YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

Maybe it's time. America tried fascism. Let's try communism next.

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

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

Who are these people? Western academic journals and media amplify views that align with those of western academics, so it’s hard to gauge what ordinary people in other countries believe.

In my experience, apart from Britain and the US (alignment with the Anglo world), Bangladeshis look to ideas from the Middle East (alignment with the Muslim world) and socialism (alignment with the Soviet bloc). All of these are imported too. They were embraced not out of a desire to eliminate British influence, but out of the notion that those ideologies were the future. It’s like microkernels-socialism was seen as a scientific government of the future at the time. Today, the country is quite capitalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...

About two decades ago I read an article from a Middlebury professor advocating Bangladesh to ignore the World Bank embrace what today would be described as economic decolonization. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/alternative-pro.... (“But there is another way of looking at things, a Gorasin way, one developed closer to home, less despairing and less grandiose at the same time.”).

Luckily these ideas found no purchase, and Bangladesh’s economy grew by a factor of five since that article was published.

> I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.

I prefer air conditioning and the rule of law and economic growth. Western culture, I find less relatable over time. Pets, I’ve always found odd. Pop culture attitudes towards marriage and babies and old age, young people talking back to their elders, etc. I find all that curiouser and curiouser as I get older.

> But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment.

Fair.

> And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art)

This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:

> Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet-philosopher of Bengal once said, “To taste the beauty of a Greek sculpture or an Italian Renaissance painting, one needs not to be a Greek or an Italian. A painting is actually a painting, not Indian, Ajantan, nothing.”

> https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/16/decolonising-queer-banglade... (on conceptions of propriety in sexual relations)

This article is extremely disingenuous. While British law may be the statutory basis for prosecuting homosexual behavior, that’s not the reason prosecutions are suddenly happening now. (“On Thursday, 18 May 2017, Bangladesh saw the arrests of men on the alleged basis of their homosexuality for the first time in its history.”). The law has been on the books since 1860. The British are long gone. What changed? Islam—another colonial import. Bangladesh has increasingly aligned itself with the broader Islamic world. When we left in 1989, headscarves were nowhere to be seen. Today they are quite common. The best thing that could happen for LGBT people in Bangladesh is westernization. It’s our western constitution, with due process rights and equality of all under the law, that offer the best hope of protection.

And before that it was controlled by the Ottomans, Muslims, Byzantine Romans, Vandals, Romans, Phoenicians and Berbers. (I may have left some groups out).

Many of these invaders had themselves been previously colonised from elsewhere.

It often seems to me that it’s only the last one or two groups that are demonised, and the atrocities perpetrated by previous generations of colonists are forgotten by those who would construct a new national myth.

I’m not discounting anything. But I’m skeptical that there are “countless” people who embrace decolonization of the kind which modern academics mean when they use the term. Note that @angibrowl talked about reforming institutions and legal systems and property rights, which is more aggressive than what you refer to below.

> Statistically speaking, the fact that you’ve never met a Bangladeshi who disagrees with you tells me more about the company you keep than what Bangladeshis think about colonialism in general.

It’s not about what you think of colonialism, but about what you want to do going forward. Polls show Bangladeshis are broadly supportive of for example the free market liberal order: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/10/09/emerging-and-d...

76% say the country is headed in the right direction under the current basically neoliberal government: https://www.iri.org/sites/default/files/bangladesh_2019_poll...

They like the things that come along with having an Anglo legal system that makes it easy for people to invest in the country. They cite development, the economy, increased living standards, and improved law and order as reasons why they think the country is headed in the right direction. They have high approval rates for the media, parliament, and high court. Their list of top problems is corruption, drugs, unemployment, security, and education.

Reading local news, talking to family, and following politics suggests to me that the problems that people actually care about have little to do with colonial legacy. Indeed, the problem of corruption is widely recognized among Bangladeshis as a cultural shortcoming, not some externally imposed problem.

