This is a community in the spirit of "Am I The Asshole" where people can post their own bans from lemmy or reddit or whatever and get some feedback from others whether the ban was justified or not.
Sometimes one just wants to be able to challenge the arguments some mod made and this could be the place for that.
All posts should follow this basic structure:
Expect to receive feedback about your posts, they might even be negative.
Make sure you follow this instance's code of conduct. In other words we won't allow bellyaching about being sanctioned for hate speech or bigotry.
YTPB matrix channel: For real-time discussions about bastards or to appeal mod actions in YPTB itself.
Some acronyms you might see.
Relevant comms
Context:
The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.
Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦
The community rules cleary states that opinion pieces and unreliable sources are subject to removal. You posted the epitome of an unreliable source. This is just enforcing the rules.
YDI.
TIL Mint Press News.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News
MintPress News supported former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia and Iran.[3][4]
The editor had investors, who Muhawesh claimed were "retired businesspeople", but she would not name them
Soon afterward, Brian Lambert of MinnPost wrote an article following up on Burke's challenge to find out where MintPress's money came from. He reported that emails to them went unanswered, their phone was disconnected, and the original office address in Plymouth, Minnesota, "haven't been valid in well over a year". While MintPress listed 20 of its writers, Lambert wrote it did not indicate where the money was "coming from to pay any of these people".[16]
MintPress News has reposted content from Russian state media outlets RT and Sputnik,[25][26] and is listed as a "partner" of PeaceData, a Russian fake news site run by the Internet Research Agency.[27][28][29] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the "Russian web of disinformation,"[30][31] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[32] MintPress News defended Russia's invasion of Crimea, claiming Ukraine's post-revolution government was "illegitimate".[33]
Sounds like YDI. MBFC is horrible of course, but it sounds like in this case they got it right (somehow focusing in one of the only things Mint Press gets right, being "anti-Israel", presumably as a performative cover so they'll fit in better among other general left wing news. Which of course triggered MBFC, which is part of the whole reason why it's clever for them to include a whole bunch of "Israel's the bad guys" in among the "Russia's the good guys.")
With those standards basically all mainstream US media should be banned for publishing Israeli and US propaganda that defends their genocide on the Palestinians
Oh i just realized that stupid bias check bot has been gone for a while. Everyone hated it so i guess it was killed or blocked at some point? Anyone know the story?
Personally I haven't seen it for ages because I blocked it, but if I was to guess, the mods finally relented to the overwhelming majority? 🤷
They held a vote after insisting for ages that it was a ‘small minority’ of users that had a problem with it. It wasn’t 90/10, but it wasn’t 50/50 either.
Oh, and they only held the vote after jordanlund claimed he would get demodded by the admins if he removed the bot. And when someone pinged an admin they said they had no idea how he got that impression, lol.
Also, a big part of their argument was that it was the only option, nothing else would do that had an API endpoint and had affordable terms of use. I offered to provide them an API endpoint to Wikipedia's sources list (which is precisely the same thing as MBFC, just... accurate and detailed) in exactly the same format, and they said no no that won't do. I wrote code to actually fetch and parse Wikipedia's list so they could make the bot follow actually-accurate source rankings with additional details and everything. Rooki silently received the message, then there was a long delay, then a little "Wikipedia" line started showing up way down below the awful MBFC rankings that were still front and center.
Yeah Jordanlund has a history of lying about why he does certain things. The fact that he said that when you can just simply ask the admins if that's true or not, is enough for me to never trust him.
The dude has recently been saying how much he is against what's happening in Gaza, but people brought up screenshots of him saying he was a fan of sending more bombs to Israel, and removing posts highlighting the increase in weapons being sent to Israel in the last 4 years.
The dude would have to get his neighbors to call the dogs home because they wouldn't believe him.
Are you serious? Because I really wanted to give Jordan the benefit of doubt mod decisions were flawed, but a though job on his part. ;(
Edit: NVM jordanlund has removed a thread by @miss_[email protected] avatar miss_demeanour in politics - He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.
