It's interesting. These leaders certainly are responsible for allowing lies and propaganda to rally and enrage these people, priming them for a civil war, however is it better it happened all at once or if Trump deplatforming sooner giving them more time to better organize on a platform and all necessary layers that they'd control to allow the public inciting of violence? Perhaps if he was deplatformed earlier then more people may have turned out for voting and may have won the election? Who knows. What I do know though is they're still rallying and still being unreasonable and calling for violence, I'm sure they're learning to use private messages instead of posting statements of violence publicly, perhaps the largest platform they have now is thedonald.win - I go there daily to be shocked at the top headlines and comments.
Seems to me like trump acknowledged his loss and was aiming towards a smooth and none violent transfer of power. De-platforming him was probably the worst thing to do in his supporters eyes.
> was aiming towards a smooth and none violent transfer of power
We've already crossed that bridge—this transition hasn't been smooth, and it hasn't been non-violent. It would be nice if he aimed for that, but maybe he should have done so before he shot and missed.
So we should just throw up our hands in the air and start killing each other. I guess nothing else can be done. But hey, at least we can feel morally superior about ourselves, because they've started it, right?
Removing offensive content is the laziest possible solution and it's funny how quickly Facebook and Twitter reverted to it once this solution was again on the table.
Most interesting part of all of this was what they did before, when they couldn't just delete the content.
They had to properly fact-check it and educate the viewers. I think this should be the default mode for stupid (counter-factual) opinions. I know it's hard but you are not the richest companies for nothing. Figure it out.
I think letting platforms just delete whatever causes an outrage is delaying the moment when we will finally get these kinds of things presented with proper fact based context instead of surrounded by ads and links to similarly stupid speech.
> They had to properly fact-check it and educate the viewers. I think this should be the default mode for stupid (counter-factual) opinions.
That’s unrealistic IMO.
I can type out a hundred lies faster than you can fact check even one of them.
Besides we’ve already seen that facts don’t matter to a lot of people. They don’t care if something is true or not anyways. All they care about is having their world views reaffirmed.
There is a lot of critique that people don't read anything besides the headlines and sometimes it's suggested that this is one of the causes for the spread of misinformation. I think that Twitter even warns you before you can retweet something to make sure that you read the entire article, so you don't spread whatever they consider to be false. But there is the same problem with fact-checking. People just search for it, see the headline that it was "debunked" and assume it's not true, without reading through the actual article. Here are some of the examples of articles, that suggest the story is not true, but once you get past the headline, it basically says the opposite:
I don't disagree that it doesn't happen, but it's not always that people just "don't care about the facts". Sometimes it's that these so-called fact-checks are - to put it bluntly - complete garbage. When there were claims about the voter fraud circulating throughout the social media and Facebook and Twitter was putting the warnings on such posts, I happened to actually read those fact-checks, and let me tell you - they weren't good. Most of the time it was either a straw man or it had nothing to do with the actual claim that was being made.
People laugh at conspiracy theorists, but most of them are not any better.
Just ambitious. We shouldn't let Facebook off the hook with just letting them delete inconvenient stuff.
We should press them till they pay for their great power by picking up the responsibility of education.
> I can type out a hundred lies faster than you can fact check even one of them.
Yes, but you can't convince people of so many new different stupid things at this rate. Novel lies are rarely the problem. Most dangerous lies are not new. There's nothing new about antivaxxers for example. Trumpism works by the same rules that nazi propaganda worked. Snake oil. Flat earth.
How many new lies of this level of impact can you invent and publish and can you really do it faster than people can correct you if their voices are properly amplified?
> Besides we’ve already seen that facts don’t matter to a lot of people. They don’t care if something is true or not anyways. All they care about is having their world views reaffirmed.
Facts don't matter to them unless they understand them. Truth matters to them immensely. That's why they hold the (wrong) beliefs they hold. They care about being right. What they lack is education in the form and on the level that could reach them. For some of them, providing them with it might be very hard. But you can't give up and just censor whatever. It doesn't work. It didn't work. What works is education.
The defeatist in me wonders if education is possible. It seems a lot of people just refuse to accept things that disgree with their world view and dismiss the source as part of the conspiracy.
I wondered if it'd be possible to make a honeypot website that would pretend to be some internal Pfizer website, or the Gates foundation, or the DNC, but fill it with content that would actually educate the conspiracy theorists, for example about how mRNA vaccine works, or how a Biden administration won't be forcing "fascism" down their throats. At least they'd be hopefully diligently reading stuff and learning while looking for smoking guns.
