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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

For God's sakes ... What underpins this need for social media companies to virtue signal about protecting 'election integrity' is the false notion that 2016 was stolen from Hillary by the Russians - a claim that had no evidential support (and no, that some trolls bought a minuscule amount of Facebook ads does not raise this claim to that level) but the entire Democratic party, with media allies, promulgated for the last 4 years and pressured social media leadership to adopt as well. And now social media companies are engaged in full-scale curation and editorial control over any content that even comes close to questioning or even having regular open discussion of unfolding events. Ridiculous.

> Since September, we've terminated over 8000 channels and thousands of harmful and misleading elections-related videos for violating our existing policies. Over 77% of those removed videos were taken down before they had 100 views.

Yay! Thank you YouTube interns for protecting me from making up my own mind about these dangerous ideas.

I also like that the authoritative sources are ... the same media companies, owned by multinational corporate conglomerates, that are always pushing for deplatforming of independent news sources. No self-serving policies here! Tell me again NYTimes how Philip DeFranco and Joe Rogan are a gateway to the alt-right.

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You are mis-stating the assertion.

The Government said that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election. They didn't say it changed the results.

No, Democrats said Russia hacked the election results. For example Neera Tanden, Biden's OMB appointee, the President of a major liberal think-tank: https://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/817744398939197442

Trump claimed that "Voting machines were not touched" by Russians in the 2016 election. Tanden said that was a "lie." The media massively amplified claims of Russian election hacking that never panned out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/us/politics/russia-electi.... They played fast-and-loose with terminology, saying that "Russia hacked the 2016 election" when they meant that Russia hacked and leaked DNC emails. (Part of the problem here is that the media has taken to regurgitating Democratic talking points. Saying "Russia hacked the 2016 election" is a clever way for an Democratic activist to describe what happened, but its misleading when that same "hacking" terminology is used by the media.)

Nalder said that, without impeachment, Trump would "rig" the 2020 election: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-08/nadler-sa...

And people believed them. Even as of 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected President": https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

The comment to which you're replying said "the government" didn't claim Russia tampered with the results. You can't rebut that with a cite of Neera Tanden, who was not in the government.

The 2 parties govern the US, for better or worse. The good faith interpretation allows for more than the official press releases (eg Trump talking points), which are presented to be in dispute.

Fair point, I read "Democrats" rather than "Government."

I'm going to gently push harder, because I don't think you can reasonably compare what angry Democrats said and did in 2016 to what's happening in 2020. Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors. The sitting Democratic president didn't directly lobby state governors and state house speakers to decertify results. For that matter: Democrats didn't deliberately fuck up tabulation processes to sow chaos to exploit later in the month.

There were many calls by Democrats for faithless electors to flip to Clinton.

See, for example, #UniteForAmerica video plea https://youtu.be/0z0iuWh3sek

They then spent the next few years making up conspiracy theories and trying to delegitimize his election. I’d gently suggest that there are no clean hands here, and what Dems did 2016-2019 was sufficiently reprehensible.

You've met my example of the outgoing administration lobbying state legislatures to overturn their own votes with a hashtag.

You said, “Nobody attempted to overturn any state's electors.” I thought you might like to know that is not true.

I posted a video which calls for exactly that in 2016. It’s a pretty amusing piece of history actually.

To her credit, “Clinton’s team and the Democratic National Committee have steadfastly refused to endorse the efforts spearheaded by a group of electors in Colorado and Washington state.”

NY Mag wrote a piece on the eve of the electoral vote documenting the extent of the harassment campaign, including hundreds of thousands of emails, hate mail, and death threats. Of course it also mentions Russia.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/12/final-push-to-sway-e...

Whatever argument you think it is we're having, you win. My point is that the 2016 Democrats and the 2020 Republicans aren't comparable, and that's obviously true.

A Youtube video, fantastic! Yet you'll blindly compare that to physical threats of violence that we continue to see over and over which have been instigated by misleading or false statements from our sitting President?

Nor did nearly twenty Democratic-controlled states sue in federal court to overturn the results of the election, as just happened today!

Do you think such an action could ever be justified? What kind of evidence would you need in order to consider proceeding down such a path? Thousands of affidavits, tens of thousands of documented illegal votes, video evidence of illegal ballot counting?

You left out Spyder and his SpiderFoot scan indicating that Iran was voting directly in the election using its access to Dominion voting machines. How could this not reach SCOTUS?

