Or, people are just inconsistent and not thinking about things beyond their politics.
People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.
People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.
> People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.
The reason why someone might hold these competing beliefs is simple: they strongly value democratic institutions. Violence, in the name of promoting democratic institutions, and ideally expanding human rights, is justifiable. Violence in the name of authoritarian insurrection is not.
Now, of course this gets really tricky, because many people on Parler, and in the capitol riots, fully believed that they were protecting democracy from massive voter-fraud. No clear answer to address that issue, but it is something that democratic societies will need to reckon with. How does one preserve democratic ideals (including promoting free speech, to whatever extent possible), while still maintaining a healthy society that doesn't tear itself apart?
> People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.
This is a great point. It's also key to consider that some of the groups that praised the Arab Spring were the Obama State Department which was led by Hillary Clinton at the time.
It appears the threshold is "support violent insurrection in other countries but stamp out the discussion of it here".
Or, perhaps, "support violent insurrection after peaceful protests against authoritarianism, human rights violations, political corruption have failed, when there is no further peaceful opportunity for opposition."
(The United States had an election, right? One with no more than the usual, minor, issues, right? One where legal actions were taken and weighed appropriately, right? One where one specific loser seems only to be complaining about losing, right? One where all of the other contemporaneous votes were not objected to, right? One that will be revisited in 2 to 4 years, right?)
Serious question: Which of the lawsuits went into discovery and were heard to weigh those claims? I'd love to read the details as that could dispel rumors and bs.
"In this case, the district court issued an emergency temporary restraining order at the plaintiffs’ request, worked at a breakneck pace to provide them an opportunity for broader relief, and was ready to enter an appealable order on the merits of their claims immediately after its expedited hearing on December 4, 2020. But the plaintiffs would not take the district court’s “yes” for an answer. They appealed instead. And, because they appealed , the evidentiary hearing has been stayed and the case considerably delayed. For our part, the law requires that we dismiss the appeal and return the case to the district court for further proceedings."
Georgia's a pain in the butt. Apparently, their official court documents site wants $.50 / page for the PDFs of filings. That's not happening.
Many of the court records can apparently be found on democracydocket.com, but my browser is complaining about the site. Sorry.
Trump v. Kemp, 1:20-cv-5310 (N.D. Ga.) (https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.285271...) (from https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/voting-ri...) is interesting, though. The plaintiff's first claim is that the election was not conducted in accord with election laws established by the GA legislature. The court decides "Therefore, Plaintiffs Electors Clause claim belongs, if it belongs to anyone, only to the Georgia General Assembly" and since none of the plaintiffs are members of the assembly, they don't have standing. (That's rather fine logic chopping, but....)
The rest of the ruling seems to be that the governor and secretary of state of the state are not the ones legally responsible for verification of ballots, so the second claim cannot apply to them.
Ok, now I've been sucked in. I started from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related..., which lists a number of the cases, mostly in federal court, and mostly (I think) appeals, which don't deal with matters of fact. I'm having to dig through those to the original cases, in state courts.
For example, Bowyer et al. v. Ducey et al., which has a currently unresolved (https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-azd-2_20-cv-023... is the latest federal dismissal) but the dismissal refers to Ward, CV 2020-015285 (Ariz. 2020); (Doc. 81-1) (and has a short explanation of the ruling that goes into the evidence).
So, that brings me to Ward v. Jackson et al (CV2020-015285) (https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/records/election-2020/...). https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1... is the minutes of the first evidentiary hearing and https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1... is the minutes of the second evidentiary hearing and ruling. (The minutes don't include the evidence, just who gave testimony and what the evidence is.) The ruling is 1) Background, 2) The Burden Of Proof In An Election Contest ("The Plaintiff in an election contest has a high burden of proof and the actions of election officials are presumed to be free from fraud and misconduct."), 3) The Evidence Does Not Show Fraud Or Misconduct (see below), 4) The Evidence Does Not Show Illegal Votes, 5) The Evidence Does Not Show An Erroneous Vote Count, and 6) Orders.
P: "A.R.S. § 16-672(A)(1) permits an election contest “[f]or misconduct on the part of election boards or any members thereof in any of the counties of the state, or on the part of any officer making or participating in a canvass for a state election.” Plaintiff alleges misconduct in three respects. First is that insufficient opportunity was given to observe the actions of election officials."
