Yeah, me too. The pattern of people relentlessly dogpiling on FS that he was terrible, in conjunction with the fact that he was active at removing propaganda from his communities, was very sad to me. If his inactivity is connected to the fact that people were constantly insulting and harassing him, that would make perfect sense. And now here is a post which is attacking Jordan, not for any of the various objectively terrible moderation decisions which he’s come out at various points to defend, but because he removed some propaganda.

I have seen the end-stage of a gradual community takeover multiple times on reddit, where a group of bad actors (either corporate-friendly or with a particular political goal) eventually manage to take over a subreddit and run it exactly how they want. That kind of pattern is honestly part of why I am so against Jordan’s “well the mods set the rules so fuck your opinion” attitude as pertains to moderation, even if I don’t really get the read that he is malicious in any way.

I have no idea if this particular instance of pointing some abuse at Jordan because he came out against some propaganda is a piece of a community “takeover” by mods who are quieter and more malicious (or even if the harassment of Squid had anything to do with a pattern like that.) But if it did, that would make good sense. I definitely have noticed one moderator of LW communities who consistently makes pro-propaganda decisions, and they’re super quiet about their reasoning and decisions, letting people like Jordan come more to the front to speak to the community about them.

Yeah. I’m of two minds about it: I don’t like ceding space to the rabble. I think a lot of times, the right response to propaganda is to call it out and be vigorous about making it clear that it doesn’t belong. Anything along the lines of “just don’t engage, that just gives it fuel” winds up as a de facto surrender where every topic will be filled with… well, with comments along the lines of a lot of the ones you see in this topic. Russia tells the truth sometimes! NATO! The State Department lies! Mint Press is well-sourced, I appreciate alternative points of view even if you don’t! Iraq War! It’s just a nonstop avalanche of talking points. If you look at the voting, you can kind of see some battle lines in terms of which of them are getting traction over time and which ones are unanimously seen through, and I’m always a little gratified when someone comes in with some bullshit and it gets solidly rejected. I don’t think it’s harmful to let that happen. I do think it’s harmful to let them just run around doing this stuff unmolested. The bullshit asymmetry principle is only an issue if you let the bullshitter dictate the terms of the conversation and keep introducing new stuff – or if no one challenges the bullshit and the public discourse becomes just a factless free-for-all.

But as far as lemmy.world, it was just too much to salvage any kind of decent space. There was too much synergy between deliberate propaganda, deliberate trolling, godawful moderation, and standard internet cluelessness and gullibility. I suspect that some of the moderation was bad specifically on purpose, actually. Someone pointed out not long ago that except for MBFC, every one of the baffling moderation decisions the lemmy.world moderators undertook was in the direction of providing cover for some kind of propaganda (UM’s “advocacy” for third parties being a good example). It’s really not normal. Even in spaces that have bad moderation, it’s usually just kind of randomly applied, random people being banned and random people not. Lemmy.world’s moderation is extremely consistent in the direction of allowing propaganda - except for FlyingSquid for a while, and FlyingSquid got harassed and eventually apparently driven out. And now, Jordan made a decision that’s anti-propaganda, and look! People are harassing him and objecting to the decision and spreading bad-faith talking points that Mint Press needs to be allowed, because it’s “well-sourced.”

Yeah. And if UM was objectively breaking the rules, for example on frequency of posting, Jordan would just fall silent or make some kind of joke about it, or remove a couple of the offending posts while pretending it was some crazy one-off that something like that could have happened.

The vibe I get is that Jordan is the fall guy who has to be the public face of bad moderation decisions being made by someone else. He basically said as much, when he said the mods “talked a lot” about UM and this was the decision. So it’s not purely his fault, I think the root of the issue is elsewhere. But that’s just speculation, and he is choosing to come out and publicly defend these absurd moderation decisions, so whatever. Eventually I just decided that the solution was not to fuck with the affected subs anymore, and often when I wander back into them I feel very vindicated in that decision.

