The breaking news thread has 100% become the catch all place for discussions about the war. There are multiple posts per day with people’s opinion, unverified claims, speculation and general postings about the war. Making the thread only about breaking news is a ship that has long since sailed. The particular poster is by far the worst offender, and posts the most clearly biased sources, but is hardly the only one that does so.
Take the most recent post:
Not propaganda, but certainly not verified facts from reputable sources either.
If you’re discussing breaking news, it’s still a thread about breaking news.
I don’t see anyone suggesting that every post needs to be backed up by a reliable source. But there’s a vast gulf between giving opinions and spreading misinformation, especially when you’re citing propaganda sites and conspiracy theories. That’s what people are objecting to.
That’s just not accurate. Do you know how many threads there are under the “Ukraine-invasion” tag, specifically to discuss different aspects of the war that would be a digression in the main breaking news thread? There are around 180 at the moment. In fact it was once suggested that we have a whole separate forum just to discuss the war in Ukraine, but the tags work well enough to organize all the threads.
It’s true that this particular thread has ranged over a wider range of issues than is typical for a breaking news thread, but that should be expected for such an important and multi-faceted issue. That includes rumours and speculation in some cases where appropriate. However, it should NOT include a persistent pattern of pro-Russian propaganda that is objectively false from sources that are obviously biased.
In a previous PM exchange I had with a mod about this, it was stated that it’s not against the rules to be pro-Russia. While this is true, it should NOT be acceptable to persistently disrupt a breaking news thread with this kind of garbage. The poster in question here is by any measure extremely persistent – he’s already been mod-noted once to knock off the politics in the Ukraine thread, and is totally going nuts in the Pit thread with his propagandizing, if sometimes thinly veiled.
I concur with the others who support a thread ban for this poster. He is disruptive, his information is invariably suspect and often untrue, and his absence from the thread would be a net benefit, IMO.
Please note, I’m requesting a Thread Ban and not a Topic Ban. It is fairly minor but it is time for him not to be dumping bad links on a breaking news thread. A few is one thing, but dozens, probably many dozens is really pushing it.
He will be free to share his information in other threads still. And we declutter the Breaking News thread and remove probably half of the sidetracks and hijacks.
Thank you very much. As per my previous post, I think this is appropriate. This may also encourage him to more reasonable postings in other threads. I don’t care what he does in the Pit – that thread is a lost cause.
That would benefit me because that is the only Ukraine thread I follow, tho I occasionally read others if they pop up to the top of a forum.
However, are you sure you want to spend that much time modding the thread? Because there are all kinds of posts in that thread that are pro Ukraine that are nothing but twitter links. Are you going to check all those for validity also? I’m about as pro Ukraine as you get and I still don’t take everything their government says as the absolute truth.
Bottom line, as far as I can see he’s not breaking any rules, it’s not hate speech, and we don’t have a long running problem with posters being pro Russia so that it’s a settled issue that we don’t want to debate anymore. Let him post his crap, it will be shown for the crap that it is, just like now. If he really irritates anyone, let them use the ignore option.
I think you’re totally missing the point here. Did you not read @What_Exit’s last post, and mine prior to that? There’s nothing wrong with the occasional unconfirmed rumour – this is a breaking news thread, not a court of law or a national newscast. That’s a natural part of the discussion. The problem is this poster’s persistent pattern of disrupting the thread with bullshit that then has to be argued and refuted and totally disrupts the exchange of good-faith information that the thread is about.
I’m missing nothing, I just don’t agree with you. All you have to do is put him on ignore and everyone wins. He can post and everyone else can choose to read him or not. It’s not like the guy is dominating the thread and nothing else is getting discussed.
Well, one thing you’re obviously misunderstanding is your implication that the thread would have to be laboriously modded to ensure that there aren’t any unverified rumours. No one has ever suggested such a thing. We just want to be rid of a nuisance poster in that thread.
And no, it’s not the case that “all I have to do is put him on ignore”. As you said yourself, “People are doing a pretty good job of shooting down his sources”. Do I have to put everyone responding to him on ignore, too? If I did that, half the thread would be blank.
No it wouldn’t, and you are a better poster than that. He’s at best a small irritation to some posters. I don’t understand the need some people have to insist that everyone agree with them or they should be shut down. Just be responsible for your own board usage, You have the ability to not see posts that you don’t want to see. Use it and let everyone else decide what they want to do.
I don’t believe that I did that, at all. But where the decision seems to made about a thread ban, I guess it doesn’t matter much. I, for one, will miss the nonsense.
If you think that’s what this is about, you are sadly mistaken. See, for instance, the prohibition in GD of “thrice-told tales”. It has nothing to do with “agree with me or go away”. It has everything to do with declining to waste time on obvious bullshit. If someone thinks that climate change is a hoax or that the moon landings never happened, we don’t want to hear from them, and it’s NOT because we want everyone to agree with us. It’s because we want to have sane and productive discussions.
Absolutely no one in this thread has claimed that posts should be removed simply because people disagree with them. Not a one.
Your lack of reading and/or comprehension of people’s posts is why you were being told to read the thread again. Either you didn’t read them, misunderstood them, or are ignoring the arguments actually be made.
And, in the case of the latter, I would point out that, if you have to change someone’s argument in order to rebut them, then that is saying your argument is not very good. Hence why the strawman is a fallacy.
Are posts that are nothing more than links to Twitter—with no thoughts added by the poster—really the sort of content wanted on the SDMB regardless of what thread they are in?
Do you guys remember when a poster would be widely criticized if they added a post that was nothing more than a link to an article or video? Mere web addresses without comment? Naked GIF memes?
Folks here used to roundly disparage that stuff and rightly so because it adds no new information to a discussion. But now we see a lot of that.
I suppose that can stand in a MMP thread maybe, but in a breaking news thread or Great Debates? Its like a low-quality YouTube comments post.
I completely agree insofar as we have a stated mission of fighting ignorance. And, if others of his/her ilk show up here to actually learn something, does the poster-of-concern pose a credible threat to our mission and to the ilk’s desire to learn something?
My personal gut feeling is that he/she should be banned, though I could be wrong.
They are a blatant Russian propagandist. I would think a thread ban could be justified simply by the don’t be a jerk rule. I for one would appreciate it.