> We welcome ongoing debate and discussion and will keep engaging with experts, researchers and organizations to ensure that our policies and products are meeting that goal. And as always, we'll apply learnings from this election to our ongoing efforts to protect the integrity of elections around the world.
> Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election...
This is likely going to make a lot of conservatives in the US unhappy, since a number of elected officials in Congress (!) are openly questioning the election results. Also seems a lot more severe than Twitter’s approach, where Twitter is labeling “disputed claims” rather than taking them down.
I don’t believe that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged, but I think it’s heavy-handed to take these videos down outright. After the 2016 election, many people went wild with Russian conspiracy theories that proved to mostly be bogus, and that content never got this level of platform scrutiny or censorship.
As far as I know, no senator is seriously contesting the results. The House always has at least a few crackpots in it, now including a Q believer.
I'm not sure why YouTube should cater to conspiracy theorists just because they'll get upset that their conspiracies are not blasted from YouTube's megaphone. YT is within its rights, and there are thousands of other video sharing services (including Mega, which is totally unregulated) for them to share their content on. They can and do self-host as well.
That is false. The request for emergency injunctive relief was also the request for certiorari. In denying the relief, they closed out the docket and denied certiorari in the process.
And yes, I did look through SCOTUS's docket to find any other docketed case referring to Kelly v PA.
There's no indication in the docket that anything about the case is still live.
If you read the original brief, this is what it requests:
> Petitioners also ask the Court to consider this Application as a petition for certiorari, grant certiorari on the questions presented, treat the Application papers as merits briefing, and issue a merits decision as soon as practicable.
In denying the application, it is by proxy denying the request for certiorari, although I believe it would be theoretically possible to actually reapply for certiorari. (Looking through SCOTUS's rules, it does seem that Rule 22.4 suggests that this is the case)
No, that's a different case. The case Cruz has promised to assist is one in which the state of Texas (yes, the whole thing) is suing other states over alleged election irregularities. When one state sues another, the case goes directly to the supreme court.
And the Texas case is very sound. It gets directly into specific cases and doesn't go down any of the silly Q/Conspiracy routes. Viva does a great analysis:
Texas v. is a great case to put in front of a bunch of originalists. You should definitely brace yourself for a ruling that state courts illegally changed election rules because the constitution solely grants that power to the legislatures of the states.
Edit: if they do the states in question will probably call special legislative sessions to repair the defect.
It's unclear if you realise, but this isn't the same thing at all.
SCOTUS settles interstate disputes all the time. But one of the things they look at before they hear a dispute is if the dispute can be settled in a lower court.
In this case, Texas is complaining about the way otehr states conduct their affairs. The normal course to do this would be via the states courts (that is literally what they exist for).
It's very unclear why SCOTUS would hear this instead of directing Texas to file in the state courts.
(There's also the question of standing, but that's another hurdle Texas would have to overcome)
I'm not a lawyer, but I would argue that other parties have already attempted to dispute the unconstitutional election changes in those state courts, including their supreme courts, and they've been unanimously dismissed for jurisdictional or procedural reasons. For example, I believe the application of laches in Pennsylvania to be improper because Republicans had sought a stay of the election changes prior to the election. Thus far, it appears the Pennsylvania courts refuse to adjudicate the constitutionality of these election changes.
Because the interstate disputes SCOTUS has heard and decided are not about states challenging other states' interpretations of their own laws, but almost entirely about who actually has various water rights? Because the suit alleged here is almost exactly the kind of interstate dispute that SCOTUS has rejected to hear as recently as 2016 (Nebraska v Colorado)?
I'm not a lawyer, but thankfully the constitution is actually a pretty easy read from the originalist perspective that now has significant influence on the court and in this case I don't need to worry about case law and so on, so I'm comfortable speculating a bit.
Here's the relevant text: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
This means that the legislatures of the state have total and exclusive power over the manner in which their electors are chosen. Plainly read, no other body, including that state's judiciary or executive, has the power to direct how electors are chosen. This power is so broad the state could select electors by lottery, or even a poll on hackernews and it wouldn't be subject to any oversight other than a constitutional amendment.
So, you can see that this isn't about a state following its own laws, it's about a state following the constitution. Since the constitution is a pact between the fifty sovereign states, like any other binding pact when another party doesn't follow the rules of the pact they can be sued in the appropriate venue which is the Supreme Court of the United States, or otherwise acted against. Let us hope it doesn't come to the otherwise option anytime soon, because the last time was a real mess.
I think the best, if not necessarily the most likely outcome, is that the court orders the lawbreaking states to fix things, which is as simple as calling a special legislative section and passing a resolution selecting a slate of electors. Presumably states with Democratic legislatures will pick Biden and those with Republican legislatures will pick Trump, but no matter what it will be up to the democratically elected legislatures of the state in question, which in a sane world would be acceptable to both sides.
And your proposed remedy involving throwing away everyone's votes is completely outrageous (as noted by the judge when proposed by the Trump team in MI or PA)
If you find this convincing I weep for the people who have to interact with you on the daily. The Texas suit is completely bananas and relies on ten pages of complete gibberish from a 75-year-old energy economist consultant. Please read the appendix of the suit. If you know anything about statistics, you'll find it to be total nonsense.
The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.on November 4, 2020,is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004).
This - of course - is only true assuming votes are evenly distributed though out each state, and urban centers vote the same as country areas. He doesn't even mention that in his affidavit.
And he tries to use Z-scores to claim that it's impossible this mean people voted differently compared to 2016! That's ridiculous and - very notably - he fails to to do the same for eg Trump vs Romney or Obama vs Clinton.
No wonder trust in science is decreasing with people asking us to take this crap seriously.
UTexas Law Professor says about it: "It looks like we have a new leader in the “craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election” category" and "o chalk this up as mostly a stunt — a dangerous, offensive, and wasteful one, but a stunt nonetheless."[1]
So a liberal professor in Austin, who is also a CNn analyst, thinks it's a "crazy stunt" with no actual law analysis? [0] And his peers are on the Biden transition team? [1]
After a cursory search, it looks like you can add Lindsay Graham [0] as a Republican senator questioning election results, as well as Mitch McConnell [1] and Perdue and Loeffler [2].
Yeah.. In court. Trump campaign and the party has a right to challenge results in court (if they don't have standing the lawsuit will be thrown out immediately). That's working within the system.
Are you arguing that candidates and parties should not be allowed to challenge various aspects of elections in a court of law? You think that had Trump been barred from filing lawsuits, that that would improve trust in the election system?
Most of the lawsuits Trumps lawyers and other supporters have produced are batshit and people are trying to get the lawyers sanctioned for frivolous lawsuits. These suits are failing in court, the only thing they're good for is as a justification for conspiracy theories
Are you trying to make the point that YouTube is a special interest site and not a platform? Or are you trying to make the point that YouTube should have its cake and eat it too by being protected as a platform, and at the same time play the role of a curator and publisher?
>are you trying to make the point that YouTube should have its cake and eat it too by being protected as a platform, and at the same time play the role of a curator and publisher?
I could waste everyone's time and explain why that's flat wrong. Instead, I'll refer you here[0] which will explain, in detail, why you're wrong about Section 230.
I'm likely banned from HN now from all the downvotes I received for the perfectly legit response, yet some people appear to not like facts so much that they just downvote to censor (which HN does).
The entire point of the safe harbor, the explicit purpose of section 230 of the CDA, is that a site exercises editorial control and moderation and still enjoys the safe harbor.
The safe harbour deadline is mostly procedural anyway. Justice Ginsburg even said something along the lines that the only real date that matters is when Congress actually certifies the electoral college votes - in January.
It would be a catastrophe if the current US administration indeed was unable to ensure free and fair elections in their country - for the first time in US history, unless previous elections such as the 2016 election were fraudulent, too!
Right... if this election was fraudulent, then might as well cancel the 2016 elections as well. They also had 4 years to help improve election security, which conservatives waited until after they lost to cry fraud.
For God's sakes ... What underpins this need for social media companies to virtue signal about protecting 'election integrity' is the false notion that 2016 was stolen from Hillary by the Russians - a claim that had no evidential support (and no, that some trolls bought a minuscule amount of Facebook ads does not raise this claim to that level) but the entire Democratic party, with media allies, promulgated for the last 4 years and pressured social media leadership to adopt as well. And now social media companies are engaged in full-scale curation and editorial control over any content that even comes close to questioning or even having regular open discussion of unfolding events. Ridiculous.
> Since September, we've terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken down before they had 100 views.
Yay! Thank you YouTube interns for protecting me from making up my own mind about these dangerous ideas.
I also like that the authoritative sources are ... the same media companies, owned by multinational corporate conglomerates, that are always pushing for deplatforming of independent news sources. No self-serving policies here! Tell me again NYTimes how Philip DeFranco and Joe Rogan are a gateway to the alt-right.
Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.)
The comment to which you're replying said "the government" didn't claim Russia tampered with the results. You can't rebut that with a cite of Neera Tanden, who was not in the government.
The 2 parties govern the US, for better or worse.
The good faith interpretation allows for more than the official press releases (eg Trump talking points), which are presented to be in dispute.
I'm going to gently push harder, because I don't think you can reasonably compare what angry Democrats said and did in 2016 to what's happening in 2020. Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors. The sitting Democratic president didn't directly lobby state governors and state house speakers to decertify results. For that matter: Democrats didn't deliberately fuck up tabulation processes to sow chaos to exploit later in the month.
They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.
You said, “Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors.” I thought you might like to know that is not true.
I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually.
To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.”
NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia.
Whatever argument you think it is we're having, you win. My point is that the 2016 Democrats and the 2020 Republicans aren't comparable, and that's obviously true.
A Youtube video, fantastic! Yet you'll blindly compare that to physical threats of violence that we continue to see over and over which have been instigated by misleading or false statements from our sitting President?
Do you think such an action could ever be justified? What kind of evidence would you need in order to consider proceeding down such a path? Thousands of affidavits, tens of thousands of documented illegal votes, video evidence of illegal ballot counting?
You left out Spyder and his SpiderFoot scan indicating that Iran was voting directly in the election using its access to Dominion voting machines. How could this not reach SCOTUS?
Hah. I have no illusions that SCOTUS will take up the case. I personally think it still pales in comparison to the “pee-pee dossier” that Clinton cooked up to frame Trump.
I follow politics pretty closely and this is literally the first time I've heard that anyone was alleging Russia actually hacked voting machines or switched votes. I had only heard about social media disinformation and social media disinformation campaigns.
I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.
As someone who followed things fairly closely at the time, that's not true. There was talk of meddling with voter rolls, but changing of votes was basically not discussed and was quickly dismissed.
So I think you're right in the literal sense, but rainer is accurate in the sentiment.
The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference.
Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.
My reading of Tanden's tweet is that she's rebutting Trump's first sentence, not the second. Ie, Asserting that Russian hacking (in the form of releasing sensitive emails) was plainly sufficient to flip 70 kVotes (Donald Trumps cumulative margin in the states over the tipping point) and ignoring the question of whether "voting machines [were] touched".
Even if they meant Russian hacking influenced people enough to flips 70k votes, that's still unsupported conjecture worded in way that strongly implies actual hacking of votes.
Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about.
And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.
Neera was clearly saying that she believes that Russia’s actions affected the election results.
Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched.
Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack.
Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign.
66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.
That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign.
What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.
Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.
I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American?
A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.
The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent.
As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good...
But baring that, how do you know which side is propaganda? Is it FOX/CNN/MSNBC or is it Newsmax/DailyWire/NYPost/Blaze/Crowder? Which side is the propaganda and which is the capitol T Truth?
Well, there are facts which are either hard to argue or everybody is agreeing upon, like the public presentations of politicians. Given those facts, sometimes - not always - it's a matter of values to choose sides.
It's not always easy, yes. But still critical thinking goes a long way.
Godwin's Law can be used as a tool to suppress valid comparisons. Don't fall for that.
I worked in Dem political tech. The Russian Troll Farm/Cambridge Analytica/social ads scandal is mostly noise and no signal. But you’re missing something important: Russian state sponsored hackers spearfished and stole data from the RNC, DNC, and the Clinton circle. They deliberately released the latter two and withheld the first. Those releases don’t define the entire election, but they had a demonstrable and empirically validated impact on voters. Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.
Russia really did interfere in that election and you’ve ignored this crucial fact.
This a very interesting, yet curiously unsupported assertion.
Indeed, it is a "crucial fact," and one with zero public, supporting evidence. If you were to find this evidence, you would change the world. Do find it, if you can.
This isn't hard to find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20... has over 500 references. The senate committee report was over 1300 pages. The evidence is readily available and as well documented as you could expect. At a certain point, the onus is on you to provide refutations on why what exists doesn't meet your impossibly high bar.
Your very link quotes: 'investigators “did not have sufficient evidence” to prove active participation in the hacks or knowledge that the electronic thefts were continuing.'
Please do not spam non-evidence. It's "an impossibly high bar" for you. But do not call it evidence. I am familiar with the level of information collection that occurs, and I do not view this as a high bar.
That quote is specifically referencing whether Trump actively participated in the efforts, which is not part of any of this discussion (though many of his close associates did).
> Russia really did interfere in that election and in your rush to point out something dumb that Dems did, you’ve ignored this crucial fact.
Well democrats clearly interfered in the 2020 election. Emergency laws to allow no excuse mail in voting (which turned out to largely favor Biden), social media banners in your face from every angle to vote vote vote, just go out and vote, don't think - vote, quick - vote, here let me hold your hand to help you register so you can vote! One of the things Dems blamed for Hillary's loss was low voter turnout, so they pushed extremely aggressively for higher voter turnout to change 2020 election results.
My point is - so what? Lots of stuff can affect the outcome of an election, as seen recently with emergency no excuse mail in voting. If we really cared about the sanctity of democracy we shouldn't have allowed last second changes that alter the mechanics of an election in favor of one party over another.
Trump didn't "demonise" mail-in voting. He stated that it enabled voter fraud by eliminating chain of custody. I have yet to hear a single advocate of mail-in voting explain how chain of custody can be preserved and ballot harvesting prevented. There is clear evidence of harvesting, e.g. 100K ballots 99% for Biden, dropped off at a polling station in Philadelphia with no chain of custody, no Republican poll watchers allowed in the room, nothing downballot i.e. only Biden was selected on the ballots - this is ballot harvesting, at a very minimum.
Do you think the mailed in votes favored democrats because of some property of mail in voting, or because republicans had been discouraging their voters from using it for much of the preceding year?
That’s not very accurate and makes a lot of unproven assumptions. They found that an old, disused RNC domain from years prior was compromised. There’s no reason to believe they withheld anything material, and even if they did, it’s not really relevant. All they did was show the public authentic emails. If anyone actually changed their vote based on having additional facts, which I doubt happened in any significant way, then it was for the right reasons.
If your wife-to-be was having an affair and this was dumped before the wedding day, would you be mad at the hacker, or at your partner? Blaming Russia for showing truth never made any sense to me. Are we to believe that the process has more integrity when we cast our votes with less information?
You are absolutely, factually incorrect. Your opinion is also unfortunate, to equate adversarial nation-state "meddling" with domestic corporate campaigns, though the latter is also woeful.
That Trump was elected is a harbinger of American decline, that so many people think his persona, "intellect" and view on leadership are worthy of consideration as leader of this country. It's an indictment of our electoral and voting systems, that any good faith Republicans felt they "had" to vote for such an awful leader in order to avoid the centrism of a Democratic administration.
But I don't think every Trump voter is a racist nazi. I think they were just okay with Trump being an awful human being and a terrible leader, so long as they could prevent poor people from getting health care or acknowledging climate change.
>That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years.
Why would you feel the need to lie about something so clearly untrue? I'm sure you can find a group of people on the internet somewhere that might have made this claim, in the same way that you can find people claiming the earth is flat.
But this fabrication that everyone was claiming Russians hacked the votes is just nonsense.
Yes, including Iran, so what's your point? A bipartisan commission found overwhelming evidence of a widespread, organized, and coordinated effort from several foreign agencies to spread misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. What term do you want to use besides "meddling" then?
Would be great if they used a term that correlates to a specific crime. "Meddling" is pervasive and legal, so accusations of meddling seem like propaganda from the intelligence community.
This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different.
The problem is the "regular open discussion", which has turned into a cesspool of fact-free ranting, and has created serious societal virality and negative impact.
You can rant against the mainstream media, but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there -- how many independent YouTube sources do the same?
Why should regular people trust the Bay Area perspective on what counts as "fact-free ranting"? Tech has no legitimate authority to decide what is true. The mindset and moral system that's overwhelmingly dominant in tech is abhorrent to much of the rest of the country and the world. Why should this prominent but fringe Bay Area mentality dominate?
It's simply not tech's place to be making these calls. It's arrogance and hubris and it's going to lead to a backlash.
Who, then, decides what is true? Random YouTube commenters? Joe Rogan? Rush Limbaugh? The QAnon Twitter-sphere? Perhaps we can just vote on whether gravity exists.
Why does anyone need to decide what is true? Each person can decide for himself in his own heart what he believes. We reach consensus through discussion. There is never, not once, in any situation whatsoever a justification for forcing a particular perspective on the public instead of letting the marketplace of ideas function and find the truth organically.
This idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed is the mark of every insecure tyranny. Secure beliefs don't need to be propped up with censorship, and a belief isn't secure, it's because it's just not adequately backed up by facts.
The marketplace is broken. A non-trivial amount of people believe the earth is flat. People are becoming immune to fact-based evidence, because they get to immerse themselves in an alternate universe which tells them that they're right. Soon the ramifications won't be restricted to people shooting up pizza parlors.
The marketplace is not broken merely because one party's goods aren't selling. If I make scratchy toilet paper and people don't buy it, it's my fault, not the market's. The fact is that the media elite have little credibility these days among the general public, their wares suck, and people are investigating alternatives. The solution isn't censorship. It's becoming more credible.
Why should credibility matter? That is to say, how can the average person know that what they're reading is credible or not to make that determination and say "oh, CNN reported this and it's credible! Must mean that CNN is becoming more credible and I should watch it more because they have a better product" rather than "CNN is reporting this but it doesn't line up with what I want to believe, they must be wrong and not credible". Your metaphor doesn't make sense in a world where news stories are looked at skin deep, where someone doesn't even know that the toilet paper is scratchy it just _looks_ scratchy from the label or uncle Joe told me that it must be scratchy because it's made by Proctor & Gamble.
Credibility matters, because people really do want to base their opinions on facts. CNN existed for two decades before Fox News got popular. That wasn't the case because everyone agreed all the time back then. It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.
> people really do want to base their opinions on facts
Not really, confirmation bias is a real thing for all human beings. The issue here is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a fact. Objectivity in reporting is also subjective, funnily enough. If I consider NPR to be very objective because the dead-pan monotonic voice of the announcer simply says a direct quote from a member of congress, I can talk to a relative who will tell me that same NPR story is biased because they reported on something they don't agree with.
> It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.
There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society. The difference is that 20-30 years ago, there wasn't a deluge of information or misinformation readily available to get those dopamine hits from confirming biases.
And a non-trivial number of people believed that the U.S. has spent decades slashing school funding. Or that Stacey Abrams "should be the governor of Georgia right now." Or that Citizens United was about campaign contributions. Or that we are 10 years away from the end of civilization due to climate change. As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.
I think it's fair to say that Republicans are somewhat more likely to believe in false information, but Democrats believe plenty of incorrect things as well. And I'd rather have a broken marketplace than one where Democrats just get to decide what's true.
Especially when its taken just 5 minutes for the perceived guard rails to evaporate! We're not talking about "the earth is flat" here. We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic. We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake. Even if I'm amenable to "fact checking" something like "Obama was born in Kenya" I'm sure as hell not going to support Google deciding something is true or untrue before the courts do.
Google is not deciding what is true or untrue. Google is deciding what they will host on their service.
The mods on this site make similar decisions every single day, but I've never seen you post about that. Why shouldn't youtube have the same ability to moderate their site as Hacker News?
Do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases?
Editing to make this a bit clearer:
As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.
The media breathlessly reports allegations in complaints as fact all the time. Stacey Abrams' case against Brian Kemp over the 2016 election was voluntarily dismissed without the court ever reaching the merits. The media reported on the complaint, and an early ruling granting Abrams discovery, but of course never reported the quiet voluntary dismissal when nothing turned up.
No, but if they were so obviously fraudulent so as to merit a media blackout, wouldn't we have established that by now? When there is actually a real dispute over authenticity, that's news.
Yes, by cryptographic signature. DKIM was verified. Some senders/recipients also provided human verification.
Censorship is why you didn't already know this. It should have been major news, being the headline story everywhere for a week. It passed by here quietly, on Hacker News, and was quickly flagged.
You're left with an incomplete view of the world that is very misleading. People everywhere are using this warped view of reality to make world-changing decisions.
> We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake.
Except we're not. Guiliani said in one of the few courts that asked for an oral argument that it wasn't a fraud case[1]. Fraud requires specific proof which he/they do not have.
This is PR/fund raising disguised as comical legal filings.
I think this is a good example of what happens when you wade into a nest of vipers. 'Fraud' can have different meanings, and sometimes what is used in common language is not the correct legal term.
So is it misleading to call it fraud? Or are you just nitpicking? Depends on who you ask.
As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.
As another left-leaning person who has also had this experience recently, and who is rather disturbed by the delusions and hypocrisy from “my team”, I’ve noticed that your posts lately seem to do an excellent job of offering a more complete picture. Often, completing the picture involves clarifying the right-leaning viewpoint. It’s unfortunate that you usually get downvoted for it, even when you aren’t inserting your own opinion and stating things that are objectively true.
Just curious, has the combination of the bad behavior by many on the left in conjunction with receiving additional context from the right, pushed you towards the center or even the right? Or are you merely trying to act as more of an ambassador for Republican views?
The people. They should watch all of it, and decide for themselves. What's wrong with Rogan? His podcast is incredible.
Let's listen to everything. Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again! This continual lockdown has deeply hurt our ability to actually communicate with one another in any meaningful way.
Individuals do not have the capacity to inspect facts. Do you inspect how the cake flour met the FDA standards? You trust authority, in this case, the FDA + Store Owner + Distributor + Manufacturer.
This is so ridiculous. I think you mean we need to have the information so if an individual wants to verify, they can and if they can spend the energy and rigor to know the research/data. Please stop requiring individuals to verify truth. Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances. Reputable media is an authority of similar civic responsibility.
Next time you buy a measuring tape, you're gonna sound ridiculous to ask for a NIST certificate at Home Depot.
Do you trust your doctor? Do you consider the court as a misplaced authority? They make judgements, often nuances of interpretation based on their moral compass - they arbitrage truth from application of laws against evidence. In many cases, there is subjective interpretation and the "spirit of the law".
This is an absurd and breathtakingly dangerous argument. No, we don't expect people to inspect their own cake flour. But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting. What you're advocating for is a kritarchy, with "reputable media" as the judges.
We've been trusting publishers of books for many decades before the internet. The internet has put in no checks and balances for publishing - any loud voice can rampantly go out and get 200,000k followers.
No one is taking away right to assemble in public. Twitter is a publisher with no quality checks in place.
Who trusted book publishers? What American can even name 3 of them, or could in the 1970s? This doesn't seem like a serious argument, and it gets less serious the further back in time you go and the more all of publishing resembled the Weekly World News.
Tell me more about the checks and balances that exist in book publishing. Publishers --- often mainstream publishers --- published the first editions of Mein Kampf, Camp of the Saints, Architects of Conspiracy, Did Six Million Really Die, and all manner of medical pseudoscience.
- Time to publish, it’s not instant like the internet
- Allows people to editorialize and review, even if they allow publishing
- Allow critics to voice their opinions before the book blows up
I’m in no way saying we need to have a CCP level control over what gets published or not, but I am just pointing out the virality of social media that didn’t exist before the internet.
You can make many arguments around it, the fact is that the internet fundamentally changed the way conspiracy theories propagate.
Even if controversial books are published, someone is going to a bookstore and buying it. There are reviews on ebooks. There is so much discussion. No such thing is exists in echo chambers.
> We had echo chambers long before we had an Internet.
Yes indeed. The Internet, as well as some other more modern communication technologies, has greatly optimized the proliferation and psychological impact of the echo chambers.
Probably a digression from OP's point, but perhaps a useful one:
Suppose two long paths leading home are filled with people.
Path one is a park filled with people reading various physical copies of books, one of whom looks up from their copy of Mein Kampf to say something threatening to you.
Path two is filled with innocuous-looking people, all glued to the screens of essentially the same model of smartphone. One of them looks up from their device just long enough to tell you, "Samy is my hero."
> But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting.
Do we?
Let's address this on two levels: First do we really expect people to evaluate the facts relevant to who they choose to vote for? I mean on the one hand, the system does this, yes. But not because we have any particular amount of faith that everyone is ready to bear the responsibility. Instead, we're resigned to the fact that all the other options are worse. I mean the founders absolutely didn't trust the people to evaluate their leadership, unless you were willing to restrict the definition of "people" to "white male landowners".
Hell, even more, the constitution as written (and federalist 68 explicitly) suggested that the people themselves shouldn't select the president, but only select representatives who ultimately do the selection. The justification for this was that said representatives would hopefully be more capable than the average individual of weighing all of the requirements of the office.
So the founders certainly didn't share your faith. Nor, even today, does the constitution itself. Ultimately though, having a well informed populace is very different from having a kritarchy, and having reputable media is necessary for a well informed populace.
If you're bombarded with two contradictory pieces of information (which I'd argue is in many cases the explicitly strategy of some of the media), you either need to be an expert on the topic, or your only approach is to trust people. Like, are you really saying we expect the average American to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to economic policy? Nobel prize winners disagree!
But that's just the first layer. There's a second layer here:
At this point we're no longer talking about the political participation of voting. That's already happened. The votes are in. What we're talking about is asking people to evaluate the facts of obscure election law that's in most cases never been tested. The average American isn't a constitutional Judge. But, to use your word, the president has asked unelected judges to directly overrule the will of the people literally dozens of times. That's kritarchy (or just raw authoritarianism, your choice). The actual experts, the judges, have resoundingly said no. Like, among the experts, there is no controversy here. And yet the conspiracy theory persists. Why is that?
Of course they have the capacity to check facts, the means to do so are found on the same network where the fact-to-be-checked was found in the first place. Some people will check those facts, many others won't. If what is written is patently false this will come out soon enough.
You call to "stop requiring individuals to verify truth" can be phrased in another, more honest way: support specific organisations to decide where the truth lies. For simple facts - the current temperature, the price of petrol at the pump, the energy content of a portion of a given food - this works. For disputed facts - nearly anything related to SARS2, nearly anything related to climate, nearly anything related to nuclear power, nearly anything related to migration, the veracity and validity of identity politics, the absence or presence of "systemic" racism - this patently fails since the gatekeeper gets to impose its own views on the public. When that gatekeeper happens to be the 500lbs gorilla in the field that means the public has to do exactly what you decry to be ridiculous: they have to go check whether the presented facts are true or just the result of the gatekeeper projecting its opinions, a task made harder by that gatekeeper - the 500lbs gorilla - blocking opposing views from its platform.
On your measuring tape comparison I can state that measuring tapes sold in e.g. the Netherlands clearly state that they are not to be used for trading purposes ("niet voor handelsdoeleinden") since they are not officially calibrated. Just like scales, pumps and other measuring equipment measuring tapes/sticks/etc. used for trading purposes need to be calibrated, get stamped that they are, complete with a calibration expiry date. So, yes, if it really matters you do ask for a calibrated measuring device.
> Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again!
Once there's a viable vaccine, sure. I don't disagree about your point of the damage the lockdown has done, but USA governments and citizens haven't locked down consistently enough to provide the intended results.
> but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there
No. No there absolutely is not. The fact that you trust the Legacy Media at all is part of the problem. It's independent analysts who have been the only ones to do any real research.
They choose how to spin stories based on biases to the point where they are effectively reporting different "facts".
The other week I posted the below, which are headlines for the same 3 stories on the same day from CNN and Fox, arguably 2 of the biggest "news" sources in the U.S. These headlines are effectively opinions with the aim of gaslighting their respective audience. It's not healthy.
What process exists for fact-checking independent analysts? Most have zero accountability and have even less incentive to verify claims because 1) It takes time and money 2) Often does not serve their own political agendas and subscriber bases/income streams
Yes, placing our complete trust in a few major media outlets to accurately report the facts is naive. But believing that individuals with no independent fact checking department or an editor to enforce journalistic standards will somehow be less biased is even more naive.
How did we get to the point where what we say needs to be factual?
Factually correct speech has its place. But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends, you don't need to be factual. That's not a necessary ingredient to a good conversation.
I have a Youtube channel where I sometimes talk about Space and Biology. I'm not educated in these subjects. No doubt a lot of what I say is factually incorrect. That doesn't mean my speech is misinformation, deceitful, or dangerous.
It's even worse than you describe. Hyperbole is being flagged as "disinformation" or "lies". All the nuance of human communication is being squeezed into a lowest-common-denominator straight-jacket, based on what's easiest to censor. And the "progressives" are the cheerleaders this time. It's depressing.
> But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends
These things are not the same. When you talk with friends or when you write a comment, you have a limited audience and counter viewpoints are readily available. When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.
>When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.
Here's a comment snippet you wrote 3 days ago: "Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies.
Are you really doing your 'best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements'? Because I'm sure you have no evidential basis for that statement and therefore promulgating misinformation. Alternatively, we can have YouTube Interns decide what you can and cannot say online.
Regardless, perhaps you should take your own advice?
It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints, such as your comment.
And it's also fun that you took a comment that basically said "channels with big audiences should care about not saying wrong things" and took it as a support of censorship.
Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
- Facebook wanted to create a digital currency, and wanted it to be used by as much people as possible.
- Monetary sovereignty is the capacity of a state to control what currency is used as legal payment, how much of it is issued and how much of is it retired.
- If Libra became widespread in a country under the conditions that Facebook wanted (i.e., the Libra association controlling issuance and retirement), it would complete and (partially or completely) replace the state's currency and therefore the state would not have power to control its own currency, therefore losing monetary sovereignty to the Libra association.
- The Libra association was an association of private companies, QED.
And all of this brings me again to the point of how comments and videos are different. I made a comment, you made a comment, I made another one, and most people reading will watch the different viewpoints. If this was instead YouTube videos with millions of views, a lot of people would see the video title and take it as fact, another group would watch it and wouldn't care or wouldn't have the capacity to search for the opposing viewpoints, and only a minority (I think) would actually see the full debate. That's why I say that the standards should be different if your potential audience is bigger and they're less exposed to other viewpoints.
>It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints
What is happening with YouTube, is happening with Twitter and Facebook, so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning. Twitter was built for off-the-cuff comment-type communication and Facebook was built for sharing posts and content with close relations. And yet the exact same 'curation' is being done there as well. So no, I don't agree there is some magic difference between video and text.
>Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
NO it's not. You saying it doesn't make it so. You're impugning a motive on Facebook that you have no evidential support for. But that's not the salient point in this discussion, because your opinion about the level of evidence that you feel you bring to the argument is immaterial to social media 'curation'. What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
> so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning.