C: "The observation procedures for the November general election were materially the same as for the August primary election, and any objection to them should have been brought at a time when any legal deficiencies could have been cured."
P: "Second, Plaintiff alleges that election officials overcounted mail-in ballots by not being sufficiently skeptical in their comparison of signatures on the mail-in envelope/affidavits with signatures on file."
C: "Maricopa County election officials followed [the Secretary of State’s Election Procedures Manual, with multiple verification steps] process faithfully in 2020. Approximately 1.9 million mail-in ballots were cast and, of these, approximately 20,000 were identified that required contacting the voter. Of those, only 587 ultimately could not be validated.[...] The Court ordered that counsel and their forensic document examiners could review 100 randomly selected envelope/affidavits to do a signature comparison. [...] Of the 100 envelope/affidavits reviewed, Plaintiff’s forensic document examiner found 6 signatures to be “inconclusive,” meaning she could not testify that the signature on the envelope/affidavit matched the signature on file. She found no sign of forgery or simulation as to any of these ballots. Defendants’ expert testified that 11 of the 100 envelopes were inconclusive, mostly because there were insufficient specimens to which to compare them. He too found no sign of forgery or simulation, and found no basis for rejecting any of the signatures. [...] None of them shows an abuse of discretion on the part of the reviewer. Every one of them listed a phone number that matched a phone number already on file, either through voter registration records or from a prior ballot. The evidence does not show that these affidavits are fraudulent, or that someone other than the voter signed them. There is no evidence that the manner in which signatures were reviewed was designed to benefit one candidate or another, or that there was any misconduct, impropriety, or violation of Arizona law with respect to the review of mail-in ballots."
P: "Third, Plaintiff alleges errors in the duplication of ballots. Arizona law requires election officials to duplicate a ballot under a number of circumstances. One is where the voter is overseas and submits a ballot under UOCAVA, the Uniformed And Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Another is where the ballot is damaged or otherwise cannot be machine-tabulated."
C: "The Court ordered that counsel could review 100 duplicate ballots. Maricopa County voluntarily made another 1,526 duplicate ballots available for review. [...] Of the 1,626 ballots reviewed, 9 had an error in the duplication of the vote for president. Plaintiff called a number of witnesses who observed the duplication process as credentialed election observers. There was credible testimony that they saw errors in which the duplicated ballot did not accurately reflect the voter’s apparent intent as reflected on the original ballot. This testimony is corroborated by the review of the 1,626 duplicate ballots in this case, and it confirms both that there were mistakes in the duplication process, and that the mistakes were few. When mistakes were brought to the attention of election workers, they were fixed. The duplication process prescribed by the Legislature necessarily requires manual action and human judgment, which entail a risk of human error. Despite that, the duplication process for the presidential election was 99.45% accurate. And there is no evidence that the inaccuracies were intentional or part of a fraudulent scheme. They were mistakes. And given both the small number of duplicate ballots and the low error rate, the evidence does not show any impact on the outcome."
The Arizona Supreme Court decision (https://www.clerkofcourt.maricopa.gov/Home/ShowDocument?id=1...) makes for good reading. It's pretty clear, with a summary of the evidence (for the parts that were appealed). Weirdly, it takes the three claims in reverse order. I particularly liked the statements that the Secretary [of State, of Arizona] represented an error of 0.37%, while the appellants say it represented an error of 0.55%; the trial court accepted the appellants' number but it and the Supreme Court note that extrapolated to the total number of duplicated ballots, that doesn't come close to what would be required for a recount. The appellant offered no evidence that 1626 ballot sample was inadequate. The court accepts that there were irregularities, but that they did not even render the result uncertain.
So, there's one. I'll go fishing for more.
From what I know about law (NOT A LAWYER!), they're probably all in state courts---elections are state procedures---and thus not reported like the federal cases (which seem to fall into two classes: appeals, which deal with laws and procedures, not evidence, and them as were dismissed due to lack of standing since state procedures are a matter for state laws.
Let's talk AI. In this case, Clark county used a machine to sort mail-in ballots and to do a first pass validation of signatures. For 453,248 ballots. For reasons, including that the signature exemplars from the DMV were less than 200DPI, 70% of the ballots were viewed as sketchy, while 30% were found machine-okey-dokey and passed on without further review. The complaint wants those 130,000 votes invalidated.