Hah. I have no illusions that SCOTUS will take up the case. I personally think it still pales in comparison to the “pee-pee dossier” that Clinton cooked up to frame Trump.

Trust the plan, Q is coming!

I follow politics pretty closely and this is literally the first time I've heard that anyone was alleging Russia actually hacked voting machines or switched votes. I had only heard about social media disinformation and social media disinformation campaigns.

I also never really heard many assertions that any of this was significant enough to have likely swayed the election.

Russian "collusion" was the primary topic on twitter for most neoliberal pundits and party consultants in 2017

As someone who followed things fairly closely at the time, that's not true. There was talk of meddling with voter rolls, but changing of votes was basically not discussed and was quickly dismissed.

Well, that was found to be absolutely true. Just look at the emails released by Don Jr. himself.

They planned to meet with someone who they believed to be working for the Kremlin in order to get dirt on their opponent.

So I think you're right in the literal sense, but rainer is accurate in the sentiment.

The media used the word 'interference' in an exaggerated and nefarious context, and they didn't seem very interested in clearing it up. Election interference--without context--is usually taken to mean vote interference.

Like many things, it isn't an outright lie. But I do think it was misleading. And while you might not have been mislead, enough people were--as evidenced by that poll.

My reading of Tanden's tweet is that she's rebutting Trump's first sentence, not the second. Ie, Asserting that Russian hacking (in the form of releasing sensitive emails) was plainly sufficient to flip 70 kVotes (Donald Trumps cumulative margin in the states over the tipping point) and ignoring the question of whether "voting machines [were] touched".

Trump's second sentence clarifies and elaborates that the first sentence is referring to voting machines.

So what? I ask this very specifically because you're applying precisely the same rhetorical device that Tanden is.

Even if they meant Russian hacking influenced people enough to flips 70k votes, that's still unsupported conjecture worded in way that strongly implies actual hacking of votes.

Calling it 70k votes makes it sound small, but its more like 1% of voters. 1% of voters making their mind up based on TRUE stories about inside baseball at the DNC? Unrealistic. I bet 99% of voters couldn't even tell you what the emails were about.

And that's without considering the negative affects of the Democrats attacking Trump for being in bed with Russia, which probably cost him votes too.

Neera was clearly saying that she believes that Russia’s actions affected the election results.

Trump made two distinct and unrelated claims in that tweet. One claim was a lie, one was true. You dishonestly pretend there is only one claim. Neera was not addressing the true claim about voting machines being touched.

Trump has a habit of mixing in things he’s not accused of and running on them to acquit him of the things he is accused of. He consistently did it by attacking nonexistent and unprovable accusations of “collusion” (an imprecise term that is not a crime one can be charged for) when the actual investigations, hearings, and findings centered on Russian interference and any of the campaign’s coordination of it. This includes direct communication with Assange as well as the Trump Tower meeting over Magnitsky Act sanctions.

Your NYT article, in opposition to your stated conclusion, addresses infiltration attempts related to voting and voter registry systems, not the DNC hack.

Nadler’s claim is only unbelievable if you memory-hole Trump’s attempt two months ago to start another misinformation and character-smear campaign against Hunter Biden. The impeachment hearings specifically addressed and exposed the early stages of this campaign.

66% of democrats in that poll are wrong, so we agree there.

That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years. Even if Russian "meddled" in the US elections, so did Boeing, BASF, Microsoft, Facebook, Northrop Grumman, Softbank, YCombinator .. anyone who bought a fucking ad or funded one campaign.

What the Russian/2016 narrative really was: Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda. There has been a four year campaign to condemn every single Trump supporter as some kind of racist, white supremacist Nazi, and it's been big media and big tech (FOX/MSNBC/CNN/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/NYTimes/etc.) that's literally been pouring petrol on the American people and the world.

Believe it or not, there's a whole host of laws around and against foreign involvement in American elections, going back basically forever. Comparing Boeing and Russia is pretty ludicrous.

I am curious what these laws are, and what constitutes involvement. Am I allowed to comment on American elections even if I am not American?

A lot of people here are talking about interference, which sounds like a very nefarious thing. But in reality, what they mean by 'interference' is just posting on the internet about why one candidate (let's be real, probably Trump) is better.

The two big categories in my mind are foreign campaign contributions (usually misdirected through others, so sometimes also fall out as fraud and money laundering charges) and failure to register as a foreign agent.

As a reminder, both of these categories have seen grand jury charges and subsequent guilty pleas by Trump associates. These have often paired nicely with 'lying to prosecutors' charges, which help clarify that they knew they were up to no good...