> It seems a lot of people just refuse to accept things that disgree with their world view and dismiss the source as part of the conspiracy.
More educated people are less likely to do that. Also people who have no financial incentives to propagate such falsehoods are less likely to propagate it.
Flat earther movement is a good example. Some members made a business out of it to advance their personal goals. Like the guy that launched himself in a rocket to "check if earth is flat", but actually just liked lunching himself in rockets and similar things (had history of that), and claimed to believe in flat earth so that gullible people pay his bill.
We can't resign ourselves to defeatism and think that nothing can be done because people are stupid and ideas are toxic. Yes, some people are stupider and some ideas are more toxic then others but we shouldn't let that cloud the simple fact that we allow to exist the multitude of positive force feedbacks that promote more toxic ideas and more stupid people. We should work on those things first.
> I wondered if it'd be possible to make a honeypot website ...
Yes. We should forcibly mix those dumb ideas with solid education on the subject. Confront the two. Debunk one with the other in-place. At many different levels of complexity to reach as many people as possible.
You want to post you antivaxxer theories on facebook? Sure but your readers will get solid science next to it by courtesy of Facebook algorithm instead of ads and crap similar to yours.
> They had to properly fact-check it and educate the viewers.
They weren't doing that. They were pushing an agenda. It was not rare to see a "false information" flag only to see the "fact-checking" article support the claim. One particular claim I saw marked false was China did not need a vaccine to keep covid under control. The article went on and on about everything other than vaccine. There were like three or four lines talking about vaccines. Those were mostly about how the Chinese weren't anti-vaccine. At the time of the "fact-checking" article, there were only about 1 million Chinese vaccinated which was still in testing. That is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total population. The source articles the "fact-checking" article linked to did not even mention vaccines. Sounds more like pushing an agenda rather than fact-checking and educating.
I'm not saying they were doing it perfectly. But at least they were trying to do something to address the root cause that people are gullible. You can't ban publishing lies because that's what more than half of human culture is. The thing you can and should do is put dangerous lies in factual context.
From the looks of it here the conspiracy shills must be getting good pay these days. Anyone know the going rate? I could pretend to be a concerned foreigner or write bobble head replies for a few bucks.
"They're paid trolls" is silly and tired when it's "Soroooooooooos!" from the right, and it's silly here. There are plenty of nuts who'll happily do this for free.
> There are plenty of nuts who'll happily do this for free.
I really doubt this. Not without somebody constantly shilling them into it.
If anybody has numbers, they'd be very welcome. I don't know how to even start measuring this. But one thing seems to be always the same, those people that get large reactions on social networks do have some amount of paid shills.
We had plenty of cranks like this on Usenet in the 80s, long before the Internet rose to significant attention from nation states and other deep-pocketed actors.
But do you think it's normal that they are all yelling the same things? Those cranks on social networks are highly conformal, that's not easy to explain.
> But do you think it's normal that they are all yelling the same things?
Yes, for the same reason everyone on Twitter knew about "Bean Dad" or "left shark" or the latest popular meme of the day.
Quite a few of them come from or are amplified by Fox News, Newsmax, etc. hosts, as well. Instant distribution of the latest talking point to millions.
So I have always wondered, but now it seems particularly germane. Why does HackerNews not require some kind of verification or elaborate registration to join?
I like the pseudonymity in some ways but everything I have posted I will stand by. I am already a pariah in my social circles for going against the east coast preppy conventional wisdom, I don't care if I am mocked here too.
If HN really wants to be a quality refuge for high-brow discussion they should show a commitment to this by migrating from being a libertarian get rich quick forum to a place where actual debate can happen without spamming by bots, intelligence service officers, etc.
To a non-us citizen and somebody who believes in free speech, this whole debacle looks like the parties behind who own our social media trying to stop in anyway the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, there might have been something fishy going on in the voting process.
Why would they otherwise go through so lengthy processes in order to stop the spreading of this information ? Claiming it is because of possible violence seems unbelievable, seeing as it is arms manufacturers and so on still have a voice on these platforms, like Raytheon and what have you, who are killing more people every day through their actions than what this political upheaving has done.
