Fediverse vs Disinformation
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
Matrix chat links
view the rest of the comments
Okay I went digging.
The article in question links to another site as the source of this report.
Clicking through, the website that this one is citing is https://gmoscience.org/. The whole article is about the Girl Scouts and how they need to realize that the cause of this contamination is factory farming. The pdfs are from a laboratory in New Jersey which does say at the bottom that they can't verify the source of the samples provided, and then there are 25 pages going over the findings for each cookie.
On the one hand, I find it fishy that the originating article is clearly coming from an interest group.
On the other hand, I find it easy to believe that food being sold in America is contaminated (I say this as an American).
I checked Snopes because usually they do the legwork and help come up with answers, but they don't have an article on this yet (which is odd, since I've seen this article a couple of times now). So I submitted a request for them to cover it. In the meantime... I don't eat Girl Scout cookies as it is. I'm a hobby baker, and I like what I bake, better than I can get elsewhere, so if I was going to financially support an institution, I'd do it by way of direct donation or volunteering.
I know people who talk about these cookies as if they're the most delicious thing on Earth, and I guess if I was one of them, my answer would be... how much do you care? Do you care enough to not eat them? If you do, then do. If you don't, then who cares?
There are always going to be people like this (anti-GMO people) who will hate on what you're eating if it doesn't conform to their idea of "good." I don't expect articles like this to impact the sales of cookies. I know it's n=1, but I reached out to a friend of mine who loves Thin Mints like they're some kind of miracle food and his answer was "everything we eat is poison, at least I like thin mints".