hate twitter, but this is something its community notes gets right. it takes all of two clicks for us to see a removed comment and when it’s “Reason: misinformation” that does nothing to combat the misinformation.

like you don’t have to link articles for obvious stuff like antivaxx shit (though that’s appreciated). but when it’s like deep lore on political parties or terrorist groups, or when the comment is like 80 paragraphs long “reason: misinformation” doesn’t really cut it and doesn’t inform the community of what specific point(s) of information were false.

for all but the most egregious misinformation (such as those encouraging or threatening harm, which should be modded anyway for those reasons), if you can’t link an article in the modlog it’s almost better to leave the comment up and let your community do a paragraph by paragraph fact check for you. otherwise it’s just kind of festering out there unchecked, your servers are still hosting the misinformation, just in modlog form.

i think giving info correcting links was more common in the past so no idk why it’s uncommon now. hoping this can be some friendly constructive criticism :)

  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgMEnglish
    1·
    21 days ago

    In a vacuum, sure. In practice, that forces the mod to do research on every batshit claim that’s commented/posted and opens the doors to just gish-galloping the mod team. You mentioned the citations being more common in the past? This is most likely why. We also just got out of a nasty election in the US, and misinformation and wild clams were running wild. Mods are volunteers and have lives and can’t fact check every foreign influence bot and misinformed lemming. Would love to, but, again, volunteer with a life. Sometimes you gotta shoot from the hip when wild claims are made, and if it’s pointed out later that’s actually correct, then it’s not uncommon to see comments restored.

    I’m also in favor of modding first and restoring later if need be. “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can lace its boots” and all that.

    I’m in favor of the opposite: If someone makes a wild claim, they should be citing credible sources to back them up.