We are very fortunate to have the algorithms, employees & management of Youtube/Google watching out for us. We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment. Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people with even more content moderation. Thank you Google - you're the nanny the American people and the world always hoped for.
Once again a thread about censorship invites comments that ignore the nuance of the situation. Having companies dictate what information is widely accessible is dangerous for democracy. Having the sitting president make completely baseless claims in an effort to delegitimize the results of an election because it didn’t go his way is also dangerous for democracy. That’s what we call a tricky situation. We don’t have an easy solution.
Regarding the former situation, the president is one person with clear, self-serving motives. His actions are constantly examined under the critical eyes of the media and his political opposition. The public itself can also use social media to provide additional scrutiny (with varying degrees of quality and professionalism).
The public has to search through garbage to find the truth. It's all easy to access, but there's a lot to go through.
In the prior situation, businesses are trying to denying the public access to provide scrutiny based solely on the content of the message, regardless of quality. Those same businesses also happen to facilitate content discovery for the overwhelming majority of internet users. There are still political opponents and a few media organizations which might broadcast the message, but it will unquestioningly reach a much smaller audience.
The public still has to search through garbage to find the truth. Now, though, some of it is much harder to access.
Neither is good, but the prior situation sounds much worse to me.
> What's tricky about it? ... The public has to search through garbage to find the truth.
"The public" is not some perfectly rational collection of human beings. Rather, it's droves of people susceptible to propaganda and misinformation campaigns.
Let's be clear: there was no widespread election fraud, certainly not by large enough margins to overturn the election. Videos that purport otherwise are not improving public discourse; in fact, they're causing it to disintegrate.
I agree that Youtube should not have carte blanche to remove content that it finds objectionable
per its own capricious standards. But that doesn't mean it should have no discretion at all. Truth seeking must be grounded in reality; these spurious claims of fraud are not.
> "The public" is not some perfectly rational collection of human beings. Rather, it's droves of people susceptible to propaganda and misinformation campaigns.
Correct.
> Let's be clear: there was no widespread election fraud, certainly not by large enough margins to overturn the election.
I am not 100% committed to that being an impossibility, but I have yet to see any evidence to make me question the final outcome of the 2020 US election. I'm legitimately concerned about small scale voter fraud, but nothing significant enough to invalidate the final result.
> Videos that purport otherwise are not improving public discourse; in fact, they're causing it to disintegrate.
I agree. But far be it from me to determine what constitutes "quality public discourse". I have a history of being wrong about a great many things so I'd rather not have myself - or any individual or organization - arbitrate on what the public is allowed to discuss.
> I agree that Youtube should not have carte blanche to remove content that it finds objectionable per its own capricious standards. But that doesn't mean it should have no discretion at all.
Maybe I'd be less critical of Goolge if they actually had some sort of guidelines for objectively determining what content should be allowed on their platforms. This inconsistent "whatever we think is best" policy strategy is way too susceptible to abuse and Google hasn't proven themselves trustworthy.
> I am not 100% committed to that being an impossibility, but I have yet to see any evidence to make me question the final outcome of the 2020 US election.
It's impossible to be 100% certain about anything. Scientists often quote a 95% confidence interval. Why not the a 100% confidence interval? Because that would be the real number line.
> But far be it from me to determine what constitutes "quality public discourse".
Fortunately, you don't need to determine the cutoff. Fact-free conspiracies are so far removed from "quality public discourse" as to render the issue irrelevant.
> Maybe I'd be less critical of Google if they actually had some sort of guidelines for objectively determining what content should be allowed on their platforms.
I absolutely agree that transparency is the best practice here; but until there's evidence of abuse, I'm not going to assume the process is abusive. And even then, I'll weigh the harm done by YouTube vs the harm done by the conspiracy theorists.
> Fortunately, you don't need to determine the cutoff. Fact-free conspiracies are so far removed from "quality public discourse" as to render the issue irrelevant.
What bodies of evidence count as "facts" and how much is necessary to surpass the "fact free" threshold?
> I absolutely agree that transparency is the best practice here; but until there's evidence of abuse, I'm not going to assume the process is abusive.
Google has a sordid history of suppressing information and ideas. Suppressing critisisms of jihad[0] and of course project Dragonfly to name a couple examples offhand.
>I am not 100% committed to that being an impossibility, but I have yet to see any evidence to make me question the final outcome of the 2020 US election.
Are you also 100% not committed to the 1969 moon landing being an impossibility? Big Foot?
There's no evidence of wide spread voter fraud, there's lots of a wide spread fair election occurring.
The burden of proof is on the accuser, because "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." To say you can't be sure fraud didn't change the outcome of the election at this point is ridiculous, and is exactly why youtube is banning such opinions.
> Are you also 100% not committed to the 1969 moon landing being an impossibility? Big Foot?
There are obvious incentives and a huge, immediate payout for using voter fraud to overturn an election result. And voter fraud is an old, recurring phenomena - even if you only consider the history of the US elections[0].
On top of that, we're talking about an event from barely a month ago. The Russian collusion thing from the 2016 election went on for years.
While I would be astounded if the voter fraud investigations yielded sufficient evidence to overthrow the election results, you'll have to forgive me for not outright rejecting that potential. Of course, I would also be extremely skeptical if that did happen.
Besides, why do we have to be 100% committed to anything right now?
I thought of the Russia collusion story too. It's pretty much this narrative in reverse: our election was stolen + invented facts. anybody who believes that the pee tape was real ought to be able to make the logical jump to believing that Biden stole the election because there's exactly the same amount of evidence for both.
The US has become so incredibly partisan though, that both sides literally experience different realities. The same people that believe the pee tape is real will scream for censorship of Trump's lies and vice versa.
Some theories are more falsifiable than others. The theory that there was fraud on a scale large enough to swing this election should be falsifiable in any sane, working electoral system. In parts of the US, however, I'm less confident, since in some cases it doesn't seem possible to disprove the theory that an individual vote was fraudulent. Hence the problem: anyone saying it's impossible is just as deluded as the person saying the election was stolen. The system is broken.
Both parties have dumb justifications for why they think the voting system should stay the way it is, but the reality is simply that the person/party in charge has no incentive to overhaul the system that go them there. They call foul and make a big fuss when the system doesn't work in their favor, but then they don't have the power to fix it. They've realized it's easier to just undermine the legitimacy of the winner and just patiently wait for the next opportunity.
I wish I knew what it would take to get the support necessary to fix it without endorsement from a political party.
My country had similar issues, it took a right man at the head of election commission to reform it. We lucked out, I think something similar would be the only way out.
As an Australian, I need no ID to vote in any elections. I can just turn up at any polling place, tell them my name & address, and they hand me the forms and mark me as having voted.
There is nothing stopping me doing this again at a different polling place on the same day, but it would trigger an investigation if my name was marked at multiple polling booths.
And yet, there is basically no electoral fraud at all. In each election, this happens less than 10 times nationally with a population of 25M ppl.
It turns out to be forgetful senior citizens more often than fraudulent voters.
The electoral roll is simply made up of legal names and addresses in each electorate.
Your name must be on the roll, or you can't vote. So fake names wont work. Nor will a name without the correct address.
If you turn up and your name/address combo is already crossed out, you will be given some sort of provisional ballot, while an investigation is started.
It would be trivial to learn someones address and turn up at a booth in their electorate early to vote in their name, but the irregularity would be obvious.
Also, it is very difficult to stay off the electoral roll or have an incorrect address, because most interactions with a government agency will automatically update it. ie: get or change drivers license details or get a passport, or enroll you kids in school etc.
You may be purged from the roll if another person legitimately enrolls at an address you used to be enrolled at, but this will be picked up quickly in practice when you change your address for any official paperwork.
I can't find the comment now, but someone pointed out that misinformation and propaganda used to be a tool that only the local (national) government could use at scale, so teaching citizens how to identify misinformation and propaganda wasn't something prioritized in schools (lest you be considered 'anti-american'). With the internet and the current state of social media, suddenly anyone can broadcast any message they want at scale, including foreign governments.
I agree that humans and "the public" are not perfectly rational people. BUT, I don't know that any system that does not treat them as such is any better. Then systems put in place by people who think they DO know better are never sustainable and are corruptible by all influences that corrupt any form of power
> BUT, I don't know that any system that does not treat them as such is any better.
In all of the civilized world, people are assumed to not be knowledgable about a myriad of problem domains such that only licensed professional can exercises certain classes of judgement.
You are not considered to be rational enough to determine what kind of chemotherapy you get, just to name an example of all sorts of prescription medicines.
You are not assumed knowledgeable about architecting a building, a car, investing, or all licensed occupations where it turns out that bad opinions can kill people by the millions.
So no, effectively we assume by default that people are mostly dumb and dangerous and we raise high bars of qualification for anything in society where there is a potential for huge damage from bad decisions.
...but your examples are completely unrelated to the conversation we're having here. Censoring content to millions of people is in no way similar to requiring a dentist to be properly trained and licensed.
All are examples of social assumptions that people are not qualified enough to evaluate evidence at face value without a substantial background in specialized knowledge.
If you claim that there's voting fraud and it turns out I'm not knowledgeable enough to evaluate that claim at face value, as a society we have a problem, just like a lot of the misinformation that leads to the voting public to support policies for erroneous reasons.
That's pretty much the basis for representative democracies (disregarding whether they're effective at it or not): choosing experts who have the time and inclination to decide policies that you would otherwise not be able to evaluate effectively on your own.
Edit: to cite a clear example: climate science is not a field where laymen can make useful opinions, although it's a field where anyone with a high-school level education can follow the reasoning behind the conclusions reached by the experts. And yet we have a political party that attempts to deny and politicize this topic without even a hint of qualifications to do so, and nonexperts believing that their opinions are useful, or a reflection of reality.
What if Youtube were a truly bad actor. (genuinely, a theoretical) and were working to actively censor the truth? What would be the right response here?
Were Youtube truly acting in bad faith, the correct response would be for the government to intervene (either by lawsuit or legislation). But of course, the government should respond to actual harms, not hypothetical harms.
That's an interesting response. I started my first comment by playing devil's advocate with myself. I'm almost a free speech absolutist, but I also really hate all the crazy, conspiratorial thinking that is so common these days. It puts me odds with myself. I can't say I'm sad when crazy and dangerous ideas are removed from the internet. However, I think it's clear to see how this could be abused. A system where the "right" ideas are allowed depends on the people in charge having the "right" ideas. When such things are possible, the pendulum swings quickly. (ie, if the government could really truly censor, imagine how the kind of censorship would differ between a red and blue administration.)
And, this is part of the problem: can you trust the government to decide what sort of speech is appropriate. I don't mean now, with regards to this particular issue. I mean every time this problem crops up for the next 50 to 100 years. It relies on the same theoretical. What if instead, it's the company which is telling the truth, but the government which is malicious, and wants to censor them?
> What if instead, it's the company which is telling the truth, but the government which is malicious, and wants to censor them?
This is not hypothetical, you can see this in many countries today like North Korea, Iran, India, etc.
Government censorship is extremely dangerous because it is backed by the power of the state. ISP censorship is extremely dangerous because there are very few options and circumvention requires expensive physical infrastructure. YouTube not allowing certain videos on their site… doesn’t seem to me to warrant these histrionics, since there are multiple other channels for video distribution (Vimeo, Twitch, Dailymotion, BitChute, Periscope, Twitter, and Facebook all come to mind off the top of my head). And, if there were no other channels for video distribution, a $5/mo server gets you one of your own.
Is it a huge bummer that we can’t have nice things and that the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ concept is fraying at the edges? Yes. Is this the end of the world, or even a slippery slope to a dystopia? Seems pretty unlikely. Distributors have always been allowed to choose what they will and won‘t carry; Barnes & Noble won’t sell books published by Amazon[0], and you know what you can do? Just buy them at Amazon. YouTube won’t carry your video? Fine, post it somewhere else.
> I'm almost a free speech absolutist, but I also really hate all the crazy, conspiratorial thinking that is so common these days. It puts me odds with myself. I can't say I'm sad when crazy and dangerous ideas are removed from the internet. However, I think it's clear to see how this could be abused. A system where the "right" ideas are allowed depends on the people in charge having the "right" ideas.
On the other hand, I'm not a free speech absolutist (obviously) because I don't trust other people to behave reasonably. But if everyone were perfectly rational, I probably would be; and maybe you and I are rational enough that we can handle "dangerous" ideas without succumbing to emotional manipulation (but then again, maybe not). However, while perhaps we can watch a purposefully mis-informative video, evaluate the merits of those claims, and dismiss them out of hand, do you trust everyone else to do the same?
That isn't to say you or I should be the arbiter of truth, but there should be some bare minimum standard. In my mind, there are two pillars for public discourse:
1. Facts, upon which arguments are based.
2. Deductive/inductive arguments, which appeal to values.
Obviously different people will have different values, so they will evaluate the weight of the arguments differently; however, facts are facts -- those should be the common ground. When someone denies reality by positing conspiracies without meaningful evidence, public discourse is impossible.
> What if instead, it's the company which is telling the truth, but the government which is malicious, and wants to censor them?
If the government is malicious, the correct response is voting. Unlimited free speech won't help: a malicious government could censor free speech; or a malicious government could promote un-truths with as much weight as truths, transforming "matters of fact" into "matters of opinion".
(As an aside, I'm nearly a democracy absolutist despite my distaste for free speech absolutism. While that might seem contradictory, democracy thrives in public discourse, and unlimited free speech can hamper that: think Citizen's United, where money can give someone an outsized influence; or conspiracies, which deny facts.)
>On the other hand, I'm not a free speech absolutist (obviously) because I don't trust other people to behave reasonably.
I don't either, but I still believe free speech is important, even if that means it certainly be abused, and cause some damage on a long enough timeline.
As a personal anecdote, I used to spend time on 4chan. (ie, within the last few months I finally blocked it.) I never picked up any of the crazier conspiracy theories that people might associate with the site. But, I was affected by reading all the extremist content. My intuitive sense for the likelihood of country-wide instability, as well as my sense for how bad that instability could be were well skewed. Having finally quit, I feel a bit silly now. I live in a very peaceful, suburban neighborhood, and it's the safest town in my whole state. I generally don't consider myself as susceptible to misinformation, but I think it's clear to me now that anyone can be affected, and everyone has a different blind spot for it.
Were I DO believe in censorship is in the home. ie, I believe it's ok to determine what media / ideas I ingest, since my abstinence won't prevent anyone else.
All of that said, I completely agree with you when it comes to facts and common ground. However, I believe that technology has fundamentally changed what it means to release and censor information. I haven't figured out a good way to articulate this yet. So I'll just say that pamphlets in the 1800s are obviously very different from youtube or social media now. I don't believe it's the same issues all over again, and I'm not sure what the right solutions are.
>If the government is malicious, the correct response is voting.
No doubt. The recent brush with populism has made me a bit nervous in this regard. It can be argued whether the founders really successfully produced enough bulwarks against populism, however I certainly agree with the intent of their efforts.
Governments continue to get bigger, with more power concentrated at the top. The president being the prime example, an office that was originally intended to be the top cop become an office invested with the hopes and desires of everyone in the country/world, looked towards to single-handedly address any problem.
Then there is the internet, where everyone has the opportunity to go viral, and we can all argue about everything.
Throw in huge multi-national corporations bigger than many nations, treated as people by law, and legally able to buy off politicians in the U.S...
So now in the U.S. we have two parties optimizing to stay in power moreso than act from principal, more manipulative media than ever, and implementing huge national programs based on the slim majority that voted for president that year.
I don't think censorship tweaks are going to fix this. A lot of people don't feel represented, and they are right.
It baffles me that so many people fall for what Trump says. He was already declaring fraud weeks before the election because he knew exactly how it would pan out. People described exactly what he would do and he did it.
He declared he won on the election night before all votes were counted. It is so blatantly explicit that he is lying, gaslighting, and deceiving people that it amazes me how so many intelligent, educated people fall for this crap.
The fact he is a conman, legally has been found so (Trump university, his own charity, two easy examples off the top of my head but there are plenty more) and yet this is the man they believe?
It's a true sickness in this country. I don't know what it is, the racism, or what. Why seemingly functional people are taken in so easily by an obvious conman.
7 months ago 80% of democrats weren't confident that the election would be free and fair. Most of them seem happy to accept the result now.
I think this is human nature rather than a flaw with members of a particular party but I think it is worthwhile for people to compare their own views before and after the election.
Of course they were not confident. Do you recall all the actions taken by Republicans to try to suppress votes? A lot of work had to be done by Democrats and some Republicans to make sure there was no vote suppression.
Lindsey Graham said out loud and clear on Fox News that Republicans must do something about votes by mail otherwise they will never be able to elect another Republican. He doesn’t seem to believe they can win without suppressing votes.
The election isn't fair, be it from voter suppression, gerrymandering, reduction of polling places and ID issuance locations, voter roll purging, etc, etc.
Already 7 months ago evidence was seen of Trump rationalizing away future losses. He mobilized plans to defund the Postal Service, deligitimize drop-off ballots, and claim that the Democrats were going to engage in fraud.
I'm sorry but that's just not it, at least not this time. When you have a narcissistic psychopath that needs to feed his ego, and army of yes-men who have no regards for laws and ethics, it pays to be extra careful. It was partially because of this dilligence that plans to remove drive-by ballot drop-offs by Republicans were thwarted.
> There's evidence to the contrary that is yet to be addressed.
No there isn't, and no one has yet even CLAIMED in court that there is. Every time the Trump legal team went before a judge, they themselves denied that they have any evidence or even CLAIM of fraud.
Sure, on TV they say all sorts of crazy stuff, but when it really matters, they back down.
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in this election whatsoever.
> but at the moment, no one can say that with confidence if they are paying attention to the allegations
And yet marvel at the number of otherwise highly logical people who do just that.
> If Youtube feels obligated to correct what it thinks are misconceptions, they can present their arguments and evidence that contradict current allegations. They should hire a team of lawyers to put together the most up to date refutations of claims, and post that on relevant videos.