To me, it seems that some parties are ready to stomp on freedom of speech as a basic right in order to make sure that this information does not get to spread. Why, I ask ?
Why would they be so interested in this fact ? Is it a threat to them ? Why suddenly all platforms are stopping the spreading of this information.
I just ask this, to me it seems like they have a lot to lose perhaps in this game personally, the owners of these platforms.
You're leading into paranoia. There's been no evidence of mass voter fraud - there are systems in place, poll watchers that people from both main parties are party to overseeing the counting.
All these actions from platforms is to prevent, limit, curb violence. That's it. There's no grand conspiracy. You're either for non-violence and a civil, reasoning-reasonable society - or you are living in ignorance is bliss and you don't care if there's chaos and the world burns.
Also, no one's freedom of speech has been taken away. These are private platforms, they're not the public space - the internet itself is the neutral platform, likewise these people have other means to communicate. They don't get the automatic right to using the most convenient technology provided by private companies though.
The military industrial complex is a whole different beast than this one currently playing out; yes, it's still a problem along with the duopoly, Andrew Yang's core policy proposals will break apart the duopoly and counter regulatory capture.
> All these actions from platforms is to prevent, limit, curb violence. That's it. There's no grand conspiracy. You're either for non-violence and a civil, reasoning-reasonable society - or you are living in ignorance is bliss and you don't care if there's chaos and the world burns.
I guess these platforms were on "team: chaos and the world burns" throughout the BLM riots, and were on "team: conspiracy theories" throughout the 2+ years of "Russian collusion" coverage.
And if you can't see parallels to this same statement you're making and echos throughout history when someone decides what's OK and not OK to say, I'm not sure what to tell you. Literally every authoritarian could make the case that silencing their opponents is worth it for the greater good.
> Also, no one's freedom of speech has been taken away. These are private platforms, they're not the public space - the internet itself is the neutral platform, likewise these people have other means to communicate. They don't get the automatic right to using the most convenient technology provided by private companies though.
People said this when it was just Facebook / Twitter. Then it's the App Stores on mobile devices, and now we're down to cloud infrastructure providers and payment processors.
That's fine--just be prepared to move your goalposts when people start pressuring ISPs to block the content, because that's what's happening next.
> and now we're down to cloud infrastructure providers and payment processors
Payment processors have always been heavily restrictive about what they allow. There have been articles talking about the hoops that OnlyFans has to jump through, for instance, because Stripe doesn't like pornography.
> just be prepared to move your goalposts when people start pressuring ISPs to block the content
Or search engines—like scihub and thepiratebay have had to deal with.
So we're already doing all of thee steps. In the end, it comes down to the same thing, though: what content should be blocked?
I think we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by framing the argument that way. Possession and transmission of child pornography has always been illegal and technically an infringement on freedom of speech, but we carved an exemption for that because the negative effect on political speech is minimal.
That does not imply it's always been open season on silencing political opponents.
It has not previously been the case that using common political rhetoric like "fight like hell" was equivocated with "inciting violence," and we carved it out for law enforcment and courts to adjudicate--not private companies.
Please show me any evidence that BLM were calling for violence against people.
I don't know if you're gaslighting here or just not understanding the situation to compare it adequately, but 1) the BLM protests were separate from the relatively few who rioted, and 2) your comparison to think a growing amount of Trump's supporters openly calling for violence - and then attempting a coup to takeover the Capitol - are the same, then you're not a reasonable person; it's an apple to oranges comparison, not the same at all if you're actually critical and differentiating the situations fully.
Calls for violence are, what private platforms are determining on their own, not okay. The government is the one who shouldn't have the ability to say what is and isn't okay, and the government isn't preventing people, nor is the government arresting people for calls of violence - they are arresting people for violence or trespassing though - like at the Capitol; you're wanting to give this power to government to say what is and isn't okay to say - which is a mechanism tyrants need to succeed.
ISPs et al already are blocking or actively trying to filter for content like child abuse content - or do you feel such content should be freely allowed to be spread? Facebook et al are moderating to remove such content too.
Maybe you draw the line at pedophilia and child abuse photos but you're okay with people inciting violence? These platforms have drawn the line at people inciting violence - and not even that, but that moderators of these platforms were allowing it to stay on and not deleting. If Parler for example was actively and adequately removing such comments by their users, then these platforms wouldn't have deplatformed them.