I did not make a distinction between video and text, I made a distinction based on audiences and availability of counterpoints. I used those examples because they were the ones that the parent comment used. I do not know why you're talking about video and text.
> What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
And at what point did I say I was in favor of social media curation? I said people should try to avoid saying wrong things in their own content when that content has a large audience with counterpoints not readily visible.
I guess the difference between 2016 and 2020 outcomes is that democrats at least didn't create any ruckus during the power transfer from Obama to Trump .
Plus, since the Democrats did it , the Republicans have a right to create a bigger ruckus is not justified.
Also the Russian interference was more about social media influence rather than raising questions on election or voter integrity.
A lot of Trump supporters are openly coming out with arms these days , hence propagating rigged election claims is or so more dangerous.
>I guess the difference between 2016 and 2020 outcomes is that democrats at least didn't create any ruckus during the power transfer from Obama to Trump
Crossfire Hurricane wasn't enough of a ruckus?
It came out recently that Eric Swalwell was targeted by a Chinese spy, but cut ties after a 'defensive briefing' by the FBI. Hillary's campaign also received a 'defensive briefing' in 2015 when a foreign government tried to influence her campaign through a campaign associate. Trump's campaign never got one, instead FBI ordered an investigation on the flimsies grounds and outright lies to the FISA courts (and what turned out to be opo-research funded by the Hillary campaign and promulgating actual Russian disinformation)..
And then the next four years had Hillary going around saying explicitly that Trump is not a legitimate president - a claim not challenged by media and echoed by the Democrats. The media itself kept pushing the discredit Steele dossier throughout that time. So I do roll my eyes when political activists in the Democratic party and media are now all about 'election integrity' after what they did to the trust in the system over the last 4 years. And I'm not really worried about Trump bitching on Twitter and putting out lawsuits (as is his right), as some threat to Democracy.
He has the right to put out lawsuits. He looks like a buffoon, but he has the right.
He does not have the right to ask state governors to ignore the election results and appoint electors who will vote for Trump. That is far beyond the legitimate exercise of Trump's rights.
Is that true? Doesn't he have the right to ask the governors to do this, or to ask them to buy him an ice cream, or to sing him a love song? They have the right to decline - he can't compel them to do anything.
Well, the courts have the legitimate authority to hear the cases. The governors do not have the legitimate authority to grant Trump's request. So filing lawsuits in court is a legitimate action in a way that the requests to governors are not.
Whether people have the right to request governors to perform illegitimate actions... that probably depends on your definition of "right", and I don't care very much about having that debate.
Generally no, because trying to convince a state actor to break his own state's laws is criminal conspiracy (though the details are specific to each state). These states have laws about how elections are run, most/all of them criminalize election fraud, and none of them allow the legislature to select electors directly.
The theory here is that the US Constitution, because of wording in Article II ("Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors [...]") that if interpreted hyperspecifically[1] implies that the legislature alone, and not Governor or state law, has the power to appoint electors. That has never been tested in practice.
But regardless, it would still be a state crime to do it. So no, he doesn't have the right.
[1] Obviously the reasonable interpretation of this line is "States decide for themselves how to choose electors", not something that makes assumptions about the structure of state government.
>He does not have the right to ask state governors to ignore the election results and appoint electors who will vote for Trump. That is far beyond the legitimate exercise of Trump's rights.
I want you to step back and really consider the reporting on this by taking into context the kind of reporting of the behind-the-scene Trump Administration actions that came out of the media. And given that, I have no idea how you can possibly take this interpretation at face-value.
For the last 4 years, there has been an egregious claim after another, each more bonkers than the next, unverified, stemming from some 'anonymous sources' against Trump that has time and time again proven to be without merit. Every.single.week.
Just recently, a news cycle was devoted to the claim that Trump will barricade himself in the office if Biden wins. Just prior to the election, multiple news cycles were devoted to reporting on Trump destroying postal boxes to prevent mail-in voting. A little before that, Trump was accused of ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers (another meritless claim that was disavowed by the the Taliban, Russian, American Intelligence and Army with no evidence presented by NYTimes). Again, this occurred every single week for the last 4 years.
And you don't even have an ounce of skepticism of reporting that Trump in a private conversation asked governors to break the law, given how this kind of stuff has been reported, time and time again?
The gaslighting of the last 4 years has been insane and the media is simply incapable of objective straight reporting on Trump. I know how that sounds, but that's what it is.
Obama did not obstruct or delay transition of power. It was quite peaceful.
Trump clearly has not facilitated a good faith, peaceful transition of power.
And this matters - the 9/11 commission noted that the rushed transition due to Bush v Gore contributed to the intelligence lapses that lead to the attack. And that wasn't even a bad actor harming the transition like we have today.
I remember the Mueller Report being kind of a big deal...
Dems didn't delay transition of power, but they did spend a huge amount of political capital trying to convince the country that Trump's victory was invalid or fraudulent.
> Dems didn't delay transition of power, but they did spend a huge amount of political capital trying to convince the country that Trump's victory was invalid or fraudulent.
No, they spent a lot of political capital on the idea that Trump was corrupt and aided by foreign powers, basically no Democrats (in national office, at least) seriously
advanced the case that Trump's election was either invalid or fraudulent (that his conduct, including conduct after the election, warranted impeachment and removal, yes, but that's a very different case than the election being fraudulent or invalid.)
As a parallel with subordinate offices, Democrats generally think Barr is a bad attorney-general, and his appointment was a result of improper motives, and some have made calls that he should be impeached, but none have claimed his appointment is invalid.
On the other hand, Chad Wolf’s appointment as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has been described and challenged as invalid (and, in fact, found to be so by courts, invalidating official acts dependent on his appointment to that position.)
There is a difference between acheiving an office by unethical means, or having bad conduct warranting removal from office, on one hand and illegitimately claiming office on the other hand. You are improperly conflating accusations of the former with accusations of the latter.
The Mueller investigation uncovered plenty of actual criminality.
Manafort (plea deal and convictions), Roger Stone (convicted on all counts), Cohen (plead guilty and convicted on multiple counts), Flynn (plead guilty to lying to the FBI, pardoned) are the big names.
All direct associates of Donald Trump, and all their criminality was for his benefit.
The main reason Donald Trump hasn't been charged with anything himself is because he is using the office of the presidency to shield himself. We will soon see if he can survive without a scratch without that shield.
Still going on about boogieman Hillary 4 years later. You've just proven why YouTube needs to take these steps, time to step out of your alt-right bubble.
YouTube IS taking these steps, so don't worry about that.
They aren't waiting for me to prove to them anything.
Reminds me of the exchange between William Roper and Thomas More. After More balked at arresting someone who hasn't broken any laws, Roper stated that he'd "cut down every law in England" to get the Devil. More answered: "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide"
Once the tech and media conglomerates take the mantle of curation and censorship, it's only a matter of time before you run afoul and get dragged under as well. You feel safe now because you feel they share your political beliefs, but that will change.
Of course, if YouTube (and others) actually cared about helping, they would change or remove their algorithmic feed, which is the real crux of the problem. But that hits their bottom line more than pulling down individual pieces of content does, so here we are.
The problem is not just that the Russians tried to interfere with our election. It's that President Trump openly invited their illegal meddling and likely conspired with them and then tried to drop sanctions on then after the election
There was an investigation taking years and several million dollars that was politically motivated to prove that was true. The investigation couldn't prove it.
I know that for a lot of people the report ended up getting reduced down to a handful of 2-4 sound bites but there isn’t a single word in the parent post that is incorrect. The reality is that the report was almost 500 pages of nuance. This seems like an ok overview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
What underpins the visceral emotions you feel? If you're entitled to rant on the Internet, if you feel some payoff to that, don't you think someone is entitled to "virtue signal?" Isn't "virtual signaling" just, "someone else's passion about something, but that something is just not something I personally feel passionate about?"
The current Tech Companies news narratives makes no logical sense to me. Here is why:
We were told that Russia interfered in 2016 elections and helped to elect Trump. Now, we are told that 2020 elections were of the highest integrity. Why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Were they scared of Trump administration? But wait, we were told that Trump was Russian puppet, so they would be scared of him, right? So again, why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Or did Russia interfered in 2020 election, "just as they did in 2016", and elected Biden this time?
In short, Tech Media narrative does not make sense to me. And all censorship eventually fails, just take a look at the Fall of Socialism in the Soviet Union.
> the entire Democratic party, with media allies, promulgated for the last 4 years and pressured social media leadership to adopt as well.
Democrats have claimed pretty every election for the last 20 years has been stolen, or at least could have been stolen, due to dominion's voting machines having the ability to flip votes undetected. Bev Harris's book Black Box Voting literally came out in 2003.[1]
Now apparently not only was this election the first not to have been stolen, but it's not even a possibility that something like that could happen. Go figure.
It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech, when we've seen over and over and over that such sites always devolve into festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism. Always. Every time.
Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans. False information is much more powerful than true information, and "making up your own mind" is simply not possible when you are bombarded with orders of magnitude more false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions.
Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.
"It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech, when we've seen over and over and over that such sites always devolve into festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism. Always. Every time."
I'd find your comment much more interesting if you actually argued against the OP's point rather than this strawman.
"False information is much more powerful than true information"
So apparently you believe individuals aren't capable of responsibly enjoying freedom, and thus should concede automomy of thought to the elite for what information they can consume or spread?
Some people can't handle their alchohol, but prohibiting the sale of alcohol didn't solve the probelm. Some individuals have problems, so the way to deal with that is at the individual level. Sorry the solution doesn't scale well. Freedom is great, but it's kind of expensive.
Targeted misinformation campaigns are capable of destroying freedom just as easily as any authoritarian government -- in fact the former is always a tool of the latter. Therefore I can rephrase your last sentence as "Freedom is great, but it comes at the cost of freedom."
People choose to consume alcohol knowing it will get them drunk. People do not choose to be lied to. A better analogy is saying that the government should not attempt to regulate what companies put in the food they sell, because then I must believe individuals aren't capable of self-determining what is or is not safe for them to eat. Correct: I do not believe in "buyer beware" for food nor for facts.
And who determines what is true? Do I get to censor Obama when he claimed 'if you like your healthcare, you can keep it' (rated 'lie of the year' by politifact btw)?
When you start down this path, you will quickly find yourself amongst a nest of vipers.
You're comparing falsehoods with hate and racism--I don't think that's a fair comparison. YouTube has always had rules around hate speech, and that generally has not been controversial.
> It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech
No, not every site. But just as we have some public forums in the real world (not all, or even most "festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism"), we should have some on the internet.
> Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans.
This reminds of arguing with objectivists who think that everything they believe flows from "A is A". I do agree that humans are humans, I'm glad we found some common ground here. Presumably you are human as well. But you are not concerned that what you believe is the result of "false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions". It's only other humans who are vulnerable to this, and you need to protect them from it, for their own good.
> Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.
Can you show that a significant % of the public/swing voters or sitting out 'Dems' swayed by Russia?
Most Democratic political workers would tell you that Comey and the emails is the #1 factor. It amplified built in brand of Clinton corruption and Comey broke long standing policy at basically the perfect time to do perfect damage.
Sure some of this was amplified by Russia but I don't know a single professional that would say Russia had a larger impact than the emails/Comey.
You can’t separate the two easily because the DNC email hack and “DCLeaks” front group was attributed to Russia by the U.S. intelligence community, as extensively covered in the Mueller report, and a large amount of social media activity around both email stories and other topics was conducted by the Russian Internet Research Agency. Comey had more significance but the flurry of allegations had more than minor involvement of Russian assets and people weren’t reacting to just one detail but the whole barrage. Pizzagate is still around now and that started with the Russian spearphisher who got Podesta’s emails.
Sorry to be clear I was talking about Hillary Clinton's misuse of private email as SoS. Didn't involve Russia to my knowledge - though I would not be surprised most larger nation states hacked there way in.
Sure Russia probably amplified it but it was wall to wall across ALL media a few days before the election - when undecideds are going to vote. And the big damage from the first hit.
The corruption, thinks she is above the rules, tarmac with Lynch etc. That hit really hard with the small slice of swing voters and maybe more importantly reduced turnout from Ds
I don't think anyone who would believe pizza gate would ever vote for Hillary lol e.g. not a swing voter to begin with
Sorry, my response needed to better clarify with a complicated mess like this. The idea I was trying to get at with “both email stories” was the attempts to blur everything together - trying to use the DNC email acknowledgment to lend credibility to all of the other stories. There were a lot of self-proclaimed infosec experts posting about how disqualifying it was.
I completely agree that Comey bringing it back into the front page played a bigger role but I wouldn’t rule out all of the social media trolling having more than a little influence. It seemed to leave a lot of reporters covering non-stories lest they be accused of bias again.
Jeez. They could have been doing this for the last month before it became endemic. How much damage did the Trump team do to America's democracy with a month of sore-losership?
? That was very much closer, and subject to reasonable recounts. This egregious slandering of any state that voted for Biden is of a different nature altogether.
306 to 232 - I mean, get real. Recounts at this stage (or really, any stage since election night) are rabble rousing pointless grandstanding.
Yeah, recounts are pretty silly at this point since it is virtually impossible that they could change anything. On the other hand this election has yet again (just like when Al Gore lost) highlighted how bad some US states are at holding elections and counting votes. Why is it so hard? There are many states and countries who can hold an election without this chaos.
You're right, but this one was worse than usual because of Covid. Far more mail-in ballots, more spacing between observers and workers, fewer observers, and some of it having to be figured out on the fly. That makes this one messier than normal. Don't judge their ability to run elections by this election - it's not a fair test of normal circumstances.
That was a 500 vote difference out of 6 million votes, a 0.009% difference, in a single state, where there were known to have been severe issues with the ballots.
Both sides agreed that there were serious issues with the ballots and counting, with the only dispute being how to address them because the issues made it pretty much impossible to determine who actually would have won if the system had been able to correctly register the intended vote of every voter.
There were no serious allegations that anyone did anything illegal or tampered with the votes.
I have a hard time believing that you are seriously comparing that to 2020, where those trying to overturn the election are alleging intentional widespread fraud in multiple states, without being able to offer any creditable evidence that it happened. All the evidence they offer generally falls into three categories:
1. Things that are outright factually incorrect. For example, that video of vote counting in Pennsylvania (I think that was the state...) that supposedly shows suitcases of fake ballots being snuck in and opened late at night.
If you watch the full surveillance video, instead of just that short extract, you see that (1) those are the standard containers they use to store ballots when they are not actively working with them, and (2) those particular ballots were ballots they were working with earlier and put in those containers when they stopped. In other words, all the excerpt is actually showing is the normal resumption of processing after a break.
Another example is the claims that votes were counted without Republican observers allowed in the room, usually based on Republican observers being turned away. Some observers were in fact turned away--because there were already the maximum number of legally allowed observers from their party in the room.
2. Things that are true, but are not evidence of fraud or error. For example, various statistical measures of a candidate's votes look different between the winner and loser in districts where one candidate receives a lot more votes than the other.
They point to these in heavy Biden districts, saying the differences indicate tampering. But if you look at heavy Trump districts, you see the same thing but going the other way.
3. Actual mistakes, such as ballots lost or miscounted. You get some of these in every big election, and no one has found any evidence that these mistakes were more frequent in this election, and even if every single one of this kind of mistake went in Biden's favor, it would not be anywhere near enough to change the outcome in any state.
There's video evidence of Republican poll watchers being thrown out of key precincts in swing states, with hundreds of thousands of ballots being counted overnight with no chain of custody, signature verification, or oversight from opposing parties. THAT is damaging to democracy. That has to be addressed and not suppressed.
Great example. This is exactly the conspiracy damage that they could have prevented by cracking down on this stuff earlier. All of this is easily disproven.
It's not a conspiracy. There's active litigation heading to the Supreme Court this week to address this. There's nearly 1000 signed witness affidavits attesting to this. There's video evidence backing it up.
Yeah, the side that says the election was stolen is what? 1:50 for wins/losses? Weird how all the claims that are so strong magically don't appear in the actual suits where there are real consequences for lying.
The supreme court is going to drop this case, like every other venue has. Stacking the court at the last minute with a conservative judge isn't going to magically save this losing case.
Have you seen these witnesses? Have you seen their testimony? Have you seen the lawsuits that were submitted with typos on the first page? (EDIT: first line! [1])
This entire thing is a grift and a sham that will thankfully come to an end within a week.
I've watched a ton of the testimony and read several of the lawsuits. In PA alone, you had 1.7 million mail in ballots sent out and over 2 million received. There are completely insane numbers of cases where dead people have voted, where signatures were not verified at all, where people who moved voted, where women found others had voted under their maiden names.
There is a real big problem with election irregularities. There was a lot going on. Whenever counting stops .. and takes days, that's a sign that someone is injecting ballots. That's what happens in corrupt nations in South/Central American and Africa and Russia.
We are in very real danger of losing all confidence in the election process in America. If you don't see that, you are selectively ignoring a dangerous reality.
The Supreme Court is going to take these cases, and if they see the evidence and declare these States violated the laws ... America is going to loose their collective shit and we'll see riots like you wouldn't believe from the left.
If Biden gets certified ... you'll see massive violence from the far-left and the media will blame it on right wing conservatives.
You should probably go read 1984 and then watch the news again.
You also took everything the Trump legal team said at face value without a single iota of criticality.
Because if you didn't, you would have never mentioned those mail-in ballots. There were over 3 million ballots requested for the general election in PA. PA, by the way, is a state that did not allow for mail-in ballots to be counted until the in-person elections were finished. Georgia was another. Both of them have Republican legislatures.
I'm sure you also took at face value the testimony of that drunk temp worker who complained about not getting enough to eat and then amending it with claims of pollbook issues. So much more believable than the Republican and Democrat poll observers who were there the entire time to watch each vote get counted.
There isn't a state or precinct anywhere on the planet that does real time vote updates. They do them in batches. It's why a state can lean a certain way and analysts are still confident they will go in a different direction: large population centers take more time to count, and in this case the votes were segregated due to a court order, so they couldn't even mix those ballots up in PA.
The rest of us can't help it if you're willing to swallow a conspiracy theory because the candidate you support lost. We can't even really be bothered with it. The Republican legislatures will do a couple of things to assuage your hurt feelings, and then they'll move on to the next thing on their agendas.
As for your threats of violence, nobody cares. You can deal with the US military after Jan 20th if you're that angry about the election. I'm sure they'll be responsive to your feelings.
I have a ton of videos saved off in case they disappear. I don't feel like digging up every link, but the fact is, there have been MASSIVE amounts of violence from the hard left.
I have been to BLM rallies and I've been to Trump/BackTheBlue rallies to report on them. I'm also a minority. I feel 100x safer at a Trump/BlueLives rally than at a BLM protest. I saw the race riots back in May in my own city of Chicago, and watched police cruisers set on fire, stores looted, and national guard deployed to the streets
If you serious do not think the left have not been committing the vast majority of the violence over the past several months, and honestly believe the narrative of the "mostly peaceful protestor," then it shows the failure of our news media and it also shows just why this YouTube CCP level censorship of independence voices is so dangerous.
Why would Biden's certification be a cue or trigger for left violence? That's the part of what you said that makes no sense to me.
I mean, if Trump managed to remain president somehow, I could see the left going absolutely insane with violence (and with reason). But why when Biden makes it in?
And if you mean that the left is going to continue in violence even after Biden is certified, that's probably true. Some of them are going to be violent until the entire system is overthrown and everyone gets a puppy. But it sounded like you were saying that Biden being certified was going to be the start of a bunch of left violence, and I can't understand why.
> Why would Biden's certification be a cue or trigger for left violence? That's the part of what you said that makes no sense to me.
Because the vast majority of antifa/anarco-anticapitalists hate Joe Biden just as much as they hate Trump. The Democratic party has been putting their weight behind defund the police, BLM and the radical left, but if you actually interview them and talk to them, they are not going to let up if Biden is in charge.
Look at the Hunter Biden stuff. Joe's connections and influence by foreign powers far exceeded anything alleged against Trump. The corruption in the establishment runs very deep.
They're going to riot no matter what. If Trump pulls out of this, they'll have the backing of tons of useful idiots to help them light cities on fire again. If Biden gets confirmed, they loose a lot of those people, but the momentum is strong and they will continue with fewer people.
It's very likely the democratic powers are going to have to reign these people back in, and we'll see massive funding increases to PDs, massive arrests, large level incarcerations and the democratic desperately try to put the genie back in the bottle, and nobody in the main stream media will cover it .. or they'll spin it to make it seem like it's all right-wingers.
Here's a good example, that guy who wanted to kidnap the governor of Michigan: right wing or left wing? Look into his history. The news would make him sound right-wing. He openly supporter Bernie Sanders.
No, it didn't, there are several active and open cases on their way to the court, including Texas vs. MI, GA, PA, and WI. The point of the tweet is to show video evidence of republican poll watchers being kicked out of buildings so shady things can happen behind the scenes. There's no reason to be non-transparent by force if you're not trying to illegally rig an election, is there?
Sure, and there are almost 50 now that have been tossed out by courts due to lack of any actual evidence. One misleading video does not get to disenfranchise millions of people. But, I'm sure the top-tier legal minds of Rudy and Sidney Powell will come up with solid, irrefutable evidence any day now.
Assuming they don't die of COVID-19 in the meantime, at least.
But yeah, exactly. This is the crack legal team that misspelled "district" on the first line of their "kraken" lawsuit.
You can sue for anything. The only way to tell if your suit has merit is winning. You can tell pretty easily that your suit doesn't have merit by getting tossed out of court -- which all of these have.
No, you can't. Anything this big is going to be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court. And no, a typo is not a big deal worth spending minutes of our lives over-analyzing. If our laughable press spent more time on investigating fraud than they did typos in 100 page lawsuits, we might actually have a functioning republic.
No, there hasn't, the ones that have been thrown out have been minor and thrown out for technicalities (like not filing soon enough), not for lack of evidence. Meanwhile they are progressing through the courts, because as you know, a lower court's ruling is not the last say in our legal system.
There's not one misleading video. I linked to a tweet stitching together a dozen clips from various precincts around the country. There are hundreds of these videos. There's hundreds of witnesses. There were hours of testimony given in state legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. There's dozens of statistical anomalies cited in the 2020 election data that is indicative of fraud. They subpoenaed video footage from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, that clearly shows Republicans being ushered out of the building at 10PM on the pretense that counting would resume in the morning. As soon as the Republicans are gone, the remaining handful of workers take ballots out of suit cases and run them through the machines:
One of these lawsuits will stick any day now, right?
> There were hours of testimony given in state legislatures
Not in an unbiased court, unsurprisingly, where lying would have actual consequences.
> There's dozens of statistical anomalies
You mean where the GOP tried to use Benford's law to prove nothing? Or where they mixed up districts across multiple states when attempting to prove there were more votes than residents?
> take ballots out of suit cases
You mean the official ballot cases that all ballots are stored in?
> Keep denying the fraud. That's how you destroy democracy.
Take a long, hard look at your media sources. You seem like a smart guy and you've been fed a bunch of stuff by professional grifters and scam artists. This lawsuit is going to disappear like all the others not because there's some grand conspiracy, but that _people actually don't like Trump and didn't vote for him_.
Trump would almost certainly have lost either way, but it is ridiculous how bad some states are at guaranteeing the integrity of the election. Those states really need to get their shit together.
I generally agree with you, but I doubt YT did a significant amount of damage compared to all the mainstream news coverage of Trump himself.
If Trump were a no-name fringe conspiracist, YT could be blamed for amplifying him. But he has Twitter, every news org, and his campaign's mailing list that (combined) are probably far more influential.
This policy is wicked and wrong. There are no other words for this policy. YouTube is deciding what of true and enforcing its perspective on the rest of the population.
And you know it won't stop here. From now on, every time a controversy emerges between the media-tech-academia elite view of the world and the views of regular people, tech will use hard censorship to enforce the elite perspective. There is no natural stopping point or limiting principle.
It is not the place of a few Bay Area policy people to decide for the whole world what is true and what is false. They are not God. Nobody voted for them. They have no power except the brute force of a natural monopoly's market share. Infrastructure companies must be part of the neutral background of technological society, not enforcers of a specific worldview.
Y'all should read "Manufacturing Consent" (to me it seems like a lot of folks in this thread haven't read it):
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).
> Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors.
These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. It took me 2 seconds to find videos claiming that the "GOP hacked/stole the 2004 election.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo
I think Trump's behavior is abhorrent. But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened. It's worse this year than usual, because Trump is worse than usual, but the losing side believing the election was stolen has become a feature of American politics during the last two decades: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
Gore's election was especially disputed because it literally came down to stopping a recount in a handful of key districts. I can't tell for sure what the result would have been otherwise but I think there's more legitimacy to that claim than here where people are complaining about millions of votes in multiple states.
>But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened.
If you said complaints about 2000 being stolen lead to skepticism about the outcome in 2004, and are part of a set of ideas that may have inflamed democratic skepticism about 2016, I would probably disagree that there is anything super concerning about that, but at least understand the thread that connects those pieces.
As it happens, I think stolen is a perfectly fair characterization of the 2000 election, even in retrospect, and would confess that that experience lead me, for a time, to incorrectly believe 2004 may have been stolen as well, which I believed for a time but no longer do. And I can see how it launched an unfortunate trend of liberals believing future elections either were or would be stolen. Greg Palast, for instance, is a celebrated journalist in some circles despite incorrectly claiming that the 2006 election would "go down in infamy" as a stolen election, and saying the same thing again in 2008. Despite being a Democrat, I find Palast's record to be deeply inaccurate and I am disappointed in the lack of critical reflection on his record by people who cite him.
But those claims come from a completely different universe than the 2020 claims, and I don't think they had anything to do with explaining the sociological forces driving election skepticism in 2020. Instead, that breed of skepticism has come from Trump and a media ecosystem that established an entirely alternate reality, with fever pitched adversarial thinking.
The content, social forces and motivations are completely independent, in their sources, in their character and in their scale and should not be equated to each other.
You're right of course. I recall in 2004 some people complaining about Bush stealing Ohio. I was living in Ohio in 2004, and I voted for Kerry, but even I thought those accusations were a bit silly at the time.
I think it just underscores the responsibility for platforms to not allow obvious misinformation to spread because it does erode faith in democracy.
The presence of any major platform acting as the unilateral arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation for many people in society erodes faith in democracy as well.
What does it matter that suits are tossed out? Do you realize how silly it seems to ban critizing the election process unless you also aknowledge Biden as winner?
There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.
These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit, like the guy who filed an affidavit about being prevented from observing vote counts because he drove to the wrong location, or the woman, central to the Texas suit against PA and MI, who claims the Obamas "funded the Wuhan lab where coronavirus was made". It is not the case that Google has to provide space for a claim simply because it's improvidently featured in a frivolous lawsuit.
That doesn't even make sense. There are all sorts of things a court won't strike down that practically nobody thinks Google should broadcast on Youtube. Go look at the Youtube content guidelines and see how many have anything to do with what a court thinks.
actually... sorry to gently disagree: the crazies are unfortunately amplifying each other and unchecked, the result will be people taking guns off the rack and people actually dying. Moving to wingnut-only platforms isn't a great solution, but at least it de-legitimizes the crazy and stops it from being "recommended" content on random peoples' screens.
As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.
You seem to be arguing that because cases 1-9 were without merit, case 10 and beyond are too. That may turn out to be true, but it is also quite literally pre-judging.
Your argument also accepts that the courts judged these cases to have no merit, while implicitly denying that such judging was necessary.
How should a Google staffer differentiate between case number 9 (dismissed) and case number 10 (still on the docket)? And what hope can they have of coming to a better understanding of the details and merits of a case than the exact body (a court) which is set up to do precisely this?
The whole legal system is premised on every case being judged on its own merits, and rightly so.
Cases 10 and beyond are, too. One way you can see that is the subsequent cases have been relying on the same batshit evidence as the dead cases.
If Google was a courtroom, you might have a point --- the courts are in many circumstances obligated to hear and dispassionately resolve batshit frivolous cases. Google is not.
My concern is that you as an individual have used your personal judgement to come to the conclusion that these cases are batshit (as have I incidentally), and in this specific case you are most likely correct. But had Google prevented you from seeing this information, you would not have been able to form any view at all. And that is the direction all these platforms are moving in.
I also have absolutely zero trust in Random Googlers being capable of determining truth and falsity in the general case (which is where this is heading), or in managing this power in such a way that is a net benefit to society. If they didn't have monopolies on information consumption I would be a little less concerned.
A different example: Google could have stopped people seeing "false" information about COVID earlier this year. Twitter and other platforms labelled this "misinformation", and Google could have censored it from YouTube, searches, etc. The tech companies anointed the WHO as the arbiter of truth, yet the WHO was wrong for quite a while about several important things. I would prefer to live in a world where individuals are allowed to see all the contested facts and arguments, and decide for themselves.
One last example: Ignaz Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and many others.
I suppose the real solution is to break up the information monopolies, then let them do all the censoring they want.
How, even in principle, would google prevent a person from seeing legal documents? Most (all?) jurisdictions publish them on the web themselves? https://www.courtlistener.com/ is great.
Nobody has accused Google of burying search results about these court cases, so you can't reasonably pretend that's the debate we're having. Please keep the goalposts static, so we can discuss productively.
1. Well, I just told you about them. It's old fashioned, but talking to people works wonders. You're not the first person I've encouraged to go directly to legal documents.
2. Probably the median person uses several -- google, facebook, and the like.
We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News. I don't find any of this persuasive. Google is also preventing me from forming my own opinions about content featuring firearms, hate speech, violent criminal organizations, sales of regulated goods, nudity, and sexual content. I'm waiting for an argument from you that would be persuasive to someone who thinks it's just fine for Google to ban porn from Youtube.
I'm not trying to persuade you that your specific personal preferences for a "Safe Mode Internet" are wrong. I'm saying that just because you are personally comfortable with Google's current set of moderation choices, this does not mean that it is right or optimal for Google to start enforcing these preferences for society as a whole, particularly when it requires them to become the arbiter of truth and basic facts, while also avoiding the normal regulatory obligations associated with this. That is the slope we are on.
There is also a difference in kind between porn and this sort of speech. Different laws apply, different social norms apply, different technical options (and trade-offs) apply, and so on. I have also heard that there are many other porn hosting websites, and Google does not enjoy any sort of monopoly.
Perhaps we're talking past each other here but to put my general point a different way, and it's only relevant because Google is effectively a monopoly: If you were told you could be born into a world with a free internet, or a curated internet, but you had no influence over who would do the curation, which world would you choose?
> We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, next to Google itself. I would say it's not beyond the realms of possibility for YouTube to eventually eclipse Google.
The election occurred over a month ago. The counting of votes was complete enough 4 days later that any violations subsequent to then could not have changed the outcome. The relief sought--to prevent the results from being certified--would have been impossible to grant two weeks ago.
At this point, any case being filed now over the results of the election is doomed to fail either by the doctrine of laches (you should have filed it sooner) or inability to grant relief, and that's even without considering any other possible failings it may have (including merit!).
