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Over the last few years there's been increasing tension over valid news sources. As social media has warped the landscape of how we receive and interact with news, alternative news sources have developed, fake news outlets have flourished, and even mainstream sources have restructured their stories and editorials around driving engagement. While the Something Awful forums are as anachronistic as ever, we still can't entirely escape these changes, and as tweet embeds were added and posters' news sources shifted to reddit or twitter or alternative news sources, so too has the discourse around sources and their validity. As we begin the restructuring of USPol, it's important to discuss this now: what should the expectations be for posted sources? How responsible are posters for the sources they post? My hope is that, with feedback from this thread, we can develop solid guidelines for posting, discussing, and debunking sources that can be added to the rules thread and give us a solid basis for enforcing better discourse. Some topics for discussion, by no means exhaustive: ---Clickbait articles with misleading headlines ---lovely editorials written to drive negative social media engagement ---Posting articles as an embedded tweet with an attached hot take ---Debating the validity of sources, or expressing skepticism about facts or subtext ---Discussing a useful article from a normally bad source, or vice-versa Remember that the goal is to develop guidelines for how the mods and iks should respond to these issues. Obviously we would all like other uses to develop better media literacy, and I'm planning on creating a thread on that topic, but topic of this thread is 'when and how should the mods intervene?'. As with the last feedback thread, this thread will remain open for roughly two weeks.
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Jan 30, 2021 18:41
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:28 |
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It's sure as hell not going to be blue checkmarks only. More like "people with any sort of notability or indication that they are providing good information". Basically, posters should have an answer to "Why should we listen/not listen to this person?"
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Jan 31, 2021 00:40
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I'm less interested in black listing sources, outside of egregious cases, and more interested guidelines for how posters should interact with sources. It's a moderation issue when posters misrepresent what their source says, its probably a moderation issue when a poster embeds a tweet of someone else misrepresent a source, but is it a moderation issue when a poster only reads a clickbait headline and writes some incendiary take based solely on that? Is it a moderation issue when someone agrees with a racist editorial that was published in the Washington Post it New York Times? Similarly, where does media criticism become dismissing a valid source for ideological reasons? These are more the sort of questions I want to work out. I'm not going to maintain a white/blacklist.
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Feb 1, 2021 18:13
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That's a pretty severe misrepresentation of what happened. A poster asked if Russia Today was a reliable source, several posters said that it was not, a poster made a thinly veiled accusation that they were only saying that to discredit a column written by Reade that RT published. That isn't a discussion of the issue, that's using it to bludgeon another poster on a tangentially related topic rather than engage on that topic. It's abusive and lazy, and honestly a pretty gross mishandling of a very serious issue. What went down is also is directly relevant to this thread: bad sources frequently give people a platform that more mainstream sources won't. Most of the time, this is because those people are themselves bad sources. Sometime they're good sources that are being published because, like the poster who brought up the Reade column, the bad source believes they can use the good source as a bludgeon. I don't believe the agenda of the publisher diminishes the value of good sources they publish, but I do think it's important to think critically about the context under which they were published, just like any other article.
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Feb 4, 2021 20:27
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OK, so this thread will be around the better part of another week, so here's where I'm at so far: ---Posters are responsible for actually reading the articles they are linking, and demonstrating that by accurately summarizing the parts they found interesting, or at least ensuring that the attached tweet does so. ---When linking opinion pieces, posters should add their own commentary; their position on the subject or on the value or lack thereof in the column. I think those are reasonable basic guidelines for posting sources. My concern now is guidelines for debunking bad articles. There's a difference between outright false sources and sources that post facts with a severe bias, obvious or otherwise. The former are pretty easy to moderate, the latter less so: poor sources frequently give platforms to people outside the mainstream, and sometimes these are valuable articles. Similarly, good sources sometimes have some awful and unreliable writers on staff. A black/whitelist isn't really the solution here, and I think we should discourage posters attempting to enforce their own. So the question is, when an article is called out as misleading or false, who is the burden of proof on, the original poster, the accuser, or to a greater or lesser degree both? Remember that breaking or exclusive news isn't always reliable, and can be difficult to prove or debunk. Posters might accidentally post information that turns out to be incorrect by no fault of their own.
