See title. Axel Springer bought Politico, and it has ties to the CIA, having received $7 million from them, as well tries to force Politico employees into supporting the genocidal apartheid state (Israel).
They also lack journalistic integrity in that they doxed freedom activists, such as those from Palestina.
There’s more in here.
https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55154354
Get a DNS blocklist for all Axel Springer related media, so you don’t need to bother.
Against. It is one thing to get rid of clear propaganda sites like Breitbart, RT, WSWS, IRNA and possibly PressTV too. But you cant be going around demanding to ban media outlets that do high factual reporting and are generally considered to be centrist because the owner company is conservative.
When Politico starts posting Fox News, Welt or Bild level crap, then we can talk about restrictions.
There is no feature to ban specific domain links in communities. So what you are really asking for is us moderators to get into turf wars with people posting these links.
Believe it or not, but this has been historically an issue in this community and my dm inbox is full of people complaining about us removing links to dubious sources.
I personally think Politico is not quite at the level that requires moderator intervention in blanket style. It is more like some tabloid that requires more scrutiny about the sources used and so far the commenters here did a good job contextualizing such articles.
Not related to the topic at hand, just a heartfelt thank you for the mostly thankless job of moderating a fairly active community. This goes out to all in the moderating team.
Against a ban for reasons already stated. I’m all for banning outright far right propaganda like Breitbart and similar sites, but politico is nowhere near that.
Let’s keep the fediverse diverse with opinion and argue on merit.
Firmly against. I think banning of sources should only even be discussed if talking about sites spreading things like CSAM or (glorifying) depictions of violence like executions. Not because they spread opinion or even propaganda of any kind. I think people especially here are able to discern propaganda for themselves. And it needs to be possible to discuss it. Those outlets already shouldn’t profit off of the couple of clicks they receive because most people will be using an adblocker. And if they don’t, they really should.
Against. The fediverse is already a very left leaning set of forums, no need to start banning non left wing news sources now.
It’s actually not only about the political leaning of the outlet’s articles. I wouldn’t care about Politico in that regard.
It is, however, about who profits off of Politico articles being shared and clicked, and that is Axel Springer SE, a right wing populist publisher who owns tabloids like german BILD and polish Fakt and uses those to help the rise of right wing populism and extremism in Europe, attacking our democratic societies. Axel Springer SE is in turn owned by Mathias Döpfner, who for example called JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he called for an end of the isolation of Europe’s far right, “inspiring”.
The question is, do we continue to click on links that make money by showing ads when that money they make off of us fuels antidemocratic engagement?The source name is usually listed. You are not obligated to click on it.
And effective ad blockers still exist
How about the bottom up approach instead of the top down one - anyone here who wishes to ban Axel Springer media comments on a post linking a Politici post with a better source and/or upvotes that comment. This is how i was made aware of the company behind Politico and because of that i would not longer post an article by them (although maybe i wouldn’t have anyway). Even a copy/paste comment of what makes the linked article a bad source will help. I believe in the ripple- / oil spill-effect, especially in a place like this.
Can we just use up and downvotes and not use bans for such things.
I wouldn’t ban them on some 1960s shady dealings. Axel Springer has enough recent dirt to warrant a ban.