Civil society is a thing you work for, you don't get there by letting people do whatever the fuck they want - just like if you're a parent you don't let children do whatever they want.
I could point you to examples, but then you'll claim those are just members of BLM and don't represent the movement itself, which is decentralized. We've all seen the rhetoric and videos of the riots. Let's not waste each others' time.
I don't support the Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/etc censorship at all.
With that established, I want to point out that the comment you responded to said there was no evidence of mass voter fraud.
I think it's impossible for a country the size of the USA to hold an election with literally zero cases of voter fraud.
The yardstick is whether there's evidence of voter fraud on a scale that could conceivably even remotely impact the results of the election. Of that, there is none.
Semantics. Don’t need “mass” if targeted distortions in a few counting centers throws the outcome. Yes, consequential abnormalities in key locations were apparent.
So provide the evidence rather than mere assertion. And, is there no way to do this without Twitter or Facebook? Have we no television news? No newspapers? No court system with judges amiable to the President’s party?
Sure, I’m curious; however, you are merely making an assertion that 1) these events happened the way you’re presenting them, 2) there is no legitimate reason for the events to have happened as you’re presenting them, 3) this constitutes a conspiracy to commit election fraud, and 4) this indicates the election was wrongly decided.
1. The incidents are well documented in general news media.
2. Illegal to count votes without observers present.
3. Between deceptive removal of observers, and subsequent dramatic change in counters’ behaviors per video recordings, conspiracy is at least a reasonable suspicion of not proven outright.
4. Vote tally for one candidate spiked from decisive loss to commanding lead in minutes during this period.
Considering you’ve moved the goalposts for this subthread, from “no evidence” to “prove intent”, I’ll consider my point made.
Rather than wasting my time guessing which events you’re referring to, how about you provide sources for the specific claims you’re making so we can tell you why they are either debunked or inconsequential to the results of the election.
I saw someone say a comment that made me laugh a few days ago: Trump going on Fox News to say whatever he wants to millions of people, while claiming his speech is being prevented.
I keep hearing the court claim but most of the court cases were dismissed without looking at the evidence. [1]
You have to wonder why the democrats, Biden in particular, never simply said. “We don’t think there was fraud but to ensure faith in fair elections and democracy we fully support a full investigation / audit. We have the utmost confidence in the outcome of this investigation / audit.” Instead they mocked and opposed every attempt to look deeper in the alleged fraud. Is it really so weird then that people start to wonder why there is so much resistance to the idea of fraud after 4 years of democrats and media claiming Russia stole the election?
I just browsed that website... that isn’t evidence and it’s spewing more lies about how Europe and other countries vote. Honestly don’t believe this stuff, please go and look up how other countries do mail in ballots... it isn’t controversial or insecure. Showing stats of how upset people are isn’t evidence is fraud...
“Witness count” is not evidence of anything, and could imply there are just more people willing to lie. Which is the more believable narrative given lying is happening.
They audited the votes in almost all the swing counties... nothing... in fact it was miscounted in trumps favour in some.
They did do a full audit in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania ... where else would you like one?
Not sure why you think those are lies? I'm from Western Europe and I don't know any neighboring country nor my own where you can vote without an ID.
In my country it works like this:
Every citizen automatically gets a paper in the mail telling them where to vote. You show the paper and your ID at the polling place so they can check if you're a real person. Then you vote. If you're sick or old you have to sign a paper and give your ID, the signed paper and the paper you got in the mail to a person that will go to the polling place for you.
Mail-in ballots are only allowed for people living abroad and every election things go wrong with those.
All the experts telling mail-in ballots are perfectly safe used to say different things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
And honestly, not requiring voter ID for an election is just dumb.
UK. (I guess technically it’s not EU) does mail in ballots. ID is done via number and signature similar to US.
Australia/NZ/Canada do mail in ballots in an almost identical way.
Northern Europe do mail in using a register and signature. Honestly go look up the relevant electoral bodies.
Which bit don’t you like?
I figured if you were doing a page of evidence you’d put your most compelling evidence up front? Am I missing something?
So I agree voter id is an issue, but think of the numbers involved, even if you could physically vote many times... how do you vote more than 10 times with 1 hour queues? Where do you get the extra 10s of thousands of serial numbered mail in ballots to fraudulently fill out? Was there mass theft from peoples mailboxes?
The random upset republican voter saying they saw a “radical left van” is not evidence of anything important.