lol

Just to do my due diligence: An easy hallmark of propaganda is that it keeps changing. Russia had every right to invade Crimea, because Crimea is Russia. Russia is not invading Crimea, those soldiers going over the border are nothing to do with us. The problem in Crimea is “tense, sometimes violent conflict” after Russia “announced the annexation.” Fast forward to 2022, and Russia is definitely not going to invade the rest of Ukraine. All these Western intelligence reports that say we’re going to invade are just Russophobia. We’re not even invading, we’re just trying to “denazify” Ukraine and remove this illegitimate government to help the Ukrainians. Most Ukrainians support the invasion. Anyway, it’s all the West’s fault we invaded, because NATO provoked us. We definitely want peace, this whole situation “just happened” somehow, and now any agreement that involves enforcement of peace with enough teeth that we can’t unilaterally ignore it sends us into a rage and means we stop negotiating.

And yes, of course this applies also to Western propaganda. You can see the same sort of pattern sometimes in what they say about Israel for example. The cold passion for truth hunts in no pack. But the Russian POV about Ukraine or Syria is nothing but jingoistic poppycock. It deserves no respect.

This is such a weird point of view. The mods don’t “own” the space. It’s not your server. You’re the representatives of the community. It’s very weird for the community to speak with an overwhelming voice that they want someone banned because they are toxic and unhinged (and also, breaking the objectively stated rules of the community, with things like how many articles posted per day), and for the mods to say, “No, we decided they stay.” Them eventually deciding to ban, after the behavior got even more objectively unacceptable, doesn’t excuse it.

It’s like the difference between how Trump runs the government and how a normal president runs the government. Trump doesn’t “own” the country. He has a responsibility for it. The ownership, but not the responsibility, is what makes someone bad in a leadership position. It’s not to say you need to automatically accede to any loud contingent of the community that’s yelling about something. But UM was about as clear-cut a case as it is possible to get, and I cannot for the life of me understand someone who’s entrusted to keep a community of people a good place, who decides to come out and tell the members of that community “No, we’ve decided that this person needs to stay in the community, and we don’t care what you think about it.” I have no idea who these moderators are who are looking at UM’s behavior and deciding “yeah that’s not rule-breaking,” let alone a consensus of them.

I think it is, in part, a product of the weirdly off-kilter incentives that exist on the modern volunteer internet. I sort of suspect that what’s going on is that every human being kind of has an internal mental model of how much the rest of the community “owes” them, and that colors their behavior and how they adhere to the social contract. In places where someone feels like the community has “given them so much,” that kind of thing, they’ll really have respect and good dealing in almost everything. They’ll fight hard to keep the community as a good place. They won’t fall back on bullshit excuses like “well he’s not breaking any rules (today).”

I do see the other side of it. I think almost any moderator on the modern internet gets put upon by so much thankless crap on a day-to-day basis (some of which you touched on elsewhere ein these comments) that your what-I-owe-the-users meter is absolutely pegged at “0” only because it can’t go lower. I get that. I don’t think it’s really wrong for you to feel that way. I have a lot of sympathy for what mods do and it’s a pretty critical part of keeping the community okay. I’m just saying that it would be hard for be in that position and take at all seriously what any one of “the users” thinks or wants, or even a group of them. That is wrong though. That is your position, to support the will of the community to build a good place to be. Not to lecture the community on what it should be, with whether that is good or bad as irrelevant or subordinate to “the rules.”

I don’t know, man. I don’t really know what the answer is, and I don’t really like the thankless and difficult position that mods on busy communities get put into. But this mindset is wrong.

Totally

Oh yes, that makes perfect sense. I see your point now. Totally.

disdain and distrust

They do source their articles very well

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/senatedocs/2/

Look at page 98, they literally have an org chart of Russian disinformation campaigns within this one particular network that they analyzed, and where Mint Press fits into it.

I also sent some examples of open propaganda articles elsewhere in these comments. They don’t source their stuff “very well,” by definition, since they are posting open propaganda and disguising the fact that it’s sourced indirectly from Russian intelligence, but that’s not even the point. It has nothing to do with “disdain,” although I applaud your consistent efforts to remove the discussion from a factual domain and into an emotional one through the use of charged words (or into a domain where “sourcing of articles” is the issue.)

Plane hit the WTC?