While the courts will operate under the assumption that a case is meritorious until proven otherwise, there is no reason for the court of public opinion to operate under the same assumption, especially when there is clear precedent and established case history demonstrating why the case must be dismissed that the filing makes no attempt to address.
I don't think "the court of public opinion" is a high enough standard for a prospective world-wide monopolistic censor of information. Such an authority needs to be completely rigorous, completely fair, completely objective, completely informed, and so on. Google cannot meet that bar.
By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.
And was that borne out in the public square or in scientific journals and conferences? There are reasonable arenas for this material. In this case, that arena is the courts.
Of course we can, because it's a law of nature. Whereas man-made laws are subject to human action and interpretation, so outcomes are far less predictable.
I think the presence of court cases, frivolous or not, is completely orthogonal to Google's content moderation policies. An appeal to "this is pending in court" is a deeply unprincipled argument; plenty of things that a court would certainly countenance are forbidden by Google's policies.
I agree but that's not really my concern. I am most concerned about granting Google (or anyone) the power to decide what is true or false, and to prevent individuals from seeing the information used to make those judgements, or to decide for themselves.
>Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And people have to right to find this despicable. Although Google may not actually have that power (I don't know how much Youtube is considered a monopoly)
> Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And half of America that politically was skeptical of anti-trust has the power to rethink that as well. (And they will, and Google will find out if the juice is worth the squeeze on that.)
Because of COVID-19 and the huge increase of mail in ballots, there is good reason to believe that fraud was higher than other years. Biden's margin of victory in key swing states is smaller than Trump's in 2016. These are not unreasonable things to discuss and I find unfathomable that this policy would be something Google would apply to say, Iran, or any other country where there was speech skeptical of government.
Acting as if speech discussing this on their platform is beyond the pale is ludicrous. It shows a sheltered, fragile group of people who think their views are more common than they are.
There is in fact no reason to believe fraud is higher than other years; for example, states where elections were administered by conservative Republicans found essentially no instances of it, despite huge incentives.
Another strong indication that there wasn't fraud? The ludicrous affidavits accompanying the highest-profile lawsuits against states.
What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).
Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.
Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".
It is a cliche that conservatives, who fare poorly both in urban areas and among the minorities who disproportionately live in those areas, accuse Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia of voter fraud. Nevertheless, no real evidence of fraud is produced; in fact, the rare cases we do see of actual voter fraud tend to be committed by older Republican voters.
The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.
What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.
Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.
> It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.
We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.
Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.
> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]
This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.
Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
> when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".
> Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election.
That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.
So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.
It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.
The "specific details" are a plethora of court rulings, election certifications, and statements from Trump's own lawyers that they are not bringing fraud cases.
Trump is absolutely hoovering up money from his followers since he started on his election fraud rant - he's up to something like $250M, and he personally gets to keep something like 70% of it.
Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.
The state attorneys general of 17 states have filed amicus briefs in a case, in some cases over the public objections of their Republican governors. They're all supporting a grift run by the President --- you know it's a grift, because substantially more than half of the hundreds of millions of dollars he's raised isn't going to the lawsuits. It's no surprise that feckless Republican officials in heavily-Republican states are willing to kowtow; the President has deluded his true believers into a frenzy, and they don't want those people outside their house at 1AM. I'm fine if Google "censors" them. This is what Parler is for.
Look, I hate to tell you, but still, 17 AGs running this is news. Forget what ever you think about the case, its blatant censorship not to report this information. I'll tell you what, I'm not right leaning, but if push comes to shove, which I think it will eventually, I will join the right and fight for political freedom. Go back to your big house and your consulting blog, this isnt for you
Look at the title, Youtube will remove content that alleges widespread fraud. Not content that alleges that 17 AGs are showing legal support for the president. Anyone can broadcast that information.
>These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit,
The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".
So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."
The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.
The judge emphatically did not rule on the merits of the case, simply that there was no reason to proceed further due to laches. A ruling on laches says nothing about the validity of the argument.
> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.
Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
> Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.
While in theory this is true, in practice we have seen in recent years that misinformation has as much weight (if not more) as true information in our fragmented global media landscape.
I see it more as doing their part to reduce the noise rather than contribute to the problem. And it’s a big problem.
> It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.
This seems demonstrably true for vast swathes of users, who have become enamored with Flat Eartherism and other such nonsense. Not saying censorship is necessarily the right solution, but arguing on behalf of the reasoning capabilities of the user base is clearly misguided.
> You're being disingenuous. But I think you know that.
No I'm not. Transmission is a kind of repetition, but some people seem to think that YouTube has some obligation to transmit (i.e. repeat) their lies about "widespread election fraud." It's not a government service, so there's no First Amendment aspect to this at all, and the allegations themselves are disingenuous lies, so YouTube's moral obligation is on the side of removal.
Youtube has been bullied by governement officials into adopting this policy. This is hardly about "forcing someone to repeat lies".
Also my argument wasn't even about this, it was that if you assume stupidity of a big portion of the population, you have no alternative but to turn to tyranny.
A couple hundred years ago these people never would have a platform and would be relegated to the depths of society, as their idiocracy rightly deserved.
Now the uneducated masses can yell and yell and yell, which gives other uneducated masses the false belief that their opinions are to be respected.
Swathes how vast? Have you checked? Everyone seems to know of one, nobody seems to know one. And what happens when the big tech companies start pushing wrong information, or censoring right information? Or, a better question, how do you know they haven't started already?
I can also claim in court that I have been wronged by an ethnic group, and that the proper remedy for that is genocide. Again - "there's a pending court case alleging this" is not a reason not to take down that kind of content. The decision needs to be on the merits of the actual content.
> Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to.
> Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.
Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.
There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.
There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
There couldn't possibly be other dissenting views on that. It's _true_ my friends.
Vox is clearly an impartial observer. The Senate hearings which led to impeachment hearings on Trump (because he investigated Hunter Biden, who has been under FBI investigation for over a year now... a materially true fact) could not _possibly_ have been politically motivated.
Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty. YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.
If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.
I've prepared a lengthy presentation outlining my arguments that you're a lizard person who drinks human blood.
I'll be by your house tonight around 2am local time to read the entire presentation in your living room with a bullhorn.
Don't shut down my speech. The "rational and scientific" approach is obviously to let me use your property to say what I want, right?
In other words, YouTube can control what is on their platform.
I mean, you couldn't even make your post without a blatant lie (Trump was impeached because he asked Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, not because he or any of his underlings investigated Hunter Biden). YouTube is well within their rights to keep certain lies off their servers. And you're within yours to publish those lies on yours, viva America!
> You have not actually provided evidence to the contrary
YouTube is arguing that I shouldn't be able to provide evidence to the contrary, which is the point.
I'm not arguing with the list of bullet points. I'm arguing with the very silly implication that there is an obvious "truth" that some MegaCorp should be able to hand down and enforce on this.
You are free to host your video evidence on your own website, following your own internal moderation rules for what is deemed credible or not. No one is taking this right from you.
Correct. But it's tantamount to saying "you can't speak in this public square, how about you pretend your front yard is a public square and speak there."
Eventually, people are going to say the hell with that and that Google's "private" management of 90% of inbound searches and content is, in fact, public.
After that, maybe we can start calling it Gov-gle or something once it's nationalized.
There are no public squares on the internet. Every DNS resolution leads to privately owned 'land'. You can be escorted off the property for nearly any reason.
Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.
Understand your response is guilty of the same argument. You consider your own sources (whatever they might be) to be more factual then the ones presented by onyx_. Both of you will not agree. More troubling is that you require their sources to be held to a higher standard than your own. I assume both of you are not experts or journalists in the field, so do not conflate your truth as superior because someone else relies on their own de facto truth. You are in fact both several degrees removed from the source.
Scrutinize their sources, but likewise your own.
> Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty
I do agree that shutting down speech only adds fuel to the flames. You're right. I also think companies are not faultless judges of the truth.
> If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.
Here is where the discussion on YouTube (social media in general) censorship should start.
The problem is that these people (the left as well) use "post truth" arguments and tactics to draw circles in the sand. Isolating discussions into talking points presented by their own side. Shrouding the herd from other arguments by claiming them to be "Fake News". Inflaming individuals to argue at (not with) everyone. This is immeasurably harmful as this information needs no fact checking and can be presented with a facade of reasonableness.
People will find these arguments faster, more digestible, more appealing, and more viral than traditional news media. No discussion will occur. Even onyx_'s list of sources will not persuade them.
> YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.
Here's the crux, you are scared of Google's knowledge of the "facts" and biases, but you show no interest in gathering the whole truth yourself. Onyx_ did give a list of sources, that could be true or false. You dismissed them immediately in your comment. But more telling is what position you place your knowledge. Is it above sources, officials, experts, scientists(?), journalists, news agencies?
Can you confidently verify the same authenticity of your sources?
We should not fool ourselves. Tomorrow, just like today, no meaningful discussion tainted by politicization will be held by both sides again.
Great citations. I think the general point is that there are more specific examples of election irregularities than there are specific examples of Russia interfering.
The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.
> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?
I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.
I abhor this, but what can be done about it? I genuinely don't know how to push back against measures like these and I'm hoping people here have some ideas.
If you don't like it, you can upload your videos to one of the other 1000's of platforms or sign up for a shared web host and utilize P2P video sharing.
I have nothing to upload because I'm not a content creator. I think that it's wrong for YouTube to be silencing people this way and I hope there's some way to influence YouTube without abandoning it - because the vast majority of people won't.
Yep. You can make your own video uploader. Then build your own hosting provider. Which would use a payment processor that you also built. Which handles transactions from a bank that you created yourself as well.
Because if you step out of line on Accepted Thought And Speech, you get cancelled.
technically you would also need to build your own payment network. and build your own electrical grid where you put the electricity you generated on your own. of course you would need to invent your own transistor to be able to build your own integrated circuits to be able to build your own computer.
The "Authoritative Sources" are all Left-wing news agencies. So in other words they have done like Wikipedia. They have determined that Left of Center is authoritative and have limited the reach of alternative viewpoints.
Their right to control political speech on their platform.
To the right under what rubric? In Germany, I have a legal right to have my kid given religious education in public schools. Bavaria can put crosses on public buildings. Abortion is only decriminalized, generally illegal after 12 weeks, and is subject to waiting periods and mandatory counseling. The governing center-right party declared accepting Muslim refugees "a mistake" that they would not repeat.
The American media demonized Amy Coney Barrett as a "Handmaid" because of the possibility that she could rule that elective abortion is a matter for the legislature, not a constitutional issue of fundamental rights. Which is the law of the land in Canada, France, Italy, Austria, and the EU Human Rights Court.
At least on social issues, the American media is significantly to the left of even moderately liberal EU countries.
You're purposefully diminishing the impact that opinion has, though. It would be a different matter if the legislature was prepared for that, but it's not.
Like it or not, the battle for abortion was fought with the Supreme Court. Saying "she just has a different view on where it should be fought" ignores the fact that it would essentially set us back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.
> It would be a different matter if the legislature was prepared for that, but it's not.
Plenty of states allowed abortion before Roe v. Wade. If legislature isn't prepared, what are they waiting for? Just pass the relevant bills already, so that impact of a potential Supreme Court verdict that returns the control to legislatures has absolutely zero consequences, because the state legislature already has enshrined the current status quo into law. What's the problem?
> Like it or not, the battle for abortion was fought with the Supreme Court.
Yes, and this is fundamentally wrong approach to issues on which there is no broad public agreement.
> Saying "she just has a different view on where it should be fought" ignores the fact that it would essentially set us back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.
So would moving to, say, Canada or Sweden, which hardly makes it sound like a disaster.
> Yes, and this is fundamentally wrong approach to issues on which there is no broad public agreement.
Two important things here:
1. The judiciary exists to protect the rights of the people protected by the constitution, even when there may not be broad public support for those rights, even when those rights are unpopular. That's what happened with Brown v. BoE
2. 61% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is, 39% think it should be illegal. To compare, 49% think that burning the American Flag should be illegal, which the court has had no problem defending, and no one seems to consider was wrong for the court to decide.
> So would moving to, say, Canada or Sweden, which hardly makes it sound like a disaster.
> 1. The judiciary exists to protect the rights of the people protected by the constitution, even when there may not be broad public support for those rights, even when those rights are unpopular. That's what happened with Brown v. BoE
That's correct, but I think the legal argument from Equal Protection Clause in Brown v. Board of Education is rather straightforward, compared to "emanations of penumbras" that form the constitutional basis for Roe v. Wade. As much as I support right to contraceptives, and right to abortion, I believe that the Supreme Court arguments for constitutional basis of these are, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
> 2. 61% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is, 39% think it should be illegal. To compare, 49% think that burning the American Flag should be illegal, which the court has had no problem defending, and no one seems to consider was wrong for the court to decide.
That's a very good point. I think if you ask American public whether they support constitutional right to free speech, overwhelming majority will be for it. I think the contradiction stems from the fact that their moral responses are rather automatic, and not based on careful moral reasoning. When you actually connect flag burning to free speech in their minds, I suspect that the support for making flag burning a crime will fall. I think it's much easier to make such connection than to argue that such right stems from the right to privacy, which in turn stems from the right to due process.
I don't like the methods, even if the outcome is to my liking. The same motivated arguments could be used to argue anything the judges want, and one day the judges will decide something I do not like using the same motivated arguments. For example, it was ruled that right to privacy prevents banning contraceptive drugs. However, recreational psychoactive drugs are banned just fine, and there are hardly any voices arguing unconstitutionality of the practice. Why is it? Clearly, the answer cannot be based on the differences enumerated in the text of clause in the constitution defining right to privacy, because there simply is no such text: it's all emanated penumbras. I think the answer is rather very simple: the judges preferred one outcome in contraceptive case, and opposite outcome in the other case. This ain't so bad, but if we just decide cases based on the outcome judges want, why we even have the law and the constitution in the first place? What's the point?
The real reason for concern of liberal Americans with respect to Roe v. Wade, and in general with respect to Trump appointments of judges to the Supreme Court, is that it is tacitly recognized that the US Constitution is dead, is just words on the old parchment, and it's the judges personal opinion that's the actual defining law of the country. This arrangement worked just fine for as long as the Supreme Court made decisions to the liking of liberal Americans, but as that era is coming to the end, they see that there's nothing to protect them anymore now that the Constitution has been killed.
Oh, I'm sorry, I incorrectly assumed that Canada's abortion laws are similar to those in the rest of the western world, however they seem to be sitting in rather exceptional bucket alongside US.
As to your first point: you’re begging the question by presupposing that there is a “right” to kill and extract a fetus under various circumstances. Where does that right originate, and who gets to decide what those circumstances are?
Liberals tend to believe that the constitution is a living document and can protect rights even when those rights didn’t exist at the time of the founding. Even if you accept that, you’re only halfway there. The right must still come from somewhere. Where does the right to an abortion, as defined by Roe—which conceives of a right to an abortion all the way to the point of viability—come from? If you can’t find it in the text of the Constitution, and you can’t find it in the history books of what rights the framers thoughts were fundamental, it has to derive from broad public recognition, correct?
Going to your second point—the right protected by Roe is very different than the version of abortion that has broad public support. Roe invalidates any law that bans abortion generally before viability (22-24 weeks), even if the law has exceptions for health of mother, etc.
That, however, is a much broader right than either Americans or most people in the rest of the developed world support. Support for “generally legal” abortion falls off a cliff after the first trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... Just 28% of people think abortion should be “generally legal” in the second trimester. There is a biological basis for why any parent who has had a 12-week anatomy scan might think that should be an upper limit on elective abortion: https://www.parents.com/pregnancy/week-by-week/12/your-growi.... Not surprisingly, in Europe, 10-14 weeks is a very common time limit for elective abortions. Under Roe, the abortion laws of France and Denmark would be unconstitutional. This is not a theoretical issue: 1 in 10 US abortions happen after 13 weeks, and birth defects are not common enough to explain most of them.
So where does Roe come from, even within a liberal theory of what’s protected by the constitution?
> As to your first point: you’re begging the question by presupposing that there is a “right” to kill and extract a fetus under various circumstances.
And you're presupposing that a nonviable fetus is alive.
As I understand it, the conservative view is that rights are not granted by the government, they are only restricted, hence the 10th amendment. The right to freedom of movement is not granted to me by anyone, yet I have it because it is not explicitly restricted. The constitution puts guardrails on when, and how, the government is allowed to restrict my rights.
> Liberals tend to believe that the constitution is a living document and can protect rights even when those rights didn’t exist at the time of the founding.
This depends on right in question. For example the right to donate to political candidates is not explicitly enumerated in the constitution (and is heavily restricted in many other nations), but is seen as protected via a combination of rights enumerated in the 1st amendment.
> If you can’t find it in the text of the Constitution, and you can’t find it in the history books of what rights the framers thoughts were fundamental, it has to derive from broad public recognition, correct?
No, I refer you again to Brown v. BoE. There was at the time no broad public recognition that Separate but Equal wasn't constitutional, and the people who wrote the amendment certainly felt segregation was A-OK.
> Where does the right to an abortion, as defined by Roe
As I understand, in this case the Justices found that an individual's right to privacy prevented the government from meddling with the medical procedures that person chose to get, without. But then you knew that already. It appears that you disagree with this, even though 15 (and a half) Supreme court justices have found that the text of the constitution supports this protection. (notably compared to 8, likely soon 9, who did not)
Not if you live in a blue state. Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Mexico are the only sometimes blue states where abortion would become illegal if Roe were overturned.
For people who doubt your characterization of where the "center" is, consider this: 2/3 of Americans oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. Is your idea of a "centrist" person someone who believes school prayer would be a good idea if the law were different?
The median voter also supports single payer healthcare and [insert lots of extreme opinions supported by the median voter here]. Centrist designates something approximating "elite public opinion," not any actual idealized voter who falls in the middle in all his attitudes.
And once you accept that centrist is simply the designator for elite public opinion, most corporate media is clearly centrist, because they're basically clearinghouses for elite public opinion.
>For people who doubt your characterization of where the "center" is, consider this: 2/3 of Americans oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. Is your idea of a "centrist" person someone who believes school prayer would be a good idea if the law were different?
I provided the website from which I got those details. I don't know how they come to these conclusions but I would tend to find that they are correct.
Well, if you had checked your source before spreading it, you'd know they just make it up. It's completely subjective, it's just whatever the owners feel like.
For instance, here's something they don't do: take a random sample of a source's news articles, anonymize the source, ask random people to rate them, and collate the ratings into an overall rating. I'm not saying that'd be a good way to do it, but at least it'd be something.
There is no Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. There is a Supreme Court decision[1] that upheld the traditional separation of church and state and interpreted the First Amendment to mean that state-run schools cannot force children to participate in a prayer. In particular, state legislation mandating prayer violated the Establishment Clause.
The Constitution doesn't say anything about "separation of church and state." The Establishment Clause says: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."
This is one of those funny areas where liberals get originalist and turn to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. The "separation of church and state" view derives from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802. Of course, TJ wasn't even in the United States at the time the Constitution was written, and he was a bit of a kook even in his day. The thing you have to remember is that "establishment" had a specific meaning back then--several states had "established" churches: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established.... Given that, the most sensible reading is that the Establishment Clause prohibits Congress from regulating those established churches: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....
The "separation of church and state" view is odd because several states had official established churches until long after the Constitution was adopted: "New Hampshire kept its establishment until 1817; Connecticut kept its establishment until 1818; and Massachusetts did not abandon its state support for Congregationalism until 1833."
You're incorrect to characterize Engel v. Vitale as saying schools "cannot force children to participate in a prayer." That would be a straightforward violation of the first amendment Free Exercise Clause. The New York law in that case was voluntary--it encouraged but did not require students to participate in prayer. The case banned prayer in schools with any sort of official sanction.
Engel is odd even leaving aside the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. Public support for religion is the norm, and sometimes even a constitutional right, throughout Europe. Several European countries, such as the Germany, Italy, and Spain, guarantee that parents can access religious education in public schools. The U.K. goes further and mandates daily school prayer "of a broadly Christian character." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_worship_in_schools. (Funnily enough, Spain has a constitutional provision that says "no religion shall have a state character." Nobody reads that to preclude teaching religion in public schools.)
Engel did absolutely strike down forcing children to pray in public schools.
> This is one of those funny areas where liberals
Can we please not do this "liberals" / "conservatives" read-team/blue-team stuff? Because then I'll just turn around and say "conservatives love to point out that phrase 'separation of church and state'" doesn't appear in the constitution and I'll just point you to Everson[1] that absolutely interpreted the First Amendment this way, and even quoted TJ himself.
> The "separation of church and state" view is odd because several states had official established churches until long after the Constitution was adopted: "New Hampshire kept its establishment until 1817; Connecticut kept its establishment until 1818; and Massachusetts did not abandon its state support for Congregationalism until 1833."
That's not odd. The bill of rights originally did not apply to state governments. It was only after the 14th amendment that the Supreme Court started incorporating the rights on state governments. Of course some states had similar language in their own constitutions before that.
The interesting thing is that the assertion is that the right-wing have been detached from reality. An epistemological crisis wherein the the blame is on the internet. Thus we have situation where Internet entities like Youtube and Twitter are actively censoring right-wing views. While allowing left-wing misinformation.
So the way forward to fixing wrong-think is to deprive people of viewpoints? This doesn't seem quite right.
What's also quite interesting, it's the left-wing who are at odds. The median democrat has moved left and has created a political divide.
Makes me wonder if perhaps it's not the rightwing who became detached from reality.
If the left-wing are the ones detached. Then their need to censor other viewpoints to maintain their bubble makes complete sense.
20 years ago reputed organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and television informed people the truth. Conspiracy theories were fringe and didn't have a way to spread.
Today more than half the population believes in conspiracy theories because they learn the "truth" from disreputable sources on social media. This is dangerous for society.
I am glad social media companies are taking action themselves, instead of the government forcing them (which would be a 1st amendment issue).
Arguably, the media's role is to stress test claims made by the government. They certainly do it for the trump admin. Though I wonder if they'll do it for the Biden admin.
I wouldn't say it's their fault. But still in 2020, the media breathlessly reports targeted leaks by intelligence agencies as fact. We didn't learn anything.
I'm left leaning, and I hope that they absolutely do stress-test the Biden administration and every administration after it. If nothing else, 2020 has showed me how important the 4th Estate is in our democracy and the power it truly has. Watching the major news networks cut Trump's speech short on Election Night when he started declaring victory and insisting they'd already won before Florida was even counted was the most important thing I've seen them do in a long, long time.
There is a well-documented connection between journalists and intelligence agencies. In some cases journalists have been little more than mouthpieces for the US (and allied) intelligence community.
I agree that the fault ultimately lies with the Bush administration for making false claims. However, it is _critically_ important to also place fault with the media outlets who simply repeated those claims, abandoning their duty as a check against the state.
30 years ago back in Eastern Europe conspiracy theories didn't have a way to spread either. We had one truth. No further debates or opinions, one truth, The Truth.
I don't think you realize how dangerous suppression of freedom of speech is.
We won't have that problem here. There will still be New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc. More weight should be given to these legit sources than to social media. On the internet everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart looks as legit as the BBC. That's a problem. More on that by Sacha Baron Cohen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
Some say if you disagree with someone else's speech you should not just ban them, you should defeat them by arguing against their ideas. But when state-sponsored actors spread fake news and divisive ads at a massive scale on social media you can’t simply defeat them by arguing against their ideas. How do you counter it? By buying opposing ads on Facebook? Even if you have pockets as deep as Putin’s, what a waste of money that would be! This is a new world and the old methods are no longer applicable. Communities and social media companies will need to engage in some censorship.
Long term I think better education and promoting critical thinking is the only way that doesn't erode democracy.
Short term I have no idea. Silencing people you deem are running misinformation campaigns is probably the quickest, and easiest. Or try weather it out while doing the long term plan of education.
Unfortunately it seems the more democratic a state is the more it's open to misinformation by rival, less democratic states.
That's sometimes called "Just Asking Questions", and is sometimes a passive-aggressive way of arguing with someone. You don't state a position, you just ask (leading) questions, without ever stating a position that can be refuted. When someone calls you on it, you say that you're "just asking questions".
It can be a real dishonest, manipulative technique. You're running close enough to that to set off peoples' defense mechanisms. So, even if you're doing it in complete innocence, if you want to not have people upset with the way you're carrying out the conversation, change your style.
Yes, yes, I'm well aware that's a common tactic. However, it is completely fair given the conversational context to ask the poster for clarification for their actual beliefs in what determines "real truth", given that they have stated multiple situations that they find disagreeable for ascertaining "real truth." To shut down valid discussion and shout down fair questioners by throwing around accusations of logical fallacies is not conducive to debate and discussion. It creates a chilling effect that poisons the conversational well.
By the time you asked your question, I thought it was rather clear that darmoddy didn't think there was a real arbiter of truth. That tipped the scales somewhat toward me thinking you were manipulative rather than honest. Even so, I was careful not to actually accuse you of dishonest manipulation.
Sure. But when I'm trying to have a conversation, it's a total pain to have the other side trying to go Socratic Method on me. State your position, and I'll state mine, and then we'll talk. Trying to talk with someone who won't state their own position, but wants to make you answer questions about yours, is... not much of a "dialog", frankly.
Is there any data that shows the number of people believing in conspiracy theories is actually greater than it was, and that that gap was due to social media?
20 years ago I remember TV shows talking about the moon landing being a hoax, and a decent number of people I talked to at the time believing it. This is just an anecdote, but I've noticed that people make the claim that conspiracy theories are on the rise and I've yet to see hard evidence to support that claim.
The difference is the moon landing or ‘who shot JFK’ are about subjects that are low stakes, very low. Having millions people believe the Presidential election was corrupt is corrosive to the basic civic foundations of the political process.
> 20 years ago reputed organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and television informed people the truth. Conspiracy theories were fringe and didn't have a way to spread.
Are you genuinely arguing that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon that is unique to the 21st century?
On mobile so I can’t find the source. Conspiracy theories spread in a low-trust environment. Maybe instead of trying to block ideas (which can never work), initiatives that work to restore trust should be investigated.
> 20 years ago reputed organizations such as newspapers, radio stations and television informed people the truth. Conspiracy theories were fringe and didn't have a way to spread. Today more than half the population believes in conspiracy theories because they learn the "truth" from disreputable sources on social media.
Why do you suppose that is, though? Could it be because algorithms designed to feed users content they like promote and reinforce echo chambers which, in turn, incentivize the creation and spread of convenient misinformation?
Social media did not start the echo chambers, but they have played a huge role in making them more accessible and extreme than ever before. How can we trust them to safeguard us from misinformation when they are the ones profiting from it?
I do not want Google deciding what is and isn't "misinformation". As far as I'm concerned, they're more guilty of the mess we're now in than any media organization or content creator.
Great, maybe now we can stop considering them a platform and hold them liable for their content, while other p2p video platforms can provide services Youtube used to provide.
I think these should be kept in some form for the simple reason of history. Videos of the behavior of past presidents (e.g "Mission Accomplished") is a powerful reminder.
I would like to think youtube could serve as that public digital archive of the past, to do some slight good alongside their mission of profit. The power of being able to find video proof of past behavior in a moment is an essential tool to our collective discussion process.
If Google wanted to be responsible they would remove videos covering the election in any way.
If there had actually been widespread fraud is this something we would want Google doing? They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections in the US and this is exactly how they would do it.
>> ... is this something we would want Google doing? They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections in the US and this is exactly how they would do it.
As someone very familiar with the original tgif, I still can't see the leap from having leadership acknowledge the majority of their employees feeling apprehensive about the election results, and being worried about the potential for their products to be used for what amounts to psy ops, to talking about google somehow manipulating elections.
Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
Oh please shut up. I'm pretty up there on the scale as a free speech absolutist, but this is the sort of shit that makes people have no fucking clue what facism is, and why its used as a pejorative generic insult by all sides.
Reducing an entire movement with complex beliefs to a single talking point is not valid in the least.
Yes, it has, to a degree. C.f. Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, etc. (These voices became much less prominent after their deplatforming.) There's also a deontological argument to be made for banning dangerous falsehoods on one's platform.
This analogy is so dishonest. These people are free to talk about all the conspiracies they want on their own websites, blogs and so on. They are not entitled to having their content hosted on other people's websites though. It's like if I complained that the NYT isn't talking about my coolest new invention and called that censorship.
That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
Except I wasn't talking about the entity involved, I was talking about the efficacy of shutting down the 'misinformation'. Entity A shutdown covid info successfully, and Entity B wants to shutdown election info.
That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
You are rewriting history. Western media was not 'fooled'. It's ironic that you are doing so in a thread about spreading misinformation on the internet.
January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1]
January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2]
January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3]
Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West.
Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings.
[4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.)
[5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.
How do you know? Their voices might just be someplace where you (and people you know) don't hear them. The world of discourse is wider than our awareness.
You can't know anything, but you can form beliefs that have various levels of confidence. For example, there is reporting about the objective reach of Jones' properties post-deplatforming. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/technology/alex-jones-inf... This type of reporting, plus my priors about how viral media spreads, inform my belief that deplatforming these individuals was moderately efficient for decreasing their reach. But it is an empirical question that would benefit from further study.
I don't need perfect evidence to form beliefs. It seems unlikely that Jones' reach increased on Twitter enough to offset his bans on other platforms. If it did, that doesn't seem consistent with the loss of traffic to his website. After he was banned on Twitter, it seems very unlikely that there was any other platform where his reach grew enough to offset that loss. Anything's possible, but it doesn't seem likely.
Bring me information from outside my bubble and I'll happily incorporate it into my schema. Ominous pronunciations don't count, though. Is there some social media platform Jones is using that I haven't heard of that allows him to reach tens of millions of people and make up for his losses on FB, YT, and TW? Are his website stats wrong or irrelevant for some reason that is uniquely invisible in my bubble? These would be valuable bits of information to me.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I said I did not need "perfect evidence." I cited evidence, albeit imperfect. Whether it's strong enough to change someone's beliefs is between them and their epistemology. That's all I have to say on this subject.
I can't necessarily argue the exact wording that you used "prominent", because the folks you listed are certainly no longer visible in the most mainstream venues, but do you really think Alex Jones has lost a lot of the audience that was deep into his content. If anything this just makes him into a martyr and gives his arguments additional fuel because "they don't want you to know the truth".
The problem is not the 100,000 people who have constructed their whole lives around Alex Jones, that's what Alex Jones had for 20 years of being a mostly harmless crank who makes a good living at it.
The problem was giving him access to a much broader public, to sow paranoia and FUD among tens or hundreds of millions of people who actually play important roles in society and don't have time to spend debunking everything they hear.
I do believe he has lost a lot of juice, but even if the hardcore viewers have stuck with him, he at least is not growing anywhere as fast anymore. If anything, this means he should've been deplatformed much sooner. The longer you wait, the more you are allowing them to grow their roots in.
Yes, I absolutely believe that Alex Jones has lost some of his audience since being "deplatformed". Some of his audience will continue to follow him, some will continue to follow some other source of cray, and some will wander out of the fever swamps. I consider this a positive outcome, even if it's not a perfect one.
Also consider that he's lost a lot of his ability to grow his audience, which is no small thing.
Yep. UK based, and Katie Hopkins has thankfully become far less visible after deplatforming (seems to have removed most income streams post-bankrupcy).
