I think Trump's behavior is abhorrent. But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened. It's worse this year than usual, because Trump is worse than usual, but the losing side believing the election was stolen has become a feature of American politics during the last two decades: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
You're right of course. I recall in 2004 some people complaining about Bush stealing Ohio. I was living in Ohio in 2004, and I voted for Kerry, but even I thought those accusations were a bit silly at the time.
I think it just underscores the responsibility for platforms to not allow obvious misinformation to spread because it does erode faith in democracy.
The presence of any major platform acting as the unilateral arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation for many people in society erodes faith in democracy as well.
Gore's election was especially disputed because it literally came down to stopping a recount in a handful of key districts. I can't tell for sure what the result would have been otherwise but I think there's more legitimacy to that claim than here where people are complaining about millions of votes in multiple states.
>But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened.
If you said complaints about 2000 being stolen lead to skepticism about the outcome in 2004, and are part of a set of ideas that may have inflamed democratic skepticism about 2016, I would probably disagree that there is anything super concerning about that, but at least understand the thread that connects those pieces.
As it happens, I think stolen is a perfectly fair characterization of the 2000 election, even in retrospect, and would confess that that experience lead me, for a time, to incorrectly believe 2004 may have been stolen as well, which I believed for a time but no longer do. And I can see how it launched an unfortunate trend of liberals believing future elections either were or would be stolen. Greg Palast, for instance, is a celebrated journalist in some circles despite incorrectly claiming that the 2006 election would "go down in infamy" as a stolen election, and saying the same thing again in 2008. Despite being a Democrat, I find Palast's record to be deeply inaccurate and I am disappointed in the lack of critical reflection on his record by people who cite him.
But those claims come from a completely different universe than the 2020 claims, and I don't think they had anything to do with explaining the sociological forces driving election skepticism in 2020. Instead, that breed of skepticism has come from Trump and a media ecosystem that established an entirely alternate reality, with fever pitched adversarial thinking.
The content, social forces and motivations are completely independent, in their sources, in their character and in their scale and should not be equated to each other.
What does it matter that suits are tossed out? Do you realize how silly it seems to ban critizing the election process unless you also aknowledge Biden as winner?
There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.
Of which what % have been tossed? 95%+? And the one (!) that hasn't have had zero impact on the results.
The election is over. Biden won. The votes will be certified, but not after Trump's team has done a great deal of damage to the American democracy.