Is Lemmy a biased platform? - eviltoast

Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.

In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.

It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.

You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.

Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.

So what do you end up with?

You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.

Then you get biased Ford stories under the “cars” community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won’t show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.

Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.

Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?

  • squiblet@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I always wonder about these ‘omg bashing on trump’ questions. It’s because he’s a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.

    • diprount_tomato@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nobody’s telling you to not hate Trump as an individual (Used to be funny before getting into politics, now just an asshole), but calling the other half of the country fascist maneaters that will bring hell on earth is quite extreme

      • squiblet@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think that’s what OP said, though? They said there were news articles that were negative about trump, and makes sense there would be.

        • whyisitalways@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          No my point is there is an absence of stories about Biden. At least that is it in a nutshell. Like I said elsewhere I’d prefer 0 stories about either one but at least equal representation of stories not just negative Trump stories endlessly. That isn’t organic and it’s obvious. There are many reasons it can happen but one is that the platform itself promotes bias and to me that is the most important factor on if I want to use a given platform. I don’t even care if every story is about hating Trump as long as I can say Fuck Biden and not get banned for it by an admin. That’s my only point. I don’t care about either of them. If you’re posting somewhere that saying Fuck Biden gets you banned but Fuck Trump is there every day all day then you’re just participating in an echo chamber and taking party in a small community not the larger world community on the internet.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Maybe they should stop acting like textbook fascists if the don’t want to be called fascists.

          • squiblet@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Not sure why you’re asking this vs researching it. Fascism is a form of authoritarianism characterized by corrupted monopolistic capitalism in cooperation with government, xenophobia, racism, sexism, o session with crime and punishment, and use of fear of “enemies” to manipulate the public.

    • ihavenopeopleskills@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Well…Chevrolet does use patriotic imagery to sell (excluding their full-size vans and the Malibu) crappy cars, thus ripping people off. Their parent company, General Motors Corporation Company also did a sleight-of-hand trick that took all kinds of money from the American taxpayer we’ll never see again. So that’s a large contribution to our eventual default on the national debt, which will lead to an eventual overthrow of the government.