Took me a bit to find it; it was in a direct reply to an admin rather than pinging them. They also give a link to the thread where JL claims the admins would sack him if he got rid of the bot.
Thanks so much. I had to "context" a few times but finally found it: https://lemmy.world/comment/12825768
Also thanking @https://kbin.earth/u/@[email protected] for standing up in that thread.
That whole conversation is so weird. I went back and reread big sections of it, and it's just... the conversation is off. Jordan says he can't remove the bot, because the admins won't allow it. Rooki says that's definitely not true, so people ask Jordan about it... and he's just silent. Not "oh I must have misunderstood" or anything else, just pretending that if he doesn't say anything, no one will notice that someone asked him a question, and everyone will move on. And then there's Rooki accepting the code for scanning Wikipedia's sources... but totally missing the point that the MBFC sources are awful, and the WP reliable sources list is actually quite good, and deciding that MBFC and Ground News are what needs to be positioned front and center. Also seeming totally uninterested in the idea of improving the quality of the ratings in response to the clear consensus of the community with citations.
I checked the last of the stuff that MBFC bot posted, 4 months ago, and the little line where the Wikipedia rating had previously featured had been replaced to a link to the WP article about the source, missing the whole point of categorizing sources cleanly into bullshit/not bullshit or the point that certain sources (Newsweek) had clearly slid into unreliability over time, but were still allowed on the lemmy.world subs for some reason.
It's just so strange. Someone had a conspiracy theory that one of the admins had an unannounced sponsorship deal with Ground News, and that was the whole reason behind the entire thing to drop a link to Ground News while misdirecting everyone into getting mad at MBFC or something. I have no idea. It was just weird.
Yeah people kept complaining so eventually they just quietly turned it off
That thing was utter trash
There was a public vote on whether to eliminate it or not from the .world news and politics communities, and the vote to remove won, thankfully!
This is the mod who shielded UniversalMonk for months and only banned them once like 1000 people loudly harped on it for weeks. Fuck that guy
We should really start those dashboards of power tripping per mod
As usual
I'm all for the increased federation of news from .world and .ml to limit the censorship the mod teams enable when it doesn't paint America or Russia as the perfect golden cows.
I lack any context but if the rule is against questionable sources and a mod is able to document that the source is questionable then surely there other news outlets are reporting on that too that you can use. Unless there’s a big conspiracy against that.
No conspiracy required. The Celtic fans' antifascist and pro-Palestinian position is not news, so I see no reason to expect non-left outlets to report an equivalent opinion piece. In fact, this second image was reported in news 9 years ago^[1]^.
That said, Manufacturing Consent is an excellent introduction to why mass media bias has emerged.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/love-from-glasgow-to-gaza-why-celtic-fc-fans-support-palestine/289198/
I was going to say that it's probably just an unsourced opinion-analysis piece, but no it's pretty thorough, even though it is relatively light news (and not an investigation despite the tag). The site doesn't seem unreliable to me.
For [email protected] if you look at the rule, it's that opinion based articles "MAY" be removed, they aren't just automatically removed because they're opinion.
As a rule, I don't have a beef with opinion articles as long as they are informative and fact based. If they go off the rails into "Well, Ukraine shouldn't have antagonized Russia!" or some such, I'll remove it for misinfornation, not because it's opinion.
Avoiding non-newsworthy content might be a part of intention behind the rule but whether that makes sense depends on how you want to run a community. I try to make an effort to not assume ill intent (not always successful) and this just looks like a mod is using external list not to be critiqued for arbitrary choices and that only works if no exceptions are made.
His shameless bias has been throughly exposed ... Block the politics and news communities on world folks...
Deny the parasite engagement, let him create a Zionist echo chamber lol
We already know legacy media is heavily biased because it's owned by the same handful of businesses. And I understand questionable sources such as Breitbart being removed. Yet here we are.
PTB, not a shocker.