Now, Bangladesh is quite a nationalist country. The Bangla language movement was a more political force in the mid 20th century and was one of the drivers of independence. At some point, the medium of instruction was changed from English to Bangla at the primary and secondary level. But today, English is taught from the first grade—with the big debate being how to teach it, not how much influence it has on the culture.

> (1) take what benefits you, (2) be proud of your heritage, especially that which your colonizer tried to suppress, (3) throw out the nonsense, and most importantly, (4) explicitly condemn the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by your occupiers. Forgetting and forgiving is not how you build an independent nation; seeking truth and justice is.

I agree with the first three, and strongly disagree with the fourth, at least in the context of my experience. Britain is never going to write Bangladesh a big check. They are a shadow of their former selves and cannot do so anyway. So what’s the point in dwelling on the past? All it does is tint the policy choices you make going forward. How a country shapes it’s institutions, laws, and culture, should rest on what will make the people prosperous going forward. Fixating on what aspects of culture or what laws and institutions were inherited from the colonial power creates a strong impetus to change those things for the sake of asserting the country’s own identity. For example, the Bangladesh High Court still writes its decisions in English and routinely cites decisions of other Anglo courts. That’s a good thing! The Anglo legal system is one of (in my opinion, the) finest in the world and highly suited for participation in the global economy. What are we going to do, replace it with Sharia? That’s what some people want, and that’s the only real alternative.

This is my beef with the academic decolonization literature. It makes your political discourse backwards looking. The article posted above about prosecution of homosexuality is a great example. The article notes that the first ever such prosecutions have happened in 2017. And it blames Victorian legal codes that have been on the books since 1860. But that’s obviously absurd. If those laws have been on the books since 1860, why are they only being enforced now? That’s obviously not what changed. Looking backward and blaming Britain blinds the author to the much more recent trend of fundamentalist Islam being imported from the Middle East.

If you want to talk about how to improve LGBT rights in Bangladesh, is decolonization a useful framework? Should we look back to acceptance of hijra (transgender people) in pre-Islamic Bangladesh? No! When the Indian Supreme Court recently granted recognition to Hijra, it did so by reference to international human rights law, court cases in the UK and Australia, and surveys of legislation in western countries: https://www.lawyerscollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04....

Decolonization is about recovering from that, not about eschewing cars for canoes.

Good question. Of course, there is no individual human mind capable of such a thing, and so why should such a mind be permitted to decide what the masses get to see?

The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.

"internal ⁦@Facebook⁩ research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation."

So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it".

I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.

If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?

It is not patronising to say that people are not all created with the same set of skills, beliefs, and values, and that some will engage with obvious bullshit. Many are not capable or interested in engaging with complex topics in a way that does not self-reinforce their pre-existing opinions. I have discussed this elsewhere[0].

When a group of people are motivated to exploit the weaknesses of others in order to get them to do things that are damaging to our democratic institutions, and they use misinformation to do it, it is unpleasant but not unreasonable to me to suggest that spreading lies through misinformation is as serious as suppressing truth through censorship and that they should both be treated equally seriously.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003

All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/12/political-disney-world.html

[2] https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html (table of contents)

Bullshit, because at this moment that comparison is a mountain vs a molehill.

0. Trumps lies about Covid and the pandemic crisis which have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans 1. The racist birther conspiracy. 2. The vast number of well-documented lies Trump told over the last few years. 3. The baseless lies about election fraud or whatever.

But you know all this. I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith and I think you’re full of shit. Because, after these last four years saying “bad actors on both sides” means that you’ve chosen to either obscure or deny reality.

What you’re doing is dangerous to democracy and you should be ashamed of yourself.

I’m not saying YouTube removing this content is the right move, but your logic only holds up in a fantasyland devoid of fact or context.

And by evidence I don't mean "hit pieces in traditional media that don't like the competition from social media".

This is just hand-wavy fearmongering about "mass psychology"

Agreed. However:

a) it is not necessary to accept these beliefs as epistemically flawless

b) it is possible (and useful) to be consciously aware that we have done this (as opposed to holding the perception that we know(!) these things)

> With these things aside, the both sides mentality stops being applicable at a certain point.