It's interesting that:
- a centralized, slowly changing "balance sheet" approach like this, which is a standard in project management, is rarely taken toward matters of public concern - I am a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a resource that enumerated all of the "just(!) a conspiracy theory" claims and illustrated how it is known(!) that they are false, I would gladly read it. Rather, the public has to somehow sort out what is true based on hundreds of "news" articles that get released into the information ecosystem on a daily basis. Or, just offload their thinking to The Experts.
- we regularly hear that we need more "critical thinking" among the public, but we never get further than talking about the incredibly important need for this
It's also interesting that ~nobody seems to notice these sorts of things (and when they are mentioned, it seems to generally displease people, for reasons that are not stated).
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of information management oversights, apparently by thousands of people in positions of power, are purely accidental.
> Let's be clear: there was no widespread election fraud, certainly not by large enough margins to overturn the election. Videos that purport otherwise are not improving public discourse; in fact, they're causing it to disintegrate.
I think there almost certainly was some fraud, but not enough to change the outcome. (Whether or not "some but not enough to change the outcome" counts as "widespread", I don't know.)
But I also think it is true that the US electoral system is very poorly organised, creating a lot more scope for fraud–or at least the appearance of fraud, or the appearance of the possibility of fraud–than in some other countries. In a number of other countries, national elections are fully run by an apolitical independent national agency (e.g. the Australian Electoral Commission), not by a hodgepodge of state and county officials many of whom are politicians or political appointees. That system provides a lot more professionalism and a lot less opportunities for suspicion of fraud than the American system does.
Yet, I think some people are so committed to "everything Trump says is 110% wrong" that they want to shut down discussion of the flaws in the US election system. It is possible that both there are real flaws in the election system, including flaws that permit fraud or the appearance of a possibility of fraud, and that simultaneously those flaws while very real and in need of being addressed didn't change the outcome this time around.
Possibly, one outcome of this election might be support from Republicans for some reforms in the way elections are carried out. Given America's toxic political polarisation, there is the risk that Democrats will oppose such reforms simply because it is Republicans proposing them.
> I think there almost certainly was some fraud, but not enough to change the outcome. (Whether or not "some but not enough to change the outcome" counts as "widespread", I don't know.)
Yea, that's what he said.
Regarding the rest of your comment: I don't think _anyone_ is arguing that the US electoral system is without flaw. A large system of any kind will have many flaws. Ask any software engineer.
Indeed, I'm also not aware of any person that wants to avoid, indefinitely, having a discussion about how we can improve the US election system. That being said, RIGHT NOW is decidedly not the right time. I'll be all for having an honest, bipartisan discussion as soon as there are no longer parties actively trying to steal an election. When it comes to election integrity, 100% of our focus needs to be on making sure that the results of _this_ election are respected. Then we can focus on improving things for future elections.
Well, the two comments are not very far apart in substance, somewhat further apart in terms of emphasis. Often two people can be close to agreement on what the facts are, much further apart in which of those facts they think ought to be emphasised.
> Regarding the rest of your comment: I don't think _anyone_ is arguing that the US electoral system is without flaw. A large system of any kind will have many flaws. Ask any software engineer.
Every large system has flaws, yes. But how does the US electoral system compare to those of other countries? It is far from being the worst, but it is also far from being the best. If someone was pointing out flaws in one of the countries with the best organised election systems, then "A large system of any kind will have many flaws" may well be a decent response, but it is less so when pointing out flaws in a system which is at the best somewhere in the middle.
Imagine your product has lots of flaws which many of its competitors lack. In such a situation, the truism "a large system of any kind will have many flaws" is missing the point.
> That being said, RIGHT NOW is decidedly not the right time. I'll be all for having an honest, bipartisan discussion as soon as there are no longer parties actively trying to steal an election
I don't agree that anyone is trying to "steal an election". President Trump is being a sore loser, but I am certain he is leaving the White House peacefully come January 20th. His attempts to challenge the result in the courts have always been half-hearted. Back in 2000, each of Bush and Gore made sure they had the brightest legal minds of their respective parties on the case. Trump has not signed up the brightest legal minds of the GOP to challenge the result. I don't think he was ever really serious about it, he is just putting on a show. He can't steal an election, he doesn't even know how to pull that one off. But I think a lot of people – his supporters and detractors alike – fall too easily for Trump's shtick.
> I don't agree that anyone is trying to "steal an election". President Trump is being a sore loser, but I am certain he is leaving the White House peacefully come January 20th. His attempts to challenge the result in the courts have always been half-hearted. Back in 2000, each of Bush and Gore made sure they had the brightest legal minds of their respective parties on the case. Trump has not signed up the brightest legal minds of the GOP to challenge the result. I don't think he was ever really serious about it, he is just putting on a show. He can't steal an election, he doesn't even know how to pull that one off. But I think a lot of people – his supporters and detractors alike – fall too easily for Trump's shtick.
This line of reasoning doesn't jive with me, for the same reason a person trying, and failing, to commit a crime like murder is still guilty of committing a crime. If I attempt to kill you, and fail, a defense of "I was just putting on a show" isn't going to go so well for me in court. In short, his ineptitude doesn't make him any less guilty for what he's actually attempting.
Too many people - his supporters and detractors alike - give him too much credit when it comes to his abilities, and not enough credit when it comes to what he's actually capable of trying.
I'll add that, "Trump has not signed up the brightest legal minds" is an absurd justification for the opinion that this isn't a legitimate attempt to steal an election. At what point during Trump's presidency has he EVER selected the "brightest minds" for any post. This is Trump being Trump.
People pretending like this isn't happening, frankly, should be ashamed of themselves. And if it ISN'T happening, pretending like feigning an attempt to subvert American democracy to steal an election isn't a big deal, is also a shameful act in my opinion.
Your whole comment would have fallen apart if the election was overturned by a smart, capable president with authoritarian undertones.
Imagine if President X had military on their side, supressed courts, had many militias supporting them and spreading misinformation day in and day out.
And getting 100 million votes and had a trifecta (House, Executive Office, Senate) + Supreme Court. Can you imagine?
I'd like to think the current situation is (at least partially) a byproduct of people creating their own echo chambers then never leaving them - before the internet, national communication was very limited since it required a lot of resources, so your local newspaper and library would need to cover news and topics without partisanship in order to sell to everyone in town. Now, you can specifically look for sources (even outside of actual news companies) and other people that have your same political views and limit communication to them, only looking at other circles and opposing viewpoints in order to criticize them out of context.
That makes sense and you make some really good points.
I have one idea (usually these ideas are fragile and blow up in my own mind, but bear with me).
What if anyone that posts something on social media requires x ratio of likes/dislikes (before spreading) from anonymous users from a truly random selection of people. What would the information landscape look like?
What if we self-censor through some small but liberal consensus - the ratio threshold is up for debate.
They are in an abstract sense, publishers. Whether they're legally or not, doesn't take away from the fact that they take information from an individual and broadcast it (print it on computer monitors) for public to consume. Just that the editorialization piece is missing.
Yeah, good thing the noble gentlemen in charge of our social media are committed and powerful enough to save us from that dark future. That makes me feel so much safer.
I hear you. What do you suggest otherwise? The society will crumble with volume of misinformation and lies cranked to 11. Truth would drown, by a long shot because even if data is presented, people are brainwashed to ignore it because it doesn't fit their narrative.
Can you talk about the alternative? I hear you but I feel like there is no choice. We're in a shitty situation and it is natural to feel fear and have a knee-jerk reaction at any solution (not just the one Google proposed).
I'm not convinced the misinformation thing is as big of a factor as many people believe. I think it's just a symptom of the real problem: echo chambers.
Every contentious issue in US politics gets divided into two major camps, each championed by one of the major political parties. Those parties use their resources to plant the seeds of powerful echo chambers, which eventually become self-perpetuating thanks to our natural tendencies for group preferences and confirmation bias. The misinformation crisis is just a result of an echo chamber throwing crap at the wall to avoid questioning itself.
The problem of echo chambers is a hard one to solve, especially when it comes to politics. However, I think an improved voting system would actually do a lot to help in the long term. By introducing a transferable vote, citizens could vote for third-party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Over time, that should hopefully empower more moderate political groups and make the middle ground between echo chambers more accessible.
A more accessible middle ground should result in fewer echo chambers. Fewer echo chambers should result in less incentive to create and circulate misinformation. At least, that's my two cents.
I think you make an excellent point. When it comes to echo chambers, social media platforms like YouTube exacerbate the problem with algorithms designed to keep users "engaged" by feeding them whatever the platform thinks they'll watch ads on next.
Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.
Any time I watch a video from CNN, Fox, or NBC, YouTube suggests political crap for weeks afterwards. I bet political content is one of their most "engaging" subjects, so I doubt Google would ever do the responsible thing and put a stop to that.
Modifying the algorithm to show "both sides" instead might help, but I don't think that would do much to encourage a middle ground. I'm worried both sides would just get more and more extreme.
> Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.
Yeah, that ain't happening. We need some FCC laws around targeted content to audience (spawning echo chambers) to optimize engagement.
The two-party political dynamic depends upon hegemonizing more than 50% of the electorate by providing the least offensive political narrative and ideological pretext.
T's effectiveness has been through manipulating that ideological pretext beyond campaign politics and beyond the requirement of even narrative cohesion with reality. He wields his populism to coerce even the interests of power themselves, with little regard for the overall homeostasis of Republican party's ideological pretext[0].
If he continues his ideological schism off-the-rails from an oval room at Mar-A-Lago, he has the precisely the same leverage in 2022 elections which he is wielding today.
If you falsely yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you will be held responsible for the resulting consequences, even though the other theater patrons could verify your claim independently.
They're trying very hard to create that fire using the stuffing in the seats as we speak. So far it hasn't worked because some people still have their heads screwed on. But it's not for lack of trying. About 10 people stand between a full blown attempt at dictatorship and a functioning democracy.
Are you arguing in bad faith, or do you actually think making it impossible for people to effectually accuse the winners of a election of election fraud is a good idea?
No, but they should have some evidence, especially being the sitting president, don't you think? This is a coup attempt.. and they have nothing to justify it.
So are YOU arguing in bad faith to ignore this very obvious problem?
No one is saying accusations with evidence and merit cannot be made. They are saying that after losing over 50 lawsuits and having substantiated exactly zero claims, then we are losing patience with offering good faith.
The president might be one person, but he’s the most powerful person on earth, with the ability to control markets, launch nukes, call millions of followers to arms or order a coup (unlikely to succeed on that one).
I find likening fact-checking Trump to censoring a private citizen a disingenuous comparison that plays down the power of the office he holds. If he goes off the deep end doing any of those things, there won’t be much the media or the house can do to stop it, so I think some preemptive action is warranted. Whether YouTube have got it right here is another question.
I do not believe there was widespread election fraud, but having a private company control what information people are allowed to see & hear is also dangerous. YouTube has the right to do this as a private company, but it's also a dangerous precedent.
I think a better approach, instead of broad censorship, would be simply inserting warning statement(s), at least in front of the material. They already stick in ads, so the tech is there. That way, the material is still available, but with warnings. We "show but warn" with many other materials (sexually explicit, violence, etc.) - I think that would be the much better way to handle such materials.
Can you define what a "platform" is? And do you think there is a legal distinction between the two?
If this is regarding section 230, around which this dichotomy always seems to surface, then are you aware that the word "platform" does not appear in the text of said section?
Platform is user uploaded content with minimal censorship and where the platform has minimal responsibility over the content. Publisher is curated content with arbitrary censorship and heavy responsibility over the content.
As a voter, I'd expect to be able to use the platform/publisher spectrum to determine how much censorship a service should have. If a service has censorship capabilities different from what a large enough part of the population thinks they should have then the law should be changed to rectify this.
My questions to you (and anyone else):
Where does YouTube lie on this idealized platform/publisher perspective? How much censorship ability should they have? To what degree does your expectations of their censorship ability differ from their actual censorship ability according to the law?
The now somewhat controversial Section 230 of the CDA would classify YouTube as an "interactive computer service," and the actual text of the law says "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected." Videos pushing to delegitimize the entire democratic process could certainly be considered "otherwise objectionable". That would be subjective, to be sure, and perhaps challengeable, but I'm going to bet that Google had a lot of discussions with their legal team before taking this action.
tl;dr: being a "platform" is neither a Get Out of Lawsuits Free card nor a requirement for content to be unmoderated.
I'm not particularly interested in what the law says. Leave that to the lawyers :)
As a voter/citizen it would be great if we had reasonable expectations about our what these services are and how we should set our own expectations for censorship. The platform/publisher spectrum is an easy jumping off point for a casual discussion.
Where is "Youtube" on this spectrum? What stops Youtube from marking all content associated with a particular religion/political party/national origin "otherwise objectionable"?
Many questions. I can state that as a citizen I view Youtube as a platform that should take a minimal approach to censorship. I view the attempts to control what the "plebians/proles" believe as excessively paternalistic and likely to be unhelpful. If the censorship causes these people to visit more radical sources of information then who is to blame when they get further radicalized? At least Youtube has washed their hands of the situation.
You are free to set up a “free speech” alternative to YouTube if you think that is a better system. Unfortunately you will not be able to get many users because it will be full of porn and spam, and you won’t be able to fund it because advertisers won’t want to be associated with it.
>What stops Youtube from marking all content associated with a particular religion/political party/national origin "otherwise objectionable"?
Market forces? Advertiser pressure? Bad hair day?
They are under no obligation to host anything they choose not to host.
And that's a good thing too. If Google can be forced to host content they don't wish to host, then so can you, and so can I and so can HackerNews or Bernadette's Knitting website.
Something else, which is the whole point of section 230 in the first place.
You may disagree with the law, but it doesn't mean I have to agree with a bullshit dichotomy that hasn't been the state of reality for the last 25 years. Instead you have to convince me that state of reality is a bad one to be in.
Youtube, at least up to now, is a platform not a publisher.
Part of the muddying is that it is very difficult for people to see information if it is not on one of these major publishers or platforms.
Information that is legal to present, but no one will ever see, may as well not exist.
A platform is a particular kind of publisher, and a publisher is a particular kind of platform. 'Publisher' and 'Platform' are two overlapping circles on a Venn diagram.
Anyone making this point needs to explain why I'm supposed to accept their de jure interpretation of the situation, when de facto, large platforms monopolize distribution. Simply saying "private company" is so lazy, it's not even wrestling with the issue.
Based upon my existing preferences, I already never see these conspiracy theories on YouTube, nor Twitter or Facebook, for that matter. Yet I'm quite familiar with them via a panoply of other sources. So I think you have to do more then just baldly assert that these platforms monopolize information distribution. The fact that there are a lot of platforms with different editorial rules is the exact opposite of a monopoly.
Certainly, a quick search can show you that the overwhelming majority of video views occur on a small number of platforms, and that you are an outlier. If I am someone who has a message to share, far and away the most effective place to share that as a video would be YT, hands down. And that doesn't even begin to address the fact that all of these platforms are converging on the same definitions of safe speech anyhow, so the diversity is nominal.
Sorry, “can” was misleading there since you can obviously get information elsewhere. What I’m wondering is: If a company chooses not to publish something, how is that different than deciding what people are allowed to see?
It’s different because they can get it elsewhere. Government censorship makes any source illegal. Extreme government censorship puts you in jail for reading about a dangerous idea.
A company censoring information on their platform seems deeply different, no?
> A company censoring information on their platform seems deeply different, no?
Not necessarily; I think that is the crux of the discussion.
From a legal point of view it is deeply different. From a practical point of view it's not so clear. If a video isn't on Youtube, for many it's the same as not existing at all. For example, my Roku can show YouTube videos, but cannot access arbitrary urls.
In general, platforms are not supposed to discriminate, while Publishers do. This particular case makes that distinction far less obvious. I'd like to see some alternative, such as markings, instead of a simple include or not.
Yes, all publishers being equal, true. But what if the publisher controlled most of the book stores that only carried their books? Would they then decide what people see if they chose not to publish?
> having a private company control what information people are allowed to see & hear is also dangerous. YouTube has the right to do this as a private company, but it's also a dangerous precedent.
Before YouTube, media was controlled by television channels, private companies who decided what they wanted to show.
Before TV, media was controlled by radio broadcasters, private companies who decided what they wanted to air.
And before that was print media, private companies who decide what is published.
So that ship has sailed. In fact it has been the norm for 99% of history. You can argue over whether we want to go back but you can't say this is some slippery slope to a dangerous future; that danger has arrived, and if anything it seems to be fuelled by the hyperdemocratisation of media.
YouTube is already exerting immense control over what information people see and hear. That's the status quo. If you're arguing that YouTube should have no recommendation algorithm or any feature whatsoever that make it more likely for any person to see any one video than any other video, and should not censor any uploaded content, then that makes some sense. That would make YouTube essentially a web hosting service (many of which already exist, of course).
I would genuinely like to know why you are so confident about what claims are and aren’t baseless.
Do you have inside knowledge that the public doesn’t posses? Because I’ve been paying attention and I’m genuinely unsure what is happening ... default skeptical about all claims in every direction.
Edit:
A lot of the responses here seem to be unaware of Texas’ lawsuit and the ramifications. I expect the conspiracy claims to be separated out from the genuine concerns if the Supreme Court chooses to hear that suit.
I think the side which is getting all their lawsuits dismissed (and with prejudice) is probably the one with the baseless claims.
I also think that the side on which the biggest (public) provable liar/narcissist of all time is on has a chance of having the most baseless claims.
Occam's Razor also applies. What is more likely: a massive conspiracy to rig the election, only in specific swing states, only for the presidency and nothing else on the ballot, requiring massive coordination and having no proof. Or... The president is a huge liar and the people in the GOP are afraid to go against him lest he turn his cult against them too.
> Because I’ve been paying attention and I’m genuinely unsure what is happening
I'm genuinely unsure how you're genuinely unsure, except if you attribute the same weight to Fox News / OANN and other propaganda networks as you do sources of information with actual credibility.