Yes, it was notable that merely advocating crimes against humanity (shooting refugees) wasn't enough, and finally libelling a blogger who managed to crowd fund a lawsuit silenced her. Just like Alex Jones.
I doubt MLK would object to the marginalization of Alex Jones. Certainly modern racial justice advocates are, by and large, not clamoring for his restoration. But, we can't know for sure, and, regardless, his hypothetical opinion on this question doesn't matter very much to me.
Forcible, violent segregation by race and declining to publish videos by content and truthfulness are far too dissimilar for me to reason about their relationship in the eyes of history.
This will work wonderfully as long as Youtube, the near-monopolistic arm of a gigantic corporation that makes its money from analyzing what you see and read in order to influence your behaviour, never bans anything that's actually true in reality.
I'm sure we can trust our censors to never do something like that! They have our best interests at heart, right? Nothing like this could ever go wrong, there's no examples from history or fiction about anything like that. Nope, it's always Wonderful Good People that only ban things that Bad Evil People would like, and reality is totally black-and-white, and only Bad Evil People would think otherwise.
"Radicalization" in this context refers to participation in a currently active and well-known plot to overthrow democracy in the United States. It's not exactly a hypothetical here.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes it impossible for me to maintain my general opposition to censorship here. The president is publicly calling for the election to be overturned, reaching out to state governors and asking them to please over turn the election for him - and a lot of smart, well-meaning people are stuck in an information bubble where this is just a legitimate process raising legitimate concerns about election fraud. That has to be addressed, and I just haven't seen any suggestions for popping the bubble other than censoring it out of all the popular places.
I was sympathetic to the ideas floating around in early November, that the issue would go away once we let all the legal processes play out. But they have played out, the votes are all certified, and nothing's changed.
What evidence have they put forth that makes you think they have a real case for meaningful amounts of fraud? Because from where I’m sitting, it’s really obvious they’re grasping at any straw they can find.
There's nothing "random" about how people encounter this stuff. Most engagement-driven recommendation engines seem to love suggesting inflammatory clickbait. Banning one specific subset of this kind of content will not solve the problem, the same people will just be radicalized by some new nonsense. This is pure CYA by Youtube.
There are many examples out of there of people ending up in some weird conspiracy theory rabbit hole, and often it starts with some youtube video, or post on facebook. Mothers who have lost sons, wives who have lost husbands. They have seen them turn into crazy people
If those videos are not as present on youtube to begin with, perhaps fewer people end up down these rabbit holes. Of course it won't do anything to convince people who are already falling down the hole.
Not sure why this is downvoted. The YouTube radicalization pathway is fairly well documented, e.g. [1][2][3]. Even if we can't all agree on the specific mechanism of action, the phenomenon certainly exists.
Conspiracy peddlers and those that follow them have been around long before YouTube and social media. Some extraordinarily bizarre ideas have been published on Xeroxed/mimeographed 'zines sent out via snail mail. While social media definitely makes it easier, it's not the only way for information to disseminate.
The difference is that mainstream platforming of those ideas exposes them to massive amounts of folks who stumble upon them, whereas you would have historically had to seek it out on purpose.
You’re right, people can make their own decisions. The justice warriors should not coddle people’s minds by shaping a narrative according to their own opinions of what radical/right/wrong mean.
Unless...they’re a publication in which case they need to be regulated and taxed accordingly.
The FN (yeah yeah they changed names, who cares) still spews its hatred behind closed doors, our police forces are amongst the worst offenders of any developed countries when it comes to racism and systemic issues (and consistently proving that even the police unions are a bunch of thugs), we have people like Zemmour on TV spewing hateful nonsense that even Fox News would probably frown at by now, and our own current government has been trying to get a law in place to prevent freedom of press so significantly that the UN and most of the world looking at those pieces of news have actually been ringing the alarms in every possible way.
While on a personal and biased level I certainly don't mind that daddy Le Pen was fined multiple times throughout the years for calling the Holocaust "a detail of history", we don't really have any proof that it does anything more than make people who dislike him (like me) happy to see him fined, and unfortunately give reasons for supporters of his bullshit to feel vindicated (i.e. rise of the extreme right everywhere with a very salient point regarding being "silenced", which crystallizes to the extreme in stuff coming from the US like Qanon).
Youtube is having a tough time because they're almost always pointed at first and foremost for being THE rabbit hole of misinformation/radicalization and other things, but they're stepping into a minefield by touching on one such hot subject without having a broader policy (extending beyond whatever the current US issue is at any moment), backed by an army of lawyers.
(I've stopped following the battles of up and downvotes on this message instead of any actual reply.. I'm only left to wonder how many of either are emotional responses over valuing the argument itself, and on this subject even HN isn't proving to be very different from reddit today)
What is "fascist" stuff? Earlier this year, people protesting coronavirus lockdowns were called "fascists." People protesting against government authority were called fascists.
Berkeley had to spend $600k in security to allow Ben Shapiro to speak, because "anti fascists" were accusing him of white supremacy, and being a fascist, and violently attempting to prevent him from speaking. And this was after they had successfully prevented him from speaking earlier in the year. Similar "anti fascists" pulled the fire alarm on Janice Fiamengo for speaking about men's issues. Warren Farrel had a similar experience, with people absolutely berating the attendants of one of his lectures for their support of fascism.
Many universities will NOT spend the money. Several guest academic lectures were straight up cancelled at Univerisity of Waterloo because the forecast security costs were too high. Seems like the protest movements have learned Denial of Sevice is effective in pushing their own agendas. What a world.
In France fascism is not illegal. There is only one thing that is really taboo, and it's badmouthing jews. Herve Ryssen, a French writer and film maker, is sleeping in jail right now because the contents of his books and documentaries was considered to be hateful.
Similarly, the only few websites that are censored by the French government are far-right websites that typically have antisemitic content (a prominent case is Democratie Participative, the French equivalent of the Daily Stormer).
That's for institutional censorship. In practice, there is an even stronger form of de-facto censorship in France (assassination) for people who draw or show caricatures of the prophet of Islam (Charlie Hebdo, and more recently a history teacher who has been beheaded; quite a few more people live under 24/7 police protection for similar reasons).
Most people have absolutely zero idea what Fascism is/was; they have a Hollywood confabulation in their head, perhaps mixed images of Star Wars and Harry Potter bad guys, anyone in a uniform, etc. Zero historical understanding of what Italy was all about in the early 20th century, no understanding of the modernizations and cleanups Mussolini brought to his country. I would hardly defend his every act, but the idea of nationalism combined with an aesthetic informed by history and myth has proven to be a very powerful one for galvanizing a society into action.
Evola's "Critique of Fascism from the Right" is one very good place to get an understanding of what the underlying ideology of "real fascism" is, separate from the inevitably-flawed implementation. (We don't need to pretend that perfect implementations of anything are possible, of course, and we similarly forgive communists their lack of a proper implementation of their own idea, which at its heart still has the same impetus of improving the state of mankind by changing the structure of civilization.)
Nobody is bringing that back. In a young and multi-cultural country like the USA, the founding mythos is neither powerful enough, aesthetic enough, or common enough to be a driving force for change any longer. There may be small pockets of adherents, but numerically they are insignificant, non-violent, and not worth worrying about in comparison to other drivers of change.
Instead of that specific and mostly-dead political ideology, the word "fascism" has become a standing for "authoritarianism" of any kind - whether it's left-wing, right-wing, or even what I think is more properly labelled as Totalitarian Liberalism, which is the era we are heading into now.
Remember that term: Totalitarian Liberalism. It is only under this system that you're ostensibly free, except everything is controlled by corporations, and people who pretend to be left-wing and "of the people" will defend the rights of billion-dollar corporations to restrict freedoms that were enshrined in law hundreds of years ago.
This action by Youtube is a perfect example of this. Each precedent they set is met by a legion of comments on sites like HN and Reddit that defend their actions, because of course it's only Fake News badthinking idiots that are kicked off. Nobody seems to notice that the scope of control increases each time, slowly but continually restricting free speech on the platform, in concert with efforts to make it more difficult to host things elsewhere, more difficult for locked-down walled-garden devices to be able to access unapproved content, etc.
It takes a real fool to think that this will never be used to suppress something legitimate.
I agree with you here, but I don't even think fascism is used interchangeably with authoritarianism. That would be a good start. Fascism has basically begun to mean "anything outside of the far left orthodoxy." People were calling Trump a fascist for his entire presidency, when the main thing that characterized his presidency was irresponsible ANTI-authoritarianism. His administration deregulated and defunded public institutions. Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production. I'm not saying these things are good or bad, they're just explicitly anti-authoritarian, and the precise opposite of fascism. Questioning the election results were the first fascist-adjacent action taken that weren't policies shared by the left, such as trade regulations.
> People were calling Trump a fascist for his entire presidency, when the main thing that characterized his presidency was irresponsible ANTI-authoritarianism.
Yes! This is amazing. There is absolutely nothing fascist about Trump - from his complete lack of anything aesthetic, his terrible diction, his lackluster speeches (despite the big rallies, which show people are hungry for something better in this direction.)
> Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production.
Whereas under fascism the exact opposite was in effect: new regulations, new control, and an early effort toward environmentalism was evident.
I don't know the details here, hopefully these laws are extremely tightly scoped. Being able to be put in jail for speech doesn't sound like something that is "working pretty well" to me.
Society can only function if those with opposing views at least agree on ground rules to debate on. Unchecked expression of view with no option for rebuttal from the other side will only destroy society. We have cases were US Senate candidates don't even show up for pre-election debates.
Why should they (rhetorical)? Many people vote based on political identity rather than actual positions or accomplishments anyways. (I hate those blanket options on the first page of the ballot to vote the entire ballot for one party or the other. People should at least go through and make sure the names are the ones they researched.)
Nope. It basically fuels the Streisand effect, both for what is really true, and for what some people believe to be the hidden truth. This kind of censorship has the opposite effect of what it claims to do.
The real truth stands up to all scrutiny, and that scrutiny is an essential part in arriving at the truth.
I'm pretty anti-censorship; specifically I believe that sunshine/debate is the best disinfectant. However, we aren't having a healthy debate right now because the election fraud conspiratorialists are shouting their message without regard for the rebuttals. I think there's something to be said for bringing the volume down to manageable levels so that we can actually have a debate. That said, I'm not remotely convinced that there's any kind of evidence that will convince these people that there wasn't election fraud--it feels like arguing with flat-earthers or blank-slaters or whomever--which isn't so much to vindicate 'censorship' (in general or in particular) as it is to express sadness at the state of our collective intellectual and political well-being.
Sunshine only works as a disinfectant when there isn't a massive coordinated artificial amplification of disinformation.
It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills. None of those is true of Americans en masse.
>when there isn't a massive coordinated artificial amplification of disinformation
>It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills
This could always be true in reverse, and pretty un-recognizable no? Does not your statement itself reflect some assumption in the ability of people to be rational actors to determine which debate is and isn't true, artificial, astro turfed, propagandized etc.
Think of for example the Iraq war push, and evidence provided for it. There are always unknown unknowns, and so your "first principles" cannot be assumed to be true
Balanced reporting of news during the election and of current president actions (for instance peace efforts in the Middle East) would probably have been a long way to not give credit to the idea that "the system" is pushing a particular candidate. Some people are thinking their voices are being silented, so censoring actions taken by Youtube or Twitter (NYP incident) are not only an additional nail in the coffin, they are actual validation of the fact a whole political side is being canceled.
I actually agree that the media in general is shamelessly pushing a particular candidate (even though I also voted for that candidate), and that that has contributed significantly to the degradation of trust. I believe the media harmed its own cause (and also my cause) which is getting Trump out of office (which is to say I think--though I can't prove--Biden could have won more easily if the media simply let Trump discredit himself), but it also harmed our collective political health, and I hope Karma lays low those responsible.
However, that doesn't excuse conspiratorialism. We still have a responsibility to find reliable trust channels and to sift through evidence, and when it becomes apparent that we're incorrect (e.g., when evidence is presented that weakens or invalidates our claims), we ought to admit our error and critically evaluate our sources who led us astray.
To put a fine point on it, the media should have to answer for its sins, but those sins don't license the rest of us to behave badly.
So ultimately you prioritize what might be described as "collective health" over generalized notions of freedom. Is that "pretty anti censorship", as this question of negative externalities is always the point of contention for censoring anything is it not?
I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health. I think it means simple frameworks of censorship, free speech, and facts cannot be generalized or universalized, as ultimately many of these will run into value judgments that aren't easily answered by questions of objective truth.
>I'm not remotely convinced that there's any kind of evidence
And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence. Or which debates or opinions are healthy or which are off limits. We see this with COVID where it's hard enough to assess the specific health risks while balancing the trade-offs of other health risks and economic impacts of lock-downs etc. "true" is too broad to encompass all the variables.
> So ultimately you prioritize what might be described as "collective health" over generalized notions of freedom. Is that "pretty anti censorship", as this question of negative externalities is always the point of contention for censoring anything is it not?
I'm not falling hard on this. I'm presently living in the tension between free speech ideals and collective political health, and I don't purport to have any great answers.
> I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health.
Agree, I think this is completely valid and I think we see a lot of this already in the cancel culture movement--lots of perfectly reasonable, healthy debate is suppressed as "possibly harmful". It's a real concern.
> And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence.
I don't buy this. I think even conspiratorialists are perfectly capable of reasoning (reasonably) well when it doesn't conflict with their political allegiance. In my opinion, the issue is that some people know full well that they're being dishonest, but they simply don't care--they value the truth less than they value their political tribe. And please note that I think there are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle who put party above truth--this isn't me punching at Republicans or conservatives or whomever while pretending that my ideological compatriots are perfectly behaved (that would make me quite the hypocrite!)--although it wouldn't be appropriate to litigate that here.
> So in your case “pretty anti-censorship” means censoring what you don’t agree with is fine?
I like ideas that I don't agree with when debate is healthy. I don't like when people who hold those ideas just keep shouting the same thing over and over without actually engaging with the rebuttals presented--frankly I find that behavior reprehensible. I have sympathy for people who want to suppress that sort of behavior, which is what you're picking up on from my previous comment, but I'm far from convinced that it's a viable solution.
Mostly though, this conspiratorial content is so obviously damaging and in bad-faith, etc that I don't care so much about imperfections with respect to free speech ideals, just like I'm not very worked up that Germany bans holocaust denialism.
> About them being loud, how can they be “loud” when none of the media is representing their case?
Because social media exists, and because the POTUS is using his enormous platform to the same end?
> This act of censorship is showcasing very grim future where absolute minority gets to decide what tune whole generations are playing to
This has always been the case. Traditional media is exactly this model.
It seems like the health of the debate has a lot to do with your opinion of the arguments presented. See how this works? What you're talking about is viewpoint censorship with extra steps
You're mistaken. The health (or lack of health) of a dialogue is completely orthogonal to agreement (I would have thought this was obvious, but I guess not). I could agree with someone, but their discourse could be completely toxic (e.g., I can love Linux but nevertheless it would be toxic if someone were just shouting "I LOVE LINUX ITS THE BEST LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU!"). I could (and frequently do) also find myself civily disagreeing with someone, but understanding their arguments (and my own) better as a result--this is an example of healthy dialogue. In this particular case, I happen to disagree with conspiratorialists and also object to their discourse, but again, those are two distinct concerns.
There was election fraud and I’m happy to link you some concrete evidence if you don’t believe me. That’s not the issue though. The issue is whether there was coordinated, systemic, and purposeful electoral fraud. That’s a much more difficult question to answer (probably a no lol). I would say that people like you who say that there was 0 electoral fraud are just as ignorant as the people conclusively saying that there was 1000% coordinated systemic electoral fraud.
> I would say that people like you who say that there was 0 electoral fraud are just as ignorant as the people conclusively saying that there was 1000% coordinated systemic electoral fraud.
You seem to have misread my comment. I'm not arguing that there is zero fraud. I didn't even say in my post that there was no conspiracy (though I'll say here that there wasn't). I only said the conspiratorialists aren't arguing constructively. I'm probably pretty aligned with you--I wouldn't be surprised if there were a handful of fraudulent ballots on either side, but there's certainly no evidence for a conspiracy.
To be fair, there are plenty of cases of _isolated, singular_ fraud (see the various people that tried to double vote and got caught). The OPs wording is quite deliberate.
Ugh. I'm very anti-censorship and I'm right there with you. It's hard to not acknowledge that we have a serious problem - half of the political establishment is hallucinating a different reality, far beyond the normal out of touch hubris pushed by both teams. I believe the raw energy is coming from being fed up with the looting and control by the plutocrats (like everyone), but they're being goaded in a completely nonsensical and destructive direction.
Every semi reputable editor (even Fox!) has put the brakes on this disinformation campaign, but it seems that doing so just makes the people believing it move on to even less credible feeds. Ultimately I think the hallucination can only die down on its own, but on the timescale of several years. Meanwhile the damage is being done right now. I just hope it's all just so Trump can continue grifting and developing political capital to try avoiding jail, rather than some larger plan like deliberately inciting a civil war.
Previously if one ventured into Internet conspiracy theory land, their new belief would be tempered by their social circle. Now whatever wild thing manages to get enough attention also creates its own social proof. We're essentially dealing with a violent mixture of the old and the new where digital non-natives are tuning into raw memetic noise while giving it the trust of the 1990's evening news.
I would be curious to see how this played out in a parallel universe where section 230 had never existed, the MITM business never gained popularity, new media ("tech") companies had to editorialize more like old media, and the anti-establishment action stayed on p2p nets with a higher barrier to entry.
I think the actual issue is that the claims of fraud are not being evaluated. I've watched tens of hours of testimonies thus far, seen the evidence, reviewed the data myself, and there's definitely something to all this.
The issue, is that the concerns are not being evaluated, both sides are not being interviewed, etc. We really need a trial. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet, in almost any of these "hearings". The lawsuits are dismissed due to "standing" or procedural issues, not on the merits.
>The lawsuits are dismissed due to "standing" or procedural issues, not on the merits.
Maybe they should hire lawyers who actually have a single clue what they hell they're doing and not Rudy Giuliani, who hasn't been in a court room since 1992 and doesn't know literally the first week of constitutional law.
What do you think all these lawsuits have been doing?
They have literally been going to court and not won a single time. These are not partisan judges. These are not Democrat secretary of states. These are Republicans.
They are throwing out every lawsuit so far. None have been substantiated, zero.
Censorship has always worked quite well, unfortunately. I grew up believing certain things until, around 30, I went to look up the figures and noticed clichés and prejudices were more correct than teachers and journalists. What a world we live in. Not a situation I’d desire!
To start with, it seems Galileo didn’t say « Pero se mueve ». If you pull the string from there, he can’t possibly have been incarcerated for saying that the Earth wasn’t the center of universe, because Kepler more or less said the same before and wasn’t incarcerated. All of that, which I had been taught in school, is false. The king of France was guillotined because he wanted to organize a referendum for him, which he was confident to win, not because he was unpopular. And so it goes on to XXth century, and the to XXIth century, with the feminism and racism narratives. When you notice the ILO’s universal treaty of 1928 against slavery of every human on Earth...
...didn’t include males from 18 to 49. Who had to wait until the UN treaty of 1957 against forced labour, if I remember, to be included.
I’m praying every night for the world to pop out of this censorship of reality. But praying is less efficient than censorship.
You’re right that the whole France’s history program in school (or what remains of it, why was it suppressed in high school scientific section?) is indeed a made up narrative trying to build a certain image of the world, often very far from the truth. It’s especially flagrant by the constant bashing of royal era, and constant praise of the republic with important facts conveniently untold like the Vendée massacre. I like reading things about history on Wikipedia, and things are a lot more nuanced than that. And like with Santa Klaus, once you know you’ve been fooled, you wonder about what else they lied... and why.
While censorship is certainly a real thing that happens, many of your examples seem to fall on the side of "History is written by the winners." Selective omission and censorship are not exactly the same thing (although the result can certainly be the same).
I think the principle is a little different, it's more a question of at what point do you reign in potentially inflammatory arguments. It's not all disproven arguments: for example, there hasn't been a big push to silence people who insist the Earth is flat, as the potential for harm stemming from that kind of nonsense is limited.
Well, they are both banned in, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia... but I see your side there, for example, if they were banned in France, that would have likely saved lives, but it would also have meant a long slide down the slippery slope. For my flat-earth example, it would require the backers of the discredited argument to be taking to the streets armed, which luckily they at least haven't shown much inclination to do (and presumably why no one has really called for them to removed from public platforms).
I think they were implying that when people advocate for censorship, they seem to be the ones that have a very secure concept on "the truth," when in reality there is no such thing.
For example, there HAS been voter fraud uncovered this election, because there is voter fraud EVERY election. The question is one of magnitude. Has the Trump administration been able to provide evidence sufficient to actually change the result of the election? No. Most conservative pundits I have seen are extremely clear about this distinction. But is this going to ban them discussing it, or discussing new evidence that is being brought forward?
As other users have mentioned, this country went through 3 years of hearing about Russian collusion during an investigation that ultimately provided no evidence of that having been an issue capable of unseating the president or delegitimizing that election. Throughout that period, I didn't hear any arguments saying that discussion of that topic should have been censored, and that is a good thing.
Taken in context "the truth" in quotes is alluding to the large number of people in the US who genuinely believe that the election was stolen, not the commenter's personal stance.
I put it in quotes because I observed people on both sides of the issue being convinced of "their" truths.
To me, the issue of how to effectively reach a general consensus in these matters is even more important than who is right or wrong. It is my personal opinion that this can only be achieved through transparency and openness, but, as always, I am my own harshest critic, so I entertain that I might be wrong.
To me it is not so much about quantifying the effectiveness as it is about qualifying the results. This is not a trivial question as democracy, which is in essence a non-violent system for transition of power, relies on a nearly unanimous acceptance of the process and the results.
So, for introspection, and I know it is not a perfect analogy, but imagine you are at a scientific presentation, and you're gut feeling tells you there is a flaw in the arguments presented. So you pose a question but instead of receiving an answer that might lay to rest your misgivings, the speaker just says "That question is not allowed. Next.". How likely is it that that response changed your mind in favor of the theories presented?
Social media is engaging in censorship, which means our society is screwed.
Social media _has_ to engage in this type of censorship because if they _don't_, society is screwed.
I think both views are probably correct.
But if we're going to screw up our society, I'd at least like to be on the side that's acting in good faith. Maybe we can stave off the inevitable a little longer.
Yes, pretty frequently, actually. Despite the best efforts of a few folks, for instance, holocaust denial 'scholarship' has been suppressed incredibly effectively, and is not part of the common zeitgeist.
In Germany displays of Nazi symbols are forbidden, as well as any political expression that incites violence against a specific race or religion. I can readily believe than in an alternative reality where they were not forbidden, the Nazi movement would be alive and well (not that there is absolutely no Nazis in Germany, but I bet there would be many more, and in power, were it not for suppression and censorship)
Yes. Extreme communities banned from their favorite platform always reform with significantly smaller numbers in whatever replacement platform they decide to go to.
This isn't about convincing people there's nothing to see, it's about preventing more people from being onboarded to the idea that there's something to see.
>> has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance.
Yes. Absolutely it has. It's naive to think that censorship, propaganda and such never work. They're not absolutes, certainly. But thinking of these as impotent and doomed is a dangerous naivety.
Chris Hitchens had a great piece about banned literature like Orwell in Czechoslovakia: More people seemed to have read it than in the west. There are plenty of examples where censorship fails.
That said, thinking that it always fails is dangerous. There's a reason censorship exists by default unless it's explicitly banned. There's a reason why strong censorship (heresy bans) exists in all monotheistic religions. Not only have they had an effect, but it's a defining feature of the religion and (IMO) the reason why these have taken over the whole world.
It matters what the top papers print, top channels run, and what appears (or does not) on social media. It may not be a predictable and mechanical effect, but censorship is not inert.
That said, we tend to overuse the word "censorship." The difference between an editor and a censor is reach. If the editor of newspaper X edits all newspapers, they are a censor. Youtube is wading into the murky gray area of this dichotomy.
> Regardless of what you believe to be 'The Truth', has suppression or censorship ever worked to quench dissonance or convince skeptical people, again, whether right or wrong, that there really is 'nothing to see here'.
I suppose that depends on if that dissonance was based in factual accounts of reality. If so, then yeah censorship probably wouldn't work. That's because opinions based in fact are consistent with the rest of the world and that tends to keep them in circulation. On the other hand, completely false and baseless lies don't last long without someone pouring energy into them. That's because they're in conflict with details that are readily observed. They might catch people's attention as a kind of entertainment. But, beyond that, they don't provide much practical value. When they're squelched, they'll just fall out of fashion like a cancelled Netflix series.
Actual war is a completely different scenario. It won’t be a lone crazy person, and it won’t happen before all other options are exhausted (thankfully, this means there is still a chance to avoid it).
It's the spirit of the First Amendment that people are concerned about wrt silencing of particular perspectives. Of course YT is privately owned so the First Amendment doesn't literally apply.
I'm not saying I'm necessarily in favor of or opposed to the action described in this post, but I do wonder if beyond a certain scale platforms like YouTube and Twitter should be treated as de facto public forums.
Obviously 1A doesn't apply as-is, but maybe some equivalent should be implemented that does. At the same time, I'm not sure that's entirely fair since they aren't publicly funded. Or maybe it is still fair, or maybe there's some reasonable middle ground.
I agree with this. The fact is that nobody could've foreseen that a private entity could have so much power over public discourse. Nobody could've predicted the impenetrable network effects of social media a century ago. The laws need to be updated to reflect this new reality and to protect open discourse.
The first amendment talks about freedom of expression. The parent comment was saying that it was first for a reason i.e. because freedom of expression is important.
Freedom of expression is relevant to Youtube because Youtube is a platform for expression.
Sure, but it's entirely irrelevant to a private company. The quote was in reference to government tyranny, not some rule imposed by a private company. The spirit of the Second Amendment isn't to encourage a well-armed militia to overthrow a private company.
If you don't like the rules of YouTube, go elsewhere. The true spirit of the First Amendment is that you have the right and freedom to do so.
I think you're ignoring the point being made. The point stated wasn't "The first amendment applies to Youtube therefore freedom of expression should be allowed on Youtube". The point stated was closer to "Freedom of expression is important so it should be allowed on Youtube".
The point as I took it had nothing to do with the First Amendment legally applying to Youtube. Simply to do with the importance of freedom of expression (which of course does apply to Youtube), as exemplified in the First Amendment.
isn't congress literally talking about such a law now? something about holding tech companies accountable for their users content? so congress is breathing down the necks of tech companies which now "choose" to refuse publishing certain content. what interest would youtube have to censor otherwise? no censoring = more views less work.
one step closer to an internet blackout, like in those "third-world" countries. should not be a surprise when this happens.
social media always engaged in censoring to appease US gov. I don't see the big deal if it's now about the election. they are always promoting some agenda (Assange, Brexit, Syria, other wars)
GoFundMe deplatformed Matt Braynard when he tried to raise money for the voter fraud research. He didn't even assert that the fraud happened or not and they still kicked him off for what they've said is "disinformation".
That's cool, but he started the campaign on November 6 and they kicked him out the next day. He didn't say anywhere that the fraud happened or not. He was just raising money for the research.
Will they let people raise money to see if theft of a bank is feasible, or to design business models for heroin dealers? They're not robbing banks or selling heroin... Where does your argument even end? It doesn't matter because it is a private platform, and if they smell BS they are free to get rid of it.
What are you even talking about? You can't compare teaching people how to sell heroin or rob a bank and conducting a research. What I take issue with is that they kicked him out for something that he did not do.
Sounds like you're talking out of your a##, since you have no idea who this person even is. You've said that evidence is not being suppressed. And now you're trying to make all of these mental gymnastics to say that if the research that is necessary to provide you with the evidence challenges your biases then it surely has to mean that it's somehow disingenuous and it's actually a good thing that it's being censored.
He was part of the Trump campaign in 2016 and from the 3rd to the 6th he interacted with various Twitter accounts that fueled the conspiracy and his fundraising was clearly attracting an audience who read between the lines.
GoFundMe is in their right to believe there was dog-whistling.
"Even just a few matches would be indicative of a much more substantial voter fraud operation" said by a Trump supporter who get's the support from a majority of misinformation spreaders when he opens the GoFundMe:
I often see in twitter bios disclaimers like "opinions are my own" and "retweets are not endorsement". I'm guessing people should now start putting a new disclaimer, them simply being retweeted by someone else doesn't mean that they have anything to do with that person.
If your audience reacts to content like it's a dog-whistle, maybe don't be surprised when you're banned?
Talking about "investigating voter fraud" when Trump was claiming voter fraud with no evidence and then getting retweeted by supporters who already had made up their mind isn't helping GoFundMe determine they are not faced with a dishonest actor.
Agreed about disclaimers: Why not go with a disclaimer that says "The president's claims are currently unfounded and have no legal merit and could endanger trust in our democratic process. Some of my analysis could reveal the impact of COVID-19 deaths in some districts or active voter suppression in some states". Enough to tune out misinfo sharers and be a bit more honest about what most analysts predicted would happen.
Actually yes, I would be surprised, because it would be completely fucked, excuse my language. Punishing someone on the basis of other people's reaction is just one step away from collective responsibility, and that's what happens during wars and occupations. A lot of innocent people were murdered because of reasoning like that.
I might have sounded a little bit too dramatic considering the fact that the tweets in question didn't even say anything bad, but whatever. Also, "dog-whistles", lol. You're clearly just making stuff up at this point. Braynard didn't do anything wrong and removing his fundraiser from GoFundMe was baseless and unfair.
Speech is dependent on context and audience. I realize there are some basic concepts around speech we don't seem to share.
Your argument that anyone can write anything no matter context or audience reactions and face no consequences is baffling. I guess no one was ever murdered because of that...
A Trump political operative is expected to have taken some level of history and political science classes though. GoFundMe probably thought he had a better understanding of the impact and context of his online discourse than a libertarian college drop-out might argue.
This is not speech, it's just a fundraiser for research. And Braynard already achieved his goals, he did the research that he wanted and the results are included in lawsuits as evidence. Deplatforming him, if anything, only gave him more exposure. GoFundMe was wrong about their decision, end of story.
You keep misrepresenting what I'm saying. Please stop. The claim was that evidence is not being suppressed and I've presented that the research of the subject is being deplatformed. In your attempt to undermine this simple fact you had to go as far as to make up conspiracy theories about "dog-whistling". It doesn't make any sense.
In retrospect, using the term "deplatforming" reveals to me you are not equipped to debate about this. His fundraising was removed but he wasn't banned from GoFundMe or any other fundraising. You seem to dismiss dog-whistling as a term but happily employ the wrong words.
I was discussing the framework and tools the people at social platforms are currently employing to decide weather they are being weaponized. I thought the discussion would start around the finer details of online moderation and operating these tasks at scale. You see evidence being suppressed, I see an overwhelmed company in the middle of its country's political crisis being asked to manage a surge in new bad-faith actors.
I've provided plenty evidence myself that they had elements to confirm his behavior could be interpreted as being linked to disinformation campaigns. Maybe they were wrong but I disagree with your take that this Trump advisor can't wrap his head around why GoFundMe believed it.
