this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2025
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Fediverse vs Disinformation
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Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
Community rules
Same as instance rules, plus:
- No disinformation
- Posts must be relevant to the topic of astroturfing, propaganda and/or disinformation
Related websites
- EU vs Disinfo
- FactCheck.org
- PolitiFact
- Snopes
- Media Bias / Fact Check
- PEN America
- Media Matters
- FAIR
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Yes, that rephrasing helps. Or something along the lines of "Israel Denies Deliberate Targeting of Reuters Journalist in Killing".
All of these options are factual. Every redaction has an editorial policy. The choice not to contextualize a headline is an editorial choice by definition. So is the choice of which institutions' press briefings to report on.
"[Redaction] doesn't editorialize titles" is as much of an oxymoron as "[Government official] doesn't do politics". The unwillingness to take accountability for unavoidable decisions is a huge red flag and points to either duplicity or a very submissive approach to decision-making.
It's true that all publishing decisions are ultimately editorial, but there's a big difference between deciding to report on what IDF and Hamas representatives say while not reporting on social media opinion, and reporting speculation and interpretation of events.
I don't feel like they failed to contextualize the headline. It was a subpar headline updated for clarity shortly after publication.
There just seems to be a lot of jumping on one of the more factual and objective news sources for a headline taken out of context for failing to include sufficient context.
It's virtually impossible to conclusively prove ill-intent for any individual headline like this. However on the whole there is a clear bias from mainstream media outlets towards under-critically perpetuating Israel's official, carefully controlled narrative – a narrative that they control in part through their own legitimacy as a recognized state, and in part through the deliberate murder and suppression of journalists.
Israeli state officials keep putting out factually incorrect, disingenuous, harmful public statements to distract from their ongoing genocide. It pollutes an already VERY saturated information space, and any headline that uncritically passes on such a decontextualized F.U.D. fails its duty as journalistic messaging.
Again, it could be an honest mistake from Reuters. But in such troubled times, it's getting very hard to forgive those mistakes as innocent when the impact of such repeated failures has been so great.
I mean, you can go look at Reuters headlines for the middle east.
https://www.reuters.com/world/israel-hamas/
It's hardly uncritically accepting of Israels narrative goals, which would be expected for a news outlet that tries to report objectively.
Given that the initial headline, which I don't think was as bad as people are responding, was shortly changed and their long history of good reporting and current history of seemingly not following someones dictated narrative, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, I'm not trying to dunk on Reuters specifically, I don't really care either way. It's about the principle of the thing, and the overall pattern of uncritical reporting in mainstream media.
F.U.D. is a strategy that works exceptionally well. It only takes a few headlines to sow the seeds of doubt that make uncontroversial stances increasingly untenable. Whether it's Trump's transparent lies, Big Oil/Tobacco/Asbestos' transparent funding of bogus "studies", or Israeli genocide denial, it doesn't matter; once these narratives are allowed to spread decontextualized and uncontradicted, well-intentioned actors are forced to spend an wildly asymmetric amount of time and energy into debunking insane and disingenuous claims before they can even begin to lay out their own arguments.
With this in mind I don't think it's unreasonable for people to be mad that a respectable journalistic institution would let even a single headline through that uncritically propagates Israeli F.U.D. covering up for war crimes.
I mean, I honestly don't think "Initial inquiry says Hamas camera target of Israeli strike that killed journalists" is uncritical propagation of Israeli FUD.
It's not a good title, since it clearly causes a misunderstanding and it doesn't convey key information like "whose investigation", but it's not disinformation.
FUD != Disinformation.
Propagating a lie without conveying that it's coming from a notorious liar is technically correct but also the very definition of FUD.