What doesn't make sense to me are all the statistical anomalies everywhere. How did down ballot republicans outperform Trump everywhere, when Trump's approval ratings among republicans were incredibly high?
The bellweather counties perplexes me.
The crazy turnout in specific counties that far exceeded demographically similar counties that wouldn't have the impact to flip the election. The fact that Trump out performed himself with all demographics except white men, he had historic republican support from black and hispanic voters, except in specific key counties.
The fact that all of these counties all flipped the next morning was perplexing, especially since many of the flips came from ballot dumps that had statistically impossible ratios of votes for Biden. Or the massive number of ballots that were showing up for Biden, but had no downballot choices filled out at all.
Couple all of this with the thousands of witnesses that swore on strange activity during counting, and the absolute lack of security around the Dominion machines. I'm surprised HN hasn't been all over the Dominion machines, the HN of several years ago would have had several posts decrying the security of those machines.
There are reasons to doubt things. The doubt needs to be addressed with transparency and in court, and so far, all of the municipalities that are raising suspicion are fighting tooth and nail against transparency.
If the concerns are met with censorship and dismissal without real rebuttal, I don't see an optimistic future for this country.
> What doesn't make sense to me are all the statistical anomalies everywhere. How did down ballot republicans outperform Trump everywhere, when Trump's approval ratings among republicans were incredibly high?
The general polls were super, duper, off. Biden was supposedly leading by 3 points in Florida and then lost by 3 points, for a net of 6 point error.
I'm not shocked by polls being wrong.
I think, if you accept that polls can be wrong, it's pretty easy to imagine the voters who were lifelong Republicans might have continued to vote R but left the top slot blank.
> The fact that Trump out performed himself with all demographics except white men, he had historic republican support from black and hispanic voters, except in specific key counties.
He BARELY won in 2016 because of a few thousand votes in three states. The geographic distribution of votes matters. Just because he picked up a few percentage points on minority demographics (still far behind Biden, just more than he had against Clinton) doesn't matter unless you tell me WHERE he picked up those margins. One of the places was south Florida and he won Florida. So there's nothing here that surprises me or seems suspicious at all.
> The fact that all of these counties all flipped the next morning was perplexing, especially since many of the flips came from ballot dumps that had statistically impossible ratios of votes for Biden. Or the massive number of ballots that were showing up for Biden, but had no downballot choices filled out at all.
No. We all knew for MONTHS that Trump would look better on election night than he would as the rest of the votes were tallied. We knew for MONTHS that Pennsylvania was not allowed to START counting mail in votes until AFTER polls closed on November 3rd. We knew it so well that they even coined a cutesy term for it: the "red mirage". We were repeatedly warned that we would see the red mirage on election night. You should not have been perplexed. I'm sorry.
The only statistically impossible ratio of votes for Biden are those that are over 100%.
> Couple all of this with the thousands of witnesses that swore on strange activity during counting, and the absolute lack of security around the Dominion machines. I'm surprised HN hasn't been all over the Dominion machines, the HN of several years ago would have had several posts decrying the security of those machines.
What lack of security, specifically? What thousands of witnesses? What activities were "strange"? All I've seen or heard is a bunch of people who are very ignorant of the election process pointing to video clips from the live streams and saying "OMG, this worker just filled out a ballot!" when the person in question was clearing performing "ballot curing".
Maybe HN wasn't exploding because there isn't anything to see here.
That's not to say that the election was perfect. No election is. I'm in Florida. We can't do an election to save our lives down here. But a nationwide conspiracy that would require thousands of individuals to coordinate in key counties in key states (many of which are run by Republicans) is basically "moon landing didn't happen" levels of conspiracy.
> If the concerns are met with censorship and dismissal without real rebuttal, I don't see an optimistic future for this country.
I've seen and read many real rebuttals against all kinds of claims. From "poll workers were ejected" to "suitcases full of ballots". Similarly I saw something about a Dominion machine that supposedly flipped Trump votes to Biden votes that was summarily debunked.
There was nothing surprising about the results except that Georgia flipped blue. But I think that says more about Trump and Georgia's demographics than it does about the election. Remember that 2016, when he eeked out his EC win, it was because he barely flipped the "blue wall" states. The fact that they went back blue this year is not at all surprising.
Credible by repetition only, at this point. They've shown themselves at the same level, and the most self-righteous networks have proven the most hypocritical, and they don't even seem to see it.
Don't forget, not only do they only care about the battleground states Trump lost, but also the congressional victories which were on the same ballot are not similarly being questioned.
Republicans picked up seats in the House. They did better in the Senate than expected. No one is questioning the results of those races.
Democrats did do everything in their power. I’m not sure what you expect, do you want them to try to be totally corrupt and step outside of their constitutional role? Because they made sure it was a really honest process:
1. They made sure investigations happened to determine the validity of any claims. Investigations from trusted intelligence officials and even from the Republican-controlled senate confirmed the same thing.
2. They impeached trump based on the evidence provided by the investigations.
3. When the republicans didn’t vote to remove him, they focused a lot on the election and driving voter turnout.
>why wouldn't Democrats do everything in their power to get him removed from office?
Correctly, people note that a sure marker of a conspiracy theory is that the absence of evidence supports the claim. (ie, there must have been a cover-up!)
This is definitely true, but another aspect which doesn't get enough attention is an argument which relies totally on psychoanalysis. "Group X would surely want to do x, and therefore they probably did!"
The truth is that you generally don't understand people's incentives as well as you might guess. Further, simply because there is an incentive does not mean there is a capability.
But, most importantly, claims require evidence. Reading incentives is pretty flawed regardless. At best, it must be backstopped by real, hard evidence. This total lack of evidence is why these cases are being unceremoniously tossed out of court.
I will come out and say I have not looked at a single court case nor do I look at Trump twitter nor do I read any social media beyond Hacker News. My interest in politics is not partisan. I am not here to debate the likelihood of any sort of fraud because internet debates about this kind of thing are pointless.
The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter fraud based on the rhetoric of the party alleged of committing the fraud." The lazy answer is "your voter fraud prior should always be zero." Is that the right answer? There's are interesting discussions to be had here. They likely cannot be had on Hacker News.
Many people have beliefs about Trump where, IF I had the same beliefs I'd totally be on board with voter fraud to get him out of office.
>Many people have beliefs about Trump where, IF I had the same beliefs I'd totally be on board with voter fraud to get him out of office.
I wouldn't, but this is because of the game theory sort of nature of democracy. If I can do it, so can my opponents. Suppose Trump is evil, and defeated, and next election my side has a truly wonderful and excellent candidate. (again, I'm just being theoretical.) I don't want the other side to be able to beat my candidate using voter fraud. Ideally, no one can beat anyone using voter fraud.
>The rationalistic question is something along the lines of "how do you adjust your priors of voter
I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you mean "this party has previously had issues with voter fraud, and therefore it's not stretch to be concerned about it again." If I have you correct, I'd again say that this is a fine suspicion, but then evidence must be produced. If evidence cannot be produced, then the priors alone are not enough. To use a very flimsy metaphor, suppose in a small town there is a kid who has robbed a convenience store. Later, when another convenience store is robbed it might make sense to suspect the kid. But, you had better not charge or convict him unless you can produce some real evidence. (and to be clear, I am not comparing either party to a common criminal, I just wanted a simple metaphor which I thought best explained the argument.)
Just to pull the thread a little further, what if you already believed that the other side was using unfair tactics to achieve their political goals. Gerrymandering, unfair court appointments, electoral college unfairness, racially based voter suppression.
I'm hard pressed to believe that someone who believes these are going on AND that the current president is a Russian asset (for example) would not support voter fraud.
And that's exactly the problem. Republicans are indeed benefiting from the backwards or technically legal but scummy tactics you outlined.
Democrats are not trying to fight fire with fire, they're just trying to make it easy to vote for anyone who is entitled to vote. It just happens that there are more of those people than there are people supporting Republicans. Quite a bit more.
You just can't imagine someone wouldn't stoop that low when you would.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here, so I'm going to address both possibilities as I understand them:
#1 - Could there be anyone, anywhere, who believes that voter fraud is warranted because they believe the situation is so dire?
Sure, I'll bet there are some people who feel this way.
#2 - Does the possibility that some people, somewhere feel this way suggest that there is real possibility of fraud?
Without evidence, no. Remember that "some democrats" feeling this way is actually not very useful. Instead, various and multiple people with different levels of the election oversight process would need to 1) feel this way, and 2) be willing to risk a federal crime despite all other incentives, and 3) have the actual capability of carrying this out. Each step in the process here carries further inter-dependencies.
For example, the people who really feel this way must be multiple election officials in multiple locations. Recall that there are no "state" elections, but rather multiple districts, which are then collected for the state elections. And so there has to be fraud in multiple locations, and it must be coordinated. Before we go any further, it's important to understand that when we're supposing that we know "how people would feel," we suddenly mean "I know the motivations and incentives of multiple strangers, whose jobs and lives I know nothing about." This is where our ability to judge a person's incentives really falls apart. If we're considering scenario #1, where an imagined other might feel some way, that's probably fine. By the time we're in scenario #2, we already do not know enough information to determine all the incentives involved. One pole worker may be a republican, another a democrat. One pole worker may have a strict credo they live by (in other words, they wouldn't break the law no matter what) while others may be much more open to malicious actions. Some might be risk averse, so might be risk addicted. The point is we don't have factual information about all these different competing incentives.
Even if we could establish the various incentives, there's further information we don't have: What is the structure of the various election boards? Which individuals would be required to coordinate malicious to reach the desired outcome? And, which of those individuals do we think have the "wrong" incentives? In other words, were enough bad actors in the right place?
Lastly, (and shortly since I'm getting too wordy) supposing we could work out the first two problems, do we think such a group could escape the nigh-historical oversight which has been playing out after this election?
The could have impeached Trump on N things, where N is way more than one. They impeached him on one thing. Yes, I would say they were not trying hard at all.
> why wouldn't Democrats do everything in their power to get him removed from office?
Because they believe in the process, the integrity of our country and our Constitution, the voice of the people and the validity of the election. (That doesn't mean Democrats are knights in shining armor, but with many politicians following the President's lead on fighting the integrity of our own country, many find it preferable that Democratic politicians refrain from taking that same low road. Sometimes the high road works. Often it doesn't.)
Democrats believe in the process so much they would rather waste four years convincing themselves a red herring is more than a fish. If they were as conniving as you have been implying, they would have either gotten results or switched tactics sooner.
They're rule-followers. That doesn't mean they're smart.
I'm not a fan of the partisan nature of our politics, or the political theater of Russiagate.
Out of curiosity, did you mean: partisanism?
I accepted that President Donald Trump won the electoral college in 2016, and that he lost it in 2020. I don't think Democrats trying to get a few million people in on an election fraud conspiracy would have been good for the country, and I don't think Democratic politicians believed that was a good idea either.
It's funny to pretend that 2016 election interference from the Russians didn't happen, even though every single intelligence agency (under Trump, by the way) agreed that it did.
I don't see how Russiagate is at odds with what neogodless said. The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.
Also, I will try to say this in the nicest way possible, but you are repeating, nearly verbatim, talking points that the President has been using for months in various rallies. The idea that the democrats needed to turn to voter fraud to ensure Biden won a Trump talking point - not something born out of any sort of rumor or leak. What is particularly nefarious about this talking point is it's not something he crafted out of the blue, but it is one that he has been forming since at least July. He has carefully planned to use pandemic and the growth in mail in ballots to throw chaos into the electoral process. In other words, I'm asking you take a step back and consider if voter fraud is a credible rumor or if its something that has been manufactured by the right wing media machine.
>The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.
You forgot a few steps. First, they claimed there was fraud (w/o evidence). Then they 'leaked' the Steele dossier and other nonsense documents. Then, there was 24/7 wall to wall coverage for months and months of it (including insane stuff like the pee tape) to manufacture consent. High profile Democrats happily went on TV expressing fake concern and repeated unproven allegations. They happily were the 'inside source' to NYTimes, rollingstone, nymag, etc, etc for more ridiculous stories. Then, they wasted tax payer money knowing full well that it was bogus.
Respectfully, I would invite you to do the same as you ask others. Take a step back, and consider (even if you aren't convinced) whether you've been had by the Dems on the most ridiculous story (if not on all of them) about Trump.
I agree. This is all established fact. Look at the FISA and the Carter Page lawsuit. A government informant leaked fake information to the press and the FISA warrant was based on that information. They literally made up information to get a warrant. That's literally a baseless allegation and all the documents that have come out in discovery back that up.
I think there are two fundamentally different worlds here. Many of the people in this thread, and in big tech, still trust CNN/FOX/MSNBC/NYTimes. But if you look at the past four years, they've constantly given us bad information, or used misleading headlines (most people don't read past the headlines), and often the content of the post itself contradicts the headline.
That's why this YouTube thing is so important. People like Shapiro, Megan Kelly, Tim Pool, Viva Frei, No Agenda .. they actually dig through this stuff and expose how corrurpt the media really is .. and they are insanely corrurpt.
We've had months of "mostly peaceful protestors" and I've watched people all around me on the left defend the burning and looting. "It's just property." The media is corrurpt and this shows YouTube/Google is just as corrurpt, trying to use their massive influence to control a narrative; making something absolute that should be brought deeply into question.
We are not in 1984. We've been in 1984 for decades. It's just now the Internet has allowed people to see that for themselves, and Big Tech wants to take that away and tell people what to think again.
I think there is a larger portion of regular folks who dislike the nutty behavior on both sides (I'm one of them) and just want to move on to more important things than the current fake-outrage news cycles over irrelevant drama/gossip.
We might be screwed in the short-term, and if people out of choice/ignorance no longer care about certain democratic ideals, then it is impossible to force it upon them. Having said that, I trust people more than I trust systems. So it might take time, but I believe we're going to get past this eventually.
I don't listen to right wing media. Or left wing media. They're both terrible. (I pay for my news to try an avoid the nonsense.)
I will say this nicely as well, you should re-read my argument to see where the depth lies. I take caution to ask a simple "IF/THEN" question that's really just a latent criticism of media including social media. The idea that "voter fraud" is some "Trump concocted nefarious scheme" is also rather ridiculous. Voter fraud gets claimed after every election.
I hope our new censorship overlords are fair and honest in their censorship.
I sincerely applaud your paying for news, but a person who gets all their news via the free AP News and Reuters newsfeeds, cspan, PBS, VOA, Propublica, NPR, and so on can be very well informed and avoid a fair amount of nonsense.
No one is required to respond to this in earnest, just like there is no requirement for Google to publish materials just because they were uploaded to their servers.
A stable belief system is not shaken by a hypothetical question. You can dodge the question if you'd like but it probably doesn't make your world view appealing to outsiders.
Are you nice because it is required to be nice? "Requirement" is a loaded term, but I would hope Google employees show some decency and hold up their liberal values and bolster free expression that they claim to value so much.
> The rules were changed prior to the election, in a way that clearly favours the democratic party. That should raise suspicion.
Meaning voting was made easier for millions, hence they voted. Meaning Republican suppression of Democratic voters was less effective, hence more voters.
There is one of the two parties fighting for election security and it's not the republicans. Mitch McConnell has a few election security bills on his desk that were never brought to a vote.
1. If huge swaths of Americans are forced to vote by mail, wouldn't you expect the rate to decrease?
2. Trump is incredibly polarizing, so, sure
3. What was the previous turnout / percentage increase?
4. The GOP specifically passed laws that disallowed counting ballots until election day in many districts, which, combined with lots of mail-ins, makes things much slower
1. No, I would expect people filling out a mail-in ballot for the first time to get it wrong (and thus have the ballot rejected) more often than people who have done it before. This would track with previous elections, where first-time mail-in voters are more likely to have their ballots invalidated.
Protections on mail-in ballots have unambiguously been reduced this election - many states skipped signature validation, for instance. This may be acceptable, but IMO should not have been implemented due to being easy fodder for conspiracy theorists. Yes, the mere appearance of illegitimacy is reason enough to not do something when it comes to potentially contested elections.
2. This election turn out was 2 standard deviations above average. That has never happened in the past.
3. Detroit region of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Oakland had a 15% increase in turnout compared to 2016 and Macomb was up 18%. More black people came out to vote for Biden than Obama in these historically Black counties.
1) "The total rejected ballots data is not yet available for 2020." from the fact check. So how can the fact check be used to disprove Trump's statements, or that it "Didn't happen".
More worrying, its been weeks since the election, and we still don't have definitive results. You don't find that suspicious?
Most countries have final results on election night.
Okay, so if the total rejected ballot data isn't available what is your basis for claiming that it did happen? The burden of proof rests on the accuser. In any case we know that the signature rejection rates for Georgia in past elections were low.
What do you mean we don't have definitive results? Biden's win was certified by the states in the last week, in accordance with the law. It will only get more definitive when the electoral college votes next week. This is nothing new in the U.S., it's the way the process works.
These seem to be the most up to date numbers.
"Rejected absentee/mail-in ballots as a percentage of total absentee/mail-in ballots returned, 2016-2020"
If you check the footnote there it seems Ballotpedia computed this rate themselves. It seems exceedingly unlikely this has anything to do with fraud, since other states handily won by Trump like Alaska and Iowa show similar large drops in 2020. I think fundamentally the data here is incomplete for 2020 and nothing meaningful can be said about it yet.
>We don't know if Russia made Trump win, we only know that they helped him.
That's a bit like saying we know there is election fraud in 2020 because we found 2 voting irregularities. Minor voting irregularities happen in every election and are also facts.
Sorry, it goes both ways. Both sides need to provide evidence and prove it in court before making such statements. If you don't know, then the right thing to do is to say nothing unless it has been proven.
So you keep posting the same old tired link claiming its "evidence". I don't think you understand what that document actually says.
I don't rebut evidence, I accept it, if courts accept it when used as evidence in a case. I don't know what rebutting evidence means, or what that would accomplish. After four years of nonsense investigations there were no indictments on this so called "collusion". This fact alone makes anyone involved in making those allegations look completely nutty.
