Article link - Video footage appears to show Russians killing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers

Fuck the Heritage Foundation.

Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances:

• Awful.systems - Blocked
• Beehaw.org - Blocked
• Blahaj.zone - Blocked
• DBZer0 - Blocked
• Eco.br - Blocked
• Feddit.org - Blocked
• Feddit.nl - Blocked
• Feddit.uk - Blocked
• Hexbear.net - Blocked
• JLai.lu - Blocked
• Lemmy.best - Blocked
• Lemmy.ca - Blocked
• Lemm.ee - Blocked
• Lemmyf.uk - Blocked
• Lemmygrad.ml - Blocked
• Lemmy.ml - Blocked
• LemmyNSFW.com - Blocked
• Lemmy.one - Blocked
• Lemmy.zip - Blocked
• Literature.cafe - Blocked
• Quokk.au - Blocked
• Reddthat - Blocked
• Sh.Itjust.works - Blocked
• SLRPNK.net - Blocked
• Szmer.info - Blocked
• Tchncs.de - Blocked
• Aggregatet.org - Not Found
• Aussie.zone - Not Found
• Feddit.cl - Not Found
• Feddit.it - Not Found
• Futurology.today - Not Found
• Lemmy.one - Not Found
• Lemmy.pt - Not Found
• Midwest.social - Not Found
• Monyet.cc - Not Found
• Pawb.social - Not Found
• RBlind.com - Not Found
• SDF.org - Not Found
• Lemmy.world - Linked
• Sopuli.xyz - Linked

Also, in memoriam:

• Feddit.ch - Blocked

I really like this short video (4:43) that Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

The !news team has recently changed course and opted out of the bot. AFAIK it will still operate in !world and !politics, but I want to share the news and thank everyone who has given feedback, downvoted, and protested the bot. This isn’t over, but I feel we’ve reached an inflection point.

Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as “Credibility: Medium” and “Factual Reporting: Mixed”; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

On Dave’s page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they’ve produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

Dave’s personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.

MBFC claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. An example of this right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of ‘undecided voters’.

If you want to understand bias, learn the five filters of the propaganda model.

According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are the first and third filters of the propaganda model.

Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated a great short about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.

I’m quite certain if I ignored the warning, I would earn a ban. The difference isn’t between the World and ML mods, it’s between me trying to play nice with their inconsistent bullshit rules, and the people getting banned from ML not respecting the predictable bullshit rules of that instance.

It’s obviously more than a disagreement about how to define ‘spamming.’ The MBFC bot is now the most downvoted account in Lemmy history, and it is now more unpopular than the most popular Lemmy account is popular. It appears in every !news, !world, and !politics thread where it is experienced as spam by the vast majority of users.

But the harm it does is greater than merely taking up pagespace. It distorts the discussion in favor of MBFC’s author’s right-wing views, and gives the World mods the pretense of neutrality when removing left-wing voices from their communities. The MBFC has been widely discredited. For example, Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources Noticeboard rates sources as generally reliable (green), no consensus (yellow), mostly unreliable (red).

Giving this joke of a resource an institutional place in the flagship communities of the Lemmy’s largest instance are an embarrassment to the entire Threadiverse project. Due to WP’s policy of neutrality, it’s even more damning when you look under the hood and read the specific criticisms that lead its policy of not linking MBFC in its pages. I am being threatened by the mods for reposting excepts from those criticisms in reply to the MBFC bot spam.

If your criticism of the bot is too regular or too persuasive, the mods will call you a spammer.

The irony saying that while the World mods are actively censoring criticism.

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Credit to [email protected] for assembling all of these references from different journals in the post text.

I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

I don’t think it’s a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.

The main thing that tipped me off this guy was not to be respected was this line from an article someone pointed out to me:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin made very clear during his Tucker Carlson interview seen by one billion people worldwide, Ukraine is part of Russian civilization – even if it is not part of the Russian Federation. So shelling ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass – still ongoing – translates as attacks on Russia.

Tucker Carlson has been legally demonstrated in court to be not a serious journalist. His interview with Putin was widely panned by experts to be a farce, specifically and especially Putin’s nebulous claims about Ukraine belonging to Russia and Tucker’s uncritical reception of those claims.

Pepe’s uncritical endorsement of Tucker’s journalism and Putin’s claims deserve ridicule.

Regardless of who it was targeted at, I’ve definitely experienced my share of similar accusations. Lemmy.world culture seems to favor low effort ‘bad faith’ accusations, and I wish that weren’t the case.

While I think this specific journalist is a piece of shit, I applaud your restraint.

MBFC uses non-partisan fact-checking institutions to bolster their credibility, while holding none of the standards. Then they use that laundered credibility to gatekeep minority and politically inconvenient voices.

It should be noted that despite no non-partisan fact checkers are listed on MBFC’s site as raising concerns about the The Cradle’s credibility, Dave M. Van Zandt has arbitrarily placed it in the “Factual Reporting: Mixed” and “Credibility: Medium” categories. One of the concerns he posits is The Cradle’s ‘lack of transparency,’ but the weird right-wing guy who decides these ratings also lacks any transparency himself in the method he used to come to that conclusion.

Fact checking should increase media literacy and identify bad actors that fabricate news, not justify the destruction of a diverse and healthy media environment.