances full of right wing extremist waiting for you to join their echo chamber. Same with the left wing nuts, there exist Lemmy instances specifically for them to congregate together. You can do some hunting and find them easily.
The only thing is that most other Lemmy instances will defederate from these kinds of instances since political extremist on either side tend to be hateful and zealous individuals who vocally express their violent fantasies of lynching anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with them. Most lemmyverse instances deem this kind of hateful speech unacceptable and will block them from cross - communicating.
Here is an example of a right wing Lemmy community:
Which Lemmy instance is not biased? Also, algorithmically, how much is Lemmy going to produce bias? Like I said that is my primary concern. Reddit is designed to produce bias and suppress unpopular opinions. Is Lemmy modeled after this design or did it ditch the stuff like shadow banning and time locking commenting based on “karma”?
There is no algorithm on Lemmy. Your fears are misplaced.
There is no shadow banning, no time locking comments based on karma, and all that?
Nope. The mod logs are public ally available on every Lemmy instance too so if a post is deleted or user banned you can check and see why. To find the mod log scroll to the bottom of an instance and you should see a link at the very bottom. There Is no need or incentive for shadow banning since Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects not backed by any corpo or investors that want a squeaky clean image. If you are an ass and the community wants you gone and the admins are inclined to agree, you will be banned in the normal manner given a proper reason. No weird backdoor shennanians, this is a normal internet form run and funded by every day joes. If you are so inclined and have the knowledge you cab skim through the source code.
Awesome thanks for answering. I knew this would turn into a political hate fest but hoped someone like you would understand the true question.
No problem I am happy to have helped you out a bit. It is a shame that being mauled by political type people is one of your first experiences here. I hope that you find Lemmy a good fit and find some communities you really like. Be well and have a good one!
There aren’t two sides to every issue, reasonable people can’t differ on everything. Your trump example illustrates this perfectly: at this point no reasonable person has a positive view of him.
That may be but I do know that many reasonable people are sick of hearing about him. This isn’t really about Trump it’s about how Lemmy functions algorithmically being too closely modeled on Reddit resulting in a biased platform. The destruction of Reddit’s politics subreddit occurred many years after its’ launch and with a lot of active interference from the site owners and moderators whereas on Lemmy it is starting in a biased state. It also doesn’t have to be about politics, it can be any number of contentious topics. My concern is that Lemmy is just copying Reddit and therefore will end up in the same place. What is new here? Why is Lemmy not going to turn into bought and paid for shill posts and comments astroturfing everything like Reddit?
You’re observing the current state of american politics manifested in a discussion platform - one side is saying “hey maybe there are things more important than shareholder value?” and the other is banning books because they were written by minorities and taking kids away from their parents for providing them healthcare.
Regardless, you’re the one who brought up posts mentioning trump. He’s in the news a lot because it’s finally looking like he’ll see some consequences for all the criming he did.
That’s just your bias. Everyone is biased but social media platforms don’t have to be designed to kettle people and feed their biases as correct. Let me put it this way using your own words…
current state of american politics manifested in a discussion platform
If that is true, can you show me the people talking about banning books because they were written by minorities and taking kids away from their parents for providing them healthcare? Even further, can you show me them talking about it in the POLITICS community?
I’m willing to bet that you can’t because this isn’t representative of the current state of American politics. It’s a one sided biased discussion absent this “other side” you’re referring to yet that “other side” is equal in numbers so where are they? Why are they so completely absent?
If I do post anti-Biden stories in politics or make anti-Biden comments in politics how long until I’m limited in some way compared to anti-Trump users? That is what I’m getting at. Does the platform support functionality to bias communities or does it actually rely on the users like old social media? Will my comments be time restricted? Will I be shadow banned? Will people have to click to expand my comment? How much will the platform itself interfere in these ways that create echo chambers?
Those backwards cunts do not exist in equal numbers, they’re just fucking loud, and due to being extraordinarily fucking dumb, probably only figured out how to reddit in the past year or two, so good luck finding any here lmfao.