Invaded Iraq?

What the fuck are you talking about? No one is saying they don’t “source” their articles. The problem is they post things like:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/textbook-politics-new-geography-book-and-atlas-recognize-russias-claim-to-crimea/210441/

Although the United Nations and many Western governments continue to object to Russia’s claims over Crimea

After Ukraine distanced itself economically and politically from Russia on the heels of the Euromaidan protests of 2013, the residents of the Crimean Peninsula of Ukraine overwhelmingly voted to break away from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Russia announced the annexation of the region soon after, but the move has not been recognized by Ukraine or its NATO allies, leading to months of tense, sometimes violent conflict.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/western-media-ignore-critical-information-snipers-killed-euromaidan-protesters-ukraine/186661/

Instead of keeping its end of the bargain, the Ukrainian mainstream opposition executed a coup through the use of violence by organized ultra-nationalist gangs, which some analysts have compared to stay-behinds or secretive militias that were created by NATO during the Cold War.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/syria-ghouta-claim-saudi-supplied-rebels-chemical-attack/168135/

And so on

That whole conversation is so weird. I went back and reread big sections of it, and it’s just… the conversation is off. Jordan says he can’t remove the bot, because the admins won’t allow it. Rooki says that’s definitely not true, so people ask Jordan about it… and he’s just silent. Not “oh I must have misunderstood” or anything else, just pretending that if he doesn’t say anything, no one will notice that someone asked him a question, and everyone will move on. And then there’s Rooki accepting the code for scanning Wikipedia’s sources… but totally missing the point that the MBFC sources are awful, and the WP reliable sources list is actually quite good, and deciding that MBFC and Ground News are what needs to be positioned front and center. Also seeming totally uninterested in the idea of improving the quality of the ratings in response to the clear consensus of the community with citations.

I checked the last of the stuff that MBFC bot posted, 4 months ago, and the little line where the Wikipedia rating had previously featured had been replaced to a link to the WP article about the source, missing the whole point of categorizing sources cleanly into bullshit/not bullshit or the point that certain sources (Newsweek) had clearly slid into unreliability over time, but were still allowed on the lemmy.world subs for some reason.

It’s just so strange. Someone had a conspiracy theory that one of the admins had an unannounced sponsorship deal with Ground News, and that was the whole reason behind the entire thing to drop a link to Ground News while misdirecting everyone into getting mad at MBFC or something. I have no idea. It was just weird.

What?

Did something I said sound like “the problem is that it’s rocket science”? I feel like your message was intended to respond to someone else or something. The problem is that it’s Russian propaganda, not that you “can’t follow sources” or whatever.

Also, a big part of their argument was that it was the only option, nothing else would do that had an API endpoint and had affordable terms of use. I offered to provide them an API endpoint to Wikipedia’s sources list (which is precisely the same thing as MBFC, just… accurate and detailed) in exactly the same format, and they said no no that won’t do. I wrote code to actually fetch and parse Wikipedia’s list so they could make the bot follow actually-accurate source rankings with additional details and everything. Rooki silently received the message, then there was a long delay, then a little “Wikipedia” line started showing up way down below the awful MBFC rankings that were still front and center.

TIL Mint Press News.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

MintPress News supported former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia and Iran.[3][4]

The editor had investors, who Muhawesh claimed were “retired businesspeople”, but she would not name them

Soon afterward, Brian Lambert of MinnPost wrote an article following up on Burke’s challenge to find out where MintPress’s money came from. He reported that emails to them went unanswered, their phone was disconnected, and the original office address in Plymouth, Minnesota, “haven’t been valid in well over a year”. While MintPress listed 20 of its writers, Lambert wrote it did not indicate where the money was “coming from to pay any of these people”.[16]

MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[25][26] and is listed as a “partner” of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[27][28][29] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the “Russian web of disinformation,”[30][31] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[32] MintPress News defended Russia’s invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine’s post-revolution government was “illegitimate”.[33]

Sounds like YDI. MBFC is horrible of course, but it sounds like in this case they got it right (somehow focusing in one of the only things Mint Press gets right, being “anti-Israel”, presumably as a performative cover so they’ll fit in better among other general left wing news. Which of course triggered MBFC, which is part of the whole reason why it’s clever for them to include a whole bunch of “Israel’s the bad guys” in among the “Russia’s the good guys.”)