The interesting thing is that the 70% that required manual review, 1-1.5% were initially rejected due to signature mismatch. Most were "cured" by voters (presumably by officials actually contacting the voters), leaving 0.3% to be completely rejected. The court notes that Washoe county (not using the magic machine) had a pre-cure reject rate of 1.53%. [So, if I have my sums right, the complaint wants 130,000 (30% of mail-in votes) plus some unknown number (greater than 1%) of the remainder invalidated, full stop, because between 1,400 and 6,900 were invalid. Or something.]
The complaint also includes Nevada's electronic voting machines ("not less than 1000 illegal and improper votes" counted and "not less than 1000 legal and proper votes" not counted). And no less than 15,000 illegal and improper mail-in votes from out-of-state. And the USPS, which was "directed" to deliver mail-in ballots where the addressee was deceased, moved, or had no known affiliation with the address. No less than 500 votes from dead people. There are also allegations of fraud in vote counting and observation. (It's a laundry list.)
According to the court, the Agilis sorting machines were determined to be ok in a previous case, Klaus v. Cegavske (which I have yet to look up).
As far as evidence, the court ordered the contestants to disclose all witnesses and evidence they intended to use by 5:00 pm Nov. 25. The contestants did not issue their first deposition notices until Nov. 27. Therefore the contestants' evidence consists of non-deposition witness declarations, with no cross-examination. The court considered these hearsay.
Michael Baselice offered expert evidence on the incidence of illegal voting based on a phone survey. He was unable to identify the source of his data and conducted no quality control. Similar questions faced Jesse Kamzol's analysis of various databases of voters. Scott Gessler's report lacked citations of facts and evidence and did not include any exhibits in support of his conclusions; his conclusions are based on a handful of affidavits. The complainants' experts were found to be of little or no value, but were not excluded from consideration, although given little weight.
The defendants provided a stack of testimony that court judged credible (including Dr. Michael Herron and the president of the company manufacturing Agilis).
Based on Herron's testimony, the court finds no evidence of a higher rate of voter fraud associated with mail-in voting. He also found that an illegal vote rate of 0.00054 percent between 2012 and prior to the 2020 general election. Herron testified that the contestant's implied double voting rate was 89 times larger than a conservative academic estimate. He finally testified that the contestants provided no persuasive evidence that fraudulent votes affected the presidential margin of 33,596 votes. (Gessler also testified that he had no personal knowledge of any voter fraud.)
The court found that the record does not support allegations of problems with provisional ballots.
The court found that the Agilis machine did not accept any signatures that should have been rejected and that the record did not support a finding that ballots with improper signatures were counted.
And on, and on. The court finds that the record does not support the allegations of the complainants, hearsay declarations included, under "any standards of evidence". The contestants failed to meet their burden and the case was dismissed.
J claims that election workers coached voters and was instructed not to ask for photo ID from voters. However J does not name the location, provide the number of incidents, or name the employees. J never told a supervisor of the incidents nor took steps to address them. (J only came forward after reports of Biden winning.) J also claims, at the TCF center, she was directed not to compare signatures and to "pre-date" absentee ballots received at TCF on Dec. 4. The State Elections Director, CT, answers that signatures were previously verified at the Detroit Election Headquarters and that the "pre-dating" involved completing a data field inadvertently left blank during that earlier process. (I wonder if Michigan use the envelope/affidavit and anonymous ballot approach like Arizona, which ideally would have stripped off the signature part before vote counting for privacy. Michigan may need to do some work, if vote counters can match signatures with ballots.)
State Senator RJ wasn't there and makes claims based on other affidavits.
AS was a Republican challenger that didn't attend the training. AS claims out-of-state license plates brought "tens of thousands" of ballots in at 4:30 am, and that every ballot after that was for Biden. CT responds that rental trucks with out-of-state plates were used, all ballots were brought in the same way, the number of ballots he claims is speculation, and that 220,000 more votes were made for Biden.
DG claims large numbers of ballots were delivered in unsealed containers. Plaintiffs never supplied any legal requirement that sealed containers were required.
