Five

Maybe read the article and make those determinations for yourself?

I can't for the life of me understand why this particular article is so threatening to LW !news mods. It provides valuable insight into how Facebook's community guidelines are experienced by journalists outside of the political mainstream and has useful lessons for why and how we might do things differently in the Fediverse.

Oh, so if he sincerely believes in genocide, it’s fine.

Regardless of our conflict, we can agree that Pepe Escobar is a shithead.

There's an old joke that goes:

Two people, a Hexbear and a Solarpunk were arguing. One said,

“On my server I can reply to an admin and say "I don't like how you're running things on this instance!"

"I can do that too!"

"Really?"

"Yes! I can reply to an admin and say, "I don't like how the SLRPNK admins are running things on their instance!"

My concern is that the criteria you are using to justify banning The Cradle would also ban most United States media as well. I value the principle of a free press, and what you're proposing is inconsistent with those values. It's easy to call for the ban of information that disagrees with us, but unless we develop a more nuanced approach to combating propaganda, we risk replicating the values of the authoritarian systems we oppose.

I disagree, and that's part of the reason I'm so strongly opposed to Lemmy.World's use of Dave Van Zandt's site in their bot. Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. You can read more about those principles here.

MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

MBFC and Ad Fontes are both part of the same grift, to artificially raise the value of right-wing journalism, while artificially denigrating left-wing journalism, so their maps of media come out looking like a horseshoe with the apex dominated by corporate advertising conglomerates that use journalism as their hook.

The CEOs of conglomerates will happily fund this propaganda, and a surprising number of people will pay good money to have the 'horseshoe theory' lie repeated back to them.

This is part of the reason why sites like MBFC are so toxic. They use 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 themselves 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.

I don't trust MBFC to tell me anything useful about left-leaning sources, or discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but if a right-biased credibility gatekeeper tells me a site I've never encountered before is far-right, I do consider that useful.