> “We don’t think there was fraud but to ensure faith in fair elections and democracy we fully support a full investigation / audit. We have the utmost confidence in the outcome of this investigation / audit.”
How many times do you want them to recount Georgia? Read the transcript of Trump's call with Raffensperger—they investigated all of these rumors, and they turned out to be nonsense.
And the simple answer to your question is, because nobody believes that a "full investigation" would ensure anybody's faith in the election. Accusations of fraud started the night of the election, they're not based on evidence. And so no amount of investigating will ever be enough. Or as Jonathan Swift put it: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."
Do you not find it suspicious that on election night four states where Trump was ahead simultaneously decided to stop counting, something that has never happened before, and Biden had huge spikes after they started counting again. One of the states claimed there was a water leak which turned out to be a lie to remove observers. With no observers present they restarted counting. This was the main event that spurred the fraud claims.
They only did a random sampling of signature checks in one county in Georgia. That's not a full audit. In Georgia, Biden overtook Trump with 89 percent of the votes counted. For the next 53 batches of votes counted, Biden led Trump by the same exact 50.05 to 49.95 percent margin in every single batch. It is particularly perplexing that all statistical anomalies and tabulation abnormalities were in Biden’s favor.
> Do you not find it suspicious that on election night four states where Trump was ahead simultaneously decided to stop counting, something that has never happened before, and Biden had huge spikes after they started counting again.
You mean when they started counting mail-in and absentee votes, a voting method which Trump had been arguing against for months, and that Democrats had been pushing? No, that isn't surprising at all—that what you should have expected to see.
> They only did a random sampling of signature checks in one county in Georgia. That's not a full audit.
"The recount was the third tally of votes in the presidential race in the state. After the initial count following Election Day, Raffensperger selected the presidential race for an audit required by state law. The tight margin meant the audit required the roughly 5 million votes in that contest to be recounted by hand, he said. That count also affirmed Biden’s victory." - from https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
So even if you were right about Georgia (even though the evidence says you are not). That would not change the outcome.
But then you will involve slippery slope and day: but if it happened in Georgia, then it probably happened elsewhere... but that’s BS, you need to show the evidence elsewhere as well.
Then even if you accept all the bullshit, there is maximum only absolutely max: 2 million votes in “question”. Where Biden won by 7 million votes.
So you Are still relying on the bs electoral college that has no democratic justification to say you won...
Honestly, if you want to stop the steal, get rid of that... but the problem with that is, you wouldn’t have had a Republican President since the 80s...
So keep making up rules until you can get minority rule. Filibusters, electoral college and failing that just kick down the doors... how can anyone think they are protecting democracy with this stuff!?
As far as I've understood, judges can (perhaps are even expected to) throw out cases that have no real evidence behind them. I could accuse you of stealing my car and sue you, but unless I have some basic proof, the judge doesn't have to take my case seriously.
Exactly this. One of the common claims is that the courts dismissed on technicalities and "refused to look at the evidence", when in actually many of the cases where dismissed specifically because the "evidence" wasn't compelling. Hence the Georgia judge chewing out Guiliani over their flawed affidavit collection for example.
No evidence of mass fraud is what I said, and arguably the majority of fraud and interference is from Republicans - gerrymandering including literally trying to dismantle the USPS.
Why did all of the judges throw out the cases brought forward to judges in different states? It's because they didn't present any evidence.
I find it fascinating that it's assumed if there's fraud it's to benefit Biden, and also that if Trump won then they'd consider the election fair.
Also, during recounts that did happen there were more votes for Biden that were added - which perhaps suggests there was fraud during counting in favour of Trump - however Trump's vote count went up too from what I remember, but the proportion was that Biden had more votes that were missed during the first count; I haven't looked into confirming this though.
> To a non-us citizen and somebody who believes in free speech, this whole debacle looks like the parties behind who own our social media trying to stop in anyway the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, there might have been something fishy going on in the voting process.
What non-US citizens tend to miss is that the distributed nature of American elections makes that extraordinarily unlikely. Elections are managed almost entirely at the state and local level in the US.
For example, Georgia's win was certified and defended by a Republican Governor and Secretary of State. Their results come from the county level, of which there are over three thousand in the US, many of which are heavily Republican, and each of which is responsible for its own election setup, count, and verification.
You'd have to convince tens if not hundreds of thousands of election officials and volunteers to participate and cover it up.
