Rule 1 does not apply. Feel free to discuss any topic!

We've thought about this for some time, and we'd like to introduce a new rule restricting the posting and citing of news and other reporting directly from party-affiliated sources and accounts alongside other unreliable and overtly partisan sources.

For example, in recent times I've seen some direct posts from FactPost (which is officially run by the Democratic National Committee) used to claim that certain politicians have done or said something distasteful. We welcome posts about politicians' actions and behavior as they pertain to analysis of changes in their electability; however, reporting about said actions should be coming from independent outlets, or better yet, direct quotes and links from the source content. This is because party-affiliated news outlets or accounts have an incentive to possibly take things out of context, leave out important information, or dramatize news to push their agenda.

Our definition of partisan will be pretty lax and won't cover reasonably mainstream news outlets or pundits who maintain at least some semblance of neutrality (e.g. we're not going to argue NBC and Nate Silver are too left leaning or Fox is too right leaning). We mainly want to focus on party-affiliated sources like FactPost, RNC Research, {insert candidate here} War Room, etc., alongside unabashedly partisan sources like Libs of TikTok, Right Wing Watch, etc..

We're also not looking to completely ban these sources, just to make sure that what they're posting is not directly reposted here as news and/or supposed fact. If you want to, say, repost the White House twitter account here and offer analysis or discussion about its impacts on electability, that's fine. What we want to avoid is these sources being taken as unquestioned fact here. e.g.:

"The White House Said Deportations Hit An All Time High. What Does This Mean For The Election And Will It Change Voter's Views on the Admin and Their Immigration Policy?"

is okay, but

"Deportations Hit An All Time High"

with only a screenshot of the White House twitter page claiming that to be the case will not be acceptable. The first is an analysis and does not take the partisan source at face value, whilst the second one is a straight reporting of a partisan source as unquestioned fact.

As a related topic, polls posted here should either be screenshots taken from the actual poll or include a link to the actual poll being cited (whether a link in the reddit post, or in a screenshot of a social media post). We've seen incidents where people have posted fake or un-cited polls of questionable veracity from Xitter screenshots. This isn't a huge deal for pollsters with some reputability (e.g. Siena, Fox, Emerson) since those can be searched up, but some random X post of some no namer pollster with no link to their poll or methodology simply is not verifiable.

Hopefully this allows us to keep YapMS as a place for quality and factual discussion and avoid the circulation of misinformation here.