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1886-indictment-giul...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn#Investigations_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Manafort#Indictments_and_...

> Americans are too stupid to make up their own minds and fall for propaganda.

Don't we see history examples of lots of people falling for propaganda? Germany 1930-s comes to mind.

Godwin's Law and you're done.

But baring that, how do you know which side is propaganda? Is it FOX/CNN/MSNBC or is it Newsmax/DailyWire/NYPost/Blaze/Crowder? Which side is the propaganda and which is the capitol T Truth?

Well, there are facts which are either hard to argue or everybody is agreeing upon, like the public presentations of politicians. Given those facts, sometimes - not always - it's a matter of values to choose sides.

It's not always easy, yes. But still critical thinking goes a long way.

Godwin's Law can be used as a tool to suppress valid comparisons. Don't fall for that.

I worked in Dem political tech. The Russian Troll Farm/Cambridge Analytica/social ads scandal is mostly noise and no signal. But you’re missing something important: Russian state sponsored hackers spearfished and stole data from the RNC, DNC, and the Clinton circle. They deliberately released the latter two and withheld the first. Those releases don’t define the entire election, but they had a demonstrable and empirically validated impact on voters. Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

Russia really did interfere in that election and you’ve ignored this crucial fact.

> Those deliberate and asymmetric releases probably changed the outcome of the election.

How is it possible to draw a causation from the releases to the election outcome? I am curious if there are academic studies to support this claim.

That’s not very accurate and makes a lot of unproven assumptions. They found that an old, disused RNC domain from years prior was compromised. There’s no reason to believe they withheld anything material, and even if they did, it’s not really relevant. All they did was show the public authentic emails. If anyone actually changed their vote based on having additional facts, which I doubt happened in any significant way, then it was for the right reasons.

If your wife-to-be was having an affair and this was dumped before the wedding day, would you be mad at the hacker, or at your partner? Blaming Russia for showing truth never made any sense to me. Are we to believe that the process has more integrity when we cast our votes with less information?

You are absolutely, factually incorrect. Your opinion is also unfortunate, to equate adversarial nation-state "meddling" with domestic corporate campaigns, though the latter is also woeful.

That Trump was elected is a harbinger of American decline, that so many people think his persona, "intellect" and view on leadership are worthy of consideration as leader of this country. It's an indictment of our electoral and voting systems, that any good faith Republicans felt they "had" to vote for such an awful leader in order to avoid the centrism of a Democratic administration.

But I don't think every Trump voter is a racist nazi. I think they were just okay with Trump being an awful human being and a terrible leader, so long as they could prevent poor people from getting health care or acknowledging climate change.

>That's not at all what people were screaming for the past four years.

Why would you feel the need to lie about something so clearly untrue? I'm sure you can find a group of people on the internet somewhere that might have made this claim, in the same way that you can find people claiming the earth is flat.

But this fabrication that everyone was claiming Russians hacked the votes is just nonsense.

"Meddled" is such an ambiguous term and we are part of an international community.

Using such loose terminology, couldn't you accurately say dozens of nations meddled with the majority of federal US elections in the past 50 years?

If you disagree, what do you think the function of AIPAC is?

Yes, including Iran, so what's your point? A bipartisan commission found overwhelming evidence of a widespread, organized, and coordinated effort from several foreign agencies to spread misinformation during both the 2016 election and the 2020 election. What term do you want to use besides "meddling" then?

Would be great if they used a term that correlates to a specific crime. "Meddling" is pervasive and legal, so accusations of meddling seem like propaganda from the intelligence community.

This documentary got nominated for tons of awards. And it heavily insinuates that the election was stolen/cheated and the outcome could have been different.

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

What underpins the visceral emotions you feel? If you're entitled to rant on the Internet, if you feel some payoff to that, don't you think someone is entitled to "virtue signal?" Isn't "virtual signaling" just, "someone else's passion about something, but that something is just not something I personally feel passionate about?"

It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech, when we've seen over and over and over that such sites always devolve into festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism. Always. Every time.

Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans. False information is much more powerful than true information, and "making up your own mind" is simply not possible when you are bombarded with orders of magnitude more false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions.

Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.

"It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech, when we've seen over and over and over that such sites always devolve into festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism. Always. Every time."

I'd find your comment much more interesting if you actually argued against the OP's point rather than this strawman.