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Feb 6, 2021 19:19
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Jarmak posted:Biased/crappy sources are one thing and they can be points of debate: "Why should we trust 'The Hill'?" is a valid point to be made in an arguement and doesn't mean that source needs to be moderated, but active disinformation outlets like the Washington Examiner, OANN, etc should be restricted to media literacy discussions or times when the fact a story is running is itself a story. To be clear I'm talking about sources like The Hill, that lean heavily on clickbait and hearsay, or something like Al Jazeera, which have a clear agenda but also provide coverage that can be difficult to otherwise get in English, not outright nonsense sources like OANN. The latter are easy to moderate. There are also issues like the New York Times, who have good factual articles but publish a ton of absolute garbage editorials.
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Feb 6, 2021 21:02
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There's a substantial difference between critiquing an article because of displayed bias or poor writing or analysis, and dismissing an article outright as false or deliberately misleading.
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Feb 6, 2021 21:18
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This thread is relevant to all of D&D but is particularly important to the upcoming USNews thread. As for the question, I think that the issue isn't "should the Reade column be banned"; it's more "should the person posting the column be asked to defend it up front because it's published by a questionable outlet" and "to what degree is it appropriate to criticize the outlet rather than the content of the article".
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Feb 9, 2021 17:19
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I would like to have a specific "this column is hot garbage" thread for dissecting and mocking stupid, poorly written, nakedly self serving, and/or untrue opinion pieces in reasonably major publications. I think there should be a place for discussing worthless editorials that isn't dropping them in USPol/USnews.
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Feb 9, 2021 23:17
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Discendo Vox posted:Proposed rule I like this, but think A/B can be enforced more loosely if the article is straightforward and factual and from a well-known source; if someone posts a CNN article about an new executive appointment being announced, we probably don't need to examine who CNN are of if they are trustworthy on that issue. If they do a dossier on said appointment, then it's valid. I'm perfectly happy with C always being in effect though.
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Feb 11, 2021 01:07
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Discendo Vox posted:The poster should at least be able to say it's CNN. Not requiring A and B at all means the jackasses start equivocating about what's a "well-known source". I was working under the assumption that the link/embedded tweet would point to them as a source. If it's someone subtweeting the article or the source is otherwise not immediately obvious, then absolutely.
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Feb 11, 2021 01:12
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Yeah I don't think we need to have nakedly bigoted video essay producers as sources even of they manage to stopped clock themselves to something not absolutely monstrous every once in a while. Posting them in the appropriate places (right wing media thread) to rant about them or mock then is one thing, using them as a source of valid information is quite another. They definately fall into the "egregious cases" part of my post about blacklists.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:32
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OK, so the rough draft of new rule that I'm kicking around looks like:quote:Good discussion requires good sources, and you are responsible for your sources. When you post a source, it should be immediately obvious 1) what that source is, 2) that the source is worth listening to, and 3) if the source is commentary or expansion on reporting by somebody else, where they are getting their information. If any of these are not immediately obvious, you are responsible for making it so with your post. You are also responsible for ensuring that any summaries you post, or any summaries by somebody else that you post, are accurate to the article. Don't fall for clickbait headlines.
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Feb 15, 2021 19:34
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Freakazoid_ posted:What will be the punishment for posting bad or misleading sources? And will they count towards the ramp rule? It'll probably start with a warning, then sixer, then ramp up for people who don't get the message yes. If it's really egregious maybe more, if it's an honest mistake from a person who usually maybe less.
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Feb 15, 2021 23:05
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Sorry for the long gap. Hell unexpectedly froze over and I ended up scrambling to deal with poo poo for a while. Anyway, I thought it over for a while but then remembered that we've had issues with tweets and even sometimes articles vanishing after they're linked for various reasons, and yeah I think that noting basic who/what/why should we care stuff about anything posted should be an expectation.
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Feb 24, 2021 17:55
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