PC claims that computers were connected to the internet, based on an icon on one of the computers, but provides no other evidence. CT asserts that only the computers that needed to be connected were. (The Court notes that CT, in a Facebook post prior to the election, claims that Democrats were using COVID to commit election fraud (They see you when you're sleeping, they know when you're awake. (I'm getting punchy here.)) and that the predilection to see fraud undermines his claims.
MC was an IT consultant from Dominion Voting Services at TCF. MC claims witnessing "nothing but fraudulent events take place" including tabulating machines that jammed a lot (?) and a cover-up of the loss of vast amounts of data. No one else corroborates MC's claims, and by no one the court says the other complaintants.
Ex-Assistant Attorney General ZL claims that he was mistreated, that ballots were processed without confirmation of eligibility, that he was unable to observe because he was required to stand 6 feet away, and that he was excluded from the room after leaving to get something to eat because he was a Republican. However, two Democratic observers were also excluded, with the reason being the maximum occupancy of the room. Further, as mentioned above, voting eligibility was determined elsewhere. A large monitor was provided to allow observation at a safe distance. ZL also did not file any complaints at the time.
There's a bit about injunctive relief, irreparable harm, and legal remedy. (Michigan law provides for the Secretary of State and county clerks to audit races, but that doesn't seem satisfactory for the plaintiffs.)
The court finds that the plaintiffs have legal remedies and suffer no harm without an injunction, but that the defendants would be harmed by an injunction, as well as the public interest. The plaintiff's affidavits are contradicted by the State Election Director, whose account is corroborated by five other affidavits. An injunction and independent audit is denied.
This one is kind of interesting, even though the "independent audit" thing seems only like some kind of delaying tactic, rather than trying to get the election discarded.
On one hand, there's the assumption that election procedures and officials are legal and fair, and the further consideration that a ruling for the plaintiffs would be a big deal. (Judges apparently don't like to be backed into a corner and forced to make rulings that result in big deals, particularly on short notice. The phrase "judicial activism" shows up, for example.) On the other, these are serious accusations that are being considered seriously.
In this case, the court decided that the plaintiffs had other options they could use, and that the affidavits were not credible enough to override other considerations.
It's been a decade, I think people's opinions of the Arab Spring have been revised since then. The Arab Spring worked out best for the actual country it originated in, Tunisia.
This is difficult to balance with having data be available when you are offline.
If your data is local to a user's device (laptop, desktop, tablet, phone), then it's not online 24/7. So, you need some way for other people to see it.
If you require people to use a server, there's either problems onboarding and trusting that server operator. Or you make people host their own server and nobody uses it b/c that's too technical.
Where are you getting an Urbit ID in 3 minutes? I am not super familiar with Urbit. But my understanding is that even getting a temporary Urbit ID (a commet) takes hours.
I just booted with a new temporary ID and it took 50 seconds to generate the cryptographic key. After 3-4 minutes, Urbit had bootstrapped itself and was accessible over HTTP.
You can try with these commands, using Mac in this example:
mkdir urbit
cd urbit
curl -JLO https://urbit.org/install/mac/latest
tar zxvf ./darwin.tgz --strip=1
./urbit -c mycomet
Oh cool. I didn't actually try it myself, since I read in the docs that it would take a long time. Good to see it's quick. Urbit looks like a really interesting system with great design underpinnings and philosophy.
It's not strange if you view it through from their point of view. Rightly or wrongly, these people just want to see much less centralized moderation. And they feel unherd and oppressed (again regardless of whether that's actually true, that's what they experience and feel).
They see things in a more absolutist free speech lens, meaning any content that is legal should be allowed. And they don't see platforms as being responsible for moderation. They view centralized moderation as inherently biased and illegitimate. If they can't or wont allow legal speech, then they think 230 should be repealed and these sites should cease to exist.
They are reacting to takedowns from social media sites, SaaS providers, IaaS providers, and financial services because they view these sites as an oligopoly acting in unison to bar them from the basic infrastructure of modern life. Imagine if typewriter companies ganged up to stop selling to right leaning newspapers and authors. Or, imagine if telegraph companies said they wouldn't transmit messages for Abraham Lincon.
On 230, they see social media sites as a monopoly due to network effects. Also/alternatively they talk about a bait-and-switch, where the social media sites held themselves out as public squares when they were small. But once they were big, they started enforcing their views.