>Their results come from the county level, of which there are over three thousand in the US, many of which are heavily Republican, and each of which is responsible for its own election setup, count, and verification.
>You'd have to convince tens if not hundreds of thousands of election officials and volunteers to participate and cover it up.
Tell that to Al Gore.
Our elections are so "distributed" that every presidential election in the past 50yr or so has comes down to a number of counties you can count on two hands in a number of states you can count on one hand. The election may be distributed but the results in the overwhelming majority of states is a foregone conclusion.
I don't see how anyone can call our (presidential) elections distributed with a straight face. Take Georgia, the example you picked. As usual the rural areas went red, the suburbs went a red or blue shade of purple and the city went blue. At the end of the day the question was whether there was enough blue in the city to exceed the red everywhere else. And this is why there's always a big argument over whether or not a fraction of a percent of inner city voters at the margin are being disfranchised by this or that policy. Basically every state goes down in this manner, albeit that in most of them the proportion between red voters and blue voters is different enough you can be reasonably sure of the results in advance. So the presidential election always comes down to a handful of city counties that will or won't flip their states red/blue based on turnout. (See also, why using gerrymandering to carve up cities to minimize or maximize their representation is such a big problem).
I'm not disagreeing with anything related to Georgia's results.
I'm disagreeing with your analysis that our elections are sufficiently distributed to make them inherently secure. Like I said, the way our elections are structured it always comes down to 10-ish counties in 5-ish states, tops. Heck you could probably flip most battleground states red by paying off the public transit union to go on strike if you wanted. The margins are that thin.
The margins being this thin electorally when Biden got 51.3% to 46.8% of the popular vote is indicative of a serious issue, but not the one you're claiming.
Thin electoral margins also give people like Kemp/Raffensperger even more reason to speak up if there was even a smidgen of evidence for "the steal".
The thing is there has been all sorts of "fishy" stuff happening in elections .. to benefit Republicans. They used "ballot security" as cover for voter intimidation, resulting in a consent decree: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576858203/decades-old-consent... (ended in 2018)
The current election cases filed by the Republicans have almost all been abandoned or thrown out.
> Claiming it is because of possible violence
The violence already happened on the 6th. Several people are dead as a result, and the protestors got very close to the elected representatives.
Sorry I count 2 senators regardless of population as gerrymandering in my head... but you are right it’s not. It’s still part of the stupid setup though.
Particularly given that it is not like if we had not spent 4 years hearing continuously that the previous election was stolen, with the blessing of those same big tech companies.
But as someone who is naturally hostile to monopolies and social media, I think this massive over-reach is a good thing. It might buy those companies some time with the current administration, but the republicans will come back to power sooner or later, and then there will be no debate over whether big tech will need to be regulated and its power cut back. It doesn't need to be through anti-trust. Banks have been forced to downsize and been over-regulated after 2008 with fresh new laws and regulations.
Doesn’t seem like that at all... to this non us citizen.
Feels like content platforms are struggling with US ideological values of free speech and how it can be exploited to manipulate people... and what is their part to play where no action is action as well.
I don’t for a second think there is any significant voter fraud... cause that’d just be so hard to orchestrate and impossible to hide the evidence of.
> To a non-us citizen and somebody who believes in free speech, this whole debacle looks like the parties behind who own our social media trying to stop in anyway the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, there might have been something fishy going on in the voting process
From another non-US citizen, this doesn't seem like the case at all; TBH, it sounds pretty paranoid.
The sitting US president has been spreading (easily disprovable) lies about election fraud for months - Facebook and Twitter didn't stop him. They are only acting now because the US president went just a little too far (leading to a violent mob attacking Capitol Hill), and also because they have to be seen to do something, lest the government try to force regulation on them.
1. The "steal" claims have been thoroughly debunked in many dozens of court cases. No evidence has been presented.
2. Many of the alleged "steals" were in Republican-controlled areas. So, Republicans stealing the election for... Democrats?
3. The results of the election closely matched much pre-election polling done by multiple private parties. Polls are an inexact science of course. The absence of major discrepancies proves nothing, but if there was major fraud we would expect to see discrepancies.
4. The debate is over. Weeks ago, "stop the steal" may have referred to the need for legal challenges. Today, that is not true. The window for legal challenge is closed. Today it is a direct reference to violent and armed insurrection.
