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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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).
World blocked Exploding-Heads. Here’s a post about by the admins.
Negative posts about a criminal? How strange!
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.
Bud, a former president of the US has been indicted for 70 crimes in three different criminal cases, and is likely to be indicted with up to 8 additional crimes in a fourth case. This is the biggest set of indictments since Nixon. The notion that you would expect this not to be major news or that merely reporting on it suggests bias is mind-boggling.
It certainly leads credence to Steven Colbert’s claim, “Reality has a well-know liberal bias.”
Because of Rule 1.
That’s the cycle of most new platforms. Early adopters are typically tech savvy and highly educated people, who in turn have a strong left tendency and also in general a tendency of questioning the status quo and wanting to improve and change things. It’s fundamentally incompatible with conservatism overall, left or right leaning. A big part of conservative ideology is not just the usual fiscal responsibility yada yada, it’s also resisting fast change and keeping traditions and existing lifestyles. Adopting bleeding edge platforms is bog change and trying out new things. New platforms also tend to reach the left worldwide before the right comes to it, so there will definitely also be a lot of anti-american bias before it essentially gets taken over by mostly americans. Even on Reddit you’d see people go like “Reddit is an english american site go back to your country” rhetoric that just wasn’t there 5-10 years ago.
Facebook when it came out in the late 2000s also leaned very left, before it became mainstream and right wing people started using it too. Same with Twitter, same with even the very early Internet and BBSes and forums. Right wing people are the last to adopt new platforms, after hating on them for a few years.
That said, I think Trump is a bad example in this context. He’s being charged with a third indictment, and done a lot of crime so even on Reddit and TikTok it’s a huge flood of news about it.
Would also help for the right to not be seen as evil if they stopped attacking basic human rights and their stupid pointless war on “wokeness”.
Stay out of politics. Enjoy Lemmy.