No indictment = no charges = no case = no conviction = innocent until proven guilty. Regardless of this report, if Dems had solid evidence to bring criminal charges, I'd bet my life savings that they'd have brought cases by now, and we'd know about it.
> Edit: A lot of the responses here seem to be unaware of Texas’ lawsuit and the ramifications. I expect the conspiracy claims to be separated out from the genuine concerns if the Supreme Court chooses to hear that suit.
I'm not sure why you think that. I doubt any legally-minded individuals think there's any merit to that lawsuit.
1. It's dubious Texas even has standing. Texas has extremely limited influence, if any, over the manner in which other states manage their elections. If Pennsylvania wanted, they could divvy out their electoral votes via coin flip in future elections. As far as I'm aware (and I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt), a state suing another state for the way it handles elections is entirely without precedent.
2. There's the issue of laches. If mail-in voting is unconstitutional, the time to make that argument was months ago. Courts are already hesitant to change election procedure near election day for fear of confusing voters. They are far less willing to disenfranchise tens of millions of voters after ballots have already been cast.
1. It is not dubious at all. The U.S. Constitution is actually quite clear about this.
2. Claims depend on damages. Judges tend to avoid ruling on hypotheticals.
In the case of ballots, each ballot should have a recorded chain of custody, so it's actually not 'impossible' to prove something didn't happen. If the accusations are "There are a bunch of ballots that were entered into the counts without proper chain of custody" that can be easily proven or disproven.
If the accusation is "Signatures were required to be verified and bipartisan representatives were legally supposed to witness the process" which apparently is the case in many jurisdictions, that too would be easy to prove or disprove. There will be records associated with those observations and chain of custody records of those ballots.
Unfortunately, some ballot envelopes have already been 'thrown away' so they cannot be audited to see if counts match, to see how many ballots were indeed signed (sometimes a witness is required), or be able to be verified against other controls (such as numbering, ensuring the name on the ballot matches who it was sent to, etc).
The law says you must hold an election, and exactly what steps you need to take to hold such an election. If you didn't follow the steps, there wasn't a lawful election. That's more or less what some of the lawsuits are about.
Are these claims 'baseless'? I don't think so. There's no shortage of sworn affidavits and statements from election officials about how the processes weren't followed. There's also court cases (such as in Georgia) where the executive branch possibly unlawfully struck an agreement with Democrats to relax certain requirements.
The only remaining question is, how heavily should this evidence be weighed, and is it enough to affect the outcome of the process. TBD.
>"There are a bunch of ballots that were entered into the counts without proper chain of custody" that can be easily proven or disproven."
And unfortunately due to the amount of bad faith in play, I would be concerned of the party hoping that there was a break in the chain of custody to employ an insider to perform a break in the chain of custody in order to get the result they want... throwing everything out in hopes of getting a different outcome. The conspiracies will never end. Sigh.
In PA at least, they could have not kicked out GOP observers, literally cheering as they were thrown out. In other counties, observers had to stand far away for "COVID" reasons, while dozens or counters of DEM observers were crammed together at tables.
In Georgia, observers were told to go home, and then people continued to count behind closed doors, unobserved. There is video and no matter how many news sources yell "debunked" ... there is no reasonable explanation for it. There was no water pipe burst. It was a lie and it LOOKS TERRIBLE.
If you want an honest election, then people have to not make up this shit. But everyone sees every single GOP/Republican as some evil racist Nazi, so some of these things could have been totally on the books, but people threw out observers due to media fueled hate. The trouble is ... it's impossible to tell. The percentage of rejected mail-in ballots due to signatures is far far below what is has been before.
It looks bad. It stinks. Anyone who is in the center and is truly looking at everything is likely going to make the judgement, even if their party won, the election was shady as fuck.
It only looks bad to people who have only gotten interested in politics in the past 4 years, and for many had never known the actual process, but without any past data claim that this year's process looks "shady".
A large problem is you've seen everyone else as the other group, and your group as persecuted, so to me, it looks like you are accepting right wing talking points without critical thought. I promise you I don't think every single GOP/Republican is a nazi, but some of them are feeding you misinformation.
For example, there were no observers kicked out in PA. This claim famously went to court where the Trump's lawyers were forced to admit that they had the same number of observers as democrats before having their case thrown out [1].
Likewise in GA, where you have a completely Republican controlled voter apparatus, you have come to believe that the governor, secretary of state and many of the republican workers for the state have decided to sloppily tilt the state in Biden's favor, for seemingly no reason.
Also consider, that in many of these cases, they are being presided over by Republican judges (or judges appointed by Republican presidents), as is the case with the majority of our judicial system. McConnell famously prevented Obama from making many court appointments, while Trump has made hundreds. The further you look into this, the voter fraud story would have required co-ordination between not only the democratic party across the country, but also with several Republican staffers and judges. Voter Fraud of this magnitude would require an incredible grand conspiracy but somehow that is more believable to many than the fact Trump lost.
Again, I don't believe every single GOP/Republican is a Nazi, but the media wing seems to be working incredibly hard to make you believe that there is something nefarious going on in this election when there hasn't been any credible proof there is. Maybe that's not what a Nazi would do, but I implore that you take an unbaised look at what is being said, and what is actually happening on the ground.
I don't see in your [1] where they admitted to any such thing. It seems they came to an agreement in court, that from that point forward, each party could have 60 representatives present.
So, based on this thread alone (which was written as happening live on Nov 5), which you provided, we don't know if at any point election observers were previously kicked out, how many, when or where, or for what reasons. We also don't know if the observers were allowed to observe much of anything (there's something about not allowing them within 100 feet in that thread).
The rest of what you wrote is speculation. Nobody need be concerned with the 'why' someone did something, merely the facts. Were the elections carried out in accordance to the law, or weren't they. That's what's being litigated.
In some cases, the chain of custody records (allegedly) aren't even available, so what are you supposed to do about that situation?
In my mind, that begs the question, how can these elections even be 'certified?' What due diligence did election officials perform to ensure everything was fair and square?
In Georgia, I believe, there were reports of multiple USB drives found that weren't initially counted during the recount. Did anyone know how many people voted in those precincts and who was in charge of ensuring the numbers were square?
If there is a truth to be gleamed here, it's that U.S. elections as they're presently conducted are a train wreck. Even the parties seeking to prove a fair election took place are being thwarted by incompetence.
That's really the entire point, IMO. If the people holding the election can't prove they did everything by the letter, how do they know they did everything by the letter? You're talking 100's or 1000's of different precincts across an entire state.
Some things have been claimed without a single shred of evidence. A complete lack of evidence points to claims as being baseless.
(That doesn't mean that YouTube's removal of those will help the situation. Though letting baseless claims be a part of polarizing the country does not appear to have been the correct solution, given where we are now.)
> I would genuinely like to know why you are so confident about what claims are and aren’t baseless.
Because he continues to lose in court time and time again, often to judges that were appointed during his administration and yet the rhetoric and allegations continue at the same pace.
>Do you have inside knowledge that the public doesn’t posses? Because I’ve been paying attention and I’m genuinely unsure what is happening ... default skeptical about all claims in every direction.
No inside knowledge necessary. Just read the court decisions themselves. They are public documents.
I don't have the time or the inclination to dig up all 50+ court rulings, many of which explain in great detail, the deficiencies of the claims that have been made and/or are unsupported by evidence.
If you are unaware of these court rulings (along with the claims being made by both sides, the arguments for and against and the opinions of the judges), that's because you haven't looked. Each and every case is in the public record.
Don't believe anyone who tells you there was/wasn't widespread electoral fraud/irregularities. Look at the documents yourself. They are publicly available (yes, I know I'm repeating myself).
Hell, even a bunch of the ballot counting processes across the country were live-streamed.
I wrote https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25354086 to explain why Texas v Pennsylvania is going to be dismissed by SCOTUS. There are at least six reasons to dismiss that don't even involve any consideration of the merits, with standing far and away the most likely reason to dismiss.
As a former resident of Texas, I'm particularly entertained by irregularity #2:
"Intrastate differences in the treatment of voters, with more favorable allotted to voters–whether lawful or unlawful–in areas administered by local government under Democrat control and with populations with higher ratios of Democrat voters than other areas of Defendant States."
Check out Tarrant, Dallas, Harris, and Travis counties:
> I would genuinely like to know why you are so confident about what claims are and aren’t baseless.
I'm confident that no good explanations have been offered for certain claims, and my epistemology is that the truth value of claims depends on having good explanations for those claims. Someone might have a different epistemology which admits claims of the form "X is true despite there being no good explanation of X being true," but note that such an epistemology effectively allows for all claims being true (the existence of unicorns, the claim that the Universe's existence began 1 millisecond ago and will end in the next 1 millisecond, etc.).
The Supreme Court isn't going to hear Texas's suit. They've already strongly signaled that by rejecting the Pennsylvania suit without any dissents; Texas is basically trying to sue Pennsylvania for the same things, again.
No I believe it is true that a plaintiff from Pennsylvania who was suing Pennsylvania was denied in the SCOTUS, but this was after Texas files their suit which was more inclusive, so the two might relate.
Edit:
SCOTUS declined to hear that case, possibly in anticipation of hearing the Texas one instead, possibly because they intend to hear neither.
There’s nothing secret or private about any of this. Go read what the judges’ responses where to the Trump legal team’s claims were. Some of these judges were appointed by Trump. The Supreme Court has struck down multiple claims. Those are public too. Election officials have investigated and found to evidence of fraud. The people Trump is attacking in Georgia for example are Republicans. Barr’s investigation found no evidence of fraud that would have changed the election.
Every person that was actually involved in the election has said Biden won fairly. They made public statements. It’s all out there in the open available for you to see. If that doesn’t convince you I don’t know what evidence would.
You're spreading misinformation. Should you be censored?
> "Some media outlets have incorrectly reported that the Department has concluded its investigation of election fraud and announced an affirmative finding of no fraud in the election," the spokesperson said. "That is not what the Associated Press reported nor what the Attorney General stated. The Department will continue to receive and vigorously pursue all specific and credible allegations of fraud as expeditiously as possible." [0]
How is the person above spreading misinformation? They stated that no evidence of fraud has been found. No evidence of fraud has been found. The fact that the AG will pursue any evidence of it if it is found is doesn’t contradict that in any way?
The court case record is a decent barometer. The fact that the Trump campaign's cases have almost unanimously tossed out quickly tells us that reality is likely one of two:
1. They have approximately no evidence of anything substantive.
2. All of the courts in all of the states where this is happening are conspiring against the President. Including those with Republican-appointed judges.
Can I argue that it must be #1 the same way I can use the laws of physics to argue that a hammer will fall to the ground when I drop it? No. Is it WAY beyond my own reasonable doubt? Yep.
> Some courts are refusing to even allow lawyers to present evidence.
That is a misleading interpretation. The cases are being dismissed for procedural reasons, which (depending on the specific case) can amount to "you should have brought your suit sooner" or "your evidence is inadmissible in the court of law" or "even if everything you say is true, you have not demonstrated that you have been harmed." The lawyers aren't being allowed to present evidence because they haven't even managed to demonstrate that they have a reason to present evidence--which is a pretty low bar to clear.
In some cases, it is a jurisdictional ruling. Meaning that the only solution is to appeal to a higher court until you get to the court with jurisdiction to rule on the case. This is largely why these rulings are happening in rapid succession, there's a procedure that must be followed and deadlines to meet.
The Texas Attorney General likely has short circuited this process by filing a claim that can only be resolved by a federal court. And now 11 other states (at my last count) have joined on as plaintiffs and the U.S. Supreme Court has placed it on the docket.
> The Texas Attorney General likely has short circuited this process by filing a claim that can only be resolved by a federal court.
Having read the claim, there is no chance that SCOTUS will do anything other than deny it per curiam.
> And now 11 other states (at my last count) have joined on as plaintiffs
They have not joined as plaintiffs. They filed an amici brief. And it's actually 17. And reading the amici brief, they don't even attempt to justify why Texas has standing in the case, which is the biggest reason to dismiss the case.
> and the U.S. Supreme Court has placed it on the docket.
You're aware that means absolutely nothing? To be refused to be docketed is an exceptionally high bar that requires the court to think you a vexatious litigant. Several thousand cases are docketed a year, and yet there's only around 200-ish that are even considered petitions worthy of commentary, and only 70-ish are actually heard.
The actual bar you're looking for is if SCOTUS accepts the petition which, (for a leave to file motion in original jurisdiction) requires 5 justices to agree to hear the case, and will not be decided before the reply brief is filed tomorrow. I suspect it will be discussed at the regular Friday conference, and likely disposed of in the Monday orders list, although the justices may decide it's important enough to release in a Friday orders list.
> They have not joined as plaintiffs. They filed an amici brief. And it's actually 17. And reading the amici brief, they don't even attempt to justify why Texas has standing in the case, which is the biggest reason to dismiss the case.
You are correct, they are not plaintiffs, but a third of U.S. states are now in support of this action.
I would argue that if a U.S. state has made unconstitutional election changes and thus has conducted an unconstitutional election then other U.S. states not in violation of the constitution have standing to dispute the election results with federal implications in accordance with the 12th Amendment.
This is not totally unprecedented, however, as the Election of 1824 resulted in a contingent election where the candidate with the popular vote lost. [0]
> I would argue that if a U.S. state has made unconstitutional election changes and thus has conducted an unconstitutional election then other U.S. states not in violation of the constitution have standing to dispute the election results with federal implications in accordance with the 12th Amendment.
The process you are talking about involves the US House of Representatives, not suing the states in SCOTUS.
The legal basis for claiming injury in the face of improper elections is the notion of "vote dilution." However, vote dilution cannot happen in the Electoral College by definition. Texas gets 38 of the 538 votes in the Electoral College, and that is true no matter how tight or loose the voting restrictions are in Pennsylvania. The voting power of Texas residents remains unaltered no matter what the voting power of residents in Pennsylvania is. Texas's brief did not persuade me that it had standing to sue (although it does appeal to vote dilution), and none of the other briefs have attempted to address the issue of standing at all.
That the House has had to decide the election is not unprecedented (it has done so on three occasions, 1800, 1824, and 1876, where it delegated its decision to accept the votes to a separate commission). What is unprecedented is a state asking SCOTUS to overturn the results of another state.
Whichever way you slice it, and by whatever technicalities were employed, Bush v. Gore resulted in the Supreme Court deciding how a state could conduct their vote.
What you are saying is plausible, but I think it’s so silly to argue this when we will find out in a few short days whether the SCOTUS will hear it.
> Whichever way you slice it, and by whatever technicalities were employed, Bush v. Gore resulted in the Supreme Court deciding how a state could conduct their vote.
On the basis of an appeal from a state supreme court, itself an appeal from lower courts, challenging the procedure. Which is basically the process that Kelly v PA went through, although SCOTUS declined to hear it yesterday.
So a lawsuit goes through some filters before it ever gets to the "presenting evidence" stage.
One of them is standing. If I sue Hawaii for not providing trueluk with a beach house, no evidence gets heard. It gets dismissed because I am not trueluk, nor am I a resident of Hawaii, and therefore I don't have standing to bring the suit. The courts are not going to hear cases where party A files suit, claiming that party B damaged party C.
Another is failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted. If I sue Nebraska for not granting AnimalMuppet an oceanfront villa, I never get to present evidence. Nebraska has no oceanfront villas to give away, and a court order can't make them have any. (A more typical form for this to take is that some forms of relief are beyond the authority of the court to grant.)
Then there's... I forget the name of it. But the complaint is supposed to give an overview of the evidence. If that claimed evidence, even if true, doesn't give reason for the court to grant the requested relief, then the court isn't going to bother to listen to the evidence.
Most of the Trump (or on behalf of Trump) cases are falling on these hurdles. It's not that the judges are suppressing the evidence. It's that the lawsuits aren't even good enough to make it to the point of presenting evidence.
Note well: IANAL. Some detail and nuance may be missing from this post, but I think it's close to right. Don't take it as legal advice, though, because it's not.
> Some courts are refusing to even allow lawyers to present evidence.
Source?
> Additionally, many of the Trump cases reported by the media are not, in fact, Trump Campaign cases.
That doesn't really matter. The "denominator" is not the most important part. In other words, it's not so much that his campaign won 1/51 cases or if it was really 1/10 cases. I only care about how many his campaign won (1).
And are you being honest, or are you being technically truthful while trying to deceive me? In other words, if a case was brought by Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell, but not some legal entity called "The Trump Campaign", then it's all the same to me.
2,560 felons voted
66,247 underage voters
2,423 votes from people not registered
1,043 individuals registered at PO boxes
4,926 individuals who voted in Georgia after registering in another state
395 individuals who voted in two states
15,700 votes from people who moved out of state before the election
40,279 votes of people who moved without re-registering in their new county
30,000 - 40,000 absentee ballots lacking proper signature matching and verification
Are the claims you listed actually supported with evidence? I don't know Georgia's laws, so maybe felons are allowed to vote under some circumstances.
How do you even get a ballot for someone who isn't registered? Also, could they have moved after casting their vote legitimately?
Votes from people who moved out of state before the election. When is "the election"? I hope and assume they mean "before mail in ballots could be requested and submitted" and not "before November 3rd".
And what is "proper" signature matching? Signature matching is tricky. Are they getting professionals to analyze the signatures? Probably not. I'm not sure some Joe Schmoe would be able to look at two of my signatures and confirm they match, so I'm not that interested in strict signature matching as a bar to clear.
Rest assured, that if these claims actually are true, I will be happy to see the issues resolved. But seeing as all of the claims so far have come up totally empty, I'm not holding my breath. Remember when Trump said that he had a TON of evidence that Obama wasn't born in this country? Forgive me if I remain skeptical.
If your world view is this simplistic, then you can argue anything.
> The law also blocks county election officials from rejecting absentee ballots because of mismatched signatures, and when information on a voter registration application doesn't match other government databases, the voter will remain on the rolls. [0]
It's not really "simplistic" to judiciously apply Occam's razor to extraordinary claims.
