THE MISUSE OF NEWS AND CURRENT EVENTS NEEDS TO STOP

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This problem occurs because there are those who misuse News and Current Events to promote political views, try to influence voters or whatever political motivation other than just sharing a news and current events story.

As the US presidential election draws closer more and more threads that belong in PPR are going to be posted to News and Current Events. In 2018 (which was another US election year) News and Current Events was flooded with such threads.

The latest post to News and Current Events at the time I am writing this is a prime example. The type of political article from The Daily Beast and what the OP wrote is probably going to create a PPR type of debate.

I have to agree. Quite a lot of the posts go well beyond the posting of a news article. The discussions go way off topic and some posters are very defensive and offensive about their positions. Not that it doesn’t make for interesting reading at times, but it’s not in the right spot.

I think there's also a certain amount of button pushing trolling going on as well.

as well as feeding the trolls

a lot

As political news is often current events and current events often have political implications I have always been confused as to why there are two separate sections for news and current events and PPR and where to post certain articles. Sometimes it is obvious to me such as an article discussing the chances of Joe Biden winning the nomination belongs in the politics section. OTOH discussion of the London Bridge stabbings will unavoidably will turn political. If I censor the political ramifications because it is the wrong section I will leave out an important part of that current event.

Since when has it become OK to ascribe nefarious motive to members in PPR?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 03 Dec 2019, 8:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

In some cases it's pretty obvious the OP has an anti whatever agenda that is better suited for PPR.

I post a lot of threads on news and current events,I have not seen a lot of problems on my threads.Grant it my threads are pure news and not usually political a lot are local news from my area that I share with WP,I often try to share funny stories but I honestly have not seem much abuse of news forum from my point of view.

Some news stories that other people post are political and they will in nature inspire debate,I think this is reasonable,I don't think news should be posted in PPR just because a little debate might arise.

The mods know who these people are (heck, we all do), so why don't the mods just ban them and let the rest of us get back to enjoying this website in peace?

Because then there would be nobody left.

I agree with this. We all have political views; no one has a view from nowhere, so of course, our postings in the news forum will often have political motivations if the subject is political or has political ramifications.

And I also agree that deciding whether to post in News and Current Events or PPR is often confusing. I generally use the rubric of, Is it current? If it is, then I will post it in the news forum. But if it's more general, or I'm bringing up something that hasn't really been in the news lately, then I'll post it in PPR.

And yeah, it's kinda irritating when you're discussing something and simply saying things how you view them, and for that you get accused of plotting world domination or something.

You should be flattered that I think you're personally capable of world domination.

You're quite clearly a real life Dr. Evil. I bet you have secret base of operations hidden inside a dormant volcano.

This. I don't quite agree with banning them, at least not permanently, but obviously if the mods don't want News and Current Events to be treated like PPR, those are the people they need to lean into to discourage them from starting such threads.

Perhaps it’s not so much the “starting” of the threads, because they often do begin with news, but rather, the discussion could be moved to PPR with a link when it gets heavily political or off topic.

It's impossible for the News and Current Events subforum NOT to be political

The News has always been something political. It was actually much worse in the 19th century than it is now. But we are devolving back, perhaps, to those days.

Yeah political news is still news. Politics influences everything in our lives so it's hard to avoid it even if you want to. If it bothers you so much you could just not read the news stories about elections. I guess there is some redundancy between the two sections but i think that's kind of true with any of the sections (a news article in current events about a health issue could also go in the health forum, for instance.