They absolutely do exist in similarly equal numbers. Just because you censor people it doesn’t make them go away in the real world.
lmao, sure thing bro
The whole “they’re a fringe minority” claim is bizarre when Trump won the election and last election set records. Republicans and Democrats are roughly equivalent in numbers and so are their fringe crazies, who are increasing in number. Eventually the much larger majority of Americans who isn’t affiliated with a party and doesn’t vote will weigh in on this nonsense.
Removed by mod
I can tell you’re a trumper because you think we have the same cult of personality around biden. I’ll let you in on a secret: none of us like him that much.
I’ll let you in on a secret. No one likes Trump or Biden.
Perhaps, if you’re sick of hearing about a major American politician, unsubscribe from a community that is exclusively focused on American politics?
Just a thought.
Heavy US bias on the site. There is nothing Republicans have done over the years to garner any support from rational humans. Sometimes things seem very one-sided because they fucking are.
That said, I installed the lemmy keyword filter userscript which has been doing a decent job of keeping shit I don’t want to see (god damn reddit posts) off my feed.
There is nothing Republicans have done over the years to garner any support from rational humans.
This is the kind of over the top laughable bias I am talking about. That’s fine if you’re biased as a user because I’m talking about algorithmic and moderator/admin bias. This is a perfect example of the crazed bias I am referring to.
Honestly, it simply reads like paid political shilling. Who really says stuff like this? Who is so far down the political party rah rah that they couldn’t even admit their opponent political party has done a single thing a rational person would support? It just reads like dehumanizing tripe.
I don’t want to use a social media platform that exposes me to this kind of nonsense under the guise of being general political discussion and plasters the front page or my feed with it. Like I said, 7/20 stories attacking Trump on the front page. That amount of energy being expended to bias people in these extreme ways smells like paid advertisement not organic social media.
That’s even fine to me. Feel free to pay people to shill your politics BUT I want a platform that isn’t secretly biased in favor of this and putting their thumb on the scales anytime decisions get made. Not to mention invested in exposing me to this garbage in the hopes of vacuuming up political ad spend and working users into a hate frenzy because it increases page views.
People are pissed about the political situation in the US (imo for good reason).
Rolling up and immediately accusing people (who are imo righteously angry) of being paid shills sounds eerily similar to the bus full of paid protestors disingenuous dog whistle bullshit the right wing media uses to discredit and derail discussions about important matters.
Hey, you do you. For me, a party who backed a twice impeached president; the party who continues to back a thrice indicted ex-president; the party who takes away women’s rights; the party who champions white nationalism; a party who backs anti-science rhetoric, and I could go on but you get the point. A party like that has nothing redeemable. Don’t get me wrong. I used to disagree with conservative friends and we’d have great discussions over beers. But that was decades ago. If someone says they are conservative, OK, let’s talk about things. A person who says they are Republican is no longer worth talking to. To be a Republican means you’ve swallowed all the nationalistic fascist bullshit.
And to be honest, that really sucks. The Dems suck. I hate the Dems. Just corporate stooges who only seem to pay lip service to the average Joes in the country. It’s awful. As long as we are stuck with a two party system, it is much better to have dynamic, reasonable people leading those parties. That’s not what we have.
So, finally, what have Republicans done over the past few years that should garner any support from rational humans? I’d be interested in hearing. Perhaps I am being overwhelmed by the crime and hate, and just missing the jewels in the rough. If you don’t have anything, it’s like getting mad at people saying shit smells, when you may be one of the few who actually enjoy the smell of shit.
Lemmy doesn’t tip the scales, the front page is generally whatever is newest, or more upvoted/boosted/whatever. That’s what users vote on. If you disagree vote against the posts you don’t like, and if that doesn’t help then the simple fact is that the majority of users disagree with you or want to see that content. At which point you can either complain about it, or curate your subscribed magazines/communities accordingly. Or leave.
Also why does it shock you that news about trump is big right now? He’s a presidential candidate for the country with the biggest military in the world, and he’s being indicted and charged on multiple federal crimes. Its just a big fucking deal regardless of your politics. And to be clear, fuck him, and republicans, but yeah. Of course people have an opinion on this, its world changing stuff. How can you be so naive lmfao.