And what exactly is your claim? It's just not plausible that there was such a large amount of voter fraud in key states (a net of hundreds of thousands of fraudulent votes for Biden. How many fraud votes for Trump are we willing to allow in this scenario?) and no tangible evidence for any of it. You have claim after claim from "internet sleuths" who think they saw something on video, but so far, it seems that all of these claims have only shown ignorance of the viewer (ballot curing being an example I saw).
And I'm not sure what point you're making with your link. Can you explain?
And this is exactly why we need the social media companies to step in. Because Trump has successfully created uncertainty where there is in fact no question.
"evidence" sourced from tweets, gab dot com posts, infowars(!) and youtube videos aren't good enough for me, and they aren't good enough for the courts...
And I'm not dismissing them just because of their sources; a lot of those tidbits have been debunked or thrown out of courts on their merits already
Your IP address and associated shadow profile are recorded by multiple nation-state intelligence agencies, most likely. Or else by private groups who are interested in compiling an army of impressionable and easily-duped folks to continue using them as a weapon to subvert democracy.
This is not a far-fetched claim. If I was Russia, for example, I would do something exactly like this for exactly that reason. Not to mention that stuff exactly like this has happened and was later shown to be run by exactly the groups I'm referencing. It's Occam's razor.
The Supreme Court will absolutely hear that suit. Those four states bypassed thier legislatures in order to change their election laws.
To anyone willing to invest a few hours of his time, he'll find it's quite obvious this election was rife with fraud.
What's sad is that our officials refuse to audit the votes. What's sad is the GOP officials in Wayne County who tried to say there was a problem were doxed and threatened. After that, no one was willing to stand up for the truth. Is there anything more important than making sure every legal vote was counted and illegal votes are discarded? They don't want transparency. That's the issue.
> To anyone willing to invest a few hours of his time, he'll find it's quite obvious this election was rife with fraud.
And yet none of the president's lawyers have actually brought forth even 1 claim of fraud before a judge, despite their rhetoric. Every time when actually in court, they have shied away from claiming accusations of fraud.
So no, not only is it not obvious that the election was rife with fraud, it is in fact extremely obvious that no real amount of fraud has taken place at all (only using "real amount" instead of "any at all" because I'm certain that you'll find 1 or maybe 2 people somewhere who have stolen maybe a dozen votes).
> Those four states bypassed thier legislatures in order to change their election laws.
When these special measures were enacted in March to accommodate voting during a pandemic, ample time was given for public comment and legal challenge. Why weren't these suits raised at that time? It seems awfully suspicious that plantiffs had no issue with the mail balloting until they lost the election.
The fact is, those procedures (i.e., "bypassing legislatures") have been implemented precisely for situations like this. Don't get mad just because people actually use them.
You tube has no obligation to carry anything. It has nothing to do with "Free Speech", that would be a very lazy characterisation.
Companies like Google can control what is easily available and discoverable next to the cat videos etc but they do not "...dictate what information is widely accessible"
Any website or even more so IP address is widely accessible. Why should Google sit around and let experienced psy ops operators have free reign on their platform?
So there is a easy solution for Google - remove it.
That’s the point. This might be acceptable if there was even one single thing about YouTube that was itself democratic in any way.
Since there isn’t, this is an inherently anti-democratic maneuver.
The corporate oligarchy is shedding yet a bit mote hesitation to fully realize itself. This is not a good thing.
The popularity of other equally-good services should have no bearing on whether a service has a "moral obligation" to do something. There's nothing preventing all the conspiracy theorists from deciding en masse to move to Vimeo, or setting up their own video posting system on Gab or Parler.
I dunno, did that stop the previous loser form claiming Russia cost her the election? Did the media come out and condemn the "undermining of election results" as a consequence? Did the media, youtube, Google, Facebook, have to babysit us? Did they have to babysit the Steele Dossier too?
According to the special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, there was a concerted effort on the part of the Russian government to influence the US election, the Trump campaign was aware of that effort, and expected to benefit from it.
Given those facts, I think the bulk of the coverage erred on the conservative side...
> Having the sitting president make completely baseless claims in an effort to delegitimize the results of an election
The whole point is that this is a biased assumption. You can't prevent people from making counterpoints, and then say "completely baseless claims." For the conversation to be fair, you need to allow the claims to be made, and then disprove them.
How many times? This is an exploitable plan. Simply refuse to accept all evidence disproving claims that the election was stolen and continue to demand additional debate forever. Your method would only work if people were actually spreading these ideas in good faith. "Debate" instead becomes a hijacked channel for people to spread propaganda until the rest of time.
Neither you nor the media are in position to disprove or prove anything. If Trump (empty rhetoric aside) has any claims about the election he needs to ask the competent authorities to review the case, there are regular channels for that. If the authorities(not you, google or twitter) determine there is no case, then Trump has to leave no matter what he says on twitter. If he does not leave, the problem wont be his Twitter account.
> Neither you nor the media are in position to disprove or prove anything.
Then what do people want? I'm not hearing simultaneous complaints that it is important for youtube to host these. "debates" so that the social media community can address wild claims and also that it is a worthless effort.
If random internet commenters can't make productive change in the crazy beliefs held by some people then great! I actually agree that is the most likely outcome. This means that nothing is lost if youtube says "we don't want to be the home to this debate".
You are free to disagree but for me a company like Youtube who has a quasi-monopolistic dominion on internet video (yes people say go to dailymotion etc, they are being disingenuous, for many reasons youtube is the only good option) is playing a dangerous game by selectively enforcing what content to host. If tomorrow they start removing BLM videos or even worst any video critical of Google I expect you wont just shrug your shoulders and say "Well, they can go and create their own video service, nothing is lost"
> If tomorrow they start removing BLM videos or even worst any video critical of Google I expect you wont just shrug your shoulders and say "Well, they can go and create their own video service, nothing is lost"
That's right. I do believe that booting white supremacist content off youtube is good and booting blm content off youtube is bad. The merits of the content are meaningfully different. If people want to argue the white supremacist content is merited, they can certainly try.
The game is already dangerous, even if youtube decides to host literally everything its users upload.
Is Jordan Peterson white supremacism? What about Christopher Hitchens? Is Nigel Farage white supremacism? Trump? Marie Le Pen? Geert Wilders? Bolsonaro? Voyage a bout de la nuit from Celine? Lovecraft? How about Teddy Roosevelt? Churchill? Columbus? Music about the crusades? Nordic rock? Midsommer?
Thanks god you and google will take all those decisions for me.Thinking is hard , paraphrasing Barbie(oops more white supremacism).
The person making the claims is responsible for providing evidence of them---specifically, evidence acceptable in the courts. Otherwise, you could continue making claims endlessly.
> The whole point is that this is a biased assumption
It's absolutely not. Whether the president's claims are true is another matter entirely. When he makes a claim with no specifics, no explanation of how it occurred, and no evidence, that's a baseless claim. And it does not deserve equal representation in the media merely by virtue of it having been said.
> For the conversation to be fair, you need to allow the claims to be made, and then disprove them.
These claims have been made on an ongoing basis for a month -- arguably more than a month, since Trump and his allies spent time before the election promoting the idea that Trump losing is itself de facto evidence of fraud. And they keep being disproven. Over, and over, and over.
At what point is it okay for a publisher -- or whatever we wish to call YouTube -- to say "enough is enough"? Must any and all arguments be endlessly re-litigated on any platform?
It is impossible to disprove conspiracy theories. No matter how many judges laugh Trump out of court millions of people will believe for the rest of their lives that their was massive voter fraud.
There _isn't_ nuance here. That's the entire point. It's an extreme slippery slope and this is already several steps down that slope. The earlier things were censorship of moon landing hoax videos and other such conspiracy theories. People didn't have an issue with censoring those as a tiny minority thought those. Now they're censoring things a significant double digit minority things (probably). Wait until they start censoring things that the political party alignment of the owners of Youtube disagree with, as that's the next step.
I also think some of the arguments against Google's actions here don't take into account the engagement algorithms. If this content is left up and people watch it, the algos will feed them more of it. I think if we're going to have the discussion about Google "censoring" content, we have to include in the discussion engagement algos.
There _isn't_ nuance here. That's the entire point. It's an extreme slippery slope and this is already several steps down that slope. The earlier things were censorship of moon landing hoax videos and other such conspiracy theories. People didn't have an issue with censoring those as a tiny minority thought those. Now they're censoring things a significant double digit minority things (probably). Wait until they start censoring things that the political party alignment of the owners of Youtube disagree with, as that's the next step.
At this point Youtube is no longer a "common carrier" of anything at all.
Also don't forget how terrible Youtube's algorithm is and how it bans people at random and deletes video streams at random.
There have been countless hearings around America. There have been election observers pushed out of counting centers. In Georgia, people were told a pipe burst, sent observers home, and then people kept counting for hours (on video).
These are NOT baseless claims! They should be investigated.
Let me ask you, if they were baseless, would YouTube even need to ban videos? They are banning them because they're afraid. I've watched hours of the hearings and looked at a lot of the information. There are serious issues with this election and they need to be investigated fully.
Have you been following Sullivan? He has committed insane amounts of Judicial misconduct in the Flynn case. It's not conspiracy. It's right there, in the record. Sullivan had ex parte e-mails sent to him entered into evidence! That's insane and unethical!
Even if true--and this is disputed, to put it mildly--none of that means that enough judges or elections are corrupt enough to flip the result of the election.
The judicial slap downs have come from many Trump appointed judges. There is no evidence that they are corrupt, but if they are corrupt, Trump has no one to blame but himself.
It is a flawed argument. Censorship may help democracy in the short term, but long term it effectively invites authoritarian rule. A good comparison may be forced ranking system. It can be used temporarily to 'get rid of dead wood', but long term use is asking for only biggest assholes to stick around.
Censorship is not that different. There is no nuance here. Person with power will determine what you can and cannot see. That kind of power does not allow for nuance.
Which is why you keep it simple by allowing all speech. Once you start down the road of a little bit of this, not much of that, and who gets to decide what the complexity only goes up.
Not to mention the honest concern of where that censorship power is held.
And that’s why he’s going to the courts instead of using all the other means and powers at his disposal. To ensure that the Democratic process is followed.
It would seem to be incumbent on someone making claims of a crime, particularly a serious, disturbing crime against the fundamentals of the United States, to provide evidence of that crime. Real evidence, not just allegations.
The only unequivocal "evidence" I have seen has been eyewitness statements, but those eyewitnesses have repeatedly refused to testify under oath. That makes their allegations useless to the legal system.
The way that some people continue to make those allegations in spite of being unable to produce any evidence makes me suspect they are not interested in legal avenues, but rather in drumming up civil unrest and distrust in the foundations of the United States. That suspicion might be reason for YouTube's actions.
How is it [the president making baseless claims] dangerous for democracy? What if the opposite is true? What if censoring thoughts is the real danger for democracy?
I am not saying I have proof for any of this. But I guess, that's true for your claim, too. I think it would be wise to rephrase it so that it doesn't sound like a fact.
It's dangerous for democracy because he's using those baseless claims to support explicit calls for antidemocratic actions - he's asked multiple governors to throw out their states' election results for him.
Part of the democratic process is to defend itself against such attacks. If the defence is suppressing speech, then that might signal that democracy is not strong enough to deal with these issues. An easy win for the attacker.
It's a pity that we aren't capable of sustaining a situation like that without dismantling the very core of the democratic system: freedom of speech.
You raise an interesting point and I upvoted because of it. Our democracy should be able to withstand this attack, yes. Having to resort to censorship would very clearly fuel the attackers.
At the same time, there's an awful lot at stake here and I'm not sure we can simply trust that the good side will win. A laissez-faire approach to some of this content may very credibly lead to violence the scale of which this country hasn't witnessed in 150 years.
Of course we cannot simply trust that the good side will win. The people that want to retain the democratic system have to defend it. And I count myself among these people. It's hard for me to watch what is happening, too.
All I'm saying is that democracy is built upon free speech. Without it, it cannot work.
You cannot defend a system by destroying its foundation. It's a trap.
It's a great insight that "You cannot defend a system by destroying its foundation."
Continuing along that line of thinking: the "good side" can't possibly be the one participating in a cover-up, trying to brush aside all the evidence of fraud.
The people who want to retain our republic have to defend it.
> It's a pity that we aren't capable of sustaining a situation like that without dismantling the very core of the democratic system: freedom of speech.
Huh? Look it up again. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you have the right to say whatever you want any place you desire. Referring to the First Amendment, it protects from governmental repercussion. Google's censorship of its users presents no First Amendment implications as no governmental, or state, action is involved.
By censoring what is said on it's platform, Google is exercising it's own free speech. Google has a right to censor dangerous and shitty takes on it's platform. You have zero rights to be heard on Google's platforms.
Yeah, for sure. Call it freedom of information, add a little bit of common sense to it, and your argument renders itself completely invalid.
Google demonstrates that it doesn't follow a revenue driven agenda with these actions. It involves itself in selecting political views that it deems acceptable to influence the opinions of a world wide audience. It is large enough to take on a quasi governmental role. If it was just acting as a neutral platform, I would buy your argument, but it obviously doesn't.
The internet has driven the pareto distribution of attention to such extremes that we now are in this mess. There is no getting out of this by engaging in the hairsplitting of an old legal text.
> Yeah, for sure. Call it freedom of information, add a little bit of common sense to it, and your argument renders itself completely invalid.
No it doesn't. Obviously you aren't grasping the concept of free speech (and its limits).
> Google demonstrates that it doesn't follow a revenue driven agenda with these actions. It involves itself in selecting political views that it deems acceptable to influence the opinions of a world wide audience.
As is its legal right to do so.
> It is large enough to take on a quasi governmental role. If it was just acting as a neutral platform, I would buy your argument, but it obviously doesn't.
"Quasi government" is a meaningless word and doesn't really help your argument. Why would it have to act as a neutral platform?
Ok, I accept that you are not willing to look beyond the current state of legal affairs, regardless of whether Google/YouTube is so large it becomes an example of a de facto public space. And how to treat these kinds of platforms with regard to freedom of speech is an ongoing legal discussion — far from being over.
Let me make it simple for you: Sticking to your (in my opinion very limited) model of looking at the world, how do you make sure Google doesn't become a puppet of some government now or in the future? Do you really think the people in that organization are able to handle the amount of power they have over a reasonably long time without getting corrupted? Would it then fall into your narrow definition of freedom of speech?
Our current state of law is not equipped to deal with that kind of behemoth and needs to evolve.
Btw.: It would help your argument to avoid provocative statements like implying that I might not be grasping a concept. Your text looks like you are trying to defend a political position.
Anyone can make claims. No one is required to give them a platform if there's no reason to take anything they say seriously. Until they present well-reasoned and informed arguments, they should be and are ignored by rational people.
And we need to go back to... censorship at the government level, vs publicly traded or private companies.
The government having a huge megaphone that reaches basically everyone, and then that same government censoring (turning the volume/reach way down) on competing messages - that's a very dangerous thing. It puts an awful lot of power in the government.
When the government says lots of dishonest things, or things that completely lack evidence, it is the duty of anyone with some influence on spreading messages to counteract that problem. In fact, when the government tries to discredit all competing sources of information, that's a very dangerous thing.
The people arguing against (government) censorship should be well to do to realize that right now, President Donald Trump is the loudest voice in government, and he's trying to drown out all opposing messages, and have you only listen to him. Read about the history of censorship, and figure out what kind of message muting you want to fight!
"Dangerous for democracy" sounds like one of those contentless phrases that can be used to justify anything. The late 2010s/2020s version of all the patriotic jingoism thrown around post 9/11.
What if his claims were true and this happened? Wouldn't that be a tricky situation too? I mean, really tricky?
At the same time I think Youtube has the right to do this (and whatever they want, basically). Currently there are no real alternatives to Youtube, that is the problem.
Clearly election security is perfect when Democrats win, but if Republicans win then Russia stole it
//for the record I think both results are valid and we just see cry baby partisans in action on both sides, in 2016 and 2020. It is pure tribalism and I am not a member of either tribe
No prominent Democrats actually argued that Donald Trump wasn't actually the president, or that the transition shouldn't happen, or that election officials should be shot.
"#NotMyPresident" was a statement of dissatisfaction, and a belief that Trump won the election unfairly, not a statement claiming that Trump was not legally the president. It was also never espoused by members of the government.
There's a difference between saying someone won by underhanded tactics and saying that someone didn't actually win and isn't legally the president. The two are not comparable.
It’s so easy to get unlucky with hashtags, am I right? I heard Twitter is working on a program to label hashtags that ignorant people keep taking too literally.
It’s baffling that #NotMyPresident would somehow give you the idea that Trump was not legally the president.
Did a single member of government or member of the DNC ever use that hashtag?
I don't care what some no-name Twitter account says, any more than we should attribute the many, many threats of violence towards Biden and his associates to the Republican party as a whole.
Bob in Connecticut using a hashtag is different from the President and many members of Congress baselessly stating, again and again, that his opponent literally faked 7 million ballots and disenfranchised the will of the American people.
aside from your subjective view as to what constitutes a "prominent Democrat" Hilary Clinton her self stated multiple times that election was stolen from her.
Multiple News personalities dedicated billions of dollars in air time to the meh Russia Stole the election narrative for 3.5 years.
Clinton gave her concession speech the day after the election. She said in it "We owe Donald Trump an open mind and a chance to lead."[1] She approved of Obama starting the transition process as soon as possible.
She didn't initiate a single court-case that tried to reverse the results of the election, or throw out votes. She didn't call up individual state electors to talk them into changing their vote.
There's a big difference in saying "my opponent may have broken the law/a foreign government tried to interfere in our election" vs. actually claiming that 7 million votes were fraudulently added and suing to overturn the results of a democratic election. I'm sorry if you can't see that the matter of scale is a serious distinction.
Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections
ICA 2017-01D 6 January 2017
Key Judgments
Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.
We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. ...
Probably. Texas is crazy. I'm surprised they aren't also suing Tennessee or any of the other states that changed election laws in the last 20 years.