I'm not sure, so I will ask for clarification: do you believe I have asserted that both sides are equal, at the object level? I am pointing out their similarity at the abstract, neurological level, although perhaps that is lost in translation (but the more explicit one is, it seems the more offense is often taken)

> While one side can show you thousands of evidence that a certain cure does work, the other side shows one questionable example of it not working and it is enough for their believers

How confident are you that this belief is accurate? You realize that it is an intuitive belief, at least now that I point it out, right? (And I do not mean this in a snarky way, I mean it literally, and seriously, for reasons that may not be obvious).

> So as to answer the specific case with antivaxxers: I will not engage with such an argument because they in fact have no scientific leg to stand on automatically.

This suggests omniscience, on at least two levels. (I do not intend this in a snarky way either.)

> For to have any meaningful debate, we would have to talk about a specific vaccine that may or may not be safe.

There is no shortage of anti-vaxxers willing to have that conversation. Finding one that genuinely knows what they are talking about, that is another matter, but there are some very well read people among all the idiots.

> If we have such a strong statement (in a mathematical sense) that ALL instance of something is a given property, is ought to not be true in a mathematical sense - and without understanding probabilities [and epistemology] there is no point in arguing.

Does this apply to both sides of the disagreement? :)

I believe that a big part of the problem here (and the numerous other culture war arguments that are currently raging out of control) is that people tend to approach/discuss the issues from a strict object level perspective, and also that both parties tend to not be mindful that such discussions are fundamentally a neurological process, and therefore subject to all the flaws and fallacies inherent in any such undertaking (which seem to be heavily amplified in discussions that are indeterminate, and culture war based) [1].

I believe that if people really cared about optimizing outcomes on these issues as much as they proclaim/self-perceive that they do, they would be willing to take the steps that are necessary to do so, or at least consider the ideas. But alas, it seems to be a bit of an intractable, recursive/coordination problem. Maybe things will get better in 2021 - one should never give up hope!

[1] For example, if you go looking for it specifically, can you spot any omniscience (lack of self-awareness) in this thread (both in the noted anecdotes, as well as in the conversation itself)?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385833

Agreed - poor wording on my part above, i meant specifically islamic terrorist propaganda when i said fake news.

>> making it harder to access radical content is maiing id harder, but not impossible, to become radicalized

Agreed but harder is a good outcome. I'm fine with "better, but not perfect"

No one is born tob believe in anything, however one typically has opinions on matters by the time that one is capable of reading.

>Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.

And even there I feel the reading of material in print is negligible as a proximate cause to inspire that.

>The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.

And most had never read Mein Kampf. They were members because their friends were — most Christians have of course also never read a Bible from cover to cover.

Or the US involvement in civilian deaths in Yemen.

Your examples both got proper smack downs. My examples are still censored - you or i have never seen pictures of the conditions the kids are stored in (and if you think you have, double check its authenticity). Would be reporters for the Yemen are suppressed well before there’s any risk of them deciding to just skip mainstream media and post online instead. End result is an information vacuum and we can’t have an informed discussion because neither you nor i knows what’s actually happening.

The demarcation problem is essentially scientists disagreeing that we can sharply divide science from non-science.

The replication crisis is evidence that not all "science" is actually science.

> If one side argues in bad faith, they can just keep making shit up or doing things to undermine the discourse itself, like talk over someone else or bully them.

Silencing one side of a debate is also undermining the discourse.

> What we are seeing now is a shifting both of cultural norms and the infrastructure of our media environment which means that “free speech” no longer has some of the constraints and restrictions which enabled it to perform the truth-seeking function we desire it to.

Actually what we are seeing now is the democratization of free speech so that an oligarchic elite is no longer the only group who is able to make their voice heard. In this light it is unsurprising that the oligarchic elite wants restrictions on speech.