"False information is much more powerful than true information"

So apparently you believe individuals aren't capable of responsibly enjoying freedom, and thus should concede automomy of thought to the elite for what information they can consume or spread?

Some people can't handle their alchohol, but prohibiting the sale of alcohol didn't solve the probelm. Some individuals have problems, so the way to deal with that is at the individual level. Sorry the solution doesn't scale well. Freedom is great, but it's kind of expensive.

Targeted misinformation campaigns are capable of destroying freedom just as easily as any authoritarian government -- in fact the former is always a tool of the latter. Therefore I can rephrase your last sentence as "Freedom is great, but it comes at the cost of freedom."

People choose to consume alcohol knowing it will get them drunk. People do not choose to be lied to. A better analogy is saying that the government should not attempt to regulate what companies put in the food they sell, because then I must believe individuals aren't capable of self-determining what is or is not safe for them to eat. Correct: I do not believe in "buyer beware" for food nor for facts.

And who determines what is true? Do I get to censor Obama when he claimed 'if you like your healthcare, you can keep it' (rated 'lie of the year' by politifact btw)?

When you start down this path, you will quickly find yourself amongst a nest of vipers.

You're comparing falsehoods with hate and racism--I don't think that's a fair comparison. YouTube has always had rules around hate speech, and that generally has not been controversial.

> It's weird to me that we still have people that still cling to the idea that censorship and curation of content is always evil and every site on the Internet should allow completely unmoderated speech

No, not every site. But just as we have some public forums in the real world (not all, or even most "festering echo-chambers of hatred and racism"), we should have some on the internet.

> Not only are you conveniently ignoring that reality, but you're also ignoring the fact that humans are humans.

This reminds of arguing with objectivists who think that everything they believe flows from "A is A". I do agree that humans are humans, I'm glad we found some common ground here. Presumably you are human as well. But you are not concerned that what you believe is the result of "false information that has been carefully constructed and self-selected to misinform you and appeal to your emotions". It's only other humans who are vulnerable to this, and you need to protect them from it, for their own good.

> Stop. Just stop. You're not helping. You're not enlightened. You're part of the problem.

Those are some extraordinary sweeping claims you've made with exactly zero evidence to back them up.

The problem is the "regular open discussion", which has turned into a cesspool of fact-free ranting, and has created serious societal virality and negative impact.

You can rant against the mainstream media, but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there -- how many independent YouTube sources do the same?

Why should regular people trust the Bay Area perspective on what counts as "fact-free ranting"? Tech has no legitimate authority to decide what is true. The mindset and moral system that's overwhelmingly dominant in tech is abhorrent to much of the rest of the country and the world. Why should this prominent but fringe Bay Area mentality dominate?

It's simply not tech's place to be making these calls. It's arrogance and hubris and it's going to lead to a backlash.

Who, then, decides what is true? Random YouTube commenters? Joe Rogan? Rush Limbaugh? The QAnon Twitter-sphere? Perhaps we can just vote on whether gravity exists.

Why does anyone need to decide what is true? Each person can decide for himself in his own heart what he believes. We reach consensus through discussion. There is never, not once, in any situation whatsoever a justification for forcing a particular perspective on the public instead of letting the marketplace of ideas function and find the truth organically.

This idea that certain ideas are dangerous and must be suppressed is the mark of every insecure tyranny. Secure beliefs don't need to be propped up with censorship, and a belief isn't secure, it's because it's just not adequately backed up by facts.

The marketplace is broken. A non-trivial amount of people believe the earth is flat. People are becoming immune to fact-based evidence, because they get to immerse themselves in an alternate universe which tells them that they're right. Soon the ramifications won't be restricted to people shooting up pizza parlors.

The marketplace is not broken merely because one party's goods aren't selling. If I make scratchy toilet paper and people don't buy it, it's my fault, not the market's. The fact is that the media elite have little credibility these days among the general public, their wares suck, and people are investigating alternatives. The solution isn't censorship. It's becoming more credible.

But all the little monkeys don't understand science.

> The solution isn't censorship. It's becoming more credible.

This is great. Is it a quote?

No. I wrote it just now.

Why should credibility matter? That is to say, how can the average person know that what they're reading is credible or not to make that determination and say "oh, CNN reported this and it's credible! Must mean that CNN is becoming more credible and I should watch it more because they have a better product" rather than "CNN is reporting this but it doesn't line up with what I want to believe, they must be wrong and not credible". Your metaphor doesn't make sense in a world where news stories are looked at skin deep, where someone doesn't even know that the toilet paper is scratchy it just _looks_ scratchy from the label or uncle Joe told me that it must be scratchy because it's made by Proctor & Gamble.

