Politico is owned by the german Axel Springer SE, a publisher that also owns Bild, Fakt (polish) and Welt among others.
The publisher and its news outlets (with the aforementioned Bild, Fakt and Welt most prominent) is a main driver for a news coverage and reporting that is jointly responsible for the rise of the far right in Germany and Europe.
Politico itself has published so-called Native Ads, a form of advertisng that is designed like op-ed articles and other opinion pieces in a way that is hard to differeentiate from regular, non-sponsored content, mostly for fossile fuel companies but also healt insurance, finance and weapons industries. (Source 1, Source 2).
That sums up to a news outlet that should not be shared, not be trusted and hence, not be posted here. It was not an issue mostly since this outlet wasn’t posted here often , but recently, Politico articles are getting posted very frequently again, so I suggest the ban now.
Edit: lost a word
Edit 2: it should be noted that there is another publisher with a similar name (Springer Nature with several subsidiaries), but that company os not affiliated with Axel Springer SE and has different issues.
Is the average social media user capable of sussing out fact from fiction as rigorously though?
This discussion is about their potential for propaganda and viewpoint manipulation on Lemmy after all, not as a citation in an encyclopaedia.
Of their many daily articles how many would be deemed acceptable to Wikipedia and how many not? There must be a ratio where Wikipedia calls time. As Wikipedia only picks the parts that are relevant, the untrustworthy articles would be ignored. That’s not the case on social media though where some users are spamming articles as if it’s an RSS feed.
As Lemmy/PieFed grows in users, the likelihood of bogus articles climbing up people’s feeds, legitimising the articles, also increases.
This is an issue that needs nipped in the bud earlier rather than later IMO.