So what strategies works most effective in restoring trust? We can learn by looking at the effective ways people have done in the past to create the opposite, increase distrust and conflict. Assuming bad faith based on race and class is very effective in creating environments of distrust, both on internet forums and elsewhere. Preemptively exercise power in unpredictable way, and enforce unclear rules in an inconsistent and nontransparent way also works wonder to further conflicts. Displaying symbols of ideological values and focus on tribal differences can effectively increase conflict over multiple generations.

You can not censor people into trust, and thus censorship is not a tool to create a good faith environment. You can remove people from the discourse until only people who belong to the same tribe is left, where every single participant trust the others because of psudo-kinship. Free speech, along with concepts like human rights and liberty, is however centered around common rules being enforced consistently in order to create trust among people who would otherwise be mistrusting of each other. You let the other side talk in order to create a common trust that they will let you talk.

My friends that went down the 4 year history/literature path appear to be just as susceptible to spreading biased bullshit full of logical fallacies on social media as anyone else.

Bavaria re-introduced crosses in classrooms several years ago, with very shady arguments.

> "And why wouldn't all religions be treated equal in a country that guarantees religious freedom?" and "Religion calsses are, by the way, mandatory in all (most?) German states, and the church has huge sa in who teaches it."

The notion of religious freedom that you promote and that schools promote explicitly excludes freedom from religion, i.e. Atheism or Agnosticism. Just like forced religious education (couldn't pick ethics as an alternative for lack of teachers, and as soon as ethics was available, noticed that the religion curriculum is literally "dancing and singing" while ethics is hardcore philosophy to keep pupils away from the subject and from any kind of acceptable grades).

Oh, and that the death penalty was abolished is beside the point. If you pick "death penalty" as a subject of discussion, then of course it must be an equally valid outcome of the discussion to be pro death penalty, if the arguments provided weigh more heavily. Changing policy isn't the intent here. Learning to discuss such matters critically is. Which doesn't work if the outcome is predetermined and you will be punished with bad marks for arriving at the "wrong" conclusion.

Do you think people should be able to make up their own minds? Unfortunately, all of those actions you mention run contrary to that premise.

If you turn on CNN for a second or two today, you'll hear them use the phrase "no widespread voter fraud occurred". In other words, there is evidence that some fraud occurred, as it does in every election. Just not enough to have swayed the results. The same can be said about any Russian interference.

So the two things are equivalent, because both happened to some degree, and it is extremely unlikely that either had any effect on the outcome.

There is much that is puzzling about the judges treatment of this case considering: 1) The FBI agents in charge of the Flynn case wrote a 'case closure memo' on Jan. 4, 2017, concluding he had found "no derogatory" evidence that Flynn committed a crime or posed a national security threat. FBI management then ordered the closure to be rescinded and pivoted toward trying lure Flynn into an interview. 2) In an extraordinary interview with prosecutors this fall, the FBI agent who led the Flynn case, William Barnett, admitted there was never evidence of wrongdoing by the retired general or Russian collusion by Trump, but the probe was kept open by Special Counsel Robert Mueller because his team was obsessed with punishing the president. [2]

And there are a long list of other odd facts about the case that put into question Judge Sullivans extraordinary actions by acting as a prosecutor in this case. [3]

[1] https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/FBIFlynn...

[2] https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-09/04518073...

[3] https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-sc...

This partisan dichotomy about all this is extremely hard to credit. For two years we were subjected to Rachel Maddow dropping one “bombshell” after the other about how Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. What was proven in the Mueller Report was a fraction of that, with scant evidence linking Trump himself to wrongdoing.

What’s worse, a story that’s 90% made up or one that’s 100% made up? The latter, obviously, but I have zero sympathy for partisans trying to make hay out of that distinction.

If so, the facts around it should be freely discussable like the Russian collusion case was. Censoring the opposition seems fishy and anti-freedom.

Here is the declassified note of the agents in charge of case trying to close it from Jan 4 2017. [2]

[1] https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-sc...

[2] https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2020-04/FBIFlynn...

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/hillary-clinton-chal...

