cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1193177/reddit-moderators-be-like
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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The problem with video isn't that it's not a legitimate source for news, the problem is that ANYONE can put a video online.
Youtube does not do any sort of vetting or validation of content, and when you consider the volume of traffic they get, that is NOT surprising.
Same thing for social media like Facebook and Twitter.
Same thing for blog sites.
Any asshole can post up a Tweet or a Youtube or a blog.
This is why communities like World and Politics require links to news articles that have some form of editorial oversight.
Here's a video link I removed yesterday:
https://youtu.be/lqR6NjEz2JY
So who is "Sibel Edmonds" and what is "newsbud.com"?
Well... newsbud.com is a batshit right-wing conspiracy site, along the lines of Infowars. Even if they had an actual news site still going, which they don't, they would be removed for being a bunch of tinfoil hat nutjobs and not actual news.
FORTUNATELY, the rule forbidding video content means that I, as a moderator, don't have to do a deep dive in conspiracy bullshit to remove a post. Videos are not allowed. Full stop. They do not pass the bar.
If we allowed video, moderators would have to review each and every one picking winners and losers and the result would be some mods removing videos they didn't like and keeping the videos they did like...
Which is exactly the kind of bad moderation you rail against.
The unbiased, fair approach is to say "No Videos".
Or, as when someone approached me about the Kennedy Center livestream and asked me in a PM "Hey, how do I post the livestream video?"
I told them to find a recent article on the topic, link to that, and then put the livestream link in the body of the post.
Which they did, and that was a good thing because there was nothing to see on the livestream until 1:30 AM Pacific / 4:30 AM Eastern, and then they put up tarps so nobody could see anyone taking the Trump sign down.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/61723313
As a top level post, that content would have been a 110% fail. So it's a good thing they linked to an article with actual information and not just a video.
The same process can be used for video of legitimate interviews or debates, link to an actual news source discussing the candidates or issues involved, put the video link in the body or as a top level comment.
Face it... YouTube is the new media, while old media has been enshitifying itself for the last few decades. Even previously trusted sources like Washington Post and NYT have really gone downhill over the past 5 years.
Shows like Last Night Tonight and some of the other late night TV shows, broadcast important political issues to the general public, those are now in jeopardy because old media doesn't fucking like it when they are called out, or they call out their Dear Leader Trump. And you know what? The best place where those ideas get broadcasted is not on TV... it's YouTube!
Good for you. You did some research and discovered it's has ties to a batshit crazy website.
Booo! Fuck your rule. It's a shit rule. Political discourse has shifted to new mediums, and your fucking rules are stuck in the past.
You mean you have to review and moderate posts? Just like you read and moderate comments? Wow! Holy shit! You're already picking winners and losers. You're just spouting off excuses.
Create a goddamn blacklist or something. You obviously don't accept every single news source in your posts. You already have a blacklist of some sort. Surely you're not allowing news posts from conservativegrandpa.americaneagle.ru or any of the other tinfoil hat nutjobs.
Oh yeah, you just said: "they would be removed for being a bunch of tinfoil hat nutjobs and not actual news." So, you're already filtering. You're already picking winners and losers.
Your rule and reasoning is hypocritical. Embrace new media and take out the shitty rule.
YouTube is the poster child for enshittification, it's not a valid example for anything else.
If generations are using YouTube as a primary news source, we're all in deep, deep trouble!
How far into c/pol will I have to dig to find an article where it's actually just an embedded video in an "article", where the entirety of the article is the headline and the embedded video, which is actually a YouTube link?
I appreciate the points about the balance of effort regarding moderation but the point which you aren't engaging with is that media and communication have adapted but the moderation approaches haven't. And that creates a kind of implicit bias which can and does allow for a form of editorial manipulation of content. It bakes it into the structure of the community.
I completely support this and always have, but we exist in a landscape of completely changing conditions. Dropsite news now has a far stronger and more reliable commitment to the truth and to their own editorial policies than CNN. And I think they (dropsite) use a software for publication which you've decided makes them a blog, they get put on the naughty list, whereas several legacy media companies have become outright state propaganda outlets (CNN, fox, anything the Ellisons get their fingers on..). The result of the moderation policy which is effectively that anything built in new media isn't allowed, is that only legacy sources get regarded as "news" , even if they don't even follow their own editorial policies or have rewritten them to be appease a figurehead like Trump
The point is that a platform, or a medium, or the presence of an editorial policy isn't sufficient to decide if something is news or isn't news. For something to be news it actually has to have an editorial policy and engage with that policy. Being legacy media doesn't immediately qualify to that standard and but being new media doesn't preclude it either.
Take the recent hit piece on Platner in the NYT. It would meet the qualifications for c/politics. But it wouldn't meet NYTs own editorial standards of journalism were they to actually enforce them.
I don't want to disregard or ignore the labor of moderation and yes rules need to be sweeping and evenly applied. But it's also clear that the current policy is anachronistic at best. Probably, as a community, message boards like Lemmy need to be thinking more broadly about how community rules are implemented and applied. Something like a red-yellow-green list for disapproved, pending, and 'approved' sources. And we've had that conversation before, about not wanting to maintain an approved list. But it's 2026. It's not out of reach where something could be built into a community where the community it's self could maintain the list via voting.
I'm not bringing this up to badger, but I want to engage the point that the current moderation policies don't effectively select for news content which is factual and consistent without the an editorial standard, but rather for what has traditionally been identified as legacy media based on format, and that more broadly, a format based approach will always suffer this kind of failing.
Probably not far, we're volunteers and don't have time to read EVERY link posted. We respond to reports and, if we happen to catch something obviously infringing in our browsing we remove that too.
If you see a link in the feed that breaks the rules, report it and we'll resolve it. I remove "stub" articles all the time that only exist to point to a video.
But if I'm looking at the feed and the source is "Youtube.com" or some other video site, that gets yanked with a quickness.
For the Dropsite news thing, that has come up before, and yes, we block substack for the same reasons above.
But like Twitter and Facebook, yes, there are legitimate news agencies that use those platforms, as there are on Substack. But opening the door to those platforms again introduces bias in moderation.
"You removed my shitty Twitter link but allowed this other one!!! WHYYYYYYY????!???!"
We aren't engaging in that. So no, no social media, no blogs, no videos.
So right now you manually scrub to enforce the policies? Oof. Brother, we can definitely build some basic moderation bots which could help with that.
For me, it's all manual, I don't have the ability to apply bots to the feed, you'd have to talk to the Admins about that, above my paygrade, which is "$0.00". LOL.