Breaking news: Internet erupts as Hillary Clinton confesses: "I am the mother of an extraterrestrial love child."

[EarlG]

51. The Internet is definitely more trash-filled than it used to be

I'm not sure it is weirder than it used to be. It's always been pretty weird

Part of the issue is simply that people are, in general, susceptible to clickbait and confirmation bias. Clickbait and confirmation bias exist on the left as well as the right, and when sources which seem authoritative come along, they get a lot of play.

Duers have always been drawn to sketchy sources. Twenty years ago, Air America hosts like Lionel and Ed Schultz were very popular on DU -- Ed Schultz switched to supporting Trump before he died, and Lionel is now a Qanon conspiracy theorist. RT used to be an okay source on DU before it became clear that it was a Putin propaganda operation. The Young Turks used to be popular here -- not so much anymore. Hell, back in the very early days, some DUers even used to post content from Infowars.

I would not lump Raw Story into the same category as the above, but there has been a twenty-year battle over whether Raw Story is acceptable source for DU or not. IIRC, some of the Raw Story founders were DUers twenty years ago.

Like pretty much everything else on DU, there is a fuzzy line determining whether and how much of this kind of content is acceptable, and that line changes over time. In the age of social media and YouTubers, content providers like Meidas Touch and the Krassensteins have risen to the top. They certainly appear to be on our side, and they post a lot of pro-Democrat, anti-Trump content. But they are not the Associated Press or Reuters, and they should not be thought of as such by DUers.

All of which is to say that none of this is really new -- we have always had debates over permissible sources at DU. But if a majority of members are concerned that this is currently a big problem, then it's certainly something I'd like to look into further.