“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don't give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said in an interview with her former communications director Jennifer Palmieri for Showtime's “The Circus,” which released a clip Tuesday.

Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/hillary-clint...

Bush won Florida in the first machine count. There was an automatic recount, and Bush won again. Gore then proceeded to create a cluster—k by demanding a hand recount of under votes only in counties he had won.

> Bush won the initial count by 1,784 votes, and he was still ahead by 327 votes after the automatic statewide machine recount. Gore then filed “protests,” demanding a hand recount of the ballots in four heavily Democratic counties, only three of which are relevant to the following discussion: Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. Gore apparently chose these counties for one or both of two reasons. First, to the extent that errors by the counting machines were randomly distributed, Gore could expect to be a net gainer in these most heavily Democratic jurisdictions. Second, the hand recounts would be supervised by local elected officials, and the chances that such officials would be biased in Gore’s favor (or at least not biased in Bush’s favor) would be highest in the most heavily Democratic counties.

It’s a simple trick that leverages the large number of under votes (1-2% of all votes) generated by these punch machines. The machine can’t read cards that aren’t fully punched out, so there is a large pool of potentially discernible but uncounted ballots. If you only recount ballots in counties that went say 2-1 for Gore as the base rate, then when hand counters look at markings on the ballot to identify “voter intent” you’ll get 2 new Gore votes for every new Bush vote. Not only that, but there was some insane maneuvering by Gore to include partial recounts in the results. The Florida Supreme Court found this unconstitutional and ordered a statewide recount. 7 to 2, the Supreme Court found that recount unconstitutional as well. (The Court split 5-4 on what to do with the mess. But people overlook that Gore precipitated the mess, burning a ton of time before the safe harbor deadline, with his partial recount strategy.)

Hillary said the election was fraudulent from day one all the way up to current election.

Or how on October 26, 2020, PBS (hardly a right-wing or conservative news agency), aired a documentary [2] on the problems with the Dominion voting machines showing how you could just copy the QR codes and they could be re-scanned and count as a legitimate vote, no major hacking needed here. Here's an excerpt: -

"J. Alex Halderman:

By analyzing the structure of the Q.R. codes, I have been able to learn that there's nothing that stops an attacker from just duplicating one, and the duplicate would count the same as the original bar code.

Miles O’Brien:

And in late September, another concern came to light. During testing, election workers found half the names of the 21 candidates for Senate intermittently disappeared from screens during the review phase.

Dominion sent out a last-minute software patch.

J. Alex Halderman:

I'm worried that the Georgia system is the technical equivalent to the 737 MAX. They have just made a last-minute software change that might well have unintended consequences and cause even more severe problems on Election Day."

For me, it's the individual states changing their own election laws via unconstitutional methods right before the election. I think that is widespread fraud without a doubt, and those votes need to be audited or discounted.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-r...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/will-georgias-new-voting-m...

There was Russian hacking, — as best we can tell, that’s where the Podesta emails came from. No one serious alleges that they tampered with the vote tallies, but we can credibly say they swung the election.

“Asset” is frustratingly vague word for Democrats to use, but a lot of the collusion narrative has panned out. The Mueller report revealed that the Trump campaign welcomed Russian interference, stopping just short of alleging outright collusion.

Meanwhile — basically everything Republicans allege now is laughably false, and many are outright calling for a coup.

You're making it sound like a witchhunt but it was in fact extremely fishy.

"The investigation found there were over 100 contacts between Trump campaign advisors and individuals affiliated with the Russian government, before and after the election, but the evidence was insufficient to show an illegal conspiracy."[1]

I'd encourage you to at least read through the Wikipedia articles on the Mueller report before shouting "zero evidence" so loudly.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Russian_interfe...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Tower_meeting

... getting in before the "maybe they've only been married a couple of days and this is the first load of trash" - then how does she know he's never taken the trash out in his life?

I call shenanigans.