Credibility matters, because people really do want to base their opinions on facts. CNN existed for two decades before Fox News got popular. That wasn't the case because everyone agreed all the time back then. It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.

> people really do want to base their opinions on facts

Not really, confirmation bias is a real thing for all human beings. The issue here is that there's a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes a fact. Objectivity in reporting is also subjective, funnily enough. If I consider NPR to be very objective because the dead-pan monotonic voice of the announcer simply says a direct quote from a member of congress, I can talk to a relative who will tell me that same NPR story is biased because they reported on something they don't agree with.

> It was because the media respected its role in society and at least tried to be objective.

There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society. The difference is that 20-30 years ago, there wasn't a deluge of information or misinformation readily available to get those dopamine hits from confirming biases.

> There are _plenty_ of news outlets that still respect their role in society.

Like?

I doubt that compiling a list will convince you, but NPR, the BBC, the Economist, the WSJ, the AP, National Review as a small snippet.

I agree, but I’m not sure I’d call those “major” (in the US) except maybe the WSJ.

And a non-trivial number of people believed that the U.S. has spent decades slashing school funding. Or that Stacey Abrams "should be the governor of Georgia right now." Or that Citizens United was about campaign contributions. Or that we are 10 years away from the end of civilization due to climate change. As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.

I think it's fair to say that Republicans are somewhat more likely to believe in false information, but Democrats believe plenty of incorrect things as well. And I'd rather have a broken marketplace than one where Democrats just get to decide what's true.

Especially when its taken just 5 minutes for the perceived guard rails to evaporate! We're not talking about "the earth is flat" here. We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic. We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake. Even if I'm amenable to "fact checking" something like "Obama was born in Kenya" I'm sure as hell not going to support Google deciding something is true or untrue before the courts do.

Google is not deciding what is true or untrue. Google is deciding what they will host on their service.

The mods on this site make similar decisions every single day, but I've never seen you post about that. Why shouldn't youtube have the same ability to moderate their site as Hacker News?

Google is deciding what to host based on decisions about what is purportedly true or untrue.

> We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake.

Does a case really count as "ongoing" if it gets dismissed pretty much as soon as the judge finishes reading the plaintiff's complaint?

Do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases?

Editing to make this a bit clearer:

As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.

It's not pre-judging when case after case has been dismissed and/or laughed out of the courtroom.

It is literally pre-judging. You are deciding the outcome of a case that has not occurred, based on cases that have.

I've replied in more detail to your other comment which said much the same thing.

The media breathlessly reports allegations in complaints as fact all the time. Stacey Abrams' case against Brian Kemp over the 2016 election was voluntarily dismissed without the court ever reaching the merits. The media reported on the complaint, and an early ruling granting Abrams discovery, but of course never reported the quiet voluntary dismissal when nothing turned up.

> We are talking about Hunter Biden emails that still nobody has proven are inauthentic.

Have they been proven to be authentic?

No, but if they were so obviously fraudulent so as to merit a media blackout, wouldn't we have established that by now? When there is actually a real dispute over authenticity, that's news.

Yes, by cryptographic signature. DKIM was verified. Some senders/recipients also provided human verification.

Censorship is why you didn't already know this. It should have been major news, being the headline story everywhere for a week. It passed by here quietly, on Hacker News, and was quickly flagged.

You're left with an incomplete view of the world that is very misleading. People everywhere are using this warped view of reality to make world-changing decisions.

Here is the link https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/hunter-dkim/

> We're talking about election fraud allegations which are the subject of ongoing court cases for god's sake.

Except we're not. Guiliani said in one of the few courts that asked for an oral argument that it wasn't a fraud case[1]. Fraud requires specific proof which he/they do not have.

This is PR/fund raising disguised as comical legal filings.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/us/politics/trump-giulian...

I think this is a good example of what happens when you wade into a nest of vipers. 'Fraud' can have different meanings, and sometimes what is used in common language is not the correct legal term.

So is it misleading to call it fraud? Or are you just nitpicking? Depends on who you ask.

As a life-long Democrat, I didn't realize how much false received wisdom I had internalized until I married a Republican.

As another left-leaning person who has also had this experience recently, and who is rather disturbed by the delusions and hypocrisy from “my team”, I’ve noticed that your posts lately seem to do an excellent job of offering a more complete picture. Often, completing the picture involves clarifying the right-leaning viewpoint. It’s unfortunate that you usually get downvoted for it, even when you aren’t inserting your own opinion and stating things that are objectively true.