Generally, I think people are failing to put themselves in a Trump supporter's shoes. Imagine you genuinely believed that the election was stolen. The court cases were almost all dismissed on standing and laches. From their perspective, no one will substantively address their videos, affidavits, statistical anomalies, etc.
And when they protest, people call them violent insurrectionists, despite all year BLM doing very similar things (again from their perspective).
I don't see how these apps dont eventually get taken down like the Fediverse apps earlier this year. Eventually (probably once it's polished enough to be usable) the deplatformed communities will discover SSB and then Google/Apple will take the apps down.
This project seemed innocuous enough. And it's a shame Discord killed it. As long as services are centralized, platform owners keep doing things like this.
I didn't watch the episode. But, I don't think the effect of repealing 230 is in dispute. It would make hosting content you didn't write unfeasible. The questions is whether that is a good thing or not. And what new rule would replace it if any.
Personally, I think even a complete repeal with no replacement would be a good thing. The vast majority of social networks, forums, comment sections, and other public spaces online are a cancer that are destroying our society.
And censorship is a poor alternative. Even if you find yourself on the favorable side of the censors now, inevitably they will come for you.
> The vast majority of social networks, forums, comment sections, and other public spaces online are a cancer that are destroying our society.
I don't think most of the participants in all those public spaces would agree with you. This forum we are having this conversation in right now is such a public space. Do you think it should just disappear?
I realize most wouldn't. But I would accept that trade. HN is a rare exception. And, there would still be sources for tech news: personal blogs, company sites, LWN and other news sites. It's true that news and discussion would flow less freely. But, I think that on-net 230 is doing profound damage to our society.
What trade, exactly, do you think you would be accepting?
If you think you would be trading the absence of HN and rare sites like it for the absence of Facebook and Twitter, or even them rolling back their most egregious moderation policies, think again. Facebook and Twitter won't care if Section 230 is repealed; they can afford enough lawyers to handle any lawsuits thrown at them. In fact they would probably like it, since it would mean even less competition for them than they currently have. So repealing Section 230 would actually make the situation worse, not better.
A change that might improve the situation would be to pass legislation clarifying the boundaries of "good faith moderation", which is the part of Section 230 that Facebook and Twitter are abusing. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be talking about that.
> HN is a rare exception.
Maybe, but the fact remains that it exists, and we can come here and have discussions and not have to even pay attention to all the dreck that is out there. I don't use Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I do use HN and sites like it. Those sites are not replaceable, and they need the protection that Section 230 offers.
> personal blogs, company sites, LWN and other news sites
I don't want "news". I want discussion. And the whole point of Section 230 is that we can have sites like this one where actual discussion can take place, not just someone posting their thoughts on blog A and someone else responding on blog B. The reason sites like this exist is that everyone just posting what they think on their own blog is not a good way to have online discussions. I don't want to give up the added value that discussion forums provide. Nor, as I said above, do I think giving it up by repealing Section 230 would actually improve anything.
I agree the web as a platform for publishing static information is feature complete. You can publish basically any kind of static content you want (news, academic articles, personal sites, business landing pages, restaurant menus, etc) with ~2005 era tech and no JS.
But once you start to consider forms and interactive content, the possibilities for expanding interactivity are near endless: raster or vector maps, the spam bot / capcha arms-race, custom form widgets (ie. better dropdowns, file upload dropzones, datatables, drag/drop items), different connection types or wire protocols (XML/JSON vs. binary formats, Websockets, WebRTC, QUIC, more UDP-based stuff in the future), rich API's like payments, hardware security dongles, and social networks (webmentions/activity-pub/etc).
Kind of like Excel, these are each must-have's for some industry or app. Each one requires a different 10% of core features to work. So, we need them all if the web is going to be an application delivery platform. And for better or worse, it is the current de-facto standard cross-platform apps.
But I think this shows an interesting effect: platforms are very unlikely to ever be feature complete. Whereas distinct pieces of software are. PDF is another example of this kind of scope creep.
People will praise the Arab Spring organizing on Twitter without considering the implications for the events at the Capital on Jan 6th.
People are fine with Parler getting banned by all their vendors for not moderating violence and threats. But people would loose their minds if the same thing happened to Facebook for their failure to moderate violence around the Rohingyan genocide.