World news

It is not out of a lack of intelligence or boredom, I just don't know how people know so much about geography,history, news etc and Im always clueless. TBH, I'm seldom interested and would rather donate or volunteer and other stuff instead of knowing every name and date. But I'm often impressed as to why I can't seem to catch up. Do people not work the same hours as me or check news at work? Do people look at flags and capitals in their free time? In school, we did many things but I relied heavily on short-term memory (studying on the bus before the exam) and then it was out of my brain in about half an hour. Im modestly intelligent and a fast learner at work,college etc but I seem to be always behind politically and generally. It does not feel good. People will be like "remember when x political person (not high profile) went to y country for z reason 10 years ago,and I'm like what, who, when ,where)

I saw a post from u/majestictrailblazer about a comment being removed from r/worldnews and lots of the comments were saying they have been banned from the sub for ridiculous reasons, which can only really be made sense of if they are biased against certain posts. And lots of people were talking about the community itself. I thought it couldn't have been that bad as it's a major subreddit surely it's must have a very broad range of people with a plethora of opinions and you guys were cherry picking some of the bad stuff.

So I decided to run a very informal experiment on r/worldnews (I was bored during a lesson at school). I searched on Google for recent news articles about the israel-palestine situation because that's a nice contraversial topic. I searched in Israel and randomly chose some articles to post on r/worldnews and I searched in Palestine and randonly chose some articles and then I found some other articles about other topics. I did this to hopefully end up getting a variety of interactions from people with what I hope to be a fairly distributed mix of opinions (spoiler alert- this was a very incorrect assumption).

I ended up posting about 30 articles onto r/worldnews. Some of these got automatically removed either because they were paywalled articles or from certain sites that they claimed to be inadequate, I didn't look too much into the articles but the one trend I did notice that all the sites names that they didn't allow sounded like they were middle eastern or thereabouts. Then, I waited for some comments and some data on views and up votes to come in.

I'll get the good out of the way first. For the posts which were pro-Palestine, the people commenting were, in my opinion fairly reasonable; critiquing hamas and the Israeli government's actions and they were able to make a distinction between hamas and Palestine. But these got a most 5 upvotes and 3 comments, I don't know if there is a way to see how many down votes you get compared to up votes, but for some of these posts I upvoted them myself and when I checked back in they had 0, so clearly they got at least 1 down vote.

Now for the pro-israeli posts, they were something. These got many more up votes and comments, the most getting over 1000 upvoted and 400 comments and the average being around 30 upvoted and around 10 comments. There were some reasonable people, similar to the ones I mentioned earlier, but they were heavily outweighed by some not so reasonable people. Obviously, there were people I disagreed with but I could acknowledge they were being decent, this group was also outweighed by another.

Here are some of the comments from this group, and some of these have a fair few upvotes:

'uluates angrily' - I don't really know what this means but it sounds racist.

'For Gaza supporters, Hamas and Palestinians being muslims fighting against jews is reason enough to fight.'- Yep Palestinians wanting liberation is just cos the Israelis are jewish.

'"While few people in any religious group describe Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as acceptable, the share of Muslims (21%) who express this view is higher than the share of Americans in other religious groups who say the same (roughly 5% or fewer, including 3% among Jewish Americans). Among U.S. Muslims, 10% say the way Hamas carried out the attack was completely acceptable; 11% say it was somewhat acceptable"

21% of Muslims in the US believe r@ping and killing children is acceptable. Little baby terrorists are being born on US soil. They should be put on some list or something. Scary.' -I don't think anything needs to be said about this.

'Genocide isn’t a valid reason'- You can't fight back it's only a genocide!

'Yet Biden chose to ally with Hamas for those precious few votes, while trying to force Israel to "Cease fire" with ISIS. Also condemning the hostages to additional torture, r*pe and starvation as the deal that could happen is now pretty much off the table. And why would Hamas do any different? The US gave them what they most wanted as a gift.'- A decision made in the past couple days definitely trumps the past 5 months of vetoing.

So my conclusion is that the people in u/majestictrailblazer 's comment section were right and they were definitely not overreacting. There are some decent people in r/worldnews, even if I disagree with their opinions, but they are drastically outnumbered by just spiteful people who honestly seem like their lives are miserbale, they don't even give half decent arguments it's just hateful stuff that clearlt isn't based in reality and I don't why certain sites aren't allowed so maybe it's a better reason that them being middle eastern but that's the only trend I noticed.

I did get banned from the sub though for spam posting, I'm not sure if I'll miss it, but I might recommend avoiding it and it's got almost 10 million members I don't know how those people manage it. Sometimes I'm hopeful for the future when I see younger people talk about politics but then I'm reminded why things are the way they are, were they way they were and how things will most likely will remain, like I was today.

(Yes I know I've got too much time on my hands)

I was just scrolling through reddit and came across what was essentially an ama by a Reuters journalist posted in r/worldnews. For context the journalist in question is reporting on the violence between Israel and Palestine, however, is based in Beirut. The majority of the questions just seem to be attacking the op and accusing her of bias, with multiple questions repeated and the op's answers often getting heavily downvoted, despite seeming fairly reasonable and nuanced. There also seem to be sweeping attacks on journalism in general, and accusations toward multiple large media sites of being anti-semetic. I'm just very confused about what's causing this sort of anger towards op and journalism in general in regards to the war, and specifically why r/worldnews seems to be on the forefront of it.

Edit: not sure if this will work because I'm on mobile but here's the link for the original post