Where do you go on Lemmy for reliable news and politics?
Where do you go on Lemmy for reliable news and politics?
I'm enjoying Lemmy so far, for the most part.
Everything here is pretty good save for the fact that all the news and politics I can find is dominated by the same few accounts.
Half or more of the accounts have a very clear agenda. They modify headlines. Lie. Spread disinformation. And generally are just extremely toxic groups.
It doesn't seem to be a secret here either. And moderators appear to have no interest in putting a stop to it.
So, where are you subbed to for reliable news and US/Global politics?
I would argue trying to find news on social media is the big mistake. It's absolutely bad on Lemmy, but it's not that much better on other platforms. Any story that isn't a "win" for the larger portion of people on the platform will naturally struggle to get attention.
There's a whole rabbit hole to go down in trying to find a way to get a solid, rounded and accurate view of current events, but imo step one should be to throw away social media as a news source. It's only popular because the algorithms on other platforms will tell people what they want to hear.
Probably not what you want to hear but I've been absolutely bombarded with the right wing perspective my entire life and I'm pretty glad to have a place that doesn't try to both sides everything. Where do I get my news? Twitter mostly I come here if I want to see something discussed further
Set up an Rss feed for AP and Reuters
As others have said, you have to think critically about every piece of news you read. Ask yourself what the opposite side on a story might think, or look for an alternative opinion. If you're reading an article in The Economist, read an article in Le Monde Diplomatique on the same subject. If you're reading something about Russia in the Washington Post, read an article in RT on the same topic. Think critically, and the truth is likely somewhere between the two opposing points.
International mass media is a form of soft power for countries to exert influence. It's not a conspiracy it's a tool available to governments which is why you have the BBC, CGTN, RT, PressTV, CBC, etc. That the mass media in the USA is mostly private doesn't change that fact and make it more independent, because the USA is essentially an ogliopoly.
What specifically do you want lemmy mods to "stop?" What kind of lies are they spreading? What do you consider disinformation. Complaining that your world view isn't being catered to is a lot less useful then pointing out specific things you find sus.
I don't get my news from any social media platform, including lemmy, no offense to lemmy. I used to do that with reddit, but it's just too unhinged getting your news that way.
I stick with Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times, in that order. I also use Google News specifically for local news, but I don't even peek at the main world news feed there.
More generally speaking, I stick to the old school human editorial board for my news. News that's presented to me on AP, for example, has already been filtered by a board of humans who are smarter than me and whose opinions I trust on the state of the world. Opening up your selection of news to an easily gameable social media algorithm is just more trouble than it's worth, in my opinion.
This doesn't ask your question, but this may be of useful to people, anyway.
I've just joined ground.news, a pay site. The great part about this site is that it rates news as to left, center, or right leaning, and rates the "factuality" of the sites. Filtering out non-factual knocks out a large part of the outlier's lies, and shows who the people are, who push them. like knowing the players pushing their agenda. One caveat is that some that push lies still slide through by quoting the people who spout lies without disclaimers of the reliabilty of their false claims. One rule of thumb that I find helpful is that I mentally filter out any pleas to emotionalism. Manipulating readers/viewers emotionally is the opposite of informing. Sites that try to be centrist and ignore whether the sources are reliable about facts, end up being half lies or propagandsa. It is useful to keep in mind that blatently propaganda sites work in some truth to give themselves some plausibility. Only the highest reliable news are worth letting in to your news sphere.
This is a worldwide problem as paid propagandaists muddy the news sphere. Welcome to our cyber warfare world.
This is what I got: Some are more active than others.
- World News@beehaw.org
- News@lemmy.world
- United States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml
- World News & Analysis@lemmy.world
- World News@lemmy.ml
I don't. Lemmy seems to have the same issue as Reddit where people are towards the extremes with the only moderate people being those who don't want to talk about politics in the first place.
I like to listen to CSPAN while at work, especially their morning show "The Washington Journal" where most of the content are regular Americans calling in to talk directly to guests or about issues they feel are important.
I don't really use social media for that, to be honest. I just get info from my friends, but if I seek out news myself I'll usually just check the BBC, free news that has to be as impartial as possible. Maybe the Financial Times is alright too, but they paywall their articles and they're more intended for investors than the average person.
Where did you go on Reddit? The only place back there I really trusted was AskHistorians and 20 years ago is not really breaking news. Everywhere else I had to sort through crap for myself.
If you really want to understand the world, you'll actually have to study it.Edit: It's interesting I still got upvotes, since OP correctly points out that wasn't well worded.
What I'm trying to say is that news with no bias is pretty much a unicorn, and one you can't identify at a glance. And I don't even mean just political bias, a lot of important stuff is boring or otherwise unsuitable for the news cycle. Adding a layer of social media people on top doesn't automatically make it better.
Unbiased news is impossible. If someone is saying that he's giving you unbiased and objective news, he's scamming you.
Good luck finding reliable news anywhere, this including the major TV and News organizations.
Lemmy and Reddit in general haven’t been good for reliable news for me. I’ve been using Artifact for the past few months to have a more personalized feed, but I much prefer picking my own RSS feeds.
The only thing that is lacking for me about RSS feeds is the ability to discuss content. If Lemmy can fill that void, I’ll gladly switch over.
Biggest https://emm.newsbrief.eu/NewsBrief/clusteredition/en/latest.html Google News Alerts https://www.howtogeek.com/444549/how-to-create-an-rss-feed-from-a-google-alert/
.json file for RSS https://controlc.com/2ea2be74
I wouldn't rely too much on lemmy for news and politics tbh, because posts can sway on way or another or even not get traction because most people don't agree with it. Instead I think it's better something like a RSS feed where you can pick your sources, or maybe just check a couple of less biased news outlets, so you can somehow have a more broad overview of what's going from different perspectives.
Someone here posted a link to fledd.it and I started to go there for my news: https://fledd.it it's a news aggregate.
Try Reuters or AP. I’ve been trying out the Boring app too recently which takes the sensationalism out of articles
As much as I hate YouTube advertisers, I like ground news a lot as an aggregator site.
For international politics I watch and read news sources from India, they are somewhat biased against Pakistan (thou, I believe, even there are truthful) and for everything else looks quite neutral.
I don't think there is any reliable source for US politics, too much interests are in play and even if someone is truthful and reliable I don't know how to assess that. But I do take a look at Democracy Now since they don't sound sensationalistic.
An interesting project here on this front is lemmy.link: https://lemmy.link/communities
They create RSS feeds from external sources and dump the feeds into lemmy communities.
So it’s an RSS aggregator native to lemmy so that we can up/down vote and comment or cross post too.
Seems like an interesting way to take the arbitrariness out of what gets posted and instead focus on actually reading, assessing and commenting on the news.
The Ground app
I do my best to avoid both.