As for fear of paid shills, you have that everywhere. I’d argue less so on something like lemmy considering its size. its always easier to just pay facebook to boost your anti vax post than build or buy a legit forum account for some random forum, then hand craft rage bait posts and use a bot army to upvote them. And on Facebook you’d reach billions of gullible mommy advice pages. Cost benefit wise I really don’t think the fediverse is worth that cost yet.
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Defending any of your two geriatric parties against the other makes all of you look like toddlers fighting over what standard football is the best.
They’re literally the same party, and as long as you don’t realise and vote third parties you’ll rot in this vicious cycle
Voting third party is a waste until we get ranked choice voting. That’s the shit system we have. Implementation of ranked choice voting enables third parties, or cooperative relationships between parties. Until then its one or the other and while they both suck one is objectively worse.
Well, thoughts like yours are what’s keeping that system everyone seems to hate going
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If you think that “enlightened centrist” thing is bad, maybe you should be the one leaving the cave of caricatures shown by your echo chamber
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Oh sorry, did I break your poor extremist heart?
Your comparison is horrible tbh.
But what you’re asking underneath it all is simple enough.
Lemmy isn’t a single entity. It’s dozens of instances (well, dozens of public ones big enough to notice), with multiple communities on each.
There is a bigger section of users that reject alt-right matters, which is an “oh no. anyway” situation because most instances also reject the left equivalent (tankies) with similar fervor. But there’s communities that are quite friendly to non extremists that are what you’d call conservative overall, if you go looking. But the major instances are run by folks that lean liberal, progressive, and/or socialist. It’s just a fact.
I hate to break this next part to you though. Any political based community, subreddit, or forum is going to be a dumpster fire of biased bullshit. And that goes for any segment of political ideology. That’s because people that are emotionally invested in identity politics are nigh unto religious zealots. And they’re the most likely to make posts and comments in those places. They’re also the ones most likely to shoehorn in political bullshit where it doesn’t belong.
That last part is a much bigger issue because it’s harder to avoid.
But, dude, don’t get it twisted. The whole trump part is to be expected. Anyone not expecting high vitriol regarding him is silly. Like, he’s divisive intentionally. He just got indicted, so it’s current news everywhere. This means the posts about him are certainly going to focus on the crimes he’s accused of, which is going to be “negative” if you’re a supporter. If you’re neutral regarding him, it’s still going to read negative because the shit he’s accused of is pretty fucking negative lol. You can’t report on someone accused of serious crimes and it not skew negative unless you ignore anything about the news that’s factual.
But I’m not going to get started on the whole “moderator and suppression” bullshit because it’s utter bullshit.
I always wonder about these ‘omg bashing on trump’ questions. It’s because he’s a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.
Nobody’s telling you to not hate Trump as an individual (Used to be funny before getting into politics, now just an asshole), but calling the other half of the country fascist maneaters that will bring hell on earth is quite extreme
I don’t think that’s what OP said, though? They said there were news articles that were negative about trump, and makes sense there would be.
He’s using Trump as an example of how biased this platform seems to be
No my point is there is an absence of stories about Biden. At least that is it in a nutshell. Like I said elsewhere I’d prefer 0 stories about either one but at least equal representation of stories not just negative Trump stories endlessly. That isn’t organic and it’s obvious. There are many reasons it can happen but one is that the platform itself promotes bias and to me that is the most important factor on if I want to use a given platform. I don’t even care if every story is about hating Trump as long as I can say Fuck Biden and not get banned for it by an admin. That’s my only point. I don’t care about either of them. If you’re posting somewhere that saying Fuck Biden gets you banned but Fuck Trump is there every day all day then you’re just participating in an echo chamber and taking party in a small community not the larger world community on the internet.
Maybe they should stop acting like textbook fascists if the don’t want to be called fascists.
And textbook fascists are?
Not sure why you’re asking this vs researching it. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism characterized by corrupted monopolistic capitalism in cooperation with government, xenophobia, racism, sexism, o session with crime and punishment, and use of fear of “enemies” to manipulate the public.
Well…Chevrolet does use patriotic imagery to sell (excluding their full-size vans and the Malibu) crappy cars, thus ripping people off. Their parent company, General Motors
CorporationCompany also did a sleight-of-hand trick that took all kinds of money from the American taxpayer we’ll never see again. So that’s a large contribution to our eventual default on the national debt, which will lead to an eventual overthrow of the government.