5. Constitutional free speech in America is defined fairly clearly (you guessed it) the Constitution. The key thing to understand is the "Congress shall make no law" part. The government is not suppressing anybody's right to speech here. Facebook is not obligated to publish "stop the steal" nonsense any more than your local newspaper is obligated to publish letters from any random crazy person.
5a. In any reasonable society, even the right to free speech has limits. It does not trump (no pun intended) others' rights. Yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theater is not protected free speech because your right to yell things does not trump others' right to safety. Similarly, inciting violent sedition/insurrection is not protected free speech even at the government level.
Instead of arguing about what FB should publish and not publish one should hope for (or create) a healthier and more diverse selection of social media platforms. While I agree with FB in this case, I think they are a drain on society in general and we would be better if there was more competition.
I agree with everything except 4, anytime someone says the debate is over I almost automatically take the other side, shutting down discourse is never ok, even when keeping it open costs lives, we need to talk more about things we disagree on, not less. Otherwise we will continue to polarize. I'm also leary of stigmatising phrases like stop the steal or all lives matter even when only 1% of uses are anything but incindiary.
5 I agree with but wonder if we should change it, network news uaed to have an equal time for both candidates thing despite being private. That and what is happening with whatsapp in EU make me think some sort of legal recognition of the effective duopoly facebook and Twitter have.
I agree with but wonder if we should change it,
network news uaed to have an equal time for both
candidates thing despite being private.
I do miss this, at least in theory.
I'm not sure how effective it would be today, as its effectiveness would depend heavily upon good-faith efforts by the various partisan networks.
Suppose we forced Fox News or Newsmax to give equal time to "liberal" viewpoints. Couldn't they simply find the least appealing and most ineffective possible "liberal" and allow them to make an utter ass of themselves?
The same of course could be said for CNN or MSNBC if they were forced to give equal air time to "conservatives" and they acted in bad faith.
I'm also leary of stigmatising phrases like
stop the steal or all lives matter even when
only 1% of uses are anything but incindiary.
I'm leery as well. Some other phrase from the opposite end of the spectrum could easily be next.
That said, the "stop the steal" movement just staged a violent ransacking of the Capitol; lawmakers narrowly escaped safely from armed mobs.
It is the laziest and most sociopathic possible fantasy to shrug our shoulders and treat the planning of such events as equal to other forms of speech. Free speech does not exist in a vacuum. It is always weighed against other rights. If somebody made credible death threats against you on Facebook, would you be okay with that? What about somebody making those threats on a megaphone, outside your home? How about a mob of people making them outside your home? Where would your love for free speech be then?
I absolutely understand the attraction and utter simplicity of "free speech, always, in all cases, trumping everything else, always" but it has never been and will never be that simple. It is an ideal to strive for. It is not our only ideal.
2a. Quite a few of the people alleging "steals" were themselves reelected in those same "stolen" elections. Oddly, they're not contesting their own seats as similarly fraudulent.
> "Why suddenly all platforms are stopping the spreading of this information."
Are you ignoring the 70 days of news, vote counts/recounts/certifications, court cases/lawsuits etc.? Do you think that there hasn't been a shred of substantiated hard evidence of widespread voter fraud for 70 days and then all of the sudden there was and so platforms started censoring people? Have you been paying any attention to this? or is your comment just based on a very narrow perspective of very recent events?
When are people going to stop with this nonsense belief that a private entity is required to enable any speech on their platform.
Facebook is not curtailing anyone's freedom of speech; those people who wish to say things that Facebook doesn't allow are still free to do it anywhere else, just not on their platform.
Freedom of speech is only protected from governmental interference in the US, why do so many people not understand this simple concept?
Trump has even more extremely demonstrated that the US has insufficient checks on a president. Both parties are equally upset by the threat of a President from the other party.
Why would any future president not claim victory in an election he lost after this debacle? Why would any president not commit crimes to hold power and then need to keep it within his allies to prevent his prosecution?
Structurally the US is dysfunctional. But whichever party thinks it has 4-8years of control will block reform.
I suspect the logical outcome of this is a Parliamentary system where the President requires the explicit approval of both houses. If the two houses go one way and the presidency the other, the president will be impeached and removed. The Clinton presidency was the dry run for this.
Removal requires 2/3 of the Senate. It’s unlikely that every member of a party would vote for removal without a clear, major violation.