Publicly Matt Braynard showed no attempt at understanding what he could change to be accepted and leaned hard into this removal to galvanize extra-donations on another platform.
In the end, the circumstantial evidence he uncovered turns out not to be admissible in court or is improperly used by the Trump campaign (given their constant lost legal challenges). It must sting, especially when he see's all the grift around those legal battles.
No, I'm not dismissing dog-whistling as a term. What I'm saying is that this is not the case here and you're making it up as a desperate attempt to rationalize what GoFundMe have done.
Historically in the US there have been only a handful of cases where voter fraud overturned an election, and it was in small elections with very narrow margins. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, the likes of which will not happen in a GoFundMe. The effort was meant to sow distrust and repeat the weaponized cynicism.
But if you insist, Matt Braynard managed to raise the money on some other platform and he did found enough potentially illegal votes to swing some states. Mainly people who moved out of state and things like that. So here are your facts.
Do whatever you want, but the caveat with that is that according to him, the journalists didn't even bothered to ask him about his actual findings, so don't expect the articles to be unbiased.
Just because you and they repeat it doesn't make it true. If he had findings, that is the news, and if no outlet is publishing them, they must not warrant attention.
He says he's found evidence. All he's posted that I can find is a 42min long video I can't be bothered watching properly, but skipping through it his methodology seems to rely on surveying people now and comparing to voting records. This - of course - isn't "finding potentially illegal votes".
But maybe I missed something. I do think it's interesting that his Twitter profile says he's releasing "data and reports" a week from Nov 24, and there is nothing.
It's also interesting how much of his video is about asking for donations......
Surveying people was just one thing that he did. He also matched the voters with NCOA database, that could indicate that people from other states voted and things like that.
One of the people they've surveyed was Nahshon Garrett:
As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing. So unfortunately, he will only give you the actual data if you're someone trustworthy, so a lawyer, politician, journalist or something like that. His research is included as evidence in some of the ongoing court cases.
From what I've seen a lot of people have said that he might just be a grifter. I personally don't care, since I never donate to anything like that, but if you're considered about this, he posted the expenses on twitter. I believe a lot of money went to the call centers.
And look, it very well might be, that it's literally nothing. But this type of research is realistically as best as you can possibly get. What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything. But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
> One of the people they've surveyed was Nahshon Garrett
Yeah so here's the affidavit he has signed[1]. There's no evidence at all that he voted in AZ, only that his voter registration record was active, and his affidavit doesn't claim he voted or that he found that he voted, only that Braynard's organisation claims he did.
If you listen carefully to the interview, the story is the same there. When she asks what kind of vote it was he says "oh I don't know - I think it was an early vote or a provisional vote or something". He hasn't checked!
Braynard claims that he voted. But there is nothing verifying that at all that this is the case, and Braynard couldn't verify this independently. (I just checked - you need your Voter ID and/or SSN).
> As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing.
This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
One of the reasons everyone is so annoyed about this is because of this shitty grifter wrecking democracy to make a few bucks for themselves.
> What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything.
This of course is complete nonsense. There have been vast numbers of state and federal investigations into every alleged piece of fraud. But there is nothing there, especially not on the scale claimed.
> But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
It really wasn't. He was raising money by alleging fraud occurred and he was going to blow the lid on it all.
Carefully trying to work around their restrictions by pretending it was "just in case" - when the President of the United States is making these claims - is clearly bad faith.
> This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
Well, I saw with my own eyes that people were banned for posting the information like that, so that's why I believe it.
I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Looking on the bright side, I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
No, him using that as an excuse is the BS. If he could actually prove anything - instead of it just being yet more allegations - would be explosive, and being "banned" (by who exactly) wouldn't matter.
> I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Of course, there are plenty of closed court methods of doing this.
> I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Put it like this: is there anything that would convince you that these claims are all BS? I mean - Trump appointed judges keep throwing the claims out of court. - what more do you need?
I already believe that at least 90-95% of those claims are BS, and no one had to convince me to believe anything. However, considering the fact how many people seriously consider Trump to be the next Hitler, there is no doubt in my mind that someone for sure did try to cheat is some way. Another question is whether there was enough of it to change the outcome and to that - I have no idea.
The most damning thing for me is preventing poll observers from challenging the ballots. This fact alone makes the election illegitimate, as far as I am considered. Poll observers should be there to ensure that there is no fraud in the first place, and without that it's really hard to figure out what happened. If the poll observers were allowed to do their job, I don't think I could complain about anything.
Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits. Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet. But I guess it's possible that it's just propaganda from the Trump side, so I have no idea on this one either.
And could you please look again at that Nahshon Garrett affidavit, exhibit 2? Doesn't that mean that "he" in fact did voted in AZ?
> The most damning thing for me is preventing poll observers from challenging the ballots.
Citation please.
The closest that occurred was that when Republicans tried to put more observers in place than was the agreed number (the number has to be equal between Democrat, Republican and Independent observers) they weren't allowed.
> Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits.
Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Guilliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
> Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet.
Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Here's a typical judgement against the claims:
One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.
Here is what I am basing the poll observers not being able to challenge the ballots claim on. From the day one, a lot of people from all over the place have been alleging the following thing. They weren't able to come any closer than at least 6ft, and if they tried to challenge a ballot, the poll workers would basically scream at them and call 911 or the security. The story is consistent among everyone who've been saying that and the video evidence supports that. The claim has been also repeated on various hearings. I wish I had time to go through all of the thousands of pages of court documents and point you to exact claims, but I unfortunately I have a work too, so if you're interested in that, you'd have to find it on your own. Giuliani said that they have it on sworn affidavits and I don't really have any reason to suspect that this is not the case. You can probably find the actual affidavits on the same court cases that Braynard is a part of.
Here is one of the videos of poll observers being forced to stay at the 20ft distance. Keep in mind that there are 3 or 4 rows of tables, 20ft is just from the first row.
Here is the leaked audio from the Detroit poll worker training. Normally it could be dismissed as it has the "conspiracy theory" vibe to it and is hard to watch, but since the story is consistent with the claims above, I found it to be believable. I don't know why people do this kind of thing instead of just posting a full, unedited audio, but whatever. I believe there is also an interview with the dude behind the leak on a Youtube channel called "Rekieta Law", if you're interested, but I haven't personally listened to it.
> Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Giuliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
That might be true, but the vast majority of the lawsuits had nothing to do with Giuliani.
> Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Let me correct myself, my understanding is that the Trump team waited a long time to file the lawsuits with actual evidence. Their first lawsuits weren't even alleging any sort of fraud or irregularities, but to allow the poll observers within a 6ft distance when challenging the ballots and things like that. Can't speak to why were they waiting so long.
> Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Going back to your previous comment, as far as it would be indeed very annoying, I don't think that it's a fair criticism, since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years. I'm not saying that you specifically are guilty of this, but still, you can't criticize someone for doing that if you did the same thing.
Regarding the Nahshon Garrett affidavit, I searched for the `Your ballot was signature verified and counted` string on twitter, and it seems like it means that your vote was indeed counted, so it seems that what Braynard says might actually be true. Which brings me to the same question that you've initially asked me: is there anything that would convince you that some of these claims ar...
> is there anything that would convince you that some of these claims are true?
Oh yes of course. From what I can see, it looks like Nahshon Garrett is either lying or someone else voted for him. I think it's mostly likely he's lying, but maybe otherwise.
But I don't think that is any evidence of systematic fraud at all.
> since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years.
Yes, and as I'm sure you realize, these allegations have been found true. Russia did act in 2016 to support Trump, people in Trump's circle worked with Russian agents etc. The best that can be said was that Trump was unwitting ( which I actually think is likely) and that his people working with the Russians didn't realize what they were doing (in general I think this is also likely).
If Nahshon Garrett is lying then he is going to prison for perjury.
The only thing that I remember from back when I was still paying attention to this is that they've worked with Russian businessmen or journalists or whatever. And that Russia bought some facebook ads. And if you're concerned about this type of thing then apparently the FBI is now looking into the Bidens regarding their dealings with Ukraine and China, because of the things that they found on his Hunter's laptop, which by the way, media and social media did a complete blackout on.
Bring the evidence to the court? It's funny how the side claiming there was fraud apparently has trucks full of evidence and affidavits on news channels and social media, but when it comes to an actual courtroom, where lying has real consequences, suddenly, they don't claim "fraud" anymore and they don't have any real evidence.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded there existed close ties between Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence, and the Trump campaign.
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress"
The link I provided was not referring to the Mueller investigation.
In August, of this year, the a US Senate Committee on Intelligence found that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence.
"The committee's findings are a more in-depth look at the interference than Mueller's investigation, but the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
Your own source literally disproves what you're claiming.
I'll say it again, from your source:
"lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
Yes, that quote says that the Mueller investigation failed.
However, the article is _about the Senate Committee_. This is a different thing than the Mueller investigation, and it succeeded where Mueller failed.
FTA:
> Among the probe's newest revelations is that Konstantin V. Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort's, was a "Russian intelligence officer." Manafort's contacts also posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the report.
> "Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election," the report added.
> "At nearly 1,000 pages, Volume 5 stands as the most comprehensive examination of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign to date — a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the panel's vice chairman, added in a statement.
>Yes, that quote says that the Mueller investigation failed.
It says nothing of the sort, it actually agrees with the Mueller investigation, and only adds to its legitimacy.
Nothing that you quoted points towards collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. There were contacts with Russians from both the DNC and RNP, but once again:
> a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Lack of evidence that Trump conspired. There is no collusion.
In stating they ran parallel they meant that they're investigating the same offences at the same time. It ran parallel, but did not collaborate with, the Mueller investigation. It found more evidence and drew stronger conclusions.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Impressive, a throwaway account that uses the very controversial summary that Barr wrote quickly before the report was released and without Mueller's re-reading.
Here's the follow up from NPR where Mueller later distanced himself from this obviously misleading summary: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/718883130/mueller-complained-...
There's at least two accounts trying to conflate the Mueller investigation with the Senate Committee. It's kind of amazing how ... clearly identical their arguments are.
Yeah. In a thread where the debate is about "people being able to form their opinions on their own" it seems like they really like to depend on spoon-fed talking points.
> In a thread where the debate is about "people being able to form their opinions on their own" it seems like they really like to depend on spoon-fed talking points.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Unfortunately it has to be a throwaway because these kinds of facts might as well be thought crimes here.
Once again, you're not linking to a source document that explicitly presents evidence. In fact there are clearly more than a hundred pages about Trump and Russians engaging in activity around the 2016 campaign.
You link to a partisan Senator who, by the way contributed to the Donald Trump campaign, says he found no-evidence.
The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio or even the report or "Russian government" to cop out of the deep involvement of ex-spies and oligarchs out of Russia.
>Once again, you're not linking to a source document that explicitly presents evidence.
This is the exact document that Rubio is referencing in his press release I linked above. The evidence presented explicitly presents no evidence of Trump colluding.
>You link to a partisan Senator
Rubio was the head chair of the investigation, not some random senator.
>The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio
Facts and legal definitions are not "weasel-words".
Your linked source just proves the following statement:
"We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You can continue to believe fake news, but that doesn't make it reality.
Collusion in the context of election campaigns has no legal definition. If I'm the one who believes in fake news I wonder why you're the one sourcing your beliefs from controversial and disavowed summaries and partisan actors.
>I wonder why you're the one sourcing your beliefs from controversial and disavowed summaries and partisan actors.
NPR, official press releases from the chairs of senate intelligence committees, etc. have not been disavowed and the facts agree with me.
Again, if you stop believing fake news and actually read what has been linked above, you will find that:
“Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive."
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
I've read your links but somehow it feels you haven't read mine as they offer later rebuttals to your sources.
You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
But ok I'll concede your following point that relies on "collusion" and "government" : the report didn't find "evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
>I've read your links but somehow it feels you haven't read mine as they offer later rebuttals to your sources.
They offer no rebuttals, they only strengthen and agree with my points.
>You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
Except they're not. Rubio is the head chair of the committee that drafted the report. The report agreed with him.
>You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
Funny how various US courts of law disagree with you and Rubio. The information the SIC vol.5 regroups was used to convict quite a few of Trump's campaign associates.
I see it coming so don't come back with "he wasn't convicted of election fraud and collusion by the judge" because that's not how the US judicial system works. His crimes are clearly linked to the whole topic of Trump & Russians interfering in the 2016 election.
> Not for anything related to collision or election fraud.
Manafort was charged with crimes not related to Russian collusion in hopes of getting him to flip on Trump. It was working too, which is how Mueller’s team learned Manafort was feeding internal campaign to a Russian Intel officer, while Russia was waging a psyops campaign against American voters. This strikes at the heart of the collusion claims.
That was until Trump started dangling the idea of a pardon and Manafort clammed up.
I suppose it would depend on whether the claims in the video have been substantiated, e.g., by the intelligence community. A video talking about Russian interference via targeted facebook ads would be fine.
On the other hand, a video claiming Russian agents infiltrated thousands of voting centers with sleeper agents should probably not get through the filter.
Though as with any content filters, there will be edge cases, false positives, false negatives, etc. that will all pose a problem.
This is the fundamental problem of common user spaces on the web these days: a failure to impose standards will often result in a toxic environment. Yet attempting to impose standards is something of an arms-race game of whack-a-mole.
I think HN only manages the balance somewhat decently because the users themselves are also highly interested in productive conversation and mostly downvote -> dead comments that are likely to provoke flaming instead of discourse.
If you're hosting a party, it's not only your right to determine what kinds of behavior and conversations are allowed and not allowed, it's your duty to do so.
YouTube gets to decide what's on their platform. As an organization, they have decided that the election fraud stuff is not only false, but harmful. That's not only their right, it's their duty.
Who would you have it be? The government? A committee? Honestly, a private company making the decision seems like the least problematic of all options. You're free to "vote them out of office" with your dollars if you wish.
You were alive when Trump called for Russia to hack Hillary's emails? Or when his son and son and law admitted to negotiating with them? Or when Trump tried to drop Russian sanctions?
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress"
If you read my link it was not referring to the Mueller investigation.
In August, of this year, the US Senate Special Committee on Intelligence concluded its investigation and found that collusion occurred with Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence. _Separately_ from Mueller.
Let's not remove the end of that quote so quickly:
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress by Attorney General William Barr."
I think Attorney General William Barr did not correctly summarize the findings of the Mueller report, and was acting to drive an incorrect narrative.
Given that, I think it's entirely appropriate to also look at the Republican-controlled Senate report that the OP linked, which says it did.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Rubio says this, but that doesn’t comport with the contents of the report. Trump’s Campaign manager giving internal campaign data, to a man who the Senate Intel Committee characterizes as a “Russian intel Agent”. and then lying about it to the American people and the FBI is clearly evidence of collusion.
For Rubio to make this statement, he needs to explain this finding of his committee.
It couldn't find anything on collusion, but the question of obstruction is still open... and what exactly were they obstructing investigators from finding? Evidence of collusion maybe? We won't know because they obstructed the investigation.
> The committee's findings are a more in-depth look at the interference than Mueller's investigation, but the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Mueller didn't indict a single US citizen for conspiring with Russia.
The article isn't about the Mueller report, it's about the Senate Committee. The Senate Committee did conclude that collusion with Russian nationals, and possibly intelligence, occurred; they did so _separately_ from the Mueller investigation.
> the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
That's from the article you linked.
a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
I do see that part, did you see the rest of that quoted paragraph?
The _subject_ of that quote is the Mueller investigation, _not_ the Senate Committee.
> the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
It's stating that _Mueller's probe_ found evidence of efforts, but not sufficient evidence of conspiracy. This is _not_ stating that the committee did not.
It says they found the same thing: a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
It's possible to parse that quote two ways, but it's pretty easy to find another source (or read the Senate report yourself)
To quote The Intercept[1], on Paul Manafort in the Senate report:
One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska.
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters.
The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.” The Manafort-Kilimnik relationship, the Senate report concludes, represents “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
To emphasise a direct quote from the Republican-led Senate Committee: "the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services."
Now it's possible that Manafort was doing this because he was greedy and getting money from the Russians (he was getting paid by them), and it's possible to argue that it wasn't collusion because Trump fired him.
And of course "collusion" is a messy thing anyway - there is no clear definition, and no crime called "colluding".
I this is a good example to bring up. One person sees "Russian Intelligence officer is an associate of Trump's campaign manager, and they worked together on some 'narratives', whatever that means. And if it were something more clearly bad, The Hill would have given a clear explanation.", and another person sees "Definitive evidence of collusion." One person sees a suitcase full of ballots hidden under a table after lying about whether counting was done, another person sees a normal ballot counting process and a misunderstanding.
The same people (YouTube employees) who don't agree with you in the first place are now in the position to decide whether your argument is reasonable enough to make. Nobody is rightly in the position to put guard rails on speculation over events, and I think we'll all be better off when we finally understand this.
It's fairly definitive, the report didn't mince words:
> Among the probe's newest revelations is that Konstantin V. Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort's, was a "Russian intelligence officer." Manafort's contacts also posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the report.
> "Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election," the report added.
> "At nearly 1,000 pages, Volume 5 stands as the most comprehensive examination of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign to date — a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the panel's vice chairman, added in a statement.
Per my interpretation, this all amounts to something troubling, but not definitively something solid pointing to let's say a quid pro quo. So to me this doesn't close the question of whether "it happened".
> “grave counterintelligence threat,”
Somebody's opinion about what could happen or might have happened.
> "very real counterintelligence threat"
The opinion of a member of the opposing political party about what could happen or might have happened.
> narratives
This sounds like something that could be part of collusion but I'd need to see the rest. It's open to interpretation and I don't trust the media enough to assume they wouldn't imply something like this without having something big behind it. Indeed they hint at things without actually stating them because they're not actually true all the time.
The fact that you're retreating to the semantics of the word narrative and ignoring all surrounding words is a dead giveaway that your blinders are growing longer.
Well, that should be enough to convince you that I shouldn't be in charge of what claims people get to make on YouTube.
Anyway, it kind of sounds like Manafort is involved in a conspiracy of some sort to cover up wrongdoing by the Russians. But it just feels like weasel wording. It sounds bad but I'm not sure what it really means. Is the implication that the Russians did Trump the favor of the social media campaign, and Manafort is doing them the favor of helping them cover it up? That's the quid pro quo? I don't want to give anyone the benefit of the doubt here, I want to hear the point.
It doesn't matter if it actually happened or not, YouTube's exact words are "We also disallow content alleging widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of a historical U.S. Presidential election." Nothing in there about only disallowing it if somebody believes it happened.
...but it did happen, and has actual admissible evidence to support it. If it weren't for the unprecedented obstruction from the WH on the matter, we'd know even more currently - but, we'll have to wait for a year or so to get more of the story.
Still blown away how trumpism has infected the HN crowd this deeply.
HNers really are clowns - there's a chorus of people acting like this is oppression. When the most powerful people in the United States are constantly spreading lies to destabilize the fundamentals of the country for years to come.
Downvote me all you want - it's just proof that SV is full of assclowns. Such a shame that I probably work with some of you idiots.
This ban the State of Texas, itself from using YouTube to discuss their own belief in election fraud. It bans the sitting president from discussing his own belief in election fraud. It bans the current Senate leadership from discussing their belief in election fraud.
Some people criticize YouTube there because they are a private company refusing to carry the messages of publicly elected officials.
Now, I personally feel no need to defend any of these entities. They're all powerful figures capable of their own fighting.
If I had to decide on the topic, I'd probably support YouTube as they're the piddling multi-billion dollar company that employs my friends, where as their opponents are the leaders of a trillion-dollar nation with military might exceeding any other country in the world. YouTube is most definitely the underdog in this fight.
The Texas Attorney General is also a partisan clown and is under investigation/indictment for corruption and bribery(his aides quit and and said that he was guilty). That lawsuit is anti-democratic nonsense and is getting tossed
For what it's worth, I downvoted you for the tone of your post, and for the allegation that I live in in Silicon Valley ("[...] proof that SV is full of assclowns"), when I don't even live in the US.
So who decides what is true/accurate? Is this action just related to the current election or will this extend to other "fake news" and elections in other countries? Covid news comes to mind.
I doubt that it would help; I don’t think failing in court will be YouTube’s standard. As so many comments remind us, they’re a private company. They don’t have to wait for a court’s opinion.
I also think no left-of-center conspiracy theory would be thrown off YouTube, even if it failed in court.
Maybe this is great, I don’t make any value judgment. It’s just a bet. Take my money if I’m wrong.
Youtube does. They pay for the servers, and thus any sensible person who believes in capitalism and freedom of speech would support that they get to decide what content goes on their servers.
Remember the controversy around "YouTube Heroes"? The arbiters of truth are going to be volunteers and activists. And, the process is going to be completely opaque with no appeals process. I guarantee it.
The courts do? And so far they haven't produced any evidence and they get flung out of every court.
On COVID, every country on the planet agrees. The scientists have spoken. The guy who thinks the royal family are lizards should not be considered even remotely reliable.
Yep, just look at the recent series "Ourcry" about a kid who served 6 years and was then exonerated for wrongful conviction.
Or look at the Buck decision, a SCOTUS case that lead to forced sterilization.
Or look at the SCOTUS decision that led to Japanese internment camps.
Oh and both of those decisions .. based on Jacobson. Contrary to what the media tells you, in Jacobson, they never forced him to take the vaccination, only pay the $5 fine. But that decision led to Buck and Manzanar.
You're looking at this through a lens of "fairness". It doesn't have to be fair. Google doesn't have to decide to either let no lies through, or let all lies through.
It's their platform, their property, they are allowed to do with it as they will. Just like a newspaper doesn't have to print every letter sent in by a reader, or every ad someone wants printed. (This later example is something I have experience with: I was the editor of a college newspaper targeted by a white-supremacist holocaust-denying group that wanted me to print their anti-Semitic ads. I didn't print them)
No one is entitled to the amplification of their views that these platforms make possible. They may be platforms that are publicly accessible, but they are privately owned & operated, and I think it would be a serious blow to the concept of private property to essentially impose forced speech on them.
There are plenty of other platforms that will let someone run anything they want through them. Sure, they're not as big and don't have the audience that Google does, but again: no one is entitled to that Freedom of speech doesn't require anyone to force others to repeat that speech.
It has basically already been to court several times and been flung out repeatedly. With lawyers stating they have nothing to present. There is a certain point where we need to own up and remember saying Biden rigged the election is slander and YouTube is well within it's right not to host it.
In Nevada the Judge decided the signatures didn't match, but then shifted the goalpost, saying the attorneys now had to prove forgery. The judges are being weaponized and Politics Ruins Everything!
No, you're allowed to talk about whatever but people think YouTube has a responsibility to stop the spread of things that have been shown to be false and of which there is zero evidence dispite lots of searching for evidence.
Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two.
Lets be clear about what's happening here: Google/Facebook and the like are becoming targets of anti-trust regulatory lawsuits (privacy, data-gathering, monopolistic behavior, etc). This is just an attempt to build goodwill with the incoming administration so they can call in a favor later. It's as simple as that.
This is the result of public pressure, not an attempt to cozy up to an administration. They've been doing this for years, it's not like this is some out of left field attempt to try and get a fruit basket from the Biden admin.
Absolutely nothing about the USA is in danger of falling apart. These conspiracy theories would die by themselves in a month or two.
Yes, totally normal to have armed militias running around state capitols, organizing kidnap plots of governors, retired generals calling for suspension of the Constitution etc., happens every election cycle.
Second, my phrasing was actually pretty neutral, such as describing Flynn as a 'retired general' rather than several less complimentary but wholly factual characterizations I could have made.
Thirdly, your assessment of their significance is an speculative opinion about the future rather than a fact. It might turn out to be correct, but if I had suggested such events happening in 2020 a few years back most people would have said I was being absurd.
Update: Here's a relevant story that was published after I had written my previous comment. While similar isolated incidents have occured in the past, I stand by my argument that their confluence these days is a political abnormality in the US, out of character with elections over the last several decades.
Interesting that you chose those specific things, and not mobs rioting and looting, attempting to burn down public buildings, and taking over whole city blocks. All far more widespread and damaging.
The post I replied to addressed conspiracy theories in particular. Race riots, or more specifically riots over perceived racism in criminal justice, are not so historically unusual, nor tied to conspiracies. I have made many comments on that topic too, just not in this thread.
3,318 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 552 ms ] threadCheck out the world police on that one.
This is likely going to make a lot of conservatives in the US unhappy, since a number of elected officials in Congress (!) are openly questioning the election results. Also seems a lot more severe than Twitter’s approach, where Twitter is labeling “disputed claims” rather than taking them down.
I don’t believe that the 2020 US presidential election was rigged, but I think it’s heavy-handed to take these videos down outright. After the 2016 election, many people went wild with Russian conspiracy theories that proved to mostly be bogus, and that content never got this level of platform scrutiny or censorship.
I'm not sure why YouTube should cater to conspiracy theorists just because they'll get upset that their conspiracies are not blasted from YouTube's megaphone. YT is within its rights, and there are thousands of other video sharing services (including Mega, which is totally unregulated) for them to share their content on. They can and do self-host as well.
The Supreme Court denied a request for emergency injunctive relief. They did not deny certiorari.
And yes, I did look through SCOTUS's docket to find any other docketed case referring to Kelly v PA.
So, unless I'm missing something, the former comment appeared correct.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/do...
There's no indication in the docket that anything about the case is still live.
If you read the original brief, this is what it requests:
> Petitioners also ask the Court to consider this Application as a petition for certiorari, grant certiorari on the questions presented, treat the Application papers as merits briefing, and issue a merits decision as soon as practicable.
In denying the application, it is by proxy denying the request for certiorari, although I believe it would be theoretically possible to actually reapply for certiorari. (Looking through SCOTUS's rules, it does seem that Rule 22.4 suggests that this is the case)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-tb11okydc
But just because it isn't doesn't excuse the Republicans that are attacking our democracy just to soothe an old narcissists ego
Edit: if they do the states in question will probably call special legislative sessions to repair the defect.
[0]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/article-3/29-suits-be...
SCOTUS settles interstate disputes all the time. But one of the things they look at before they hear a dispute is if the dispute can be settled in a lower court.
In this case, Texas is complaining about the way otehr states conduct their affairs. The normal course to do this would be via the states courts (that is literally what they exist for).
It's very unclear why SCOTUS would hear this instead of directing Texas to file in the state courts.
(There's also the question of standing, but that's another hurdle Texas would have to overcome)
They rejected it.
Once again it was a fantasy disconnected to facts.
Here's the relevant text: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
This means that the legislatures of the state have total and exclusive power over the manner in which their electors are chosen. Plainly read, no other body, including that state's judiciary or executive, has the power to direct how electors are chosen. This power is so broad the state could select electors by lottery, or even a poll on hackernews and it wouldn't be subject to any oversight other than a constitutional amendment.
So, you can see that this isn't about a state following its own laws, it's about a state following the constitution. Since the constitution is a pact between the fifty sovereign states, like any other binding pact when another party doesn't follow the rules of the pact they can be sued in the appropriate venue which is the Supreme Court of the United States, or otherwise acted against. Let us hope it doesn't come to the otherwise option anytime soon, because the last time was a real mess.
I think the best, if not necessarily the most likely outcome, is that the court orders the lawbreaking states to fix things, which is as simple as calling a special legislative section and passing a resolution selecting a slate of electors. Presumably states with Democratic legislatures will pick Biden and those with Republican legislatures will pick Trump, but no matter what it will be up to the democratically elected legislatures of the state in question, which in a sane world would be acceptable to both sides.
And your proposed remedy involving throwing away everyone's votes is completely outrageous (as noted by the judge when proposed by the Trump team in MI or PA)
Look for "Declaration of Charles J. Cicchetti"
The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m.on November 4, 2020,is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,0004).
This - of course - is only true assuming votes are evenly distributed though out each state, and urban centers vote the same as country areas. He doesn't even mention that in his affidavit.
And he tries to use Z-scores to claim that it's impossible this mean people voted differently compared to 2016! That's ridiculous and - very notably - he fails to to do the same for eg Trump vs Romney or Obama vs Clinton.
No wonder trust in science is decreasing with people asking us to take this crap seriously.
There are 6 reasons for SCOTUS to dismiss it before it even considers the merits. Anyone who thinks the case has a chance does not understand SCOTUS.
UTexas Law Professor says about it: "It looks like we have a new leader in the “craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election” category" and "o chalk this up as mostly a stunt — a dangerous, offensive, and wasteful one, but a stunt nonetheless."[1]
[1] https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/status/1336312379408322560
Well, I'm convinced.
[0]: https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/stephen-i-vladeck [1]: https://www.kvue.com/article/news/education/university-of-te...
0 - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
1 - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
2 - https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/georgia-s-republican-s...
Are you arguing that candidates and parties should not be allowed to challenge various aspects of elections in a court of law? You think that had Trump been barred from filing lawsuits, that that would improve trust in the election system?
Most of the lawsuits Trumps lawyers and other supporters have produced are batshit and people are trying to get the lawyers sanctioned for frivolous lawsuits. These suits are failing in court, the only thing they're good for is as a justification for conspiracy theories
YouTube isn’t a public utility and they don’t have to publish things they don’t like.
Disclaimer: I don’t really like YouTube and I think it would indeed be better if the internet was less centralised for this very reason.
They are protected under safe harbor provisions. The question arises, once they start taking direct editorial control over content, should they be?
I could waste everyone's time and explain why that's flat wrong. Instead, I'll refer you here[0] which will explain, in detail, why you're wrong about Section 230.
[0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
If they don’t want to show the content, tough luck.
Don’t like the content? Don’t watch it.
Don’t agree with their ethics ? Don’t use their product.
It’s simple.
You mean that you wish to require others to say or host the things that you want, and if they don't they should be forced to do so?
That's freedom for you but not for others, not the other way around.
Sigh. YouTube is run by a public company, has been for many years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE
It should give you an idea about what kind of ideological bias you can expect from this company.
> Since September, we've terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken down before they had 100 views.
Yay! Thank you YouTube interns for protecting me from making up my own mind about these dangerous ideas.
I also like that the authoritative sources are ... the same media companies, owned by multinational corporate conglomerates, that are always pushing for deplatforming of independent news sources. No self-serving policies here! Tell me again NYTimes how Philip DeFranco and Joe Rogan are a gateway to the alt-right.
The Government said that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. They didn't say it changed the results.
Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.)
Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa...
And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
See, for example, #UniteForAmerica video plea https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek
They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.
I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually.
To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.”
NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-e...
I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.
They planned to meet with someone who they believed to be working for the Kremlin in order to get dirt on their opponent.
The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference.
Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.
Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about.
And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.
Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched.
Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack.
Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign.
66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.
What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.
A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.
As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good...
https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...
Don't we see history examples of lots of people falling for propaganda? Germany 1930-s comes to mind.
But baring that, how do you know which side is propaganda? Is it FOX/CNN/MSNBC or is it Newsmax/DailyWire/NYPost/Blaze/Crowder? Which side is the propaganda and which is the capitol T Truth?
It's not always easy, yes. But still critical thinking goes a long way.
