Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims

> you're being obtuse

No name-calling on HN, please. It's specifically against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The more polarized things become, the more all of us here need to breathe and treat each other well.

You're reacting to just the word "absolute" and misinterpreting what he meant. In that sentence it just means "very much". You could delete it without changing the argument.

Right but then they omit links which verify his comments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/close-results-in-pater...

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar like this. It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note these, for example:

"Don't be snarky."

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

You may not owe pathetic snowflakes better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here, because we're hoping not to explode: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

But he didn't kill her

I'm sorry, I fail to see how having a more informed electorate is a partisan issue or a "losing move". That concept implies that the party this is "against" is only successful when the voters aren't well informed. The only side twitter is against is an intentionally misinformed userbase.

Twitter had already been fact-checking misinformation about covid-19 for harm reduction: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/11/21254733/twitter-covid-19...

The political leaning of the head of site integrity is irrelevant, his job is a branch off of infosec and can be simplified to combating spam. If one person was using 10 accounts to hype up a fake cryptocurrency, the head of site integrity would be in charge of taking action to fight that. This case happens to be harm reduction in politics and not finance or health. Unfortunately there has been somewhat of a harassment campaign against the head of site integrity because people continue to misunderstand his role.

Facebook is currently synonymous with fake news. I think that in the long term, people will stop trust it completely, similar to how they've learn to avoid clickbait titles on articles.

I have to disagree with you about Facebook/Twitter comparison. To me it looks like Facebook is obliviously annoying everyone at the same time. Twitter doesn’t look great but does at least seem to be aware of this and trying to improve.

It sounds like you're defining anybody who is explicitly liberal or conservative as partisan, which is deeply ironic.

Why is disagreeing with a politician a partisan?

The US has no hope of recovering from this circus show if you can't mentally separate people from parties. Trump being a dangerous idiot does not mean all Republicans are, nor does it mean all Dems are great. There are good people on all sides but this reductionism makes it impossible to see that.

For some people, it’s all about the money: Low taxes, more benefits, cheaper stuff, free stuff. Whichever candidate will give them the most, that’s what they want. Lazy people will fall into this category by default because they can’t be bothered to do any more rigorous analysis and don’t really have any strong values one way or another. Plus it’s hard to beat free stuff.

And then there’s other people, who don’t care so much about money, but rather the values. They will vote for a candidate that will actually make them worse off as long as they feel that candidate represents their values. And they will do it over and over again.

Not necessarily. There are many historical examples of political parties founded on the principle that members of the opposition were of unsound mind or perhaps weren't even considered to be people. If one accepts these premises as sound then it is quite reasonable to restrict voting rights only to those who support the party.

Something to think about: the electoral college is halfway more representative of people who can't vote (minors, non-citizens) because, in a sense, the elector represents them, and their neighbors who did vote probably have similar political views.

It’s a cross-party issue in the sense that Democrat Eric Holder, former US Attorney General, has been raising money for candidates who support citizen redistributing through the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. You don’t have to be a Democratic Party candidate to be a part.

I know there are also Republicans who care about this issue, but I don’t know of a better plan to fix it than this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Democratic_Redistrict...

https://democraticredistricting.com/chairman/

> gerrymandering in the US is a cross-party issue.

Not in the last ca. 20-30 years, it certainly isn't.

This is the worst kind of both-side-ism. Compare the redistricting procedures of blue states like CA or NY, to red states like TX.

If anything Democrats have been way too timid about gerrymandering and have lost votes because of it.

Adding friction to voting disproportionately hurts marginalized voters, who typically vote left. A clear example is requiring a drivers license or passport for voting. It makes voting easier for the rich than the poor.

I think because what is the right and the left constantly rebalance around 50% popularity. So, because currently it’s harder for certain people to vote, typically liberal people, if they were able to more easily vote, they would tile things to the democrats. But then the republicans would readjust to the new realities (or never get elected again!), and soon things would be right back to around 50/50... but a 50/50 that more accurately reflects the now higher % of people who vote.

I’ll get downvoting for attempting to answer but,... why would someone think this helps the left and hurts the right?

Ballot harvesting is generally agreed (by both political parties) to have been a major factor in the last congressional elections in CA for example.

Personally I think it is a very strange dynamic to have 200-300 political operatives canvassing specific addresses in a district to deliver provisional ballots, assist a very targeted set of people in helping to fill out those ballets, and then driving those filled out ballots to the polling station on Election Day.

> Ada Briceño, chair of the Democratic Party of Orange County, said her staff and volunteers have collected mail-in ballots for GOP candidates and turned them in along with Democratic and independent ballots.

> Briceño said her favorite story about ballot collection came in 2018, after she knocked on the door of a Latino man in his 70s. Her told her he’d never voted because he’d been intimidated by the ballot and process. Briceño said she spent time walking him through how it worked and discussing the candidates with him. By the end of their talk, she said the man was crying because he’d just finished voting for the first time in his life. [1]

We don’t allow campaigning within a certain distance of a polling place. But the chair of the Democratic Party can knock on a man’s door with a provisional ballot, discuss the candidates, and help him vote?

Republican campaigns take the position that their voters would never hand over a completed ballot or accept “help” in filling one out.

> Fred Whitaker, chair of the Republican Party of Orange County, said they spent money on a ballot harvesting program in 2018 but saw almost no results. He said, “Republicans will basically tell you, ‘You’re not prying my ballot from my hand.’”

