How to deal with accepted answers that were sourced out of bigoted propaganda/conspiracy sites?

Question

A couple of recent Q/A have answers, including one marked as Accepted, which are actually badly researched to put it mildly.

Their source material is from outright Neo-Nazi, far-right, white-power sites. From the phrasing and choice of words, I'd sadly also have to accuse the answer-giver as having sympathies and leanings in that direction. (why use those sources otherwise). But that's his or her own problem.

As far as I can tell, the best approach seems to flag the posts. Which is what I proceeded to do. Are there other approaches?

Answer 1

^{NOTICE - In the years since I wrote this answer, it had been made obsolete (by both events and site policy) and had to be rewritten. See the edit history if you're curious what it used to be.}

This site, like all StackExchange sites, has to work within a Code of Conduct that prohibits engaging in or supporting bigotry.

As a natural extension of that, we do not now allow content sourced from websites that exist primarily to promote bigotry in our answers, nor do we allow links to such sites in our answers. Such material has more than enough internet hosts without us, and it does not benefit humanity to help such a site's pagerank scores.

This should not be a burden to any legitimate answer to a question about history, as any legitimate historical information should be available from legitimate historical sources.

In most cases users should have the ability to edit out obviously offending content without community moderator attention, but in cases where you don't, or more votes are required, feel free to flag the offending content.

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As for questions, there are some circumstances where bigoted content might be OK (eg: in order to ask about the history of bigotry), but only if the question is worded very carefully to avoid promoting or encouraging the bigotry itself.

Answer 2

This is an important issue. We certainly do not want any Nazi (or any other) political propaganda on this cite. I did not notice the "accepted answers" we are discussing (I do not read all answers to all questions), and I would like to see them.

But I did notice several QUESTIONS which constitute Nazi propaganda. I cannot give an example because the questions of this sort that I know have been removed, but I can explain how a question can constitute a propaganda. A question may contain "implicit assumptions" (in fact many questions do). Examples (not from this site):

Are you still beating your wife?

Why is the Moon made of green cheese?

Such implicit assumptions may constitute propaganda. I hope everyone understands what I mean.

Now how should we fight this. First of all, by voting down. I suppose an accepted answer can be voted down. Is it reasonable to empower the administrators to remove some answers? Even those accepted? If there is a sufficient number of downvotes and tags. I think this is reasonable.

Administrators should not decide themselves what constitutes propaganda and what is not. We should be relying on votes and tags.

Now why should we single out Nazi propaganda/antisemitism? Or right-wing propaganda? I understand it is most obnoxious, because it is related to the hudge mass murder in the recent past. But left-wing propaganda can be also obnoxious. I do not want to give examples, (read political articles of people like Noam Chomsky yourself, if you want examples). And it can be neither left nor right. (Example: Russian state-sponsored "news" about the recent events in Ukraine which flood the media).

For these reasons I propose to introduce a reason for closing vote "political propaganda", and a corresponding tag for the answers. Questions and answers which collect certain number of these tags are closed and removed by the administrators. We can leave to the administrators to decide how many are needed in each case. This should apply even to the accepted answers.

EDIT. I react on the references in the comment of Marakai. The author of the "answer" in the first reference is the same whom I already mentioned. His two "propaganda questions" in the similar style were deleted. I already proposed to ban this user. And I repeat my proposal: after all, this is a third offence, and I hope the moderators have access to his deleted "questions". This "answer" is not accepted, and was downvoted many times. This case seems to be clear.

The case of the second reference is more complicated. Superficially it looks like a well researched answer, and has many up votes. But it actually contains a lot of incorrect statements, of course without citing any source, which are skilfully mixed with correct ones. In this case I expect some person with good knowledge of the subject to refute this answer.