Godwin's Law can be used as a tool to suppress valid comparisons. Don't fall for that.
Russia really did interfere in that election and you’ve ignored this crucial fact.
Indeed, it is a "crucial fact," and one with zero public, supporting evidence. If you were to find this evidence, you would change the world. Do find it, if you can.
The (GOP-led) senate released a comprehensive report. The head of the FBI gave long testimony. What more do you want?
Read the report here: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/25/745351734/read-senate-intelli... Or the comprehensive wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report
Edit: I neither live in a groupthink bubble nor care about internet points. Downvote or flag away!
Please do not spam non-evidence. It's "an impossibly high bar" for you. But do not call it evidence. I am familiar with the level of information collection that occurs, and I do not view this as a high bar.
Well democrats clearly interfered in the 2020 election. Emergency laws to allow no excuse mail in voting (which turned out to largely favor Biden), social media banners in your face from every angle to vote vote vote, just go out and vote, don't think - vote, quick - vote, here let me hold your hand to help you register so you can vote! One of the things Dems blamed for Hillary's loss was low voter turnout, so they pushed extremely aggressively for higher voter turnout to change 2020 election results.
Do you mean because Trump demonised mail-in voting for months before the election, and many of his followers believe COVID is a hoax?
How is it possible to draw a causation from the releases to the election outcome? I am curious if there are academic studies to support this claim.
If your wife-to-be was having an affair and this was dumped before the wedding day, would you be mad at the hacker, or at your partner? Blaming Russia for showing truth never made any sense to me. Are we to believe that the process has more integrity when we cast our votes with less information?
That Trump was elected is a harbinger of American decline, that so many people think his persona, "intellect" and view on leadership are worthy of consideration as leader of this country. It's an indictment of our electoral and voting systems, that any good faith Republicans felt they "had" to vote for such an awful leader in order to avoid the centrism of a Democratic administration.
But I don't think every Trump voter is a racist nazi. I think they were just okay with Trump being an awful human being and a terrible leader, so long as they could prevent poor people from getting health care or acknowledging climate change.
Why would you feel the need to lie about something so clearly untrue? I'm sure you can find a group of people on the internet somewhere that might have made this claim, in the same way that you can find people claiming the earth is flat.
But this fabrication that everyone was claiming Russians hacked the votes is just nonsense.
Using such loose terminology, couldn't you accurately say dozens of nations meddled with the majority of federal US elections in the past 50 years?
If you disagree, what do you think the function of AIPAC is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Hack
Being a good person? No one needs to tell you anything again, you got it right the first time.
You can rant against the mainstream media, but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there -- how many independent YouTube sources do the same?
It's simply not tech's place to be making these calls. It's arrogance and hubris and it's going to lead to a backlash.
This idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed is the mark of every insecure tyranny. Secure beliefs don't need to be propped up with censorship, and a belief isn't secure, it's because it's just not adequately backed up by facts.
This is great. Is it a quote?
Not really, confirmation bias is a real thing for all human beings. The issue here is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a fact. Objectivity in reporting is also subjective, funnily enough. If I consider NPR to be very objective because the dead-pan monotonic voice of the announcer simply says a direct quote from a member of congress, I can talk to a relative who will tell me that same NPR story is biased because they reported on something they don't agree with.
> It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.
There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society. The difference is that 20-30 years ago, there wasn't a deluge of information or misinformation readily available to get those dopamine hits from confirming biases.
Like?
I think it's fair to say that Republicans are somewhat more likely to believe in false information, but Democrats believe plenty of incorrect things as well. And I'd rather have a broken marketplace than one where Democrats just get to decide what's true.
Especially when its taken just 5 minutes for the perceived guard rails to evaporate! We're not talking about "the earth is flat" here. We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic. We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake. Even if I'm amenable to "fact checking" something like "Obama was born in Kenya" I'm sure as hell not going to support Google deciding something is true or untrue before the courts do.
The mods on this site make similar decisions every single day, but I've never seen you post about that. Why shouldn't youtube have the same ability to moderate their site as Hacker News?
Does a case really count as "ongoing" if it gets dismissed pretty much as soon as the judge finishes reading the plaintiff's complaint?
Editing to make this a bit clearer:
As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.
I've replied in more detail to your other comment which said much the same thing.
Have they been proven to be authentic?
Censorship is why you didn't already know this. It should have been major news, being the headline story everywhere for a week. It passed by here quietly, on Hacker News, and was quickly flagged.
You're left with an incomplete view of the world that is very misleading. People everywhere are using this warped view of reality to make world-changing decisions.
Except we're not. Guiliani said in one of the few courts that asked for an oral argument that it wasn't a fraud case[1]. Fraud requires specific proof which he/they do not have.
This is PR/fund raising disguised as comical legal filings.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/us/politics/trump-giulian...
So is it misleading to call it fraud? Or are you just nitpicking? Depends on who you ask.
As another left-leaning person who has also had this experience recently, and who is rather disturbed by the delusions and hypocrisy from “my team”, I’ve noticed that your posts lately seem to do an excellent job of offering a more complete picture. Often, completing the picture involves clarifying the right-leaning viewpoint. It’s unfortunate that you usually get downvoted for it, even when you aren’t inserting your own opinion and stating things that are objectively true.
Just curious, has the combination of the bad behavior by many on the left in conjunction with receiving additional context from the right, pushed you towards the center or even the right? Or are you merely trying to act as more of an ambassador for Republican views?
Let me decide for me. I'm not outsourcing thinking to YouTube interns.
Let's listen to everything. Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again! This continual lockdown has deeply hurt our ability to actually communicate with one another in any meaningful way.
We're viewing the world through a straw.
This is so ridiculous. I think you mean we need to have the information so if an individual wants to verify, they can and if they can spend the energy and rigor to know the research/data. Please stop requiring individuals to verify truth. Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances. Reputable media is an authority of similar civic responsibility.
Next time you buy a measuring tape, you're gonna sound ridiculous to ask for a NIST certificate at Home Depot.
This statement stands in direct opposition to the primary founding principals of liberal democracy.
No one is taking away right to assemble in public. Twitter is a publisher with no quality checks in place.
I am pointing out the difference between traditional media and internet media. One has checks and balances, and the other is wild wild west.
- Time to publish, it’s not instant like the internet
- Allows people to editorialize and review, even if they allow publishing
- Allow critics to voice their opinions before the book blows up
I’m in no way saying we need to have a CCP level control over what gets published or not, but I am just pointing out the virality of social media that didn’t exist before the internet.
You can make many arguments around it, the fact is that the internet fundamentally changed the way conspiracy theories propagate.
Even if controversial books are published, someone is going to a bookstore and buying it. There are reviews on ebooks. There is so much discussion. No such thing is exists in echo chambers.
Yes indeed. The Internet, as well as some other more modern communication technologies, has greatly optimized the proliferation and psychological impact of the echo chambers.
Suppose two long paths leading home are filled with people.
Path one is a park filled with people reading various physical copies of books, one of whom looks up from their copy of Mein Kampf to say something threatening to you.
Path two is filled with innocuous-looking people, all glued to the screens of essentially the same model of smartphone. One of them looks up from their device just long enough to tell you, "Samy is my hero."
Which path do you take and why?
Do we?
Let's address this on two levels: First do we really expect people to evaluate the facts relevant to who they choose to vote for? I mean on the one hand, the system does this, yes. But not because we have any particular amount of faith that everyone is ready to bear the responsibility. Instead, we're resigned to the fact that all the other options are worse. I mean the founders absolutely didn't trust the people to evaluate their leadership, unless you were willing to restrict the definition of "people" to "white male landowners".
Hell, even more, the constitution as written (and federalist 68 explicitly) suggested that the people themselves shouldn't select the president, but only select representatives who ultimately do the selection. The justification for this was that said representatives would hopefully be more capable than the average individual of weighing all of the requirements of the office.
So the founders certainly didn't share your faith. Nor, even today, does the constitution itself. Ultimately though, having a well informed populace is very different from having a kritarchy, and having reputable media is necessary for a well informed populace.
If you're bombarded with two contradictory pieces of information (which I'd argue is in many cases the explicitly strategy of some of the media), you either need to be an expert on the topic, or your only approach is to trust people. Like, are you really saying we expect the average American to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to economic policy? Nobel prize winners disagree!
But that's just the first layer. There's a second layer here:
At this point we're no longer talking about the political participation of voting. That's already happened. The votes are in. What we're talking about is asking people to evaluate the facts of obscure election law that's in most cases never been tested. The average American isn't a constitutional Judge. But, to use your word, the president has asked unelected judges to directly overrule the will of the people literally dozens of times. That's kritarchy (or just raw authoritarianism, your choice). The actual experts, the judges, have resoundingly said no. Like, among the experts, there is no controversy here. And yet the conspiracy theory persists. Why is that?
You call to "stop requiring individuals to verify truth" can be phrased in another, more honest way: support specific organisations to decide where the truth lies. For simple facts - the current temperature, the price of petrol at the pump, the energy content of a portion of a given food - this works. For disputed facts - nearly anything related to SARS2, nearly anything related to climate, nearly anything related to nuclear power, nearly anything related to migration, the veracity and validity of identity politics, the absence or presence of "systemic" racism - this patently fails since the gatekeeper gets to impose its own views on the public. When that gatekeeper happens to be the 500lbs gorilla in the field that means the public has to do exactly what you decry to be ridiculous: they have to go check whether the presented facts are true or just the result of the gatekeeper projecting its opinions, a task made harder by that gatekeeper - the 500lbs gorilla - blocking opposing views from its platform.
On your measuring tape comparison I can state that measuring tapes sold in e.g. the Netherlands clearly state that they are not to be used for trading purposes ("niet voor handelsdoeleinden") since they are not officially calibrated. Just like scales, pumps and other measuring equipment measuring tapes/sticks/etc. used for trading purposes need to be calibrated, get stamped that they are, complete with a calibration expiry date. So, yes, if it really matters you do ask for a calibrated measuring device.
Once there's a viable vaccine, sure. I don't disagree about your point of the damage the lockdown has done, but USA governments and citizens haven't locked down consistently enough to provide the intended results.
It is techs responsibility to moderate the forums they operate
No. No there absolutely is not. The fact that you trust the Legacy Media at all is part of the problem. It's independent analysts who have been the only ones to do any real research.
Viva Frei does a great piece on how the New York Times contradicts their own headlines in their article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmgMu5sefzA
"The full source material is what keeps journalism honest," said a man who is now in prison somewhere.
The other week I posted the below, which are headlines for the same 3 stories on the same day from CNN and Fox, arguably 2 of the biggest "news" sources in the U.S. These headlines are effectively opinions with the aim of gaslighting their respective audience. It's not healthy.
FOX: Trump touts historic stock market jump as Dow tops 'sacred number,'
CNN: Dow tops 30,000 for the first time ever as Biden transition begins
FOX: Biden's pick for national security adviser defended anti-Trump Steele dossier
CNN: 'The team meets this moment:' Biden introduces top admin nominees
FOX: Happy Thanksgiving! State relaxes gathering limits ahead of holiday
CNN: Doctor fights back tears describing single day of heartbreaking losses
Yes, placing our complete trust in a few major media outlets to accurately report the facts is naive. But believing that individuals with no independent fact checking department or an editor to enforce journalistic standards will somehow be less biased is even more naive.
Factually correct speech has its place. But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends, you don't need to be factual. That's not a necessary ingredient to a good conversation.
I have a Youtube channel where I sometimes talk about Space and Biology. I'm not educated in these subjects. No doubt a lot of what I say is factually incorrect. That doesn't mean my speech is misinformation, deceitful, or dangerous.
These things are not the same. When you talk with friends or when you write a comment, you have a limited audience and counter viewpoints are readily available. When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.
Here's a comment snippet you wrote 3 days ago: "Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies.
Are you really doing your 'best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements'? Because I'm sure you have no evidential basis for that statement and therefore promulgating misinformation. Alternatively, we can have YouTube Interns decide what you can and cannot say online.
Regardless, perhaps you should take your own advice?
And it's also fun that you took a comment that basically said "channels with big audiences should care about not saying wrong things" and took it as a support of censorship.
Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
- Facebook wanted to create a digital currency, and wanted it to be used by as much people as possible.
- Monetary sovereignty is the capacity of a state to control what currency is used as legal payment, how much of it is issued and how much of is it retired.
- If Libra became widespread in a country under the conditions that Facebook wanted (i.e., the Libra association controlling issuance and retirement), it would complete and (partially or completely) replace the state's currency and therefore the state would not have power to control its own currency, therefore losing monetary sovereignty to the Libra association.
- The Libra association was an association of private companies, QED.
And all of this brings me again to the point of how comments and videos are different. I made a comment, you made a comment, I made another one, and most people reading will watch the different viewpoints. If this was instead YouTube videos with millions of views, a lot of people would see the video title and take it as fact, another group would watch it and wouldn't care or wouldn't have the capacity to search for the opposing viewpoints, and only a minority (I think) would actually see the full debate. That's why I say that the standards should be different if your potential audience is bigger and they're less exposed to other viewpoints.
What is happening with YouTube, is happening with Twitter and Facebook, so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning. Twitter was built for off-the-cuff comment-type communication and Facebook was built for sharing posts and content with close relations. And yet the exact same 'curation' is being done there as well. So no, I don't agree there is some magic difference between video and text.
>Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!
NO it's not. You saying it doesn't make it so. You're impugning a motive on Facebook that you have no evidential support for. But that's not the salient point in this discussion, because your opinion about the level of evidence that you feel you bring to the argument is immaterial to social media 'curation'. What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
I did not make a distinction between video and text, I made a distinction based on audiences and availability of counterpoints. I used those examples because they were the ones that the parent comment used. I do not know why you're talking about video and text.
> What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.
And at what point did I say I was in favor of social media curation? I said people should try to avoid saying wrong things in their own content when that content has a large audience with counterpoints not readily visible.
Crossfire Hurricane wasn't enough of a ruckus?
It came out recently that Eric Swalwell was targeted by a Chinese spy, but cut ties after a 'defensive briefing' by the FBI. Hillary's campaign also received a 'defensive briefing' in 2015 when a foreign government tried to influence her campaign through a campaign associate. Trump's campaign never got one, instead FBI ordered an investigation on the flimsies grounds and outright lies to the FISA courts (and what turned out to be opo-research funded by the Hillary campaign and promulgating actual Russian disinformation)..
And then the next four years had Hillary going around saying explicitly that Trump is not a legitimate president - a claim not challenged by media and echoed by the Democrats. The media itself kept pushing the discredit Steele dossier throughout that time. So I do roll my eyes when political activists in the Democratic party and media are now all about 'election integrity' after what they did to the trust in the system over the last 4 years. And I'm not really worried about Trump bitching on Twitter and putting out lawsuits (as is his right), as some threat to Democracy.
He does not have the right to ask state governors to ignore the election results and appoint electors who will vote for Trump. That is far beyond the legitimate exercise of Trump's rights.
Whether he should do it is a different question.
Whether people have the right to request governors to perform illegitimate actions... that probably depends on your definition of "right", and I don't care very much about having that debate.
The theory here is that the US Constitution, because of wording in Article II ("Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors [...]") that if interpreted hyperspecifically[1] implies that the legislature alone, and not Governor or state law, has the power to appoint electors. That has never been tested in practice.
But regardless, it would still be a state crime to do it. So no, he doesn't have the right.
[1] Obviously the reasonable interpretation of this line is "States decide for themselves how to choose electors", not something that makes assumptions about the structure of state government.
I want you to step back and really consider the reporting on this by taking into context the kind of reporting of the behind-the-scene Trump Administration actions that came out of the media. And given that, I have no idea how you can possibly take this interpretation at face-value.
For the last 4 years, there has been an egregious claim after another, each more bonkers than the next, unverified, stemming from some 'anonymous sources' against Trump that has time and time again proven to be without merit. Every.single.week.
Just recently, a news cycle was devoted to the claim that Trump will barricade himself in the office if Biden wins. Just prior to the election, multiple news cycles were devoted to reporting on Trump destroying postal boxes to prevent mail-in voting. A little before that, Trump was accused of ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers (another meritless claim that was disavowed by the the Taliban, Russian, American Intelligence and Army with no evidence presented by NYTimes). Again, this occurred every single week for the last 4 years.
And you don't even have an ounce of skepticism of reporting that Trump in a private conversation asked governors to break the law, given how this kind of stuff has been reported, time and time again?
The gaslighting of the last 4 years has been insane and the media is simply incapable of objective straight reporting on Trump. I know how that sounds, but that's what it is.
Trump clearly has not facilitated a good faith, peaceful transition of power.
And this matters - the 9/11 commission noted that the rushed transition due to Bush v Gore contributed to the intelligence lapses that lead to the attack. And that wasn't even a bad actor harming the transition like we have today.
Dems didn't delay transition of power, but they did spend a huge amount of political capital trying to convince the country that Trump's victory was invalid or fraudulent.
No, they spent a lot of political capital on the idea that Trump was corrupt and aided by foreign powers, basically no Democrats (in national office, at least) seriously advanced the case that Trump's election was either invalid or fraudulent (that his conduct, including conduct after the election, warranted impeachment and removal, yes, but that's a very different case than the election being fraudulent or invalid.)
As a parallel with subordinate offices, Democrats generally think Barr is a bad attorney-general, and his appointment was a result of improper motives, and some have made calls that he should be impeached, but none have claimed his appointment is invalid.
On the other hand, Chad Wolf’s appointment as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has been described and challenged as invalid (and, in fact, found to be so by courts, invalidating official acts dependent on his appointment to that position.)
There is a difference between acheiving an office by unethical means, or having bad conduct warranting removal from office, on one hand and illegitimately claiming office on the other hand. You are improperly conflating accusations of the former with accusations of the latter.
Manafort (plea deal and convictions), Roger Stone (convicted on all counts), Cohen (plead guilty and convicted on multiple counts), Flynn (plead guilty to lying to the FBI, pardoned) are the big names.
All direct associates of Donald Trump, and all their criminality was for his benefit.
The main reason Donald Trump hasn't been charged with anything himself is because he is using the office of the presidency to shield himself. We will soon see if he can survive without a scratch without that shield.
Reminds me of the exchange between William Roper and Thomas More. After More balked at arresting someone who hasn't broken any laws, Roper stated that he'd "cut down every law in England" to get the Devil. More answered: "And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide"
Once the tech and media conglomerates take the mantle of curation and censorship, it's only a matter of time before you run afoul and get dragged under as well. You feel safe now because you feel they share your political beliefs, but that will change.
https://www.wired.com/story/christchurch-shooter-youtube-rad...
Of course, if YouTube (and others) actually cared about helping, they would change or remove their algorithmic feed, which is the real crux of the problem. But that hits their bottom line more than pulling down individual pieces of content does, so here we are.
We were told that Russia interfered in 2016 elections and helped to elect Trump. Now, we are told that 2020 elections were of the highest integrity. Why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Were they scared of Trump administration? But wait, we were told that Trump was Russian puppet, so they would be scared of him, right? So again, why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Or did Russia interfered in 2020 election, "just as they did in 2016", and elected Biden this time?
In short, Tech Media narrative does not make sense to me. And all censorship eventually fails, just take a look at the Fall of Socialism in the Soviet Union.
Democrats have claimed pretty every election for the last 20 years has been stolen, or at least could have been stolen, due to dominion's voting machines having the ability to flip votes undetected. Bev Harris's book Black Box Voting literally came out in 2003.[1]
Now apparently not only was this election the first not to have been stolen, but it's not even a possibility that something like that could happen. Go figure.
[1] https://blackboxvoting.org/
I love that you mention Joe Rogan. He's one of the leading Progressives that is bringing up how hypocrticial censorship has in Big Tech.
Everybody knows how absurd censorship has gotten in the last decade –– most noticably since Trump was elected.
Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans. False information is much more powerful than true information, and "making up your own mind" is simply not possible when you are bombarded with orders of magnitude more false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions.
Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.
I'd find your comment much more interesting if you actually argued against the OP's point rather than this strawman.
So apparently you believe individuals aren't capable of responsibly enjoying freedom, and thus should concede automomy of thought to the elite for what information they can consume or spread?
Some people can't handle their alchohol, but prohibiting the sale of alcohol didn't solve the probelm. Some individuals have problems, so the way to deal with that is at the individual level. Sorry the solution doesn't scale well. Freedom is great, but it's kind of expensive.
People choose to consume alcohol knowing it will get them drunk. People do not choose to be lied to. A better analogy is saying that the government should not attempt to regulate what companies put in the food they sell, because then I must believe individuals aren't capable of self-determining what is or is not safe for them to eat. Correct: I do not believe in "buyer beware" for food nor for facts.
When you start down this path, you will quickly find yourself amongst a nest of vipers.
You're comparing falsehoods with hate and racism--I don't think that's a fair comparison. YouTube has always had rules around hate speech, and that generally has not been controversial.
No, not every site. But just as we have some public forums in the real world (not all, or even most "festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism"), we should have some on the internet.
> Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans.
This reminds of arguing with objectivists who think that everything they believe flows from "A is A". I do agree that humans are humans, I'm glad we found some common ground here. Presumably you are human as well. But you are not concerned that what you believe is the result of "false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions". It's only other humans who are vulnerable to this, and you need to protect them from it, for their own good.
> Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.
Most Democratic political workers would tell you that Comey and the emails is the #1 factor. It amplified built in brand of Clinton corruption and Comey broke long standing policy at basically the perfect time to do perfect damage.
Sure some of this was amplified by Russia but I don't know a single professional that would say Russia had a larger impact than the emails/Comey.
Sure Russia probably amplified it but it was wall to wall across ALL media a few days before the election - when undecideds are going to vote. And the big damage from the first hit.
The corruption, thinks she is above the rules, tarmac with Lynch etc. That hit really hard with the small slice of swing voters and maybe more importantly reduced turnout from Ds
I don't think anyone who would believe pizza gate would ever vote for Hillary lol e.g. not a swing voter to begin with
I completely agree that Comey bringing it back into the front page played a bigger role but I wouldn’t rule out all of the social media trolling having more than a little influence. It seemed to leave a lot of reporters covering non-stories lest they be accused of bias again.
306 to 232 - I mean, get real. Recounts at this stage (or really, any stage since election night) are rabble rousing pointless grandstanding.
Both sides agreed that there were serious issues with the ballots and counting, with the only dispute being how to address them because the issues made it pretty much impossible to determine who actually would have won if the system had been able to correctly register the intended vote of every voter.
There were no serious allegations that anyone did anything illegal or tampered with the votes.
I have a hard time believing that you are seriously comparing that to 2020, where those trying to overturn the election are alleging intentional widespread fraud in multiple states, without being able to offer any creditable evidence that it happened. All the evidence they offer generally falls into three categories:
1. Things that are outright factually incorrect. For example, that video of vote counting in Pennsylvania (I think that was the state...) that supposedly shows suitcases of fake ballots being snuck in and opened late at night.
If you watch the full surveillance video, instead of just that short extract, you see that (1) those are the standard containers they use to store ballots when they are not actively working with them, and (2) those particular ballots were ballots they were working with earlier and put in those containers when they stopped. In other words, all the excerpt is actually showing is the normal resumption of processing after a break.
Another example is the claims that votes were counted without Republican observers allowed in the room, usually based on Republican observers being turned away. Some observers were in fact turned away--because there were already the maximum number of legally allowed observers from their party in the room.
2. Things that are true, but are not evidence of fraud or error. For example, various statistical measures of a candidate's votes look different between the winner and loser in districts where one candidate receives a lot more votes than the other.
They point to these in heavy Biden districts, saying the differences indicate tampering. But if you look at heavy Trump districts, you see the same thing but going the other way.
3. Actual mistakes, such as ballots lost or miscounted. You get some of these in every big election, and no one has found any evidence that these mistakes were more frequent in this election, and even if every single one of this kind of mistake went in Biden's favor, it would not be anywhere near enough to change the outcome in any state.
https://twitter.com/kelliwardaz/status/1335225504899739649
The supreme court is going to drop this case, like every other venue has. Stacking the court at the last minute with a conservative judge isn't going to magically save this losing case.
Have you seen these witnesses? Have you seen their testimony? Have you seen the lawsuits that were submitted with typos on the first page? (EDIT: first line! [1])
This entire thing is a grift and a sham that will thankfully come to an end within a week.
[1] https://archive.org/details/complaint-cj-pearson-v.-kemp-11....
There is a real big problem with election irregularities. There was a lot going on. Whenever counting stops .. and takes days, that's a sign that someone is injecting ballots. That's what happens in corrupt nations in South/Central American and Africa and Russia.
We are in very real danger of losing all confidence in the election process in America. If you don't see that, you are selectively ignoring a dangerous reality.
The Supreme Court is going to take these cases, and if they see the evidence and declare these States violated the laws ... America is going to loose their collective shit and we'll see riots like you wouldn't believe from the left.
If Biden gets certified ... you'll see massive violence from the far-left and the media will blame it on right wing conservatives.
You should probably go read 1984 and then watch the news again.
Come on man. This is easily debunked. The Republicans tweeted numbers that mixed primary and general election numbers.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/28/fac...
You also took everything the Trump legal team said at face value without a single iota of criticality.
Because if you didn't, you would have never mentioned those mail-in ballots. There were over 3 million ballots requested for the general election in PA. PA, by the way, is a state that did not allow for mail-in ballots to be counted until the in-person elections were finished. Georgia was another. Both of them have Republican legislatures.
I'm sure you also took at face value the testimony of that drunk temp worker who complained about not getting enough to eat and then amending it with claims of pollbook issues. So much more believable than the Republican and Democrat poll observers who were there the entire time to watch each vote get counted.
There isn't a state or precinct anywhere on the planet that does real time vote updates. They do them in batches. It's why a state can lean a certain way and analysts are still confident they will go in a different direction: large population centers take more time to count, and in this case the votes were segregated due to a court order, so they couldn't even mix those ballots up in PA.
The rest of us can't help it if you're willing to swallow a conspiracy theory because the candidate you support lost. We can't even really be bothered with it. The Republican legislatures will do a couple of things to assuage your hurt feelings, and then they'll move on to the next thing on their agendas.
As for your threats of violence, nobody cares. You can deal with the US military after Jan 20th if you're that angry about the election. I'm sure they'll be responsive to your feelings.
From the far left? Why? What's your rationale for claiming that they would instigate violence?
This is happening in Portland THIS WEEK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpPs2PyLKZE
I have friend in Oregon and they've told be the police in most areas will no longer come hen you call.
Before the election, there were hard-left leaders talking about plans for shutting down DC:
https://streamable.com/6gyav3
There were Seattle protestors yelling at people to give up their homes:
https://nypost.com/2020/08/14/seattle-blm-protesters-demand-...
I have a ton of videos saved off in case they disappear. I don't feel like digging up every link, but the fact is, there have been MASSIVE amounts of violence from the hard left.
I have been to BLM rallies and I've been to Trump/BackTheBlue rallies to report on them. I'm also a minority. I feel 100x safer at a Trump/BlueLives rally than at a BLM protest. I saw the race riots back in May in my own city of Chicago, and watched police cruisers set on fire, stores looted, and national guard deployed to the streets
If you serious do not think the left have not been committing the vast majority of the violence over the past several months, and honestly believe the narrative of the "mostly peaceful protestor," then it shows the failure of our news media and it also shows just why this YouTube CCP level censorship of independence voices is so dangerous.
Why would Biden's certification be a cue or trigger for left violence? That's the part of what you said that makes no sense to me.
I mean, if Trump managed to remain president somehow, I could see the left going absolutely insane with violence (and with reason). But why when Biden makes it in?
And if you mean that the left is going to continue in violence even after Biden is certified, that's probably true. Some of them are going to be violent until the entire system is overthrown and everyone gets a puppy. But it sounded like you were saying that Biden being certified was going to be the start of a bunch of left violence, and I can't understand why.
Because the vast majority of antifa/anarco-anticapitalists hate Joe Biden just as much as they hate Trump. The Democratic party has been putting their weight behind defund the police, BLM and the radical left, but if you actually interview them and talk to them, they are not going to let up if Biden is in charge.
Look at the Hunter Biden stuff. Joe's connections and influence by foreign powers far exceeded anything alleged against Trump. The corruption in the establishment runs very deep.
They're going to riot no matter what. If Trump pulls out of this, they'll have the backing of tons of useful idiots to help them light cities on fire again. If Biden gets confirmed, they loose a lot of those people, but the momentum is strong and they will continue with fewer people.
It's very likely the democratic powers are going to have to reign these people back in, and we'll see massive funding increases to PDs, massive arrests, large level incarcerations and the democratic desperately try to put the genie back in the bottle, and nobody in the main stream media will cover it .. or they'll spin it to make it seem like it's all right-wingers.
Here's a good example, that guy who wanted to kidnap the governor of Michigan: right wing or left wing? Look into his history. The news would make him sound right-wing. He openly supporter Bernie Sanders.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/8/texas-goes-s...
But yeah, exactly. This is the crack legal team that misspelled "district" on the first line of their "kraken" lawsuit.
You can sue for anything. The only way to tell if your suit has merit is winning. You can tell pretty easily that your suit doesn't have merit by getting tossed out of court -- which all of these have.
There's not one misleading video. I linked to a tweet stitching together a dozen clips from various precincts around the country. There are hundreds of these videos. There's hundreds of witnesses. There were hours of testimony given in state legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. There's dozens of statistical anomalies cited in the 2020 election data that is indicative of fraud. They subpoenaed video footage from the State Farm Arena in Atlanta, that clearly shows Republicans being ushered out of the building at 10PM on the pretense that counting would resume in the morning. As soon as the Republicans are gone, the remaining handful of workers take ballots out of suit cases and run them through the machines:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/state-farm-arena-footage-shows...
Keep denying the fraud. That's how you destroy democracy.
> There were hours of testimony given in state legislatures
Not in an unbiased court, unsurprisingly, where lying would have actual consequences.
> There's dozens of statistical anomalies
You mean where the GOP tried to use Benford's law to prove nothing? Or where they mixed up districts across multiple states when attempting to prove there were more votes than residents?
> take ballots out of suit cases
You mean the official ballot cases that all ballots are stored in?
> Keep denying the fraud. That's how you destroy democracy.
Take a long, hard look at your media sources. You seem like a smart guy and you've been fed a bunch of stuff by professional grifters and scam artists. This lawsuit is going to disappear like all the others not because there's some grand conspiracy, but that _people actually don't like Trump and didn't vote for him_.
The legal briefs are full of typos, lies, and absolutely stacked with witnesses that are testifying to essentially nothing.
This legal team will end up disbarred by the end of this election cycle.
If Trump were a no-name fringe conspiracist, YT could be blamed for amplifying him. But he has Twitter, every news org, and his campaign's mailing list that (combined) are probably far more influential.
And you know it won't stop here. From now on, every time a controversy emerges between the media-tech-academia elite view of the world and the views of regular people, tech will use hard censorship to enforce the elite perspective. There is no natural stopping point or limiting principle.
It is not the place of a few Bay Area policy people to decide for the whole world what is true and what is false. They are not God. Nobody voted for them. They have no power except the brute force of a natural monopoly's market share. Infrastructure companies must be part of the neutral background of technological society, not enforcers of a specific worldview.