Just curious, has the combination of the bad behavior by many on the left in conjunction with receiving additional context from the right, pushed you towards the center or even the right? Or are you merely trying to act as more of an ambassador for Republican views?

The problem really is that many people know the truth but they choose the truth that feels right.

>Who, then, decides what is true?

Let me decide for me. I'm not outsourcing thinking to YouTube interns.

The people. They should watch all of it, and decide for themselves. What's wrong with Rogan? His podcast is incredible.

Let's listen to everything. Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again! This continual lockdown has deeply hurt our ability to actually communicate with one another in any meaningful way.

We're viewing the world through a straw.

Individuals do not have the capacity to inspect facts. Do you inspect how the cake flour met the FDA standards? You trust authority, in this case, the FDA + Store Owner + Distributor + Manufacturer.

This is so ridiculous. I think you mean we need to have the information so if an individual wants to verify, they can and if they can spend the energy and rigor to know the research/data. Please stop requiring individuals to verify truth. Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances. Reputable media is an authority of similar civic responsibility.

Next time you buy a measuring tape, you're gonna sound ridiculous to ask for a NIST certificate at Home Depot.

How should we decide whether to believe your comment? By appeal to some authority?

Do you trust your doctor? Do you consider the court as a misplaced authority? They make judgements, often nuances of interpretation based on their moral compass - they arbitrage truth from application of laws against evidence. In many cases, there is subjective interpretation and the "spirit of the law".

"Truth has always been escorted by authorities with checks and balances."

This statement stands in direct opposition to the primary founding principals of liberal democracy.

This is an absurd and breathtakingly dangerous argument. No, we don't expect people to inspect their own cake flour. But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting. What you're advocating for is a kritarchy, with "reputable media" as the judges.

We've been trusting publishers of books for many decades before the internet. The internet has put in no checks and balances for publishing - any loud voice can rampantly go out and get 200,000k followers.

No one is taking away right to assemble in public. Twitter is a publisher with no quality checks in place.

Who trusted book publishers? What American can even name 3 of them, or could in the 1970s? This doesn't seem like a serious argument, and it gets less serious the further back in time you go and the more all of publishing resembled the Weekly World News.

Doesn't matter. It is obvious to see that publishes (newspapers, books) were the "gatekeepers" of massive, worldwide distribution of information.

I am pointing out the difference between traditional media and internet media. One has checks and balances, and the other is wild wild west.

Tell me more about the checks and balances that exist in book publishing. Publishers --- often mainstream publishers --- published the first editions of Mein Kampf, Camp of the Saints, Architects of Conspiracy, Did Six Million Really Die, and all manner of medical pseudoscience.

Definitely. It is obvious that there is some:

- Time to publish, it’s not instant like the internet

- Allows people to editorialize and review, even if they allow publishing

- Allow critics to voice their opinions before the book blows up

I’m in no way saying we need to have a CCP level control over what gets published or not, but I am just pointing out the virality of social media that didn’t exist before the internet.

You can make many arguments around it, the fact is that the internet fundamentally changed the way conspiracy theories propagate.

Even if controversial books are published, someone is going to a bookstore and buying it. There are reviews on ebooks. There is so much discussion. No such thing is exists in echo chambers.

We had echo chambers long before we had an Internet. Read Rick Perlstein on the John Birch Society, for instance.

> We had echo chambers long before we had an Internet.

Yes indeed. The Internet, as well as some other more modern communication technologies, has greatly optimized the proliferation and psychological impact of the echo chambers.

Probably a digression from OP's point, but perhaps a useful one:

Suppose two long paths leading home are filled with people.

Path one is a park filled with people reading various physical copies of books, one of whom looks up from their copy of Mein Kampf to say something threatening to you.

Path two is filled with innocuous-looking people, all glued to the screens of essentially the same model of smartphone. One of them looks up from their device just long enough to tell you, "Samy is my hero."

Which path do you take and why?

> But we do expect them to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to the basic political participation of voting.

Do we?

Let's address this on two levels: First do we really expect people to evaluate the facts relevant to who they choose to vote for? I mean on the one hand, the system does this, yes. But not because we have any particular amount of faith that everyone is ready to bear the responsibility. Instead, we're resigned to the fact that all the other options are worse. I mean the founders absolutely didn't trust the people to evaluate their leadership, unless you were willing to restrict the definition of "people" to "white male landowners".

