Dealing with Misinformation

Harvey

Harvey

Active member
Twitter, Facebook and others label misinformation, and sometime ban, temporary or permanent.

We have one guy who is basically saying that vaccination is the cause of the rise in covid cases, the evidence that I've seen contradicts that, pretty clearly.

What do you do? Is there a way to label an individual post? I could also remove him from the covid thread.
 
We had someone who was increasingly shrill about COVID being a conspiracy by the billionaires and also loudly anti-vax. No really supported her and plenty of us stepped up to counter her nonsense so labelling her as "misinformation" would not have accomplished much. The users were taking care of that. But she kept steering thread after thread in that direction and throwing abuse at her opponents. Tried to use reply-bans and warnings to steer her to keep the crap in one thread about "Conspiracies" but she kept starting new threads. Cried crocodile tears about how we were limiting her freedom of speech. Finally, she stepped on one toe too many and we said "sayonara". So label and warn as @frm suggests to be sure, but watch out what impact they are having on the general flow of discourse. You may be better off using a long suspension or permaban if they are becoming disruptive or belligerent.
 
AndyB said:
Use Notices to ask members to not post political content on your forum. Allowing political discussions on a forum which is not a political forum will ultimately result in members leaving your forum.
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That's another key thing but getting hard to do. We have a politics forum and try to keep political stuff there, using moves if needed. The problem these days is that other topics, such as health or how churches are doing services in the pandemic age tend to turn political and that is legitimate to some degree. When politicians are involved in deciding what is safe and how things should be done, politics becomes a part of a lot of discussions that aren't specifically political.
 
Mendalla said:
That's another key thing but getting hard to do. We have a politics forum and try to keep political stuff there, using moves if needed. The problem these days is that other topics, such as health or how churches are doing services in the pandemic age tend to turn political and that is legitimate to some degree. When politicians are involved in deciding what is safe and how things should be done, politics becomes a part of a lot of discussions that aren't specifically political.
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Your forum is a general discussion forum, I was referring to forums which have a specific topic.
 
Everyone has own truth.

You should decide what side would you take, and just stick to it.

Just remember that taking no one's side is also one side.

This thing with covid is like anything else. There was a time when people, even medical professionals claimed that washing hands is a stupid thing to do and attacked first proponent of that idea. It went so far that Ignaz Semmelweis literally lost his mind. Because he claimed something that at that time wasn't accepted.

So, you decide what you want to allow, and stick to it.
 
Mendalla said:
about how we were limiting her freedom of speech.
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Her freedom of speech was already limited by amendments to the ICCPR which I believe include restrictions in regard to national security and public health.

In my experience all thread about covid go downhill. Our rules do not allow politics and now state that since masks and vaccination have been politicised, those topics are disallowed under the no politics rule.
 
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One warning then put on the naughty step for a week.
If it continues permanent ban.

Only one way to deal with them otherwise they become the tail wagging the dog.
 
My community was significantly disrupted enforcing a long-standing policy against any political discussions.

What is going on now is unprecedented, so we allow a degree of "sharing" regarding events they experience in a non-public forum. It doesn't please everyone, and they continue to share opinions on other forums and social media.

I'm not saying that everyone should follow the same approach; but after going through decades of wars, recessions, terrorism, natural disasters, and now a pandemic - the only thing that will ensure your survival is original purpose for your forum. Motorcycles are among the first consumer items to go when an individual is experiencing challenges in life, all I can do is to make sure the good times are there when they are able to return.

Just my two cents ;)
 
Mendalla said:
We never actually deleted any posts, just moved them to more appropriate locations. And then sent the user packing when they refused to follow mod instructions to keep her crap in those locations.
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I'm not questioning or judging what you did. If political posts were put on my site I would delete them, regardless of this information.

Even though that has been my policy for decades, it doesn't mean that a special-interest group couldn't complain if they wished. I'm still researching the impact of this recent event and possible actions I could take.
 
I have been involved with two forums during this century, one of them a US forum asa moderator, the other a UK forum as owner.

Both have strict no politics rules but descried to allow for what seemed very special public interest.

So the US forum allowed discussion when there was the first ever black president. The UK forum allowed discussion around the Brexit referendum.

In both cases the discussions went very well... until page four.

If we do it again, I now know to close at the end of page 3.
 
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