Source: Grew up in Texas. Took Texas government classes. (Justices of the Peace are responsible for determining cause of death in counties without suitable medical authorities. The only requirement for a JP is to be breathing. One recorded a body with a dozen or so bullet wounds as "suicide.")
This isn't the article I was looking for (trust me, the story of a state legislator crawling through transoms in the capitol to make off with early copies of legislation was hilarious), but it's pretty good. Go down to "ten worst".
Zero states or other parties have joined, or filed to intervene, but seven states plus the president have indicated that they support and intend to do so.
I think it's 9 indicating they want to join now. I don't have an official source.
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Dakota, Missouri. They may get Indiana and Oklahoma as well is my understanding.
And they are (at least some of them) interested in joining.
> This is a big deal no matter what your political persuasion is.
Yes, attempted anti-democratic coups d'etats in powerful, established democracies are big deal.
> It's not just some crazy people claiming voting machines are controlled by the Chinese using mind control and a local judge throwing it out.
That's true; while not substantially different in the craziness of the claims, if it is thrown out, it won't be by a local judge.
> If they take the case it's going to be a very historic event.
If they refuse to take the case, its very historic.
If they take the case and then dismiss it on threshold grounds like standing or the political question / separation of powers doctrine, it will be very historic.
If they take the case and reach the merits, it will be very historic.
The problem I'm seeing is this. You (and millions of others) see this as a coup attempt.
Myself (and millions of others) see the election with hurried mail in ballots and little oversight and lack of external challengers as a coup attempt.
We are coming from two very different places obviously and there are a bunch of us. Too many to just say "screw those people they are wrong!" (which is the natural first inclination probably). So what happens? How do we work this out where we can share society together?
> So what happens? How do we work this out where we can share society together?
What makes you think that's still even a reasonable expectation? Likely, there will be blood in the streets. Even if the leadership peacefully admits defeat to end the formal dispute, the radicalization on your side has, with the deliberate encouragement of rhetoric from the top, probably gone too far for there to be any reasonable expectation that that won't be where this ultimately ends for many of the foot soldiers.
And, the people on your side that have been seeking specifically a second civil and/or a race war may well still get what they have sought.
The "people on my side" haven't been seeking a second civil war or race war. There may be a handful of Richard Spencer types but no one I know agrees with anything like that. What I know is a multi ethnic coalition that is anti-globalist, anti-bureaucratic, anti-war and nationalistic in the sense it believes in strong American identity and state and it believes in free and transparent elections.
The same "extremist" comments could be made about antifa types but it wouldn't be representative of all Democrats, many of whom are probably something like school teacher union and human resource members not communists with Molotov cocktails.
These are big coalitions but you are smart person who spends a lot of time over the years commenting on politics and you know that I'm sure.
I hope you are wrong about blood in the streets. I really do. But you might not be. Both sides have gotten a bit too extremist and utterly convinced of their righteousness so it might go to bad place no matter the outcome.
> If the election was totally normal would Texas still be suing four other states?
Yes, because the election was normal and Texas (joined by 17 other states and the defeated candidate) are suing four other states hoping to overturn the manifest will of the people (both nationally and specifically in the target states.)
What's abnormal isn't the election but the radicalization of much of the GOP behind an administration that cannot accept defeat because its head, and much of its upper ranks, face potentially severe legal risk if and when they are no longer shielded by possession of the Office of the President.
A radicalization serving personal interest of the Leader above not only national interest (which is, sadly, perhaps not that uncommon) but even partisan interest (which is much less common), causing significant difficulty in the ongoing Senate runoff campaigns in Georgia.
There is indeed no easy solution on what is “good for democracy”, but that ideal can be damned to me because the idea of voters making ”informed choices” is laughable and they will always primarily vote based on simple tribalist allegiance, not to mention that the concept is silly in a two-party state.
It has nothing to do with what is and isn't “good for democracy” and indeed simply that I find it scary that powerful companies play arbitrary referee on fact policing.
YouTube is of course constantly filled with videos that contain falsehoods and it's arbitrary to only police it here.
While the sarcasm is dripping, it's also true. There clearly are people that can view a video and realize that it's is 100% BS. Yet, at the same time, there are other people that will watch it and 100% believe it. If it wasn't effective, it wouldn't be used.
At the same time, getting used to curation of informal speech and having intermediaries censoring this type of content has its own, potentially greater risks.
First, Google is already heavily curating information on their platform. Don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise. Secondly, Youtube is not a public good. It is a product owned by a company who answers to their shareholders. Google is free (and should remain free) to censor whatever they want on the platform that they own, and users/content creators are free to leave for other platforms. Finally, before folks say that Youtube is a monopoly in video content on the internet, no they aren't. Are they the biggest? Sure. But by no means are they the only platform.
The point is, we have a whole bunch of mores and law that work together to form a free society work that were formed in times when most interpersonal communications didn't go through a few concentrated intermediaries. This new equilibrium a really big concern for free communication and freedom of speech: just letting whatever dangerous stuff circulate at massive scale isn't good, but fully empowering corporate entities being able to squash and marginalize categories of speech isn't great either.
Generally, a company need not be the only one on the market in order to be considered dominant for the purpose of anti-trust laws. Anti-trust laws apply to non-monopolies as well.
> Google is free (and should remain free) to censor whatever they want on the platform that they own
So, since ISPs also own their platform, should they also be free to block content that competes with their services along with content they’re required to block by law?
If only we had a government mechanism for holding service providers to higher standards for neutral delivery of services to citizens regardless of economic incentives.
On the other hand, we have sufficiently large number of people believing that Trump actually won this year - enough for it to be a potential political issue. I wouldn't count out someone getting killed over this.
So, the relative merits and dangers of "censorship" should be evaluated against this. The bar for the censorship being "potentially greater risk" is reasonably high.
"Potentially saving lives" is a really dangerous way to choose whether censoring speech is ethical.
Squashing what one might think is dubious criticism of police potentially saves lives, too.
Not too long ago Youtube was removing videos criticizing the CDC for not advocating for masks... Squashing criticism of the CDC during a pandemic seems like an action that could potentially save lives, too.
Maybe I chose a poor example - I didn't mean that "potentially saving lives" is the only important metric.
What I meant was that giving a platform to Trump's deranged claims is harming the fabric of society, eroding trust in each other and in the society itself, sowing discord, and widens the opportunity for an aspiring tyrant to seize the public's interest, declare a bunch of "undesirables" as enemy of the state, and infringe upon individual rights while his supporters cheer him on. (And also kill some lives along the way.)
Just like censorship could potentially lead to a similar kind of outcome.
So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.
I just don't believe that having powerful intermediaries squashing views work well for democracy.
It doesn't work so well to stop dangerous ideas, and it has a whole lot of risk of being used against unpopular ones.
Trump's ideas are doing damage to democracy, but attempting to suppress them in this way adds credence to many peoples' belief that there's some dangerous tech/liberal cabal squashing the true majority conservative opinion, too. And even attempts to use these in a bright-line, careful fashion have often squashed the wrong speech and silenced the wrong people; this is before any actual malicious use which is sure to come if the precedent strengthens.
In our rush to get rid of the most repugnant ideas, too, we tend to lose our ability to discuss nuance. To avoid COVID quackery, we can't have an open discussion of the merits of specific policies and interventions. In our rush to squash the dangerous idea of election fraud, we can't have the discussion about how to make our actual election system robust and beyond reproach.
> So, the danger of "censorship", in our current context, should be gauged against the danger of "non-censorship" in the same context.
Yes, which is why I acknowledged those risks in my first comment and said that I believed that these risks are potentially greater.
Think about how much important speech from the past few centuries has seemed dangerous and repugnant at the time it was uttered.
It is funny how short people memory is when YT was removing videos of people saying you should wear a mask and the YT Censorship gods said "no that is misinformation you can not say that"
> The Australian white supremacist who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand was radicalized by YouTube, according to a 792-page report on the March 2019 shooting.
I have a feeling he'd say that was ridiculous, based on this quote from his manifesto:
Q: Were you taught violence and extremism by video games, music, literature, cinema?
Yes, Spyro the dragon 3 taught me ethno-nationalism. Fortnite trained me to be a killer and to floss on the corpses of my enemies. No.
People are more intelligent than these criticisms give them credit for. Their beliefs come from opinions and thoughts, not just from above. See Ross Douthat's recent column, "Why Do So Many Americans Think the Election Was Stolen?"
"The potency of this belief has already scrambled some of the conventional explanations for conspiratorial beliefs, particularly the conceit that the key problem is misinformation spreading downward from partisan news outlets and social-media fraudsters to the easily deceived. As I watch the way certain fraud theories spread online, or watch conservatives abandon Fox News for Newsmax in search of validating narratives, it’s clear that this is about demand as much as supply. A strong belief spurs people to go out in search of evidence, a lot of so-called disinformation is collected and circulated sincerely rather than cynically, and the power of various authorities — Tucker Carlson’s show or Facebook’s algorithm — to change beliefs is relatively limited."
I invite you to read up on the psychological effect known as "priming."
Top-down disinformation primes the minds of the less-scrupulous, who then seek to rationalize and harden their half-baked beliefs through their everyday experiences.
People used to believe in brainwashing too. We like to think people who disagree with us are easily swayed idiots. It keeps our opinions safe and justifies censoring their opinions instead of engaging with them.
He is an unreliable narrator, for sure. But more than his claim about whether he was brainwashed, does he sound like the kind of person who just mindlessly clicked from Youtube to Youtube, accepting every claim uncritically? Does he sound like the kind of person who can't be trusted to think for themselves? Engineer is a common profession for terrorists. Regular, thoughtful people can radicalize themselves, and censoring the masses to stop that is a power grab in search of a problem.
Everyone has to be trusted to think for themselves. We can put barriers in place to harmful actions resulting from those thoughts but I would not want to live in a world so dystopian and authoritarian that we intentionally take away someone's ability to think.
I don't really get this. People regularly quoted Osama bin Laden's statements about how he did 9/11 to force the US into overreacting. It may have "normalised" him to see that he had rational reasons for what he did, rather than being a religious maniac. But it didn't make it right, and it didn't lead to people flocking to his cause. If it had been censored, we might have had more people believing the harmful "religious war" frame, just from not knowing any better.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations" -- Osama bin Laden
It's been pretty widely dissected and explained why he said and wrote all of that idiotic internet leetspeak in his "manifesto".
There is also a reason why many of these folks who finally decide to kill people also consume "alt-lite" content like Ben Shapiro / Jordan Peterson etc, it isn't a coincidence.
Regulating that and keeping people from spreading racist propaganda, or content that just exists to undermine democracy is fine in my book.
I tried googling "why did christchurch use leetspeak" and didn't get results. I presume it was to get more views from incels and because he found it funny. Not because he was radicalized by the Navy Seal copypasta.
With Peterson and Shapiro I feel like you're trending toward a standard of "anything terrorists like to read, but I don't, should be censored". They're close to as popular as, say, Rachel Maddow, which means almost all of their readers are peaceful.
So, this is one example of many, many users who haven't killed anyone.
If "one incident is too many", then marijuana must stay strictly illegal and violent video games must be banned, because both have nonzero body count IRL. Remember Harris and Klebold?
Yeah, I just don't know what to do anymore. It's clear that the idea of good information rising to the top of vigorous discourse among an informed populace just isn't working. We're tearing the country apart right now with lies.
Is this fixable at all? Do we just give up? Do we fight the lies directly by not spreading them? No good options as long as the lies are spreading.
I have a very hard time seeing Youtube or Twitter as the bad guys here. At least they're trying. Screaming about censorship as the civilization falls apart seems to really be missing the point.
Making some assumptions about what you mean by "democracy", that's actually a good question. We believe in freedom of expression because we don't want the government suppressing information for the purpose of manipulating us, but in the information age it has become obvious that one can manipulate people by spreading information just as easily as by suppressing it.
For this reason, I am forced to wonder if democracy can survive the information age at all.
Hypothetically, you can think that you need institutions to properly frame and prioritize issues in public discourse, and only then is democracy ideal. And at some scale it's true: if a bunch of us were suddenly dropped into a locked room and told to discuss and then vote for the best mayor of Mumbai with no resources, we'd fail.
Democracy isn't looking too healthy nowadays though, I agree.
Traditionally, it's been extremely reconcilable. News agencies had a responsibility to be more accurate than not. The government itself keeps a very hands-off approach to that information flow, and the people reward papers that succeed with subscriptions and eyeballs. This detente is why the media has traditionally been referred to as "The fourth estate."
Unclear what the solution is as that system breaks down because the subscription-free ad-fueled Internet dwarfs the traditional model.
Ultimately, people (the audience) will go to sources that are credible and abandon sources that are not, regardless of how the source pays their bills.
You cant, that is why the US is not a democracy nor should it become one
The US is a constitutional republic who's institution where designed in a way that the ONLY democratic part of that system of governance was the US House of representatives
Unfortunately for those that like individual freedom and see democracy as mob rule (people like myself) there is a strong push for more and more democracy into the system which is a net negative for individual liberty. Things like abolishing of electoral collage, even past changes like Electing Senators via Popular vote have been a net negative for liberty
>The main portion of the study, which measured the public’s ability to distinguish between five factual statements and five opinion statements, found that a majority of Americans correctly identified at least three of the five statements in each set. But this result is only a little better than random guesses. Far fewer Americans got all five correct, and roughly a quarter got most or all wrong.
That's a might broad brush you're painting with. "A frighteningly large percentage of people have trouble..." would be much more accurate. You make it sound like Europeans have never be hoodwinked by people with agendas. History is rife with examples of charismatic people duping followers.
It's pretty accurate. I would never want a jury trial because of how easily the common American can be manipulated. Reports now indicate that 3/4 of GOP members won't accept the outcome even though the closest state is nowhere near the 500 vote margin Gore lost by in 2000. That's how the modern propaganda machine leads the gullible.
It would be classified as a factual statement for the survey study even though it's an inaccurate statement (intersexed people exist)
As
>Respondents were asked to determine if each was a factual statement (whether accurate or not) or an opinion statement (whether agreed with or not).
I never gave my opinion on the matter, but since you asked, no, I don't personally care if corporations ban me because I disagree with their TOS (which had inaccurate statements of fact in it), that's their right. I probably wouldn't be doing business with them in the first place, though it's also my right to petition them to change it if I wanted to. Example: When I was a kid Walmart only sold censored CDs so everyone knew not to buy CDs from Walmart.
Because this publically traded company (not private) invites the public to view and share content. Now the public is voicing concern over who they are censoring.
If Google doesn't like it they are free to shutdown the service.
If only the virgin mary were contrary. Science has lost it's power. Someone will choose an interpretation that benefits themselves over the truth. It's normal. Too many tech people are coasting on the libertarian dream of the past.
You are the person choosing your own interpretation.
I believe in science, what I don't believe is that people will listen to truth when it is presented. They are two different things. Science has lost its power to object to a higher cultural malaise.
If you understood what it meant for the virgin mary to be contrary, you would understand the words I wrote on the page and my meaning.
You were not correct, you didn't understand my post. Stop dreaming. There are real truths being expressed here.
Anyways, I honestly can't blame "them". Less than a year ago, the mainstream media was full of "information" like, masks don't work, it's racist to think that hugging a Chinese could make you infected, and people questioning the origin of the virus were deemed conspiracy theorists. Now some of these are suddenly considered "misinformation" or "COVIDiots" and you have "conspiracy theory" on front page of Washington Post
What's someone who's not 100% plugged in supposed to think?!
Let this be a lesson that a lot of people are susceptible to all sorts of "remarkable" ideas, including objectively dangerous ones like believing that Covid is a hoax.
There's no refutation because there's no argument to refute. It's always some form of "There are bad people doing bad things and we need to stop them."
Notice how every thread here is about acting against alleged disinformation agents? It's not about any argument at all. It's a generic outgroup argument.
Should we expect people to just never question elections? It's completely bizarre.
Come on. That same group questioning elections 1) has spent 4 years decrying the questioning of an election 2) actively prevented measures being taken to secure elections and 3) hasn't come up with any proof of vote changes. We should expect people to come at things in good faith, which is clearly not the case in this discussion.
If you don't believe it's true, then explain to me how Measles, something that was more or less a solved problem, suddenly had a huge resurgence, leading to 50% increase in the number of deaths from 2016 to 2019?
While flat earthers are mostly harmless, other misinformation have real tangible cost. People are literally dying due to the anti-vaxx and anti-mask misinformation. Not blocking these videos is equivalent to having blood on your hands.
You do realize that the largest outbreak of measles in 2019 was not because of Anti-Vax YouTube Videos or other misinformation right? It was directly linked to religious fundamentalism that barred a large group of people from getting vaccinated
So all the YT censorship in the world will not stop that unless you are going to advocate prohibition of religion as well which I feel you likely will not get as much support for
YT and online misinformation is a good scapegoat, much like Usenet was in the 1990's for people that do not understand the real, actual problem
you are not going to fix these problems by censorship
> It was directly linked to religious fundamentalism that barred a large group of people from getting vaccinated
And it just happened to be perfectly in sync with the rise of anti-vaxx content on social media? You do realize these "religious fundamentalism" with fringe ideas also use Youtube, FB and other sites to share their anti-vaxx ideas and have their own ideas re-affirmed?
Sure, but improvement to the education system won't come into effect for decades, and in the short term, real people are dying from anti-vaxx and anti-mask misinformation. I know 2020 has been wild, but let's not forget the huge surge in Measle deaths, something that was mostly solved beforehand. Blocking certain content now literally saves people's lives.
For sure, but I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that YouTube is merely dealing with the symptoms of a much broader societal problem. We can't truly fix the issue until we address the root cause. Everything else is whack-a-mole.
Again, why not both? This is a short term solution, while we work in parallel in improving the education system. Youtube itself can be a great source of education if you promote scientific videos over trashy conspiracy videos.
Correct, the exact same way "some people" think indenting with tab is 100% BS. Yet, at the same time, there are "other people" that will indent TAB + 2 spaces every new line.