You had me in the first half lol

PTB

ESH

@Unruffled: MBFC is absolutely terrible. Plenty of people have given examples, but just to name a few:

• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/al-jazeera/ - Al Jazeera is rated “mixed” factually. They are, objectively, a top-notch news organization. The issue is they’re anti-Israel (not even in a partisan way, just in a “look at these war crimes which are objectively war crimes” type of way instead of tiptoeing around certain facts to be nice to Western governments)
• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/msnbc/ - MSNBC is “mixed” factually. I looked into some of the claimed reasons, and it was things like they had a guest on, the guest said something misleading or made a mistake, and then the host corrected them.

Contrast with:

• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/ - The New York Post is “mixed” factually, to give you a sense of what that categorization means
• https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/ - The New York Times is “high” factually, despite the fact that they’ve had at least one major factual-reporting scandal in the very recent past (some but not all of the elements of their reporting of sexual assaults by Hamas during the October 8th attacks were fabricated, people were raising concerns pre-publication that they were fabricated, and they reported them anyway)

And so on. It’s just, basically, one person’s subjective opinion of what he thinks about various news sources.

If you want to do this task of categorizing news sources, just use the Wikipedia Perennial Sources list. That one’s peer-reviewed by a huge team of people who care a lot, qualified feedback is taken seriously and used to improve the list, there’s a ton more transparency, it is just better in every respect.

@Deceptichum: As with almost every time someone gathers mod action, it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it. You were abrasive and insulting for no reason at all. You’re not wrong, but IMO you pretty much deserved the mod action because you were being a cock. I think if you’d responded to the pretty reasonable (if phrased a little bit hostile) question by just answering the reasonable question, you would have been fine. The mods here seem fairly reasonable in most cases, but most people will respond poorly to being cursed at and insulted out of nowhere.

Bureaucracy is one of the super-powers of modern civilization. It keeps the water clean, it keeps the food growing, it makes sure that someone who knows the right people can’t just drive drunk because everyone in a position of power can keep them out of trouble. Having an organized system for things, and then consistently applying it so that problems can be fixed systemically and then the fix can stick in place, is the only way we have billions and billions of people on the planet right now instead of little chaotic scattered settlements.

Like any superpower it creates new problems that it introduces. Some people might say the settlements would be a better idea. But it solves a whole bunch of problems too, and the idea that it’s inherently an evil thing is along the exact same lines as “the servers always run fine, why do we pay an IT department?”

It reminded him, the briefing says, of “fleeing arbitrary detention in Syria and forced disappearance of his friends in Syria in 2013.”

My brotherman, there is a reason for that.

Ha, fair enough. I won’t say you are wrong about someone doing that. My observation has been:

1. Lemmy has vanishingly few people who are actually racist/transphobic/in favor of genocide/whatever
2. Lemmy has a ton of people who are convinced that those people are all over the place, and devote a really substantial amount of mental energy into trying to find something they can misinterpret as being one of those things and then go on the attack (also periodically assuring one another that there are definitely a ton of those people all over the place, and attacking them to each other)

My advice would be to avoid the places where group 2 likes to congregate, because they tend to be silly places that will give people a distorted view of what’s real after a while.

Your quote marks and your original question sound like you’re really trying hard to find something offensive about the way I am saying it. Good luck! I hope you find some enemies you can be performatively anti-racist against, if that is in fact your goal. If that’s not your goal, then I would modify your language, because you’re making it sound like that’s your goal, and there are better things to be upset about in the modern day than being hyper-vigilant about anything that sounds offensive and then then proudly pointing out to everyone that it’s offensive.

(Well, I mean yes, the nature of the system is offensive, and I’m aiming to be direct about how it behaves, so in that sense maybe my language is offensive. I think it is extremely clear that the system is meant for Khalil, though, and he’s not Hispanic. He is brown. I said what I said, the way I said it, for a reason.)