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?

  • jeffw@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Explain to me how a Republican would say Democrats are trying to erase people from existence.

    • whyisitalways@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Democrats are trying to groom children into being gay by letting drag queens molest them Democrats are trying to start WW3 in Ukraine

      You do remember that our Democrat administration is pushing for cluster bombs in Ukraine? How does that compare to transgender rights in America?

      This is a common tactic to demonize your opponent and it was widely demonstrated during the BLM protests. It was repeated all over the nation at these protests whenever anyone criticized something like burning down buildings. “How can you care about burning down buildings when black bodies are being killed in the streets?”

      This emotional appeal to DEATH. People are DYING. We can’t be RATIONAL because people are DYING and THEY are the ones causing it! Meanwhile the people saying this turn a blind eye to the forever wars America is engaged in resulting in millions of death. Literally cluster bombs are being rolled out and you don’t hear a beep suddenly about “people are dying.”

      If I point things out like this I become a Republican in the mind of the deranged Democrat biased poster. That’s fine but it works the same for biased moderators and admins who start to thumb the scales. It also works the other way if you go point out legitimate criticism of Republicans in biased Republican forums.

      This is a discussion of bias not political beliefs.

      • jeffw@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Except democrats are not trying to groom children, whereas the GOP has enacted anti-trans and anti-healthcare policies. One statement is a conspiracy, the other is based on facts. You’ll find more facts on Lemmy

        Also, the GOP is traditionally the more hawk-ish party lol. Just because a few loud voices are pro-Putin doesn’t make them doves.

        • whyisitalways@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Because I’m right and they’re wrong. Also even though Democrats are committing war crimes usually it is the Republicans.

          There is one party from where I stand partner.