> Yet, at the same time, there are other people that will watch it and 100% believe it
When has that ever not been the case? Fortunately there are natural barriers preventing most people with wild ideas from gaining enough support to be a detriment to society. Should I really care if someone else chooses to believe x, y, or z in the face of contradictory evidence? If they try and do something public with a wrong idea, their failure will be the teacher, not me.
> Fortunately there are natural barriers preventing most people with wild ideas from gaining enough support to be a detriment to society.
The internet has all but nullified these barriers. Just look at all the QAnon garbage. That would have gone nowhere 30 years ago, but today a sizable portion of this country believes it because there is no real difference in authority between one Facebook post, Youtube video, or Tweet and another.
>Should I really care if someone else chooses to believe x, y, or z?
You shouldn't, unless that view is harmful to society. I don't care if you think the COVID vaccine has a microchip in it. But if you delay our return to a normally functioning society because you refuse to get that vaccine, your stupidity is starting to infringe on my rights.
I know a lot of religious people, but none of them think themselves exempt from basic laws of nature (e.g. immune to artillery fire). This kind of belief goes way beyond usual religion.
Does it really matter if some people believe in QAnon?
If enough people decide that the COVID vaccine is important enough for everyone to receive (regardless of their personal beliefs), then that will be codified into law. No need for censorship to try and manipulate public perception.
>Does it really matter if some people believe in QAnon?
When it starts to get dangerous, yes. People are inspired toward violence when they believe that other people are killing children to drink their blood. For those unaware, that is at the heart of QAnon beliefs.
>If enough people decide that the COVID vaccine is important enough for everyone to receive (regardless of their personal beliefs), then that will be codified into law. No need for censorship to try and manipulate public perception.
Do you realize this is an exact analogy to what Youtube is doing here? They tried to let the people decide. We ended up with a result that was bad for society. So they instead tried to codify the "right" choice into the laws of their platform.
> When it starts to get dangerous, yes. People are inspired toward violence when they believe...
I see this argument a lot, but it fails to address the clear distinction between beliefs and actions. If people are actually violent, we have clear laws to deal with those actions.
If the argument is that certain beliefs shouldn't be allowed because they could be construed as "inspiring violence", then I'd love to hear about how tolerant you are towards Islam's idea of jihad or countless others who believe violence is justified in circumstances that you disagree with.
>I see this argument a lot, but it fails to address the clear distinction between beliefs and actions. If people are actually violent, we have clear laws to deal with those actions.
Why outlaw threats and fighting words then? They aren't violence.
Some of us want to stop easily predictable violence before it gets to the point of actual violence.
>If the argument is that certain beliefs shouldn't be allowed because they could be construed as "inspiring violence", then I'd love to hear about how tolerant you are towards Islam's idea of jihad or countless others who believe violence is justified in circumstances that you disagree with.
It is curious that you use Islam as your example here. Various religions preach violence. The Old Testament establishes the death penalty for people who break the Sabbath. What matters is the actual practice and how likely they are to inspire violence. The QAnon conspiracies are more dangerous in this regard than thousand plus year old religions.
> Some of us want to stop easily predictable violence before it gets to the point of actual violence.
Are you being serious? I honestly can't tell. This has played out in countless movies and books, and the result is never good. It has also played out in real life, and the result is even worse.
> What matters is the actual practice...
Bingo! Sounds like maybe you're beginning to see the error in trying to police thoughtcrime. It's the actions that matter, not the beliefs alone.
Yes, I am serious. The problem is there is no clear delineated line between "thoughtcrime" and plain old crime prevention. Where is the line for you when a threat of violence is equivalent to violence? When does a thought become a plan? Threats are just words, so I imagine I can threaten to kill you. What about if those threats are through deliberate and premeditated actions like mailing you a death threat? Is it any different if I tell other people to attack you? Those are just words, right? Is it different if I pay them? Can I brandish a knife if I am 20 feet away from you? I don't pose an immediate threat in that instance. Can I pull a gun on you without any fear of reprisal? That isn't a direct act of violence either yet. Do I need to pull the trigger before you respond?
> Where is the line for you when a threat of violence is equivalent to violence?
The line is "imminent lawless action" [1], with case law clarifying that "advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time" is not considered "imminent" (and therefore protected free speech). It's a pretty clear line, and one that most of the censored material being discussed objectively does not cross.
Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are within their rights as private companies to enforce content rules as they wish, but these recent censorship actions have strong implications as to their protections under Section 230, and are alarming insofar as they represent a trend that crosses the line of free speech protections normally recognized by the government and content platforms.
> Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are within their rights as private companies to enforce content rules as they wish, but these recent censorship actions have strong implications as to their protections under Section 230,
No, they don't; 230 exists to promote censorship, it does not involve a bar to it.
> and are alarming insofar as they represent a trend that crosses the line of free speech protections normally recognized by the government and content platforms.
They aren't the government, and there has never been a set of free speech protections “normally recognized by content platforms”, especially since 230 was adopted specifically to remove legal disincentives to active moderation.
I never stated or implied that Section 230 barred censorship. It does, however, protect service providers from the liability that a publisher would take on for publishing content that otherwise should be censored. As these companies voluntarily embrace more censorship, they are calling into question their status as "service providers" since they are effectively operating as publishers; i.e., not protected under 230.
> there has never been a set of free speech protections “normally recognized by content platforms”
I agree; legally there hasn't been anything like that, but in the past, those platforms were demonstrably more reluctant to censor political content (e.g., views that didn't align with the company's political views) because they knew that more active involvement might jeopardize their classification as neutral platforms (along with their protections under 230 as described above). In effect, they stayed out of politics not by law, but out of fear of being forced to censor all content if they became "publishers". Now that machine learning has made the censoring part easier, they're less concerned about that happening. However, at the moment they want to have their cake and eat it too – controlling content as they wish while also enjoying the protections of 230.
>I never stated or implied that Section 230 barred censorship. It does, however, protect service providers from the liability that a publisher would take on for publishing content that otherwise should be censored. As these companies voluntarily embrace more censorship, they are calling into question their status as "service providers" since they are effectively operating as publishers; i.e., not protected under 230.
No. That's not what section 230 says.
There is no distinction in section 230 between "platform" and "publisher."
This has been noted and detailed repeatedly in this discussion.
Please see this[0] which will explain, in explicit detail, why you are wrong about section 230.
The objections you're raising (and repeated on sites like the one you posted) are a matter of interpretation of the law, and people on both sides of the political spectrum are now realizing that the law needs clarification. It is not a settled matter by any means, and our lawmakers are still debating the issue.
When a company like Twitter censors the president of the United States, while also embedding their own editorial comments over the content he posted, those actions could easily be seen as falling outside 230 (even if courts haven't decided that in the past). No one denies the fact that the internet today is very different from when 230 was drafted, and from a moral standpoint, we absolutely need more clarification codified into the law.
If your town's public square were seized by one of the richest companies in the world, and they began exerting political control over who was allowed to speak in the town square, it would certainly raise some red flags and likely encourage legal changes (even if, for a time, it was perfectly legal).
The 230 debate isn't even the core of my argument (if you read my previous comments). The point is, whether through legal means or simply by way of market pressure, we should not be allowing these companies to control the political discussion in such heavy-handed ways. Diversity of opinion is diversity, and we need more of it - not less (it's ironic how some push so hard for diversity, yet seem to think we can't handle it when it comes to speech).
I'm sure it's hard to imagine, but if they started silencing liberal views, there's no doubt there would be an uproar among democrats. Apart from any legal changes that may come, we vote with our clicks and platform usage, and there's a growing number of people who are tired of these political censorship games, so they're leaving for other platforms with less political bias. As censorship increases, that will likely accelerate.
> The objections you're raising (and repeated on sites like the one you posted) are a matter of interpretation of the law,
No, they are a matter of clear and unambiguous historical fact.
> and people on both sides of the political spectrum are now realizing that the law needs clarification.
No, subsets within each major party are adopting preferences for regulation with opposed purposes to those for which CDA Section 230 was originally adopted. Which we could debate the merits of, but it's simply factually wrong to describe actions of the type that both the plain text and the legislative history of Section 230 show clearly to be exactly what 230 was adopted to remove existing barriers to are somehow in conflict with Section 230’s protections or purpose.
>I'm sure it's hard to imagine, but if they started silencing liberal views, there's no doubt there would be an uproar among democrats. Apart from any legal changes that may come, we vote with our clicks and platform usage, and there's a growing number of people who are tired of these political censorship games, so they're leaving for other platforms with less political bias. As censorship increases, that will likely accelerate.
Please remember that Section 230 doesn't just apply to the big players. It applies to any internet resource that allows third-party content. Including any site that you may host/own.
I suggest you actually read the sharp end of Section 230 (section (C)(1), which pretty much all litigation around it has been resolved). I present it here for your review[4]:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
That's it. Full stop.
I don't care about platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. I don't use them (well, okay, sometimes I listen to songs on YT and once in a while I'll dig up an amusing or enjoyable clip from a movie or tv show) because I find their business models personally offensive.
But you attack Section 230 at your own (and everyone else's) peril. And there are a bunch of reasons for this.
The impetus for Section 230 came out of the court decision in Stratton, Oakmont v. Prodigy[0], where the court ruled that if Prodigy did any moderation at all, they were then liable to be sued for third-party content they hosted.
But that didn't just apply to Prodigy. It applied to any connected device that hosted any content, whether that content originated from the owner or a third-party.
Try to imagine what the world would look like under such a legal regime:
A site like HackerNews, if they (as they do now) allowed the upvote/downvote/flag moderation system, would be liable to be sued for just about any post that someone didn't like, or for a submission that wasn't sufficiently up or down voted.
In such an environment, HackerNews (and every single other website, mailing list, Usenet group, Mastodon instance, Github repo, etc., etc., etc.) would be liable to be sued for just about anything that anyone posted if they did any form of moderation (like blocking spam, porn or any content unrelated to the purpose of the site).
If there was no Section 230, you could be sued if you hosted a mirror of the lkml[1] list and someone didn't like a snarky response from Linus about a rejected patch merge request.
You could also be sued just for forwarding an email that contained statements that someone didn't like. In fact, Section 230 protections stopped just such a lawsuit[2] in 2006.
Companies with deep pockets like FB, Twitter, YT, Reddit, etc., have the resources to fight most such lawsuits, but what about sites like HackerNews?
Do you really think we'd be having this pleasant conversation right now if YC could be sued for any post or submission on this site?
YC would run for the hills, because they don't want that sort of liability. If they moderated anything (and that includes user up/downvotes/flags), they could be sued for any content hosted here. The only alternatives they would have would be to shut down or not make or use any moderation tools at all.
Which would quickly turn this site into a cesspit of spam, porn, irrelevant postings and other garbage (essentially, 4chan/8chan/8kun).
Do you have a github repo? If there were no Section 230, and you blocked even one PR that contained spam, porn, discussions about placentas and/or other irrelevant content, you are now liable to be sued for any statements made by others in that repo.
As such, the result of removing Section 230 protections would create two kinds of Internet resources:
1. Sites which do not allow any third-party content;
2. Sites which allow all third-party content without any limit (think gay, midget furry porn plastered all over a knitting website)
And so, no. I wouldn't mind at all if a particular site moderated in favor of a political (or any other) view with which I disagree. If I don't like it, I'll go elsewhere.
Because of all this, I say that Section 230 is essential to free speech, not a hindrance to it.
> It applies to any internet resource that allows third-party content.
Also to users, on sites where user action can affect the visibility of other content. Were 230 not in place, users making use of such features (not just site operators) could face civil liability.
I didn’t go far back enough other than parent. So apologies if this is out of context.
But I don’t think the goal should be to attack 230, but a desired goal would be stop platforms like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube to stop acting like a publisher. They are simply abusing 230 privileges while still acting like a publisher with editorial muscle.
>But I don’t think the goal should be to attack 230, but a desired goal would be stop platforms like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube to stop acting like a publisher. They are simply abusing 230 privileges while still acting like a publisher with editorial muscle.
The term "publisher" has no legal meaning in the context of section 230.
I (and at least a half-dozen other folks) have explained this repeatedly in this discussion.
I won't do so again, but in the interest of expanding knowledge, I'll point you over here[0] so you can understand the deal as it stands.
If you (or anyone else) would like to see changes to Section 230, that's perfectly fine with me. I suggest you write your congressperson/senators and demand the changes for which you advocate.
That said, what you are describing is not the law as it is now. Whether you (or I for that matter) agree or disagree, that's irrelevant to current jurisprudence.
But we have ways to change our laws and we should take advantage of them where we feel it appropriate.
> As these companies voluntarily embrace more censorship, they are calling into question their status as "service providers" since they are effectively operating as publishers; i.e., not protected under 230.
230 was expressly adopted to let service providers (and users!) of interactive computer services take actions that would otherwise make them publishers without the liability that goes with that, with regard to content that is created by someone else. That's it's whole purpose. Key operative text: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” and ”No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of [...] any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected”
I wasn't asking you a legal question. We all know that QAnon isn't literally illegal. I was asking you a series of moral questions, many of which can't be answered with "imminent lawless action". For example, is it considered a "thoughtcrime" if the danger isn't imminent? If someone is working on detailed plans to kill the president, but the plan would take multiple years, should this person be stopped or should they be allowed to continue their plans until the danger is imminent?
Godwin's law, but Hitler succeeded for a very long time in the decade before WW2. This isn't a useful metric for determining whether ideas are right or wrong.
All of recorded human history is evidence that this is false. Consider the Holocaust, the Salem Witch Trials, Lysenkoism, The Great Leap Forward, Aztec human sacrifices, and so many others. Even if you just consider the relatively modern United States just look at Prohibition, the War on Drugs, Jim Crow Laws, and so many others.
I am against censorship, but not because I believe that bad ideas can't take hold and cause enormous damage. I just believe that the benefits of living in a society with free speech outweigh the costs.
You say this while half the country believes random people on Youtube and Facebook, refuse to wear masks in a pandemic that is killing people by the thousands.
I was young and believer in open internet once (and still am mostly) but the society as a whole has underestimated how much people are susceptible to being deceived and the cost differential between spreading and refuting false information.
I don't see this as anything other than an extension of anti-spam over email efforts of early 2000s.
Marketing works and that means propaganda works. Constant messaging can and will influence people's behavior.
Consumer Reports studies consumer products, product marketing claims, and real-world use. That enables consumers to make more educated purchase decisions. Is there anything like that for political news or news in general? If news is a form of entertainment which is a product, then it deserves some level of critique to measure its accuracy.
So if that is the mental state of half the country - is democracy worth defending? Why not just ban wrong-think and come out and admit that authoritarianism is the best, since too many people are too stupid to make the right decisions?
Because we are faulty creatures with faulty institutions. Let us work with what we have. Authoritarianism is mostly never better than democracy. Absolute democracy isn't always better than authoritarianism. And in this case it is largely irrelevant because the government is not the one censoring people.
The arguments about if and when companies can exercise these rights are good to have otherwise we may end up in one of the extremes.
That quote would work with "the entire population".
Instead, now he's not alone, the other half of the population supports him and holds the opposite opinion and I'm quite sure the first half the grand parent comment mentions (Covid denying crowd) has lost its grasp on reality. Or they have other motives to deny it... Which makes things worse.
2) the Koch Brothers, paid actors from Russia and Saudi and hyper-partisan US groups, etc. all flooding our information platforms with trash and noise, completely UNCHECKED, in the name of "freedom"?
I think there's solid evidence that option 2 is terrible for us, the USA has had a disastrous COVID response, for instance. Meanwhile, we haven't really tried option 1, we are just at the beginning of this censorship of trash information.
In general, I find many talking of "freedom" in US history are using it as a shield to ignore sticky issues and allow bad solutions to reign...freedom to own slaves, freedom to expand wherever and kill any natives there, freedom of pollution, freedom of marketing with harmful lies...freedom is an over-used and intellectually lazy concept.
This argument doesn't really hold when you're discussing a monopoly/social network.
Referring to youtube as "just a private company" or "just a video hosting service" is almost to the point of being disingenuous. There are no alternatives that come even close to what youtube offers. You can't just replicate a social network, and even if you could, who has the hardware and resources to do what youtube does?
Vimeo is niche/specialized, it's not for general video uploads. Selfhosting via e.g. Peertube only really works in smallish communities, due to hardware limitations and word of mouth discovery. No other service has the social aspect that youtube does.
The reality is that this is a much more complicated discussion than "oh, merely switch to another private company".
> I swear, it's like people have never had to cancel a newspaper subscription before
This is such a blithe comment that I'm not sure if you actually use youtube to any degree. It is -the- place to put videos and content. Nowhere else has the sheer amount of educational content, etc, all in one place. There's an extreme wealth of content that is not replicated anywhere else on the internet, much less spread across random websites.
Youtube not only allows for discovery via topics/related youtubers, but it also incentivizes people to make content due to income both internally on youtube and externally as they build a brand. I'm not trying to be a shill here, but without youtube I wouldn't have been able to learn about topics like woodworking, chess, bass guitar, music theory, cooking, programming, etc, to the degree that I have , and discover great content makers as well. Not to mention discovering music that isn't necessarily on spotify/etc.
So it's not so easy as to say "just use a different site/company/etc". What site...?
So under what philosophical model do we justify forcing YouTube to host content that they find objectionable just so that content is more easily discovered using their algorithm?
I'm certainly not arguing that. What I'm saying is it's complicated, and we (the people & our governments) need to have a discussion around youtube/facebook/twitter and private companies that are basically used like public utilities. It's not their fault, but the fact is there is no real alternative to yt/fb/twitter unless one wishes to avoid a large part of the human population.
Of course youtube can remove whatever it wants, it's a private company. This doesn't mean that people can't find this objectionable, and it doesn't mean the only argument has to be "well, just use another company/site/provider".
I think people here are -reasonably- concerned about YT censoring particular information and the precedent it sets. In this case you and I might agree with YT's stance. Will we agree the next time YT decides to take a stance and censors a topic?