So the only way your scenario works out is if the Senate has 70 or so members from the party opposing the President. A split like that is very unlikely.
>Why would any president not commit crimes to hold power and then need to keep it within his allies to prevent his prosecution?
It hasn't worked. Trump's chances of holding power would have been greater working within the system. He had his 9/11 moment with COVID and chose to squander it.
I do agree that the executive office has too much power. For a nation that prides itself on having spilled blood to avoid monarchy, The US seems to really want their President to be King/CEO In Chief of the entire government, rather than simply being the head of one of three equal branches of government. The Presidency simply should not be as important as it is.
I think that I would prefer the President have a single six year term, after which they can never hold the office of President or Vice President again. Then at least they would have to spend half of their first term campaigning for a second term. Presidential pardons and executive orders should also either be done away with or should require Congressional approval.
That said, it is surprising how many checks have worked. Most of the chaos Trump has really wreaked has been outside the system, with a band of loyalists willing to help him undermine it. But he's been stopped within the system numerous times, from repealing DACA to getting his wall built to forcing American companies to to his bidding to sending the military in to Portland. He couldn't even get the Supreme Court to rule in his favor over his election lawsuits, and he specifically stacked it for that purpose.
So yes, it's not the best possible timeline, but it's also not the worst, and let's not forget that Trump is a symptom, not the disease. If they had managed to drag Nancy Pelosi bound and, no doubt beaten, out to the gallows and hanged her for whatever imaginary treason, the whole crowd would have cheered it on.
That's the bigger issue American needs to deal with, the effect of two centuries of glorifying and romanticizing the archetypes of the stateless cowboy and revolutionary patriot, and normalizing the pretense of the white American right wing being the just inheritors and righteous executioners of American culture and liberty. And no, I don't believe that and America's desire for Presidential strongmen are at all unrelated. Many, many people have pointed out the stark difference between the government's response to BLM protests in Washington and the Capitol riots. That's also not unrelated.
The real checks and balances we need to work on are societal and cultural. Government is an expression of culture. We got Trump because we wanted Trump. We got chaos and dysfunction because we wanted to throw a brick through the window of the establishment. We got violence because the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants or whatever. We fear BLM more than we fear neo-nazis because the former threatens the status quo far more than the latter. We'd hate Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton less than we would if they were men.
Maybe at some point we should stop looking for faults in the stars and start looking at ourselves?
The system is working relatively well - though there can be tweaks; if Biden didn't win then we'd be in a lot more trouble. Trump in fact has allowed the swamp to be cleared as he promised, as we can see the treasonous Republican senators who allowed all of this behaviour to continue by not removing Trump - the House impeached him, then it was the Senate"s job to confirm. Trump exposed the rot, how far they're willing to go, showed us all their true colours that Trump's a wannabe tyrant and the Republican senators are happy to fall in line with that. He's also exposed the flaws in systems that allowed him and others to manipulate Americans for decades. Thankfully Biden won and I believe full out civil war can be avoided now, so long as these systems including the duopoly and mainstream media's ability to lie, to only tell one narrative; the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated as review recommended by Andrew Yang, along with his core policy proposals will adequately counter these problems.
To a non-us citizen and somebody who believes in free speech, this whole debacle looks like the parties behind who own our social media trying to stop in anyway the possibility that, maybe, just maybe, there might have been something fishy going on in the voting process.
You may have noticed that our president recently exhorted a gang of insurgents to break into the seat of the country's legislative branch and attempt to stop the process of counting the votes from the individual states that elected his rival.
While this insurrection was unsuccessful, several people were killed. The president's own party is unwilling to take action against him, and the opposition party is not yet empowered to do so.
You may also have noticed that the social media companies had previously taken little or no action against the president until this happened.
You may, not unreasonably, assume that the two events are connected.
This isn't censorship of unpopular views, it's an immune response against malicious lies.
You may have noticed that The Squad & Co. has been exhorting violence for 4 years. The violent idiots on the 6th probably just assumed that's how things go now: you lose, you get to be violent now, and the news will quietly sweep it aside and call you peaceful.
This is more of a comment on our broken communication and information apparatus as a species than on anything political.
Possibly. People who are stupid enough to assault the Capitol building without an actual army behind them are likely more than stupid enough to draw false equivalencies between civil disturbances prompted by documented instances of injustice and a coup attempt based on nothing but bluster and lies.
Nothing quite like locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.