Hell, even more, the constitution as written (and federalist 68 explicitly) suggested that the people themselves shouldn't select the president, but only select representatives who ultimately do the selection. The justification for this was that said representatives would hopefully be more capable than the average individual of weighing all of the requirements of the office.

So the founders certainly didn't share your faith. Nor, even today, does the constitution itself. Ultimately though, having a well informed populace is very different from having a kritarchy, and having reputable media is necessary for a well informed populace.

If you're bombarded with two contradictory pieces of information (which I'd argue is in many cases the explicitly strategy of some of the media), you either need to be an expert on the topic, or your only approach is to trust people. Like, are you really saying we expect the average American to be able to evaluate the facts relevant to economic policy? Nobel prize winners disagree!

But that's just the first layer. There's a second layer here:

At this point we're no longer talking about the political participation of voting. That's already happened. The votes are in. What we're talking about is asking people to evaluate the facts of obscure election law that's in most cases never been tested. The average American isn't a constitutional Judge. But, to use your word, the president has asked unelected judges to directly overrule the will of the people literally dozens of times. That's kritarchy (or just raw authoritarianism, your choice). The actual experts, the judges, have resoundingly said no. Like, among the experts, there is no controversy here. And yet the conspiracy theory persists. Why is that?

Of course they have the capacity to check facts, the means to do so are found on the same network where the fact-to-be-checked was found in the first place. Some people will check those facts, many others won't. If what is written is patently false this will come out soon enough.

You call to "stop requiring individuals to verify truth" can be phrased in another, more honest way: support specific organisations to decide where the truth lies. For simple facts - the current temperature, the price of petrol at the pump, the energy content of a portion of a given food - this works. For disputed facts - nearly anything related to SARS2, nearly anything related to climate, nearly anything related to nuclear power, nearly anything related to migration, the veracity and validity of identity politics, the absence or presence of "systemic" racism - this patently fails since the gatekeeper gets to impose its own views on the public. When that gatekeeper happens to be the 500lbs gorilla in the field that means the public has to do exactly what you decry to be ridiculous: they have to go check whether the presented facts are true or just the result of the gatekeeper projecting its opinions, a task made harder by that gatekeeper - the 500lbs gorilla - blocking opposing views from its platform.

On your measuring tape comparison I can state that measuring tapes sold in e.g. the Netherlands clearly state that they are not to be used for trading purposes ("niet voor handelsdoeleinden") since they are not officially calibrated. Just like scales, pumps and other measuring equipment measuring tapes/sticks/etc. used for trading purposes need to be calibrated, get stamped that they are, complete with a calibration expiry date. So, yes, if it really matters you do ask for a calibrated measuring device.

> Hell, let's go outside and talk to each other again!

Once there's a viable vaccine, sure. I don't disagree about your point of the damage the lockdown has done, but USA governments and citizens haven't locked down consistently enough to provide the intended results.

Most of the media isn't located in Silicon Valley

It is techs responsibility to moderate the forums they operate

> but at least there is a modicum of fact checking and research there

No. No there absolutely is not. The fact that you trust the Legacy Media at all is part of the problem. It's independent analysts who have been the only ones to do any real research.

Viva Frei does a great piece on how the New York Times contradicts their own headlines in their article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmgMu5sefzA

They absolutely do. They get things wrong sometimes. But by and large, they operate on journalistic principles and standards.

This is an unjustified statement, but also one that admits to tipping the scales upon mere convenience.

"The full source material is what keeps journalism honest," said a man who is now in prison somewhere.

They choose how to spin stories based on biases to the point where they are effectively reporting different "facts".

The other week I posted the below, which are headlines for the same 3 stories on the same day from CNN and Fox, arguably 2 of the biggest "news" sources in the U.S. These headlines are effectively opinions with the aim of gaslighting their respective audience. It's not healthy.

FOX: Trump touts historic stock market jump as Dow tops 'sacred number,'

CNN: Dow tops 30,000 for the first time ever as Biden transition begins

FOX: Biden's pick for national security adviser defended anti-Trump Steele dossier

CNN: 'The team meets this moment:' Biden introduces top admin nominees

FOX: Happy Thanksgiving! State relaxes gathering limits ahead of holiday

CNN: Doctor fights back tears describing single day of heartbreaking losses

Neither of those cable entertainment channels are what many would consider "journalism".

