Against a ban for reasons already stated. I'm all for banning outright far right propaganda like Breitbart and similar sites, but politico is nowhere near that.
Let's keep the fediverse diverse with opinion and argue on merit.
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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There is no feature to ban specific domain links in communities. So what you are really asking for is us moderators to get into turf wars with people posting these links.
Believe it or not, but this has been historically an issue in this community and my dm inbox is full of people complaining about us removing links to dubious sources.
I personally think Politico is not quite at the level that requires moderator intervention in blanket style. It is more like some tabloid that requires more scrutiny about the sources used and so far the commenters here did a good job contextualizing such articles.
Not related to the topic at hand, just a heartfelt thank you for the mostly thankless job of moderating a fairly active community. This goes out to all in the moderating team.
I personally think Politico is not quite at the level that requires moderator intervention in blanket style
It's not just about Politico itself. It's mostly about Axel Springer SE and who profits off of articles being shared and clicked.
Firmly against. I think banning of sources should only even be discussed if talking about sites spreading things like CSAM or (glorifying) depictions of violence like executions. Not because they spread opinion or even propaganda of any kind. I think people especially here are able to discern propaganda for themselves. And it needs to be possible to discuss it. Those outlets already shouldn't profit off of the couple of clicks they receive because most people will be using an adblocker. And if they don't, they really should.
I wouldn't ban them on some 1960s shady dealings. Axel Springer has enough recent dirt to warrant a ban.
Indeed. Axel Springer deserved a ban back in the 1960s, but they are even more deserving today. Beides having gotten money from the CIA ages ago is hardly one of their worst deeds, even back then. They are a far-right propaganda mill that didn't shy away from incitement to murder. Fuck them.
My exact thought, we shouldn't base a ban based on an article from 2003 about cia money from before the 1970s. But aside from that, I am all for banning Axel Springer
How about the bottom up approach instead of the top down one - anyone here who wishes to ban Axel Springer media comments on a post linking a Politici post with a better source and/or upvotes that comment. This is how i was made aware of the company behind Politico and because of that i would not longer post an article by them (although maybe i wouldn't have anyway). Even a copy/paste comment of what makes the linked article a bad source will help. I believe in the ripple- / oil spill-effect, especially in a place like this.
Can we just use up and downvotes and not use bans for such things.
Without wishing to weigh in on this specific case right now, I think we have to recognise that votes don't work for all instances of this because way too many people do not read the article. An outlet can publish an incendiary headline and then people that agree with it upvote it without ever noticing that the article doesn't actually back it up
In this particular case the problem is that most Germans know what it means for a news outlet belonging to Axel Springer, while internationals can't understand our anger. This is because politico by itself is not a far right outlet like it's brother BILD. That's why the up/downvote thing will not work here sadly.
Welt has decent articles from time to time. Itβs also a good idea to expose yourself to viewpoints you donβt like.
I do that is why I also read conservative news papers like FAZ, their articles are hard to bear sometimes. Axel Springer however is straight up evil. That's like saying you should read FOX news from time time.
That does not work on lemmy.
Why?
Lemmy scores like this:
Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity
With:
Score = Upvotes - Downvotes + 3
And Time is the time since either the posting for "Active" or the last comment for "Hot". The issue being that the Time score drops of very quickly. As a result it matters much more, what the Time is rather then the votes, as long as it is not horribly bad. Also posts with a lot of downvotes are not treated as bad, as long as they have a lot of upvotes as well.
The way in which I interact with lemmy doesn't allow for downvoting. Nor would I want it to, to be honest.
Against. The fediverse is already a very left leaning set of forums, no need to start banning non left wing news sources now.
It's actually not only about the political leaning of the outlet's articles. I wouldn't care about Politico in that regard.
It is, however, about who profits off of Politico articles being shared and clicked, and that is Axel Springer SE, a right wing populist publisher who owns tabloids like german BILD and polish Fakt and uses those to help the rise of right wing populism and extremism in Europe, attacking our democratic societies. Axel Springer SE is in turn owned by Mathias DΓΆpfner, who for example called JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he called for an end of the isolation of Europe's far right, "inspiring".
The question is, do we continue to click on links that make money by showing ads when that money they make off of us fuels antidemocratic engagement?
It would be way more productive to just use an adblocker. And I'd kinda expect everyone to do so already.
Exactly!
Please ban them.