The SF Chronicle wrote a piece on the last CA election where Democrats gained more seats then they’ve ever won before in CA;

> California Democrats took advantage of seemingly minor changes in a 2016 law to score their stunningly successful midterm election results, providing a target for GOP unhappiness that is tinged with a bit of admiration. [2]

> ...They felt the hit on Nov. 6 — and in the days after, as late-arriving Democratic votes were tabulated and one Republican candidate after another saw leads shrink and then evaporate. This week, a seventh GOP-held congressional seat flipped to the Democrats, leaving Republicans controlling a mere seven of California’s 53 House districts.

In Orange County alone, where every House seat went Democratic, “the number of Election Day vote-by-mail dropoffs was unprecedented — over 250,000,” Fred Whitaker, chairman of the county Republican Party, said in a note to supporters. “This is a direct result of ballot harvesting allowed under California law for the first time. That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later.”

[1] https://www.ocregister.com/what-is-ballot-harvesting-and-how...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-la...

As long as the plurality of voters are buying shit someone is going to sell it. The GOP primary had every kinds of people and Trump won because he was the most blatant. So there's that.

Was it also a "transparent attempt" in 2008 as well? Or should Debbie be "fact checked" here? I'm getting all confused.

Because the world is very big and we're really well insulated from most parts of it. Yeah there are hospitals full of patients in Wuhan, who cares. Yeah I can't go to Rome this year, because those frightened Italians closed shop, even though the plague is only in Northern Italy. Hah, those New Yorkers are losers, they don't even have enough morgues, probably because the constant crime! Damn these irresponsible city dwellers brought death to our doorsteps! Uh, well, Joe the neighbor got well after two day, so fuck these mask-donning gun-fearing science-suckers, don't tell me what to wear, and I won't cover my face, I'm not a Muslim woman!

And so on, and so on. The cognitive dissonance is palpable at every turn, but that doesn't help those who are in its grip. 100+ years ago people blamed that new thing, electricity, for the Russian flu, now people blame 5G. Just as sometimes lovely religious folks blame gays, rock and roll, and video games for everything.

There are very few clear cut things in our world that our brain accepts as such. (The Earth is round? Well, it seems flat to me. An anvil falls down faster than a pillow, so that must be because it's heavier.)

But it's more than that, though. If you closely read the works of some modern-day conservative intellectuals, such as Gingrich or Scalia, you can trace their arguments to, e.g., radical continental (esp. French) philosophy, both 19th and 20th century. A couple of years ago I read an interview where Gingrich basically admits to being a nihilist, albeit driven by his disgust with liberal politics. Truth and facts literally don't matter to Gingrich; his goal is the destruction of the modern liberal state as he sees it; yet, as an intellectual (he's at least well read, if anything), he's naturally driven to rationalize things, so it's unsurprising he effectively ends up in much the same place as, e.g, radical, Marxist leftists driven to develop ideological models in their attempts to undermine the capitalist state and its institutions. In a famous speech Scalia admits he believes American constitutional jurisprudence should reflect French Civil Law jurisprudence, which principally emerged after the writing and adoption of the U.S. Constitution. (Therefore, Scalia's jurisprudence is fundamentally in opposition to originalism, even though it emphasizes textualism and contemporaneous dictionary definitions. It's continental radicalism disguised as American conservatism.)

It all stands out because since its founding American intellectuals, especially mainstream and conservative political intellectuals, have leaned far more heavily toward Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, literally and aesthetically. Americans tended to be more pragmatic, less abstract, and, frankly, generally conservative compared to any of their continental counterparts. Everything about American political philosophy and popular political sentiment has historically been relatively muted; that is, until the modern era that has seen the Republican party ascendent. This has been true even at the liberal extreme--compare Abolitionism, Progressivism, and the American labor movements to their contemporaneous continental European counterparts. (We largely inherited this culture from Britain, of course.)

Likewise, haven't you ever noticed the rather conspicuous conversions of many conservative intellectuals to Catholicism? Or the fact that all the conservatives on SCOTUS are Catholic? (Gorsuch attends an Episcopal church, though.) Even as a Catholic myself, it sort of makes me wonder if the fears of the anti-papists are coming to pass. Of course, Catholicism is very conservative, but it's conservative in a continental European sense, has been shaped by radical continental intellectual dynamics, and culturally continues to have a far larger surface area exposed to radical intellectualism. The Jesuits are great examples of how zealous conservatism can morph into a radical--and even leftist radical--ideological culture. I believe Catholics have risen to the intellectual ranks of conservative factions precisely because they're more familiar with and adept at developing and weaponizing radical ideology. (Relatedly, most of the liberals on SCOTUS are now Jewish, and not coincidentally it was early and mid 20th century European Jewish immigrants who injected radical continental thought into American intellectual circles, greatly influencing the course of American liberalism. There's an obvious stereotyping and prejudice in the types of people the Senate is comfortable confirming, both on the right and the left.)

So it's not just about the adoption and display of "truthiness", it's the deliberate development of ideological arguments and models that undergird "truthiness", in the same manner that conservatives once accused radical mid-century leftists (i.e. Marxists, some extreme feminists, etc) of shaping liberal politics. Nationalist, populist political waves have traveled across the world, but arguably its in America where that wave has a distinctively sophisticated intellectual underpinning, and one might even argue that the global phenomenon originated in the U.S. because of that. Modern American conservatism emerged to oppose mid-century liberalism, but seems to have adopted and recontextualized many of its arguments--moral relativism, identity politics, etc.