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky arguing that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title refers to consent of the governed, and derives from the phrase "the manufacture of consent" used by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion (1922).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
What we're seeing is the system reasserting itself.
> Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors.
These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.
Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. It took me 2 seconds to find videos claiming that the "GOP hacked/stole the 2004 election.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=batAXTWBjMo
Of which what % have been tossed? 95%+? And the one (!) that hasn't have had zero impact on the results.
The election is over. Biden won. The votes will be certified, but not after Trump's team has done a great deal of damage to the American democracy.
After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.
If you said complaints about 2000 being stolen lead to skepticism about the outcome in 2004, and are part of a set of ideas that may have inflamed democratic skepticism about 2016, I would probably disagree that there is anything super concerning about that, but at least understand the thread that connects those pieces.
As it happens, I think stolen is a perfectly fair characterization of the 2000 election, even in retrospect, and would confess that that experience lead me, for a time, to incorrectly believe 2004 may have been stolen as well, which I believed for a time but no longer do. And I can see how it launched an unfortunate trend of liberals believing future elections either were or would be stolen. Greg Palast, for instance, is a celebrated journalist in some circles despite incorrectly claiming that the 2006 election would "go down in infamy" as a stolen election, and saying the same thing again in 2008. Despite being a Democrat, I find Palast's record to be deeply inaccurate and I am disappointed in the lack of critical reflection on his record by people who cite him.
But those claims come from a completely different universe than the 2020 claims, and I don't think they had anything to do with explaining the sociological forces driving election skepticism in 2020. Instead, that breed of skepticism has come from Trump and a media ecosystem that established an entirely alternate reality, with fever pitched adversarial thinking.
The content, social forces and motivations are completely independent, in their sources, in their character and in their scale and should not be equated to each other.
I think it just underscores the responsibility for platforms to not allow obvious misinformation to spread because it does erode faith in democracy.
There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.
They provided the forum, they need to moderate it
example of crazy plot? hereya go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...
Your argument also accepts that the courts judged these cases to have no merit, while implicitly denying that such judging was necessary.
How should a Google staffer differentiate between case number 9 (dismissed) and case number 10 (still on the docket)? And what hope can they have of coming to a better understanding of the details and merits of a case than the exact body (a court) which is set up to do precisely this?
The whole legal system is premised on every case being judged on its own merits, and rightly so.
If Google was a courtroom, you might have a point --- the courts are in many circumstances obligated to hear and dispassionately resolve batshit frivolous cases. Google is not.
I also have absolutely zero trust in Random Googlers being capable of determining truth and falsity in the general case (which is where this is heading), or in managing this power in such a way that is a net benefit to society. If they didn't have monopolies on information consumption I would be a little less concerned.
A different example: Google could have stopped people seeing "false" information about COVID earlier this year. Twitter and other platforms labelled this "misinformation", and Google could have censored it from YouTube, searches, etc. The tech companies anointed the WHO as the arbiter of truth, yet the WHO was wrong for quite a while about several important things. I would prefer to live in a world where individuals are allowed to see all the contested facts and arguments, and decide for themselves.
One last example: Ignaz Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and many others.
I suppose the real solution is to break up the information monopolies, then let them do all the censoring they want.
1. How would the average person find that website? A search engine perhaps?
2. How many search engines does the average person use? One, perhaps? Which one?
2. Probably the median person uses several -- google, facebook, and the like.
There is also a difference in kind between porn and this sort of speech. Different laws apply, different social norms apply, different technical options (and trade-offs) apply, and so on. I have also heard that there are many other porn hosting websites, and Google does not enjoy any sort of monopoly.
Perhaps we're talking past each other here but to put my general point a different way, and it's only relevant because Google is effectively a monopoly: If you were told you could be born into a world with a free internet, or a curated internet, but you had no influence over who would do the curation, which world would you choose?
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, next to Google itself. I would say it's not beyond the realms of possibility for YouTube to eventually eclipse Google.
At this point, any case being filed now over the results of the election is doomed to fail either by the doctrine of laches (you should have filed it sooner) or inability to grant relief, and that's even without considering any other possible failings it may have (including merit!).
While the courts will operate under the assumption that a case is meritorious until proven otherwise, there is no reason for the court of public opinion to operate under the same assumption, especially when there is clear precedent and established case history demonstrating why the case must be dismissed that the filing makes no attempt to address.
By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.
See my other reply to you below.
Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And people have to right to find this despicable. Although Google may not actually have that power (I don't know how much Youtube is considered a monopoly)
And half of America that politically was skeptical of anti-trust has the power to rethink that as well. (And they will, and Google will find out if the juice is worth the squeeze on that.)
Because of COVID-19 and the huge increase of mail in ballots, there is good reason to believe that fraud was higher than other years. Biden's margin of victory in key swing states is smaller than Trump's in 2016. These are not unreasonable things to discuss and I find unfathomable that this policy would be something Google would apply to say, Iran, or any other country where there was speech skeptical of government.
Acting as if speech discussing this on their platform is beyond the pale is ludicrous. It shows a sheltered, fragile group of people who think their views are more common than they are.
Another strong indication that there wasn't fraud? The ludicrous affidavits accompanying the highest-profile lawsuits against states.
What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).
Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.
Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".
Please.
The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.
What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.
Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.
But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.
We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.
Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.
> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]
This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.
Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".
That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.
So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.
It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.
Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.
If your side's arguments are correct, then they should withstand transparency and scrutiny.
If you must censor others to win an argument, that should be a pretty good clue that maybe you are not on the winning side of debate, or of history.
There are many people in the world saying things I don't agree with, but I have never called for censorship, and never will.
How do you know the more non batshit accounts haven't already been taken down?
The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".
So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."
The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.
Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?
No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.
I see it more as doing their part to reduce the noise rather than contribute to the problem. And it’s a big problem.
This is not the same argument as
> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.
I think your argument is definitely worth considering, but the “there are court cases” is clearly wrong.
This seems demonstrably true for vast swathes of users, who have become enamored with Flat Eartherism and other such nonsense. Not saying censorship is necessarily the right solution, but arguing on behalf of the reasoning capabilities of the user base is clearly misguided.
The alternative you're condoning is to make decisions for these people and tell them what to think; that is tyranny.
E.g. By not assuming good cognitive ability for people, you are setting them up to be controlled, that you agree with censorship or not.
TIL not repeating lies is tyranny.
No I'm not. Transmission is a kind of repetition, but some people seem to think that YouTube has some obligation to transmit (i.e. repeat) their lies about "widespread election fraud." It's not a government service, so there's no First Amendment aspect to this at all, and the allegations themselves are disingenuous lies, so YouTube's moral obligation is on the side of removal.
Also my argument wasn't even about this, it was that if you assume stupidity of a big portion of the population, you have no alternative but to turn to tyranny.
Now the uneducated masses can yell and yell and yell, which gives other uneducated masses the false belief that their opinions are to be respected.
And, yet, YouTube isn't censoring flat earthers.
Indeed.
I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.
To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.
All of that content will not be taken down.
But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.
There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.
There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714810702/muellers-report-sho...
[2]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-report-russian-interfere...
[3]https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
[4]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-elec...
[5]https://apnews.com/article/fb011f39af3b40518b572c8cce6e906c
[6]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18068492/g...
[7]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/30/18118264/...
[8]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud...
[9]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/
[10]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-lawyers-no-ele...
[11]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/us/politics/trump-electio...
There couldn't possibly be other dissenting views on that. It's _true_ my friends.
Vox is clearly an impartial observer. The Senate hearings which led to impeachment hearings on Trump (because he investigated Hunter Biden, who has been under FBI investigation for over a year now... a materially true fact) could not _possibly_ have been politically motivated.
Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty. YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.
If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.
I'll be by your house tonight around 2am local time to read the entire presentation in your living room with a bullhorn.
Don't shut down my speech. The "rational and scientific" approach is obviously to let me use your property to say what I want, right?
In other words, YouTube can control what is on their platform.
I mean, you couldn't even make your post without a blatant lie (Trump was impeached because he asked Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, not because he or any of his underlings investigated Hunter Biden). YouTube is well within their rights to keep certain lies off their servers. And you're within yours to publish those lies on yours, viva America!
YouTube is arguing that I shouldn't be able to provide evidence to the contrary, which is the point.
I'm not arguing with the list of bullet points. I'm arguing with the very silly implication that there is an obvious "truth" that some MegaCorp should be able to hand down and enforce on this.
Correct. But it's tantamount to saying "you can't speak in this public square, how about you pretend your front yard is a public square and speak there."
Eventually, people are going to say the hell with that and that Google's "private" management of 90% of inbound searches and content is, in fact, public.
After that, maybe we can start calling it Gov-gle or something once it's nationalized.
Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.
Welp. Time to get rid of Section 230 then!
Apparently these companies aren't neutral carriers and should be held liable for what they censor in their editorial discretion.
Scrutinize their sources, but likewise your own.
> Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty
I do agree that shutting down speech only adds fuel to the flames. You're right. I also think companies are not faultless judges of the truth.
> If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.
Here is where the discussion on YouTube (social media in general) censorship should start.
The problem is that these people (the left as well) use "post truth" arguments and tactics to draw circles in the sand. Isolating discussions into talking points presented by their own side. Shrouding the herd from other arguments by claiming them to be "Fake News". Inflaming individuals to argue at (not with) everyone. This is immeasurably harmful as this information needs no fact checking and can be presented with a facade of reasonableness.
People will find these arguments faster, more digestible, more appealing, and more viral than traditional news media. No discussion will occur. Even onyx_'s list of sources will not persuade them.
> YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.
Here's the crux, you are scared of Google's knowledge of the "facts" and biases, but you show no interest in gathering the whole truth yourself. Onyx_ did give a list of sources, that could be true or false. You dismissed them immediately in your comment. But more telling is what position you place your knowledge. Is it above sources, officials, experts, scientists(?), journalists, news agencies?
Can you confidently verify the same authenticity of your sources?
We should not fool ourselves. Tomorrow, just like today, no meaningful discussion tainted by politicization will be held by both sides again.
you add this to your list: https://hereistheevidence.com which provides a detailed breakdown with citations.
The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.
Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?
I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.
Because if you step out of line on Accepted Thought And Speech, you get cancelled.
Top channels from picture. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
ABC: Left of Center
NBC: Left of Center
USA today: Left of Center
CNN: Left
CBS: Left of Center
The "Authoritative Sources" are all Left-wing news agencies. So in other words they have done like Wikipedia. They have determined that Left of Center is authoritative and have limited the reach of alternative viewpoints.
Their right to control political speech on their platform.
The American media demonized Amy Coney Barrett as a "Handmaid" because of the possibility that she could rule that elective abortion is a matter for the legislature, not a constitutional issue of fundamental rights. Which is the law of the land in Canada, France, Italy, Austria, and the EU Human Rights Court.
At least on social issues, the American media is significantly to the left of even moderately liberal EU countries.
Like it or not, the battle for abortion was fought with the Supreme Court. Saying "she just has a different view on where it should be fought" ignores the fact that it would essentially set us back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.
Plenty of states allowed abortion before Roe v. Wade. If legislature isn't prepared, what are they waiting for? Just pass the relevant bills already, so that impact of a potential Supreme Court verdict that returns the control to legislatures has absolutely zero consequences, because the state legislature already has enshrined the current status quo into law. What's the problem?
> Like it or not, the battle for abortion was fought with the Supreme Court.
Yes, and this is fundamentally wrong approach to issues on which there is no broad public agreement.
> Saying "she just has a different view on where it should be fought" ignores the fact that it would essentially set us back 50 years in terms of reproductive rights.
So would moving to, say, Canada or Sweden, which hardly makes it sound like a disaster.
Two important things here:
1. The judiciary exists to protect the rights of the people protected by the constitution, even when there may not be broad public support for those rights, even when those rights are unpopular. That's what happened with Brown v. BoE
2. 61% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is, 39% think it should be illegal. To compare, 49% think that burning the American Flag should be illegal, which the court has had no problem defending, and no one seems to consider was wrong for the court to decide.
> So would moving to, say, Canada or Sweden, which hardly makes it sound like a disaster.
Huh? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Morgentaler)
That's correct, but I think the legal argument from Equal Protection Clause in Brown v. Board of Education is rather straightforward, compared to "emanations of penumbras" that form the constitutional basis for Roe v. Wade. As much as I support right to contraceptives, and right to abortion, I believe that the Supreme Court arguments for constitutional basis of these are, to put it bluntly, full of shit.
> 2. 61% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That is, 39% think it should be illegal. To compare, 49% think that burning the American Flag should be illegal, which the court has had no problem defending, and no one seems to consider was wrong for the court to decide.
That's a very good point. I think if you ask American public whether they support constitutional right to free speech, overwhelming majority will be for it. I think the contradiction stems from the fact that their moral responses are rather automatic, and not based on careful moral reasoning. When you actually connect flag burning to free speech in their minds, I suspect that the support for making flag burning a crime will fall. I think it's much easier to make such connection than to argue that such right stems from the right to privacy, which in turn stems from the right to due process.
I don't like the methods, even if the outcome is to my liking. The same motivated arguments could be used to argue anything the judges want, and one day the judges will decide something I do not like using the same motivated arguments. For example, it was ruled that right to privacy prevents banning contraceptive drugs. However, recreational psychoactive drugs are banned just fine, and there are hardly any voices arguing unconstitutionality of the practice. Why is it? Clearly, the answer cannot be based on the differences enumerated in the text of clause in the constitution defining right to privacy, because there simply is no such text: it's all emanated penumbras. I think the answer is rather very simple: the judges preferred one outcome in contraceptive case, and opposite outcome in the other case. This ain't so bad, but if we just decide cases based on the outcome judges want, why we even have the law and the constitution in the first place? What's the point?
The real reason for concern of liberal Americans with respect to Roe v. Wade, and in general with respect to Trump appointments of judges to the Supreme Court, is that it is tacitly recognized that the US Constitution is dead, is just words on the old parchment, and it's the judges personal opinion that's the actual defining law of the country. This arrangement worked just fine for as long as the Supreme Court made decisions to the liking of liberal Americans, but as that era is coming to the end, they see that there's nothing to protect them anymore now that the Constitution has been killed.
> Huh? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Morgentaler)
Oh, I'm sorry, I incorrectly assumed that Canada's abortion laws are similar to those in the rest of the western world, however they seem to be sitting in rather exceptional bucket alongside US.
Liberals tend to believe that the constitution is a living document and can protect rights even when those rights didn’t exist at the time of the founding. Even if you accept that, you’re only halfway there. The right must still come from somewhere. Where does the right to an abortion, as defined by Roe—which conceives of a right to an abortion all the way to the point of viability—come from? If you can’t find it in the text of the Constitution, and you can’t find it in the history books of what rights the framers thoughts were fundamental, it has to derive from broad public recognition, correct?
Going to your second point—the right protected by Roe is very different than the version of abortion that has broad public support. Roe invalidates any law that bans abortion generally before viability (22-24 weeks), even if the law has exceptions for health of mother, etc.
That, however, is a much broader right than either Americans or most people in the rest of the developed world support. Support for “generally legal” abortion falls off a cliff after the first trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... Just 28% of people think abortion should be “generally legal” in the second trimester. There is a biological basis for why any parent who has had a 12-week anatomy scan might think that should be an upper limit on elective abortion: https://www.parents.com/pregnancy/week-by-week/12/your-growi.... Not surprisingly, in Europe, 10-14 weeks is a very common time limit for elective abortions. Under Roe, the abortion laws of France and Denmark would be unconstitutional. This is not a theoretical issue: 1 in 10 US abortions happen after 13 weeks, and birth defects are not common enough to explain most of them.
So where does Roe come from, even within a liberal theory of what’s protected by the constitution?
And you're presupposing that a nonviable fetus is alive.
As I understand it, the conservative view is that rights are not granted by the government, they are only restricted, hence the 10th amendment. The right to freedom of movement is not granted to me by anyone, yet I have it because it is not explicitly restricted. The constitution puts guardrails on when, and how, the government is allowed to restrict my rights.
> Liberals tend to believe that the constitution is a living document and can protect rights even when those rights didn’t exist at the time of the founding.
This depends on right in question. For example the right to donate to political candidates is not explicitly enumerated in the constitution (and is heavily restricted in many other nations), but is seen as protected via a combination of rights enumerated in the 1st amendment.
> If you can’t find it in the text of the Constitution, and you can’t find it in the history books of what rights the framers thoughts were fundamental, it has to derive from broad public recognition, correct?
No, I refer you again to Brown v. BoE. There was at the time no broad public recognition that Separate but Equal wasn't constitutional, and the people who wrote the amendment certainly felt segregation was A-OK.
> Where does the right to an abortion, as defined by Roe
As I understand, in this case the Justices found that an individual's right to privacy prevented the government from meddling with the medical procedures that person chose to get, without. But then you knew that already. It appears that you disagree with this, even though 15 (and a half) Supreme court justices have found that the text of the constitution supports this protection. (notably compared to 8, likely soon 9, who did not)
I provided the website which indicates the bias. You can use the same site to find right of center or right biased news.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/forbes/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news/
The point I am making. Youtube clearly have a Left of Center bias and have indicated they are restricting other viewpoints.
This is intentional and you get to decide if you like them doing this.
And once you accept that centrist is simply the designator for elite public opinion, most corporate media is clearly centrist, because they're basically clearinghouses for elite public opinion.
I provided the website from which I got those details. I don't know how they come to these conclusions but I would tend to find that they are correct.
For instance, here's something they don't do: take a random sample of a source's news articles, anonymize the source, ask random people to rate them, and collate the ratings into an overall rating. I'm not saying that'd be a good way to do it, but at least it'd be something.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engel_v._Vitale
This is one of those funny areas where liberals get originalist and turn to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. The "separation of church and state" view derives from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802. Of course, TJ wasn't even in the United States at the time the Constitution was written, and he was a bit of a kook even in his day. The thing you have to remember is that "establishment" had a specific meaning back then--several states had "established" churches: https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/801/established.... Given that, the most sensible reading is that the Establishment Clause prohibits Congress from regulating those established churches: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....
The "separation of church and state" view is odd because several states had official established churches until long after the Constitution was adopted: "New Hampshire kept its establishment until 1817; Connecticut kept its establishment until 1818; and Massachusetts did not abandon its state support for Congregationalism until 1833."
You're incorrect to characterize Engel v. Vitale as saying schools "cannot force children to participate in a prayer." That would be a straightforward violation of the first amendment Free Exercise Clause. The New York law in that case was voluntary--it encouraged but did not require students to participate in prayer. The case banned prayer in schools with any sort of official sanction.
Engel is odd even leaving aside the original meaning of the Establishment Clause. Public support for religion is the norm, and sometimes even a constitutional right, throughout Europe. Several European countries, such as the Germany, Italy, and Spain, guarantee that parents can access religious education in public schools. The U.K. goes further and mandates daily school prayer "of a broadly Christian character." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_worship_in_schools. (Funnily enough, Spain has a constitutional provision that says "no religion shall have a state character." Nobody reads that to preclude teaching religion in public schools.)
> This is one of those funny areas where liberals
Can we please not do this "liberals" / "conservatives" read-team/blue-team stuff? Because then I'll just turn around and say "conservatives love to point out that phrase 'separation of church and state'" doesn't appear in the constitution and I'll just point you to Everson[1] that absolutely interpreted the First Amendment this way, and even quoted TJ himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everson_v._Board_of_Education
That's not odd. The bill of rights originally did not apply to state governments. It was only after the 14th amendment that the Supreme Court started incorporating the rights on state governments. Of course some states had similar language in their own constitutions before that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R...
Who's fault is it that the conserative movement has become more and more detached from facts?
This is a very interesting subject. I read an article like: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opinion/republican-disinf...
The interesting thing is that the assertion is that the right-wing have been detached from reality. An epistemological crisis wherein the the blame is on the internet. Thus we have situation where Internet entities like Youtube and Twitter are actively censoring right-wing views. While allowing left-wing misinformation.
So the way forward to fixing wrong-think is to deprive people of viewpoints? This doesn't seem quite right.
What's also quite interesting, it's the left-wing who are at odds. The median democrat has moved left and has created a political divide.
Makes me wonder if perhaps it's not the rightwing who became detached from reality.
If the left-wing are the ones detached. Then their need to censor other viewpoints to maintain their bubble makes complete sense.
Today more than half the population believes in conspiracy theories because they learn the "truth" from disreputable sources on social media. This is dangerous for society.
I am glad social media companies are taking action themselves, instead of the government forcing them (which would be a 1st amendment issue).
I wouldn't say it's their fault. But still in 2020, the media breathlessly reports targeted leaks by intelligence agencies as fact. We didn't learn anything.
There is a well-documented connection between journalists and intelligence agencies. In some cases journalists have been little more than mouthpieces for the US (and allied) intelligence community.
I don't think you realize how dangerous suppression of freedom of speech is.
China has different media as well. I'd like to see one of them saying the CCP should leave or something against them.
The only thing we have is freedom of speech to challenge ideas, debate and find what is true by ourselves, if such truth exists.
Short term I have no idea. Silencing people you deem are running misinformation campaigns is probably the quickest, and easiest. Or try weather it out while doing the long term plan of education.
Unfortunately it seems the more democratic a state is the more it's open to misinformation by rival, less democratic states.
It can be a real dishonest, manipulative technique. You're running close enough to that to set off peoples' defense mechanisms. So, even if you're doing it in complete innocence, if you want to not have people upset with the way you're carrying out the conversation, change your style.
20 years ago I remember TV shows talking about the moon landing being a hoax, and a decent number of people I talked to at the time believing it. This is just an anecdote, but I've noticed that people make the claim that conspiracy theories are on the rise and I've yet to see hard evidence to support that claim.
Are you genuinely arguing that conspiracy theories are a phenomenon that is unique to the 21st century?
Come on, do you really believe this?
Why do you suppose that is, though? Could it be because algorithms designed to feed users content they like promote and reinforce echo chambers which, in turn, incentivize the creation and spread of convenient misinformation?
Social media did not start the echo chambers, but they have played a huge role in making them more accessible and extreme than ever before. How can we trust them to safeguard us from misinformation when they are the ones profiting from it?
I do not want Google deciding what is and isn't "misinformation". As far as I'm concerned, they're more guilty of the mess we're now in than any media organization or content creator.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn’t work out.”
- Dave Chappelle
I would like to think youtube could serve as that public digital archive of the past, to do some slight good alongside their mission of profit. The power of being able to find video proof of past behavior in a moment is an essential tool to our collective discussion process.
If there had actually been widespread fraud is this something we would want Google doing? They have said themselves that they intend to manipulate elections in the US and this is exactly how they would do it.
??
Source please. That's a bold statement.
Also, as Moway linked to in this thread¹: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRf9UxsM-NE
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359710
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7178881/Undercover-...
Falsely calling someone a rapist is libelous and slanderous -- both crimes.
Not all types of lies need to fall under free speech.
Reducing an entire movement with complex beliefs to a single talking point is not valid in the least.
I've noted your request!
That's very different than the government (not a private company) trying to shut you down from speaking anywhere.
That's dishonest? What's dishonest is you misreading my comment and then blaming me for it.
January 8th - China identifies new virus causing phenomnia-like illness [1]
January 10th - China reports first death from new virus [2]
January 21st - The outbreak, which began in December in a seafood and poultry market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, is spreading: Patients have been identified in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. [3]
Don't blame our inability to react to the virus on China. The pandemic was raging for months, with news coverage of people being locked in their own apartments, doctors dying, makeshift hospitals getting set up in stadiums, before it exceeded more than a handful of cases in the West.
Hell, even after hundreds of thousands dead, we still don't have the political will to do what would have been necessary to stamp it out back in March - massive testing, massive contact tracing, enforced quarantine. If we were to go back in time, and do it again, I think we would arrive at pretty much the same outcome.
The 'China hid the facts' [4] narrative has little explanatory power, and its primary purpose is to shift the blame from our own failings.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-pneumonia-ou...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wu...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/health/cdc-coronavirus.ht...
[4] It[5] did hide the facts, but it hid them so poorly that everyone who was paying any attention, both inside, and outside China was aware of how serious this pandemic is at the start of the year. It's hard to hide the facts about something when you put an entire city under lockdown (But don't cut the telephone and internet lines into it.)
[5] China isn't a monolith. To be exact, local government did its best to downplay the pandemic. National government was not very happy with how that went down, and purged their local and regional party branches for their mishandling of the outbreak.
If Alex moves to another platform wouldn't part of his following move to this platform? Wouldn't that grow others in that new platform.
Isn't deplatforming just replatforming. With every deplatform doesn't it leak more users to the new platform.
If they deplatform them one day it could be you.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I said I did not need "perfect evidence." I cited evidence, albeit imperfect. Whether it's strong enough to change someone's beliefs is between them and their epistemology. That's all I have to say on this subject.
But you need one to change hearts and minds.
The problem was giving him access to a much broader public, to sow paranoia and FUD among tens or hundreds of millions of people who actually play important roles in society and don't have time to spend debunking everything they hear.
Also consider that he's lost a lot of his ability to grow his audience, which is no small thing.
Banning on platforms for whatever reason reduces the platforms reach and raises the platform the party moves too.
We use to separate people by race now we do it by idea. Now sure martin luther king or lennon would agree.
I'm sure we can trust our censors to never do something like that! They have our best interests at heart, right? Nothing like this could ever go wrong, there's no examples from history or fiction about anything like that. Nope, it's always Wonderful Good People that only ban things that Bad Evil People would like, and reality is totally black-and-white, and only Bad Evil People would think otherwise.
I was sympathetic to the ideas floating around in early November, that the issue would go away once we let all the legal processes play out. But they have played out, the votes are all certified, and nothing's changed.
(examples: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/14/qanon-f... )
If those videos are not as present on youtube to begin with, perhaps fewer people end up down these rabbit holes. Of course it won't do anything to convince people who are already falling down the hole.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.11211
[2] https://mark-ledwich.medium.com/youtube-radicalization-an-au...
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/not-youtubes-algorithm-radicaliz...
Unless...they’re a publication in which case they need to be regulated and taxed accordingly.
The FN (yeah yeah they changed names, who cares) still spews its hatred behind closed doors, our police forces are amongst the worst offenders of any developed countries when it comes to racism and systemic issues (and consistently proving that even the police unions are a bunch of thugs), we have people like Zemmour on TV spewing hateful nonsense that even Fox News would probably frown at by now, and our own current government has been trying to get a law in place to prevent freedom of press so significantly that the UN and most of the world looking at those pieces of news have actually been ringing the alarms in every possible way.
While on a personal and biased level I certainly don't mind that daddy Le Pen was fined multiple times throughout the years for calling the Holocaust "a detail of history", we don't really have any proof that it does anything more than make people who dislike him (like me) happy to see him fined, and unfortunately give reasons for supporters of his bullshit to feel vindicated (i.e. rise of the extreme right everywhere with a very salient point regarding being "silenced", which crystallizes to the extreme in stuff coming from the US like Qanon).
Youtube is having a tough time because they're almost always pointed at first and foremost for being THE rabbit hole of misinformation/radicalization and other things, but they're stepping into a minefield by touching on one such hot subject without having a broader policy (extending beyond whatever the current US issue is at any moment), backed by an army of lawyers.
(I've stopped following the battles of up and downvotes on this message instead of any actual reply.. I'm only left to wonder how many of either are emotional responses over valuing the argument itself, and on this subject even HN isn't proving to be very different from reddit today)
Berkeley had to spend $600k in security to allow Ben Shapiro to speak, because "anti fascists" were accusing him of white supremacy, and being a fascist, and violently attempting to prevent him from speaking. And this was after they had successfully prevented him from speaking earlier in the year. Similar "anti fascists" pulled the fire alarm on Janice Fiamengo for speaking about men's issues. Warren Farrel had a similar experience, with people absolutely berating the attendants of one of his lectures for their support of fascism.
In France fascism is not illegal. There is only one thing that is really taboo, and it's badmouthing jews. Herve Ryssen, a French writer and film maker, is sleeping in jail right now because the contents of his books and documentaries was considered to be hateful.
Similarly, the only few websites that are censored by the French government are far-right websites that typically have antisemitic content (a prominent case is Democratie Participative, the French equivalent of the Daily Stormer).
That's for institutional censorship. In practice, there is an even stronger form of de-facto censorship in France (assassination) for people who draw or show caricatures of the prophet of Islam (Charlie Hebdo, and more recently a history teacher who has been beheaded; quite a few more people live under 24/7 police protection for similar reasons).
It's a pretty grim situation overall.
Most people have absolutely zero idea what Fascism is/was; they have a Hollywood confabulation in their head, perhaps mixed images of Star Wars and Harry Potter bad guys, anyone in a uniform, etc. Zero historical understanding of what Italy was all about in the early 20th century, no understanding of the modernizations and cleanups Mussolini brought to his country. I would hardly defend his every act, but the idea of nationalism combined with an aesthetic informed by history and myth has proven to be a very powerful one for galvanizing a society into action.
Evola's "Critique of Fascism from the Right" is one very good place to get an understanding of what the underlying ideology of "real fascism" is, separate from the inevitably-flawed implementation. (We don't need to pretend that perfect implementations of anything are possible, of course, and we similarly forgive communists their lack of a proper implementation of their own idea, which at its heart still has the same impetus of improving the state of mankind by changing the structure of civilization.)
Nobody is bringing that back. In a young and multi-cultural country like the USA, the founding mythos is neither powerful enough, aesthetic enough, or common enough to be a driving force for change any longer. There may be small pockets of adherents, but numerically they are insignificant, non-violent, and not worth worrying about in comparison to other drivers of change.
Instead of that specific and mostly-dead political ideology, the word "fascism" has become a standing for "authoritarianism" of any kind - whether it's left-wing, right-wing, or even what I think is more properly labelled as Totalitarian Liberalism, which is the era we are heading into now.
Remember that term: Totalitarian Liberalism. It is only under this system that you're ostensibly free, except everything is controlled by corporations, and people who pretend to be left-wing and "of the people" will defend the rights of billion-dollar corporations to restrict freedoms that were enshrined in law hundreds of years ago.
This action by Youtube is a perfect example of this. Each precedent they set is met by a legion of comments on sites like HN and Reddit that defend their actions, because of course it's only Fake News badthinking idiots that are kicked off. Nobody seems to notice that the scope of control increases each time, slowly but continually restricting free speech on the platform, in concert with efforts to make it more difficult to host things elsewhere, more difficult for locked-down walled-garden devices to be able to access unapproved content, etc.
It takes a real fool to think that this will never be used to suppress something legitimate.
Yes! This is amazing. There is absolutely nothing fascist about Trump - from his complete lack of anything aesthetic, his terrible diction, his lackluster speeches (despite the big rallies, which show people are hungry for something better in this direction.)
> Lowering taxes, pulling back business regulations, pulling out of climate agreements and pulling back restrictions on energy production.
Whereas under fascism the exact opposite was in effect: new regulations, new control, and an early effort toward environmentalism was evident.
Or they did in the last presidential election.
The real truth stands up to all scrutiny, and that scrutiny is an essential part in arriving at the truth.