I don’t want to be pedantic about anything. The terms can say whatever they want - they write them. But regardless of what the TOS say, when you advertise yourself as an open platform for free speech, which YouTube certainly does, it opens you up to liability when you prove not to be that open platform. Further, if they go too far with moderation and begin censoring content over and above clear, previously set guidelines, they can lose their immunity to libel/slander lawsuits under the CDA (Communications Decency Act).

What I've seen this last election on Facebook is partisan fact checkers hunting for that one bad grain of rice so they can use it to label the whole article as "false" or "partly false" in an effort to protect Biden/Harris. I'm having trouble finding them now because facebook isn't super searchable but I remember thinking a lot of them were really nit-picky, similar to this one from 2018[0]. It got so bad I started seeing various viral memes complaining about it[1]

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

(Context: Trump tweeted that "crooked Hillary destroyed her phones with a hammer", Snopes labels his tweet as partly false because Hillary personally didn't destroy her phones with a hammer, her aide did)

[1] https://imgur.com/a/1Job9xX

>state officials told us that the full video shows the supposed “suitcases” were actually standard containers used to secure ballots, and that the ballots in question were opened and prepared for counting earlier in the night in full view of observers.

>On Dec. 5, Frances Watson, the chief investigator for the secretary of state’s office, said in an affidavit that after reviewing the video and conducting interviews, her investigators found “that observers and media were not asked to leave” but “simply left” after they saw workers, whose job was to open the ballots, leave. She said the investigation remains open.

> Trump calling it a win the night of the election is, no matter how you spin it, very close to your "unaccountable central authority" deciding what’s true and what’s not.

Your mistake to presume that I am defending Trump really backs my point here. I have made no comments defending him or any of his court action, or public statements, or any action or statements from his allies. I have only made comments in defence of reasonableness and common sense, and against mega-corps like google using their influence to control the internet in a way that suits their political agendas. The merits of his claims will be decided by our justice system, not by Google. But if you’re ok with Google dictating to the internet which sides of a political debate are allowed to exist on the internet, then I guess you and I just have very different values. It's also a bit of a false equivalence, as the president is accountable to both the law and the electorate, opposed to Google, which is accountable to what exactly? Shareholders (theoretically)?

We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources.

Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be.

>I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.

We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does.

>We have experts, in other words.

No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us.

>We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.

That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority.

A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno.

>Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?

>Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.

Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube.

It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age.

We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that.

Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/944230517/supreme-court-rejec...

Right. The faith is already gone, which is why allegations of election fraud immediately gained a large following. The cat is out of the bag, and nothing will be accomplished by censoring these videos except setting a bad precedent.

When NO fact finding court will back up any of your claims then how do you know there are "problems" with the ballots in Georgia? Your only source is partisans and the manipulated media they are releasing.

Just because trump has been working to blanket the airwaves with lies and half truths to sew doubt doesn't mean there is anything there. If there was they would be taking it to court and not losing 50+ cases.

There is no way to justify trying to overturn the vote based on technicalities while filling the airwaves with lies about fraud and that the election was stolen. If there is fraud they can prove it. If they can't prove it then they don't get to find loopholes to steal the election.

Can you actually not tell that trump is using marketing and con artist style manipulation to trick you into believing the election was stolen? There is no substance to these accusations.

Lies, falsehoods, misinformation and irrational statements are all protected by the first amendment. As is uttering insane and unintelligible thoughts in public.

If speech is used to further a crime or directly causes civil harm that result in damages (ex. assault or nuisance), there are existing applicable criminal and civil laws to either punish or provide a remedy.

If for example, the police were to execute a lawful warrant to search your property, it would not nullify or burden your fourth amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Similarly, civil remedies (i.e. tort law) allowing for compensation for damages due to negligence - say from getting trampled in a crowd that was spooked by someone yelling "fire" or "shooter" - would not place limitations on your protected right of freedom to assemble.

The biggest problem with the campaign to justify censorship or moderation of misinformation/disinformation under the guise that it causes harm, is that it removes the measurable injury element of tort law and replaces it with vague and abstract notions of either mass ethereal or psychic harm (which the Supreme Court has expressing found against).

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.

By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.

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.