Negative posts about a criminal? How strange!
Whole point is lost on you and has nothing to do with Trump.
“is email a biased platform?”
If you’re on a Lemmy instance that federates with ExplodingHeads, you would probably see the opposite results (since they are very pro-Trump).
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That is what worries me about this concept.
That now not only do you need a different community within social media but an entirely different site catering to your in group. It is further fracturing people into small groups that refuse to interact with each other and are becoming unhinged and paranoid as a result.
Is it really so hard to have a social media site with politics discussion that is moderated without bias? Everyone seems to just accept that the bias is a given and you just have to find your own little bubble to be happy in. No. I want to discuss with people different than me. Not circle jerk people who already think like me.
This means whereas you used to have a biased politics within a social media site you at least had political groups interacting outside of politics there but fracturing across sites will speed this up rather than reduce the group think. Hopefully social media just dies.
The problem you’re describing is different than the one Lemmy solves. Lemmy is just a federated, open source alternative to Reddit. It doesn’t try to be anything else.
But the good news is this: If somebody wants to create “a social media site with politics discussion that is moderated without bias”, they can just use Lemmy and make it happen. They no longer need to create a 50 person company to develop the software the runs the network. It can be done by a handful of people now, and that wasn’t possible before.
Also, your car analogy isn’t great. I can objectively say that the PT Cruiser is unsafe. That is hard to debate me on. I can objectively say Trump is a narcissist who throws his food on the wall and who is being indicted for multiple crimes both federally and in 2 other locations. It’s hard to deny those things.
Your comment is childish.
How so? I made 2 objective statements. One about PT Cruisers and one about Trump?
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Define fascist
Edit: odd that the user is ignoring this comment, but still attacking people elsewhere on this post lol
Oh sorry, I do in fact have a life and I’m not always able to answer every single comment
Why do you feel that you’re entitled to centrism?
Lemmy isn’t Reddit - there’s no single central website. It’s made up of instances that can have a whole range of political leanings (from the alt-right to tankies to no particular angle), if one doesn’t suit you then look around for another. What you will find is that the general insurances tend to be more leftwing and anti-corporate because the bulk of members are here because they got tired of big business interfering with the more mainstream social media.
Also, you are presumably looking at the front page of lemmy.world and, considering Trump is currently in court on serious charges, it’s no great surprise there are posts on him that don’t show him in a flattering light.
And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.
OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.
It’s not different, that’s my concern. I want something different and better and fragmented instances of biased social media sites isn’t it. I want a politics discussion to be diverse and varied not “politics” on the republican lemmy instance, “politics” on the democrat lemmy instance, and so on. It seems to be impossible these days for moderators or admins to promote an unbiased forum even if they themselves are biased. Everyone just kind of accepts and admits the bias and stays in their little bubble thinking this is how it should be. It didn’t used to be this way.
Any chance of that happening has pretty much stopped when the internet became monetized and corporations figured out echo chambers made the most money and most user engagement. It’s also harder in the US in particular because of how the corporate owners managed to make politics into a “support your sports team” theatre.
If you want discourse, best find it in person, because I an guarantee you that it’ll be very slim pickings, if any, to find that online.
You will never be able to stop people having biases, I think we have learned that thus far. It is really hard to prevent no matter where you go. What Lemmy allows the individual to do is remove those constantly negative hate groups from being visible for them. Lemmy gives us options, you can block users, communities, and instances. Well that’s great and all, but maybe you still want to see political content, just not negative stuff constantly.
Part of being federated is that we can have multiple politics communities of the same name on many different instances. If you have a power mod suppressing one community, you can go to another or create your own under your rules that you see fit. Some moderators and user dynamics do a really good job at removing biases as best they can for the sake of good journalism.
It is no easy feat to accomplish that, but Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) makes it possible to accomplish. You can’t say that for many other social networks.
That’s right. I’m not sure if anyone federates with them, but Gab runs Mastodon, which has some ActivityPub compatibility with Kbin on toots / microblogging.
