this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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the idea of social media as source of news needs to die
Evolve, rather, IMO. It's too conventient, it's simply where people are nowadays. It needs to become more reliable and fact-based.
I agree that it shouldn't die, but evolve. It has been fascinating to see Tik Tok during interesting moments in time act as a boots on the ground view of a major incident. But wrongdoers just trying to stir up ad revenue or trying to sew mistrust and disinformation are always going to be a huge problem. Not to mention dipshits like in the op just making things up, whatever their motivation was.
Freedom of speech in the United States is freedom from repercussions from the government for your speech, but all of these platforms removing moderation and leaning in to this free speech ethos are lying about their motivation and hiding behind these free speech implications. And now they are all, predictably, absolutely riddled with misinformation.
It is my hope that the next big social media platform is one that is very open to moderation and aggressively removes hate speech and misinformation. I just don't know how you do that without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, taking too aggressive an approach to content moderation could catch legitimate posts and is going to piss users off and make them leave the platform. These companies did try for a while, before they went full "actively contributing to the destruction of humanity" capitalist dystopia.
The only way to hide your bad deeds in a world where everyone is a reporter, where everything’s a camera, is to fill the air with noise, and hope we all become too delirious to see.
PieFed, see especially this blog post. It's not quite fully developed but I'm talking with you from it now if that's any indication of its status.
That's the primary reason I used Reddit though. I had a good set of subreddits where I got a good mix of news articles, and those had a decent amount of discussion with additional linked articles in the comments. It worked pretty well for years until spez screwed it all up by killing third party apps so I bailed.
Lemmy isn't nearly as good since it seems most of the people here are pretty far left on the political spectrum, so the news posted is heavily skewed. Reddit also leaned left, but we're way past leaning here.
That really makes me sad, and it's why I'm working on an alternative that I hope will appeal to people who want what I liked about Reddit.
that's slighly different, because you are sharing an article from a news organization, you can place the blame and/or trust on that organization, but just random people posting a picture with some text? i would dismiss 100%
Sure, but it's still my source of news, even if it's an aggregator of other sources. I'm a lot less likely to see some piece of news if it isn't posted to some social media site I'm part of.
But yeah, if someone on SM claims a thing happened, I want proof. If a news organization I respect claims a thing happened, I trust that they have proof.
Whats there to replace it? Systematically biased and profit oriented private news sites? State controlled news? Even nonprofit news is gonna be biased. Having some sort of public feedback loop built into any news source is honestly great and always preferable over private "fact checking". I hate these silicon valley companies just as much, but i prefer social media + community notes over legacy news media with no public feedback mechanism.
public feedback + engagement algorithms != public feedback
Also, plenty of news outlets have comments and voting. How do we know they're real people and not bots? Same way we know with social media: we don't. There's something to be said for actual journalists and editors who have to build and maintain their reputation.
Of course, Gramma, now it's time for bed.
Information flow pre internet was a nightmare in terms of being manipulated by governments and private news agencies. Saying that centralized fact checking is necessary is saying that people shouldnt be making judgements and need to be fed the truth. Ofcourse there is lots of garbage and fake shit everywhere on the internet, but if you actually want to know the truth its not that hard to find it most of the time.
For obvious hate speech stuff its not that complicated, but for things like the example in this post, i prefer it when random people give me a source over some mega corp being allowed to determine whats correct.
If for example there was not tons of live data about Gaza from social media, people would probably still be called terrorist supporters for even suggesting its a genocide. There might be some small sources talking about it, but without the overwhelming trove of evidence streaming out of all the social media platforms, there would not be enough info to actually make a case.
Im pretty confident, that without social media there would not be an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
There is lots of talk about governments, parties or individuals like musk influencing elections and its valid, but the funny thing is, before the internet this was even more extreme because all information that the average person received about politics came from government approved papers. If you went too hard against the vietnam war, your paper would be demolished.