YT already flagged LGBTQ content as objectionable and demonitized it years ago, and I, for one, never questioned their right to do so. I think it's a bad look for them and will have consequences, but most of those consequences are of the form "LGBTQ companies are going to think twice about tossing ad dollars your way" and "People have solid questions about your actual dedication to LGBTQ inclusivity," not "We should modify the law to take away your right to flag that content objectionable."
I agree that ad dollars are where YT is hurt the most, and them making bad decisions ought to lead to corrections via advertisers pulling out.
However, a lot of people making content on yt are facing demonetization due to the same thing: advertiser pressure. For things like swearing, any sort of violence, etc. A lot of people have issues in some game communities for example.
So I don't think relying on the benevolence of Coca-Cola is the best solution either. Until relatively recently it would not have cared about appearances regarding LBGTQ+ issues either.
We prohibit discriminating customers on the basis of color. religion etc. Add one more clause: discrimination based on political/social beliefs or something along those lines however stupid those might be.
That's a terrible clause. Half the point of free exchange of information is so we can find which deeply-held beliefs (which are maleable, unlike color) are incorrect, detrimental, or even dangerous when acted on.
Black people and pedophiles don't deserve the same legal protections to have access to a playground or a private school.
I don't think it would make much of a difference. Are there pedophiles who publicly post controversial views without the cover of anonymity? How would you even know what their views are?
So you're whining that you can't make Youtube host your conspiracy theories for free? And that you can't ride of the back of their massive CDN infrastructure? Your biggest issue is that you are being excluded from someone else's assets and that you can't reach as many people through other alternatives at the same price point.
I don't even watch anything political on youtube. I use youtube for music and learning about hobbies.
I still think it's worth talking about the precedent that youtube is setting here, and it's not productive to be combative about it. Of course youtube can censor or remove whatever it wants.
My main point, anyway, was that I dislike the "just use a different platform/site/company" argument, for the reasons I outlined above. Not because I think youtube -has- to host any sort of content, nor did I ever state that.
I feel like YouTube is much less of a monopoly than Facebook. Facebook has strong network effects (i.e. everyone you know is already on it and you want to see what your friends post) whereas YouTube has much less of a social network element. Can't someone just host their videos elsewhere? I understand most random viewers are on YouTube, but if there was a niche video site for woodworking, chess, or bass guitar I don't think it would be too hard to convince YouTubers to go check out those sites
The way I see it, youtube is the facebook/twitter of generalized video sharing. There isn't any other site that people use to the same degree.
Sure, one -could- host their own peertube instance for a community. However the discovery probability drops immensely. One of the main benefits of youtube (at least for me) is easily discovering new content/creators. Also, having high-quality videos in one central location versus multiple different sites for cooking videos, woodworking videos, etc. Having something like a global search across federated peertube instances could work though.
At that point you also run into the issue of who has the hardware to power these new communities? Few people have that sort of data storage available, and fewer still have enough powerful servers + cdns across the world. The new owners of an instance could easily just as well decide to censor whatever they want, and if I had to trust a random person over youtube I'd most likely choose youtube. At least it faces public scrutiny, etc.
Any attempt at making a youtube competitor for these reasons will get you banned by paypal and patreon. Any attempt at replacing paypal and patreon them will get you banned by visa and mastercard. Basically you have to start from first principles and create a new global banking system first.
This is a subject I've been following for a while.
Basically any content that is controversial for any reason, be it porn, government criticism in china or unpopular opinions, makes VISA and Mastercard wary that it will be bad PR for them, so there is some evidence that the pair is basically threaning to cut service to any of their downstream partners, for example if you google a bit there is some (sadly murky) evidence that they been threatening Patreon if they allow certain kinds of content (for example incest porn).
So people noticed many particularly sensitive political videos, can only be hosted safely on outright porn hosting sites, even self-hosting is not safe unless you also own everything else needed, because the CC providers have firepower to threaten almost any company they wish to, including ISP, DNS providers, etc...
We've seen wikileaks deplatformed and there are many more instances that don't come with a legal power.
Not hard to imagine the same happening to "a platform promoting dangerous misinformation" as is the justification from YouTube.
But that's actually predictable. Banking is built on trust. Trust is a societal construct. "It's hard to open my porn shop because the banks won't give me a loan and the town won't zone for it" is an issue older than the Internet.
Newspapers typically did not enjoy monopoly positions in the markets they served, and even for those that did, rarely did those translate into worldwide monopolies.
Also, because newspapers have an editor, they are liable for what they print. Google enjoys protections from these liabilities, even though they're clearly willing and capable of editing their users content.
> Newspapers typically did not enjoy monopoly positions in the markets they served
On average, newspapers definitely did. Most major cities have at most two primary newspapers. The difference between them and YouTube was geographic reach.
... even still, YT's size doesn't obligate them to provide hosting for high-bandwidth data. It definitely doesn't obligate them to put any specific videos in people's field-of-view. People with alternative viewpoints can buy cloud storage if they desperately need a place to host videos.
The "Is YouTube an editor" question is a good one, but I have a hard time reconciling the notion that they're taking on new editorial behavior with the fact that they've always had both community standards and full control of their curation algorithm. Haven't they always been an editor in that sense, and the new concern is some people don't like how they're using that power?
You're comparing a nearly perfectly competitive marketplace (newspapers) with an oligopoly due to network effects (social media). The customer has free choice in the former but very little in the latter.
I'm not sure that newspapers have ever been perfectly competitive. Even in my midwest, midsized city, there has really only been one or two newspapers that achieve enough circulation.
Similarly, major television media has always locked out socialist and communist points of view in the United States.
This idea that only Google suddenly has a point of view in their editing what they allow on the platform seems really strange to me.
I agree they're not perfectly competitive but they come close (which was my claim). I view them similarly to the soft drinks market, you have moats due to brand such as Coca Cola, but vigorous competition with a heterogeneity of choices for the consumer. If I'm a socialist I can read Jacobin and if I'm very right wing I can read OANN, no matter my perspective I can find print media to suit. TV networks aren't a good comparison to newspapers/print media since they have very high fixed costs and as a result will only cater to markets that represent a sizeable proportion of the populace.
What do you think is hypocritical about not believing the rights of the individual should automatically translate to businesses? It seems obvious that they should not.
So, since we do not have laws over atoms, neither should we over molecules, etc until we reach humans -- clearly I'm taking your argument to absurd levels, but it does illustrate my point. Something something seeing the forest for the trees.
I don't quite get your point regarding atoms. What I was trying to say is humans are not the only "person" before the law - corporates, trust, clubs and other bodies are also persons, and should have similar rights (including free speech).
If you can get congress/a court to designate an atom as a "person", then sure, the rights would extend to atoms too.
The real irony is wanting the leader of your government, the President, to have absolute power over speech, but then throw up complaints about private organizations trying to combat the dangerous messages coming from the government, because that's censorship.
I wholeheartedly agree. Private companies should be free of regulation and be free to do whatever they want, like refusing service to whoever they want - nazis, flat-earthers, homosexuals, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, blacks, etc.
The reason we have specific protected-class carve-outs is because the default, outside of the need for protected classes, is exactly that. Private companies are free to discriminate except in cases where society has determined that discrimination is harmful to society.
Now, if one wants to have a conversation about the societal benefits of QAnon, or broadcasting information that is re-enforcing the President's overt attempt to thwart the American election for his own benefit, we can go through the front door and have that conversation. But if one wants to fall back on general principles of "Businesses should be required to associate with everyone, all the time, forever!" we quickly find society has never actually agreed with that line.
One tend to think that what is good/bad for one will be like that for everyone. In this case, stopping misinformation, is better for the average citizen and then better for the society.
Partisanship has leaked into this thread.. What if the tables were turned? As a non-American, it disappoints me to read some of these comments. Defending your side at all costs. I wish there was more balanced comments, acknowledging points on each side. The inability to concede to anything makes for ugly discussion. Whatever side you are on, stubbornness and hostility is not a good strategy to convince the other side.
"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence." -Richard Feynman
You make a fine point about partisan hostility leaking into every crack and crevice these days. It really does get tiring. Its as if we in the US are all Sports Fans rooting for The Home Team without regard to inconvenient facts or anything that challenges the outcome desired. America is in a sad state for sure.
"What if the tables were turned?" - Is it really a "What If" kind of question? Maybe the tables have in fact turned?
YouTube certainly has no problem hosting videos that purport the idea of a rigged 2016 election.
For a solid 4 years one party accused the other of rigging an election and it was considered news and reported on nearly non-stop. Now the tables are turned and the formerly accused party is claiming the other one rigged the election.
4 years ago one party went with a Boogey Man kind of narrative where a nebulous and hostile foreign power used untold influences and means to change the course of the election.
Today one party is going with the narrative that laws were broken regarding the conduct of elections.
These 2 things are similar but I put forth the idea they are not exactly the same. The TX vs. PA suit presents evidence and makes specific claims. Maybe I missed something along the way but I never saw anything but innuendo regarding what specific crimes were committed in the "Russian Rigging" of the 2016 election. Im open to reading up if anyone cares to drop a relevant link or two.
> For a solid 4 years one party accused the other of rigging an election and it was considered news and reported on nearly non-stop. Now the tables are turned and the formerly accused party is claiming the other one rigged the election.
Except that's not what the Russian collusion accusations were about. I still find it hard to believe when I see polls that actively suggest people believe votes or voting machines were directly manipulated in 2016. This is not the narrative I experienced while following the election and subsequent Mueller investigation.
The information I consumed made it clear that there were questionable staffing, unusual meetings, and a foreign disinformation campaign associated mostly with benefiting Trump's campaign. In any case the current admin knew the stakes, and knew the issues but failed to safeguard against it. Still they claim there is widespread fraud, but fail to provide convincing evidence. Now they have pivoted to suggesting changes made during a pandemic could invalidate votes.
The specific crimes are laid out in the Mueller report [0]. A bipartisan Senate committee confirmed the intelligence findings that lead to the Mueller report even while Senators were publicly denying it [1]. Again I don't understand the claim of "rigging". This wasn't pushed in the circles I frequent or I considered it hyperbole at the time. There was a clear disinformation campaign, hacking attempts, and questionable contacts with the Trump campaign.
Given how perilous the balance of power in the United States is and that the popular vote is not respected it isn't all that strange a thought that someone would do to the United States what the United States has done to untold other countries in the past: attempt to install a friendly regime. Who knows, it may have succeeded. At best, an election was influenced without results. At worst the attempt worked.
I'm not sure if we will ever know what exactly transpired, for me the off-the-books attempt to set up a direct line of communication between Kushner and the Kremlin looked extremely bad and is one of the strongest bits of outward visible proof that there really was something extremely dirty going on. Besides all the circumstantial evidence the direct evidence by itself is telling and I can not imagine any previous - and hopefully future - US administration caught with their pants down to that extent.
I agree with your post and I dont mean to tell you things you may already know but the phrasing of your comment strikes me - "the popular vote is not respected". In an effort to explain rather than talk down, and knowing no more than I do from the comment ...
The popular vote is not a criteria for the winner/loser of an election - never has been here - instead its a component to a larger outcome.
The US has about 327M people and by the nature of our geography they tend to be somewhat more concentrated around coastal areas. Big cities, small farms so to speak.
The reason for the existence of the Electoral College is specifically to prevent any one region/geographic faction of the country from asserting control of the nation via the popular vote.
The lack of respect for the popular vote is no accident. Its a feature, not a bug. "Every vote counts" is absolutely untrue in the US and thats by design.
The evils brought about by counting each vote towards an election are thought to be outweighed by the evils of allowing one regional/socio-economic faction of the population dictate the government for all by virtue of their popular vote capability.
Now lets get real - this is precisely what happens anyhow despite the Electoral College - the battle lines are not regional in nature but economic/religious/cultural. One foreseen evil has been prevented while allowing another situation to thrive. Both sides play this divide and attempt to sway things their own direction.
America has been subdivided into two groups - "Us" and "Them". Things aren't going to get better anytime soon.
Partisanship has nothing to do with destroying your country in order to get ahead. Any time the importance of a party is placed above the importance to the country everybody loses.
Unfortunately, we are witnessing one of the parties in the US doing this, repeatedly I might add.
If the democrats were doing this sort of thing I would be just as much against it. The point is: there actually is a party that is doing this, it is not 'some party' but a specific one.
This is such an empty comment. All it does is whine about "partistanship" without addressing the fact that we have an ideology that has firmly become detached from reality.
As a Canadian, the republican "side" of politics in the US has made it so that debating with them is no longer necessary.
When the moment arrived that facts were no longer on their side, they chose to alter the perception of reality of their voters instead of changing their behavior. They band together and adopt a narrative which they then spread through the networks which are aligned with them and in other public tools like youtube and twitter.
This is so incredibly successful that the only thing guiding their behavior is a change in polling with their base, rather than any philosophy based on values, convictions or general sense of morality.
Hell yes their outright lies should be banned from places like Youtube. They have no basis in reality and contrary to other types of false information, their information has the single goal of maintaining or increasing their power and delegitimizing democracy in the US.
Now from the point of view of the brainwashed conservatives, people like me are the brainwashed ones. There's pretty much nothing we can say to them to convince them otherwise. We can try and prevent the bad actors from saying the things which lead them down the path to dismissing reality.
Also worth noting is are they censoring content that is at the level of "Democrats rigged the election". Or are they censoring all content relating to the election that mentions anything to do with out-of-state voters, dead voters, or unusual voting patterns. The former might be justifiable, the latter seems to censor uncomfortable truths. I personally think the total level of fraud was not nearly large enough to decide the election but a non-zero amount of fraud exists. If we censor any amount of coverage of that fraud how do we improve the system so that dead people and out of state people no longer vote?
I think Google would be more than happy to take a hands off approach. The issue is that the PR hit for being alleged to "radicalize" people or promote fringe views had becomes smaller than the PR hit of censorship.
I have a hard time understanding how this view can be held when we know that there is "censorship" and "moderation" happening in EVERYTHING we do online.
There is a reason you can't find snuff films, pornography, abuse or other exceptionally offensive videos on YouTube. You have to go on some shady websites to get to that kind of content and I'm sure even there some censorship happens so the admins are not legally liable for content.
How about text? Highly classified government information and informant data can put peoples' lives at risk so some text must be "moderated".
> Hopefully some day we will have the same protections the CCP gives its people
Do you not see the contradiction inherent in this? Your implied argument is that people are smart enough to see through propaganda, and your example is China, a society shaped by an extremely effective propaganda machine.
It is unsettling, but look at where we are in 2020, when deepfakes are not yet zero-effort. Imagine a world where every mobile device can deepfake any activity with any person's face. Now think of how places like Newsmax, Fox and Infowars have no scruples spreading lies or dancing around the truth.
We need institutions to trust. Trust in authoritative journalism is all we will have in the future.
Precisely. Youtube is a hosting service first and foremost but increasingly it is used as the propaganda arm of some of the most despicable entities in politics who are aiming for the audience, not the hosting as their main reason for dumping content there. They are freeriding on the youtube brand and do incalculable damage to some very precious concepts and societal structures.
You can't though. Bitchute was banned on Twitter for a long time. The barriers to entry for a new competitor, including network effects in addition to hostility from other platforms, is incredible. YT have a monopoly in their domain.
>We're not intelligent enough to view a video and decide for ourselves what is fact v. propaganda v. entertainment.
You're being sarcastic but growing up we used to joke around saying "I saw it on the internet so it must be true" and now a significant portion of the population actually uses this as a guideline for truth.
I'd argue that many humans think too highly of their intelligence and are not intelligent enough to decide correctly for themselves.
Watching a video or reading an article is, at least, second hand information that you can't verify. If you don't have enough verified data then you cannot make an informed decision anyway.
Many people simply feel they "trust" a source. What is that? Your brain taking input and deciding it "likes" the pattern it concocts? That's okay for lesser decisions but not major nation changing ones.
If you cannot form a consistent logical chain of events that you can extrapolate a decision from then what you are really doing is guessing or gambling. No matter what your "feelings" may tell you.
A non-insignificant proportion of your population believes the earth is as young as 6,000 years old.
A non-insignificant proportion of your population believes Obama is a Muslim anti-christ who wasn't born in the U.S.. Fun fact, the current president is one of the people who participated in stirring up that last part.
A non-insignificant proportion of your population believes Joe Biden defrauded himself into the position of president elect.
Providing a platform every fringe/crackpot conspiracy theory has legitimised some increasingly insane viewpoints in the U.S. and social media appears to be pushing these to even greater extremes than we've seen in the past.
Edit:
We're seeing the same thing in Europe with Q-Anon/Coronavirus/Anti-vaxx conspiracies taking hold as well.
I know its weird, but if I don't like YouTube here in the USA, I can choose to watch videos somewhere else, it isn't my only choice. Except in China, YouTube isn't a choice at all (even via a flaky VPN, video streaming is iffy).
As another analogy, there have been resemblances made between Trump and Xi as both being authoritarians. However, one was unelected, and one declared himself president for life. Huge difference (and if Trump overturns the election, that difference will be gone, but that's a huge "if").
You can't just declare it. You have to have the political power for people to respect it. Even after Xi became president, he didn't have that power until he purged his opponents. Trump certainly never will.
It's so excellent that they've streamlined things for us here. I wish we had something like this here on Hacker News, to tame the ne'er-do-wells who disagree with Mother TV.
The AG of Texas has alleged wrongdoing officially in the form of a suit. I wonder what YouTubes policy would be of someone reading this document on video?
This is slippery slope fallacy. I don't think YouTube removing genuially harmful and false content is really comparable to CCP's suppression of opposing views.
Conversely, others could say that the CCPs removing of generally harmful and false content isn't really comparable to YouTube’s suppression of opposing views.
The difference isn't that some third party observer thinks that what YouTube is suppressing is “harmful and false” while what the CCP is suppressing is opposing views that are neither, in that estimation, harmful nor false, but that YouTube isn't the state and people in the geographic region served by YouTube have alternate sources of content that are not subject to YouTube’s editorial decisions, while those in the region “served” by the CCP have all information sources subjected to (at least by policy, if not always completely successful) the same editorial oversight.
