News
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1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
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4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
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7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
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I will indeed rephrase the first rule, good suggestion!
If you have a whitelist, you don't need a blacklist, so I don't fully understand what you mean with that. The problem with having a whitelist is that I think it's to much work to curate each news source, and could be seen as restricting if not enough are whitelisted. That's why we'll probably go for a blacklist.
Yea, the bot already has some problems with that. But we'll first ask questions, then delete, so no worries there.
Good suggestion, I'll discuss it with the other moderators.
That catch all rule is already included in the instance rules, so that's not really needed.
Thank you for the suggestions (:
Good point. Either way you'll have a lot of work to sort out sources up front. After a few months of work the system should sort itself out and you'll have to do much less maintenance. But you're right that a blacklist-only approach is probably simpler. I guess it just depends on whether you choose to take a "source is forbidden until we allow it" approach or "source is allowed until we forbit it" approach. Both have merit, but the optimal choice depends entirely on how much traffic you're generating.
I think regardless of whether we have a white list, black-list or both there will be sources that fall in the grey. Here's an example. Imagine a school shooting in XYZ Community. Perhaps the local community newspaper provides a very detailed and credible article - the site is small enough it is unlikely to be on either a white list or a black list but it could still be a good contribution to the site. I providing examples of sources that are broadly accepted or not accepted is useful, but at the end of the day I think much of it falls to moderator discretion.
Absolutely true. A list either way is just meant to be a fast-track for approved sources and a stop light for disapproved ones. You'll still have your work cut out for you. The value of a list, however, is that eventually submitters learn what's kosher and what's not. If you don't have a blacklist, for example, then you'll have to manually remove National Enquirer-type submissions every time they pop up. A blacklist allows you to set up an automated filter that everyone knows and understands. Coming from someone who modded on Reddit for over a decade, you want rules that are helpful enough to ALLOW you discretion, while at the same time being specific enough to cut down on repetitive bullshit. Clarity and consistency is key, and you don't want rules that rely SOLELY on moderator discretion, otherwise your work just gets harder and harder as traffic increases. If you're likely to remove Daily Stormer submissions every time they show up anyway, then go ahead and put it on a blacklist so folks know ahead of time that it won't fly.
I think a blocklist of common sources of biased and sensationalized / misinformation sources would be the best option. It would definitely be a ton of work to whitelist every good source, and you especially want to encourage smaller trusted industry-specific sources (think like pv magazine), there are a lot of those small high quality sources that are geared towards industry professionals. With a short blocklist you could probably cover a significant portion of the loudest biased sources of misinformation.