It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills. None of those is true of Americans en masse.
None of those is true for people en masse.
Agree in general, but where does it stop? What about articles? Web searches? Websites hosted on Google Cloud?
What about documented (albeit very limited) cases of voter fraud in favor of Biden?
What about documented (albeit very limited) cases of voter fraud in favor of Trump?
>It assumes that people are rational actors, and have good critical thinking skills, and care to apply those skills
This could always be true in reverse, and pretty un-recognizable no? Does not your statement itself reflect some assumption in the ability of people to be rational actors to determine which debate is and isn't true, artificial, astro turfed, propagandized etc.
Think of for example the Iraq war push, and evidence provided for it. There are always unknown unknowns, and so your "first principles" cannot be assumed to be true
https://commoncog.com/blog/how-first-principles-thinking-fai...
Propaganda wasn't born yesterday, neither were people in the past more rational than today.
However, that doesn't excuse conspiratorialism. We still have a responsibility to find reliable trust channels and to sift through evidence, and when it becomes apparent that we're incorrect (e.g., when evidence is presented that weakens or invalidates our claims), we ought to admit our error and critically evaluate our sources who led us astray.
To put a fine point on it, the media should have to answer for its sins, but those sins don't license the rest of us to behave badly.
So ultimately you prioritize what might be described as "collective health" over generalized notions of freedom. Is that "pretty anti censorship", as this question of negative externalities is always the point of contention for censoring anything is it not?
I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health. I think it means simple frameworks of censorship, free speech, and facts cannot be generalized or universalized, as ultimately many of these will run into value judgments that aren't easily answered by questions of objective truth.
>I'm not remotely convinced that there's any kind of evidence
And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence. Or which debates or opinions are healthy or which are off limits. We see this with COVID where it's hard enough to assess the specific health risks while balancing the trade-offs of other health risks and economic impacts of lock-downs etc. "true" is too broad to encompass all the variables.
I'm not falling hard on this. I'm presently living in the tension between free speech ideals and collective political health, and I don't purport to have any great answers.
> I'd agree with this framing, though if one goes down this route, all sorts of instances of "freedom" and individual choice would be called into question on grounds of it's effect on overall societal health.
Agree, I think this is completely valid and I think we see a lot of this already in the cancel culture movement--lots of perfectly reasonable, healthy debate is suppressed as "possibly harmful". It's a real concern.
> And this calls into question the efficacy of "truth" and objective facts. At some point people simply have different value judgments about what is true, or for which other things to carve out exceptions which take precedence.
I don't buy this. I think even conspiratorialists are perfectly capable of reasoning (reasonably) well when it doesn't conflict with their political allegiance. In my opinion, the issue is that some people know full well that they're being dishonest, but they simply don't care--they value the truth less than they value their political tribe. And please note that I think there are plenty of people on both sides of the aisle who put party above truth--this isn't me punching at Republicans or conservatives or whomever while pretending that my ideological compatriots are perfectly behaved (that would make me quite the hypocrite!)--although it wouldn't be appropriate to litigate that here.
“election fraud conspiratorialists” seem to have a case in court. It’s up to Supreme Court to decide whether something is true or not, not youtube.
About them being loud, how can they be “loud” when none of the media is representing their case?
This act of censorship is showcasing very grim future where absolute minority gets to decide what tune whole generations are playing to.
I like ideas that I don't agree with when debate is healthy. I don't like when people who hold those ideas just keep shouting the same thing over and over without actually engaging with the rebuttals presented--frankly I find that behavior reprehensible. I have sympathy for people who want to suppress that sort of behavior, which is what you're picking up on from my previous comment, but I'm far from convinced that it's a viable solution.
Mostly though, this conspiratorial content is so obviously damaging and in bad-faith, etc that I don't care so much about imperfections with respect to free speech ideals, just like I'm not very worked up that Germany bans holocaust denialism.
> About them being loud, how can they be “loud” when none of the media is representing their case?
Because social media exists, and because the POTUS is using his enormous platform to the same end?
> This act of censorship is showcasing very grim future where absolute minority gets to decide what tune whole generations are playing to
This has always been the case. Traditional media is exactly this model.
You seem to have misread my comment. I'm not arguing that there is zero fraud. I didn't even say in my post that there was no conspiracy (though I'll say here that there wasn't). I only said the conspiratorialists aren't arguing constructively. I'm probably pretty aligned with you--I wouldn't be surprised if there were a handful of fraudulent ballots on either side, but there's certainly no evidence for a conspiracy.
Every semi reputable editor (even Fox!) has put the brakes on this disinformation campaign, but it seems that doing so just makes the people believing it move on to even less credible feeds. Ultimately I think the hallucination can only die down on its own, but on the timescale of several years. Meanwhile the damage is being done right now. I just hope it's all just so Trump can continue grifting and developing political capital to try avoiding jail, rather than some larger plan like deliberately inciting a civil war.
Previously if one ventured into Internet conspiracy theory land, their new belief would be tempered by their social circle. Now whatever wild thing manages to get enough attention also creates its own social proof. We're essentially dealing with a violent mixture of the old and the new where digital non-natives are tuning into raw memetic noise while giving it the trust of the 1990's evening news.
I would be curious to see how this played out in a parallel universe where section 230 had never existed, the MITM business never gained popularity, new media ("tech") companies had to editorialize more like old media, and the anti-establishment action stayed on p2p nets with a higher barrier to entry.
The issue, is that the concerns are not being evaluated, both sides are not being interviewed, etc. We really need a trial. Unfortunately, that has not happened yet, in almost any of these "hearings". The lawsuits are dismissed due to "standing" or procedural issues, not on the merits.
Maybe they should hire lawyers who actually have a single clue what they hell they're doing and not Rudy Giuliani, who hasn't been in a court room since 1992 and doesn't know literally the first week of constitutional law.
They have literally been going to court and not won a single time. These are not partisan judges. These are not Democrat secretary of states. These are Republicans.
They are throwing out every lawsuit so far. None have been substantiated, zero.
Stop repeating lies.
To start with, it seems Galileo didn’t say « Pero se mueve ». If you pull the string from there, he can’t possibly have been incarcerated for saying that the Earth wasn’t the center of universe, because Kepler more or less said the same before and wasn’t incarcerated. All of that, which I had been taught in school, is false. The king of France was guillotined because he wanted to organize a referendum for him, which he was confident to win, not because he was unpopular. And so it goes on to XXth century, and the to XXIth century, with the feminism and racism narratives. When you notice the ILO’s universal treaty of 1928 against slavery of every human on Earth...
...didn’t include males from 18 to 49. Who had to wait until the UN treaty of 1957 against forced labour, if I remember, to be included.
I’m praying every night for the world to pop out of this censorship of reality. But praying is less efficient than censorship.
So, banning Salman Rushdie and any cartoon of Muhammad?
For example, there HAS been voter fraud uncovered this election, because there is voter fraud EVERY election. The question is one of magnitude. Has the Trump administration been able to provide evidence sufficient to actually change the result of the election? No. Most conservative pundits I have seen are extremely clear about this distinction. But is this going to ban them discussing it, or discussing new evidence that is being brought forward?
As other users have mentioned, this country went through 3 years of hearing about Russian collusion during an investigation that ultimately provided no evidence of that having been an issue capable of unseating the president or delegitimizing that election. Throughout that period, I didn't hear any arguments saying that discussion of that topic should have been censored, and that is a good thing.
To me, the issue of how to effectively reach a general consensus in these matters is even more important than who is right or wrong. It is my personal opinion that this can only be achieved through transparency and openness, but, as always, I am my own harshest critic, so I entertain that I might be wrong.
Say this is true. How would you recommend measuring this?
So, for introspection, and I know it is not a perfect analogy, but imagine you are at a scientific presentation, and you're gut feeling tells you there is a flaw in the arguments presented. So you pose a question but instead of receiving an answer that might lay to rest your misgivings, the speaker just says "That question is not allowed. Next.". How likely is it that that response changed your mind in favor of the theories presented?
Social media is engaging in censorship, which means our society is screwed.
Social media _has_ to engage in this type of censorship because if they _don't_, society is screwed.
I think both views are probably correct.
But if we're going to screw up our society, I'd at least like to be on the side that's acting in good faith. Maybe we can stave off the inevitable a little longer.
Yes. Absolutely it has. It's naive to think that censorship, propaganda and such never work. They're not absolutes, certainly. But thinking of these as impotent and doomed is a dangerous naivety.
Chris Hitchens had a great piece about banned literature like Orwell in Czechoslovakia: More people seemed to have read it than in the west. There are plenty of examples where censorship fails.
That said, thinking that it always fails is dangerous. There's a reason censorship exists by default unless it's explicitly banned. There's a reason why strong censorship (heresy bans) exists in all monotheistic religions. Not only have they had an effect, but it's a defining feature of the religion and (IMO) the reason why these have taken over the whole world.
It matters what the top papers print, top channels run, and what appears (or does not) on social media. It may not be a predictable and mechanical effect, but censorship is not inert.
That said, we tend to overuse the word "censorship." The difference between an editor and a censor is reach. If the editor of newspaper X edits all newspapers, they are a censor. Youtube is wading into the murky gray area of this dichotomy.
I suppose that depends on if that dissonance was based in factual accounts of reality. If so, then yeah censorship probably wouldn't work. That's because opinions based in fact are consistent with the rest of the world and that tends to keep them in circulation. On the other hand, completely false and baseless lies don't last long without someone pouring energy into them. That's because they're in conflict with details that are readily observed. They might catch people's attention as a kind of entertainment. But, beyond that, they don't provide much practical value. When they're squelched, they'll just fall out of fashion like a cancelled Netflix series.
“The First Amendment is first for a reason. Second Amendment is just in case the First one doesn’t work out.”
- Dave Chappelle
Obviously 1A doesn't apply as-is, but maybe some equivalent should be implemented that does. At the same time, I'm not sure that's entirely fair since they aren't publicly funded. Or maybe it is still fair, or maybe there's some reasonable middle ground.
Freedom of expression is relevant to Youtube because Youtube is a platform for expression.
If you don't like the rules of YouTube, go elsewhere. The true spirit of the First Amendment is that you have the right and freedom to do so.
Freedom of speech/expression is only freedom from the restriction by the government.
Youtube can refuse to publish anything it wants to. Zero people have an inalienable right to publish on YouTube's private platform.
social media always engaged in censoring to appease US gov. I don't see the big deal if it's now about the election. they are always promoting some agenda (Assange, Brexit, Syria, other wars)
GoFundMe is in their right to believe there was dog-whistling.
"Even just a few matches would be indicative of a much more substantial voter fraud operation" said by a Trump supporter who get's the support from a majority of misinformation spreaders when he opens the GoFundMe:
https://twitter.com/ZubSpike/status/1324871896689750017 https://twitter.com/Ester04848788/status/1324535773819924481
Talking about "investigating voter fraud" when Trump was claiming voter fraud with no evidence and then getting retweeted by supporters who already had made up their mind isn't helping GoFundMe determine they are not faced with a dishonest actor.
Agreed about disclaimers: Why not go with a disclaimer that says "The president's claims are currently unfounded and have no legal merit and could endanger trust in our democratic process. Some of my analysis could reveal the impact of COVID-19 deaths in some districts or active voter suppression in some states". Enough to tune out misinfo sharers and be a bit more honest about what most analysts predicted would happen.
I might have sounded a little bit too dramatic considering the fact that the tweets in question didn't even say anything bad, but whatever. Also, "dog-whistles", lol. You're clearly just making stuff up at this point. Braynard didn't do anything wrong and removing his fundraiser from GoFundMe was baseless and unfair.
Your argument that anyone can write anything no matter context or audience reactions and face no consequences is baffling. I guess no one was ever murdered because of that...
A Trump political operative is expected to have taken some level of history and political science classes though. GoFundMe probably thought he had a better understanding of the impact and context of his online discourse than a libertarian college drop-out might argue.
I was discussing the framework and tools the people at social platforms are currently employing to decide weather they are being weaponized. I thought the discussion would start around the finer details of online moderation and operating these tasks at scale. You see evidence being suppressed, I see an overwhelmed company in the middle of its country's political crisis being asked to manage a surge in new bad-faith actors.
I've provided plenty evidence myself that they had elements to confirm his behavior could be interpreted as being linked to disinformation campaigns. Maybe they were wrong but I disagree with your take that this Trump advisor can't wrap his head around why GoFundMe believed it.
Publicly Matt Braynard showed no attempt at understanding what he could change to be accepted and leaned hard into this removal to galvanize extra-donations on another platform.
In the end, the circumstantial evidence he uncovered turns out not to be admissible in court or is improperly used by the Trump campaign (given their constant lost legal challenges). It must sting, especially when he see's all the grift around those legal battles.
But if you insist, Matt Braynard managed to raise the money on some other platform and he did found enough potentially illegal votes to swing some states. Mainly people who moved out of state and things like that. So here are your facts.
He says he's found evidence. All he's posted that I can find is a 42min long video I can't be bothered watching properly, but skipping through it his methodology seems to rely on surveying people now and comparing to voting records. This - of course - isn't "finding potentially illegal votes".
But maybe I missed something. I do think it's interesting that his Twitter profile says he's releasing "data and reports" a week from Nov 24, and there is nothing.
It's also interesting how much of his video is about asking for donations......
One of the people they've surveyed was Nahshon Garrett:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTDEIGVoWhI
As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing. So unfortunately, he will only give you the actual data if you're someone trustworthy, so a lawyer, politician, journalist or something like that. His research is included as evidence in some of the ongoing court cases.
From what I've seen a lot of people have said that he might just be a grifter. I personally don't care, since I never donate to anything like that, but if you're considered about this, he posted the expenses on twitter. I believe a lot of money went to the call centers.
And look, it very well might be, that it's literally nothing. But this type of research is realistically as best as you can possibly get. What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything. But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
Yeah so here's the affidavit he has signed[1]. There's no evidence at all that he voted in AZ, only that his voter registration record was active, and his affidavit doesn't claim he voted or that he found that he voted, only that Braynard's organisation claims he did.
If you listen carefully to the interview, the story is the same there. When she asks what kind of vote it was he says "oh I don't know - I think it was an early vote or a provisional vote or something". He hasn't checked!
Braynard claims that he voted. But there is nothing verifying that at all that this is the case, and Braynard couldn't verify this independently. (I just checked - you need your Voter ID and/or SSN).
> As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing.
This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
One of the reasons everyone is so annoyed about this is because of this shitty grifter wrecking democracy to make a few bucks for themselves.
> What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything.
This of course is complete nonsense. There have been vast numbers of state and federal investigations into every alleged piece of fraud. But there is nothing there, especially not on the scale claimed.
> But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
It really wasn't. He was raising money by alleging fraud occurred and he was going to blow the lid on it all.
Carefully trying to work around their restrictions by pretending it was "just in case" - when the President of the United States is making these claims - is clearly bad faith.
[1] https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1...
> This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
Well, I saw with my own eyes that people were banned for posting the information like that, so that's why I believe it.
I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Looking on the bright side, I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
No, him using that as an excuse is the BS. If he could actually prove anything - instead of it just being yet more allegations - would be explosive, and being "banned" (by who exactly) wouldn't matter.
> I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Of course, there are plenty of closed court methods of doing this.
> I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Put it like this: is there anything that would convince you that these claims are all BS? I mean - Trump appointed judges keep throwing the claims out of court. - what more do you need?
I already believe that at least 90-95% of those claims are BS, and no one had to convince me to believe anything. However, considering the fact how many people seriously consider Trump to be the next Hitler, there is no doubt in my mind that someone for sure did try to cheat is some way. Another question is whether there was enough of it to change the outcome and to that - I have no idea.
The most damning thing for me is preventing poll observers from challenging the ballots. This fact alone makes the election illegitimate, as far as I am considered. Poll observers should be there to ensure that there is no fraud in the first place, and without that it's really hard to figure out what happened. If the poll observers were allowed to do their job, I don't think I could complain about anything.
Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits. Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet. But I guess it's possible that it's just propaganda from the Trump side, so I have no idea on this one either.
And could you please look again at that Nahshon Garrett affidavit, exhibit 2? Doesn't that mean that "he" in fact did voted in AZ?
Citation please.
The closest that occurred was that when Republicans tried to put more observers in place than was the agreed number (the number has to be equal between Democrat, Republican and Independent observers) they weren't allowed.
> Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits.
Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Guilliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
> Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet.
Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Here's a typical judgement against the claims:
One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.
Note "unsupported by evidence"
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.pamd.127057...
> And could you please look again at that Nahshon Garrett affidavit, exhibit 2? Doesn't that mean that "he" in fact did voted in AZ?
No, that appears to be a voter registration record. Is there something on it you think indicates he voted?
Not sure about that.
Here is one of the videos of poll observers being forced to stay at the 20ft distance. Keep in mind that there are 3 or 4 rows of tables, 20ft is just from the first row.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOTWqD5fZKo
Here is just one example of people alleging what I've described on the election night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOS0sLlR-sU
Here is the leaked audio from the Detroit poll worker training. Normally it could be dismissed as it has the "conspiracy theory" vibe to it and is hard to watch, but since the story is consistent with the claims above, I found it to be believable. I don't know why people do this kind of thing instead of just posting a full, unedited audio, but whatever. I believe there is also an interview with the dude behind the leak on a Youtube channel called "Rekieta Law", if you're interested, but I haven't personally listened to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzyLmtjy6sI
> Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Giuliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
That might be true, but the vast majority of the lawsuits had nothing to do with Giuliani.
> Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Let me correct myself, my understanding is that the Trump team waited a long time to file the lawsuits with actual evidence. Their first lawsuits weren't even alleging any sort of fraud or irregularities, but to allow the poll observers within a 6ft distance when challenging the ballots and things like that. Can't speak to why were they waiting so long.
> Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Going back to your previous comment, as far as it would be indeed very annoying, I don't think that it's a fair criticism, since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years. I'm not saying that you specifically are guilty of this, but still, you can't criticize someone for doing that if you did the same thing.
Regarding the Nahshon Garrett affidavit, I searched for the `Your ballot was signature verified and counted` string on twitter, and it seems like it means that your vote was indeed counted, so it seems that what Braynard says might actually be true. Which brings me to the same question that you've initially asked me: is there anything that would convince you that some of these claims ar...
Oh yes of course. From what I can see, it looks like Nahshon Garrett is either lying or someone else voted for him. I think it's mostly likely he's lying, but maybe otherwise.
But I don't think that is any evidence of systematic fraud at all.
> since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years.
Yes, and as I'm sure you realize, these allegations have been found true. Russia did act in 2016 to support Trump, people in Trump's circle worked with Russian agents etc. The best that can be said was that Trump was unwitting ( which I actually think is likely) and that his people working with the Russians didn't realize what they were doing (in general I think this is also likely).
The only thing that I remember from back when I was still paying attention to this is that they've worked with Russian businessmen or journalists or whatever. And that Russia bought some facebook ads. And if you're concerned about this type of thing then apparently the FBI is now looking into the Bidens regarding their dealings with Ukraine and China, because of the things that they found on his Hunter's laptop, which by the way, media and social media did a complete blackout on.
Fluid flow near surfaces becomes a near zero vector.
Over and over again.
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512487-senate-p...
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706318191/trump-white-house-h...
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress"
In August, of this year, the a US Senate Committee on Intelligence found that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence.
Independently of Mueller.
"The committee's findings are a more in-depth look at the interference than Mueller's investigation, but the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
Your own source literally disproves what you're claiming.
I'll say it again, from your source:
"lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
However, the article is _about the Senate Committee_. This is a different thing than the Mueller investigation, and it succeeded where Mueller failed.
FTA:
> Among the probe's newest revelations is that Konstantin V. Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort's, was a "Russian intelligence officer." Manafort's contacts also posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the report.
> "Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election," the report added.
> "At nearly 1,000 pages, Volume 5 stands as the most comprehensive examination of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign to date — a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the panel's vice chairman, added in a statement.
It says nothing of the sort, it actually agrees with the Mueller investigation, and only adds to its legitimacy.
Nothing that you quoted points towards collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. There were contacts with Russians from both the DNC and RNP, but once again:
> a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Lack of evidence that Trump conspired. There is no collusion.
Thanks for proving my point with your source.
This? This is about Mueller. Not the committee.
> lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Wrong, I am quoting the bits that are taking about the US Senate Special Committee on Intelligence report.
>"the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe"
"the findings [of the US Senate Special Committee on Intelligence] run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe"
It's reconfirming that the Senate committee findings run parallel, or in other words, come to the same conclusion, as the Mueller report.
In stating they ran parallel they meant that they're investigating the same offences at the same time. It ran parallel, but did not collaborate with, the Mueller investigation. It found more evidence and drew stronger conclusions.
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases...
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
He's speaking directly about the report, and it was linked in the press release above, if you cared to click on it.
This belongs at the top of /r/selfawarewolves
Or use the latest findings from the lead on the Senate Intel report: https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases...
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Unfortunately it has to be a throwaway because these kinds of facts might as well be thought crimes here.
You link to a partisan Senator who, by the way contributed to the Donald Trump campaign, says he found no-evidence.
The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio or even the report or "Russian government" to cop out of the deep involvement of ex-spies and oligarchs out of Russia.
Source: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
This is the exact document that Rubio is referencing in his press release I linked above. The evidence presented explicitly presents no evidence of Trump colluding.
>You link to a partisan Senator
Rubio was the head chair of the investigation, not some random senator.
>The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio
Facts and legal definitions are not "weasel-words".
Your linked source just proves the following statement:
"We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You can continue to believe fake news, but that doesn't make it reality.
NPR, official press releases from the chairs of senate intelligence committees, etc. have not been disavowed and the facts agree with me.
Again, if you stop believing fake news and actually read what has been linked above, you will find that:
“Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive."
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
But ok I'll concede your following point that relies on "collusion" and "government" : the report didn't find "evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
They offer no rebuttals, they only strengthen and agree with my points.
>You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
Except they're not. Rubio is the head chair of the committee that drafted the report. The report agreed with him.
>You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
Except it says the exact opposite of that...
No they don't.
>The information the SIC vol.5 regroups was used to convict quite a few of Trump's campaign associates.
Not for anything related to collision or election fraud.
Here's one of the convictions of Stone: https://www.axios.com/roger-stone-found-guilty-all-counts-9a...
I see it coming so don't come back with "he wasn't convicted of election fraud and collusion by the judge" because that's not how the US judicial system works. His crimes are clearly linked to the whole topic of Trump & Russians interfering in the 2016 election.
Manafort was charged with crimes not related to Russian collusion in hopes of getting him to flip on Trump. It was working too, which is how Mueller’s team learned Manafort was feeding internal campaign to a Russian Intel officer, while Russia was waging a psyops campaign against American voters. This strikes at the heart of the collusion claims.
That was until Trump started dangling the idea of a pardon and Manafort clammed up.
On the other hand, a video claiming Russian agents infiltrated thousands of voting centers with sleeper agents should probably not get through the filter.
Though as with any content filters, there will be edge cases, false positives, false negatives, etc. that will all pose a problem.
This is the fundamental problem of common user spaces on the web these days: a failure to impose standards will often result in a toxic environment. Yet attempting to impose standards is something of an arms-race game of whack-a-mole.
I think HN only manages the balance somewhat decently because the users themselves are also highly interested in productive conversation and mostly downvote -> dead comments that are likely to provoke flaming instead of discourse.
YouTube gets to decide what's on their platform. As an organization, they have decided that the election fraud stuff is not only false, but harmful. That's not only their right, it's their duty.
All of them? I highly doubt it.
You were alive when Trump called for Russia to hack Hillary's emails? Or when his son and son and law admitted to negotiating with them? Or when Trump tried to drop Russian sanctions?
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/512487-senate-p...
https://www.npr.org/2019/03/24/706318191/trump-white-house-h...
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress"
In August, of this year, the US Senate Special Committee on Intelligence concluded its investigation and found that collusion occurred with Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence. _Separately_ from Mueller.
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress by Attorney General William Barr."
I think Attorney General William Barr did not correctly summarize the findings of the Mueller report, and was acting to drive an incorrect narrative.
Given that, I think it's entirely appropriate to also look at the Republican-controlled Senate report that the OP linked, which says it did.
Wrong, it said it did not find collision.
Here's the summary from the lead on the US Senate Special Committee on Intelligence:
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases...
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
https://www.lawfareblog.com/republican-senators-misrepresent...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/19/marco-rub...
For Rubio to make this statement, he needs to explain this finding of his committee.
> The committee's findings are a more in-depth look at the interference than Mueller's investigation, but the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Mueller didn't indict a single US citizen for conspiring with Russia.
It didn't happen.
> the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
That's from the article you linked.
a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Do you see that part?
The _subject_ of that quote is the Mueller investigation, _not_ the Senate Committee.
> the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
It's stating that _Mueller's probe_ found evidence of efforts, but not sufficient evidence of conspiracy. This is _not_ stating that the committee did not.
To quote The Intercept[1], on Paul Manafort in the Senate report:
One of Manafort’s closest aides during his time in Ukraine was Konstantin Kilimnik, who the Senate report identifies as a Russian intelligence officer. Kilimnik also served as Manafort’s liaison with Deripaska.
While he was working for Trump during the 2016 campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with Kilimnik and gave him the Trump campaign’s internal polling data, which showed that the key to defeating Clinton was to drive up negative attitudes about her among voters.
The Senate report says that the intelligence committee “obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the GRU’s hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 election.” The report adds that “this information suggests that a channel for coordination on the GRU hack operation may have existed through Kilimnik.” The report adds that in interviews with Mueller’s prosecution team, “Manafort lied consistently about one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.” Manafort decided to “face more severe criminal penalties rather than provide complete answers about his interactions with Kilimnik.” The Manafort-Kilimnik relationship, the Senate report concludes, represents “the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services.”
To emphasise a direct quote from the Republican-led Senate Committee: "the single most direct tie between senior Trump campaign officials and the Russian intelligence services."
Now it's possible that Manafort was doing this because he was greedy and getting money from the Russians (he was getting paid by them), and it's possible to argue that it wasn't collusion because Trump fired him.
And of course "collusion" is a messy thing anyway - there is no clear definition, and no crime called "colluding".
The whole report is worth reading[2].
[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/09/03/trump-russia-senate-repo...
[2] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
The same people (YouTube employees) who don't agree with you in the first place are now in the position to decide whether your argument is reasonable enough to make. Nobody is rightly in the position to put guard rails on speculation over events, and I think we'll all be better off when we finally understand this.
> Among the probe's newest revelations is that Konstantin V. Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort's, was a "Russian intelligence officer." Manafort's contacts also posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the report.
> "Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election," the report added.
> "At nearly 1,000 pages, Volume 5 stands as the most comprehensive examination of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign to date — a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the panel's vice chairman, added in a statement.
> “grave counterintelligence threat,”
Somebody's opinion about what could happen or might have happened.
> "very real counterintelligence threat"
The opinion of a member of the opposing political party about what could happen or might have happened.
> narratives
This sounds like something that could be part of collusion but I'd need to see the rest. It's open to interpretation and I don't trust the media enough to assume they wouldn't imply something like this without having something big behind it. Indeed they hint at things without actually stating them because they're not actually true all the time.
Anyway, it kind of sounds like Manafort is involved in a conspiracy of some sort to cover up wrongdoing by the Russians. But it just feels like weasel wording. It sounds bad but I'm not sure what it really means. Is the implication that the Russians did Trump the favor of the social media campaign, and Manafort is doing them the favor of helping them cover it up? That's the quid pro quo? I don't want to give anyone the benefit of the doubt here, I want to hear the point.
Still blown away how trumpism has infected the HN crowd this deeply.
Downvote me all you want - it's just proof that SV is full of assclowns. Such a shame that I probably work with some of you idiots.
Youtube's new policy basically is saying that the state of Texas is not allowed to discuss the supreme court case on their platform.
This election fraud nonsense is social contagion.
This ban the State of Texas, itself from using YouTube to discuss their own belief in election fraud. It bans the sitting president from discussing his own belief in election fraud. It bans the current Senate leadership from discussing their belief in election fraud.
Some people criticize YouTube there because they are a private company refusing to carry the messages of publicly elected officials.
Now, I personally feel no need to defend any of these entities. They're all powerful figures capable of their own fighting.
If I had to decide on the topic, I'd probably support YouTube as they're the piddling multi-billion dollar company that employs my friends, where as their opponents are the leaders of a trillion-dollar nation with military might exceeding any other country in the world. YouTube is most definitely the underdog in this fight.
Here’s the statement from the Texas AG. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/ag-paxton...
To combat establishment elites in either side we need more freedom, not less.
There are a million places to host your own videos at your own expense if youtube decides it doesn't want to. Whatever that reason may be.
I also think no left-of-center conspiracy theory would be thrown off YouTube, even if it failed in court.
Maybe this is great, I don’t make any value judgment. It’s just a bet. Take my money if I’m wrong.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fruzsinaeordogh/2016/09/02/maki...
On COVID, every country on the planet agrees. The scientists have spoken. The guy who thinks the royal family are lizards should not be considered even remotely reliable.
Or look at the Buck decision, a SCOTUS case that lead to forced sterilization.
Or look at the SCOTUS decision that led to Japanese internment camps.
Oh and both of those decisions .. based on Jacobson. Contrary to what the media tells you, in Jacobson, they never forced him to take the vaccination, only pay the $5 fine. But that decision led to Buck and Manzanar.
It's their platform, their property, they are allowed to do with it as they will. Just like a newspaper doesn't have to print every letter sent in by a reader, or every ad someone wants printed. (This later example is something I have experience with: I was the editor of a college newspaper targeted by a white-supremacist holocaust-denying group that wanted me to print their anti-Semitic ads. I didn't print them)
No one is entitled to the amplification of their views that these platforms make possible. They may be platforms that are publicly accessible, but they are privately owned & operated, and I think it would be a serious blow to the concept of private property to essentially impose forced speech on them.
There are plenty of other platforms that will let someone run anything they want through them. Sure, they're not as big and don't have the audience that Google does, but again: no one is entitled to that Freedom of speech doesn't require anyone to force others to repeat that speech.
that's a relief.
Lets be clear about what's happening here: Google/Facebook and the like are becoming targets of anti-trust regulatory lawsuits (privacy, data-gathering, monopolistic behavior, etc). This is just an attempt to build goodwill with the incoming administration so they can call in a favor later. It's as simple as that.
Yes, totally normal to have armed militias running around state capitols, organizing kidnap plots of governors, retired generals calling for suspension of the Constitution etc., happens every election cycle.
/sarcasm
Second, my phrasing was actually pretty neutral, such as describing Flynn as a 'retired general' rather than several less complimentary but wholly factual characterizations I could have made.
Thirdly, your assessment of their significance is an speculative opinion about the future rather than a fact. It might turn out to be correct, but if I had suggested such events happening in 2020 a few years back most people would have said I was being absurd.
Update: Here's a relevant story that was published after I had written my previous comment. While similar isolated incidents have occured in the past, I stand by my argument that their confluence these days is a political abnormality in the US, out of character with elections over the last several decades.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/dec/09/police-investi...
You mean like how the antivaxx and flat earth conspiracies naturally died out?