What process exists for fact-checking independent analysts? Most have zero accountability and have even less incentive to verify claims because 1) It takes time and money 2) Often does not serve their own political agendas and subscriber bases/income streams

Yes, placing our complete trust in a few major media outlets to accurately report the facts is naive. But believing that individuals with no independent fact checking department or an editor to enforce journalistic standards will somehow be less biased is even more naive.

How did we get to the point where what we say needs to be factual?

Factually correct speech has its place. But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends, you don't need to be factual. That's not a necessary ingredient to a good conversation.

I have a Youtube channel where I sometimes talk about Space and Biology. I'm not educated in these subjects. No doubt a lot of what I say is factually incorrect. That doesn't mean my speech is misinformation, deceitful, or dangerous.

It's even worse than you describe. Hyperbole is being flagged as "disinformation" or "lies". All the nuance of human communication is being squeezed into a lowest-common-denominator straight-jacket, based on what's easiest to censor. And the "progressives" are the cheerleaders this time. It's depressing.

> But when you're making Youtube videos, podcasts, writing comments, talking with friends

These things are not the same. When you talk with friends or when you write a comment, you have a limited audience and counter viewpoints are readily available. When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.

>When you make a video or a podcast, you might have a pretty large audience and no immediate counterpoints. You should do your best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements.

Here's a comment snippet you wrote 3 days ago: "Facebook basically wanted to take monetary sovereignty away from states and give control to private companies.

Are you really doing your 'best to avoid spreading factually wrong statements'? Because I'm sure you have no evidential basis for that statement and therefore promulgating misinformation. Alternatively, we can have YouTube Interns decide what you can and cannot say online.

Regardless, perhaps you should take your own advice?

It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints, such as your comment.

And it's also fun that you took a comment that basically said "channels with big audiences should care about not saying wrong things" and took it as a support of censorship.

Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!

- Facebook wanted to create a digital currency, and wanted it to be used by as much people as possible.

- Monetary sovereignty is the capacity of a state to control what currency is used as legal payment, how much of it is issued and how much of is it retired.

- If Libra became widespread in a country under the conditions that Facebook wanted (i.e., the Libra association controlling issuance and retirement), it would complete and (partially or completely) replace the state's currency and therefore the state would not have power to control its own currency, therefore losing monetary sovereignty to the Libra association.

- The Libra association was an association of private companies, QED.

And all of this brings me again to the point of how comments and videos are different. I made a comment, you made a comment, I made another one, and most people reading will watch the different viewpoints. If this was instead YouTube videos with millions of views, a lot of people would see the video title and take it as fact, another group would watch it and wouldn't care or wouldn't have the capacity to search for the opposing viewpoints, and only a minority (I think) would actually see the full debate. That's why I say that the standards should be different if your potential audience is bigger and they're less exposed to other viewpoints.

>It's funny because I explicitly said that writing a comment and talking to friends is way different from making a video or a podcast because of the audience you might have and the presence of counterpoints

What is happening with YouTube, is happening with Twitter and Facebook, so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning. Twitter was built for off-the-cuff comment-type communication and Facebook was built for sharing posts and content with close relations. And yet the exact same 'curation' is being done there as well. So no, I don't agree there is some magic difference between video and text.

>Finally, you took the one example where the evidential basis is exactly there!

NO it's not. You saying it doesn't make it so. You're impugning a motive on Facebook that you have no evidential support for. But that's not the salient point in this discussion, because your opinion about the level of evidence that you feel you bring to the argument is immaterial to social media 'curation'. What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.

> so your arbitrary distinction between video and text is a distinction without meaning.

I did not make a distinction between video and text, I made a distinction based on audiences and availability of counterpoints. I used those examples because they were the ones that the parent comment used. I do not know why you're talking about video and text.

> What matters is what the minimum-wage, 20-something intern that is making an editorial decision feels about your post.

And at what point did I say I was in favor of social media curation? I said people should try to avoid saying wrong things in their own content when that content has a large audience with counterpoints not readily visible.

Can you show that a significant % of the public/swing voters or sitting out 'Dems' swayed by Russia?

Most Democratic political workers would tell you that Comey and the emails is the #1 factor. It amplified built in brand of Clinton corruption and Comey broke long standing policy at basically the perfect time to do perfect damage.

Sure some of this was amplified by Russia but I don't know a single professional that would say Russia had a larger impact than the emails/Comey.

You can’t separate the two easily because the DNC email hack and “DCLeaks” front group was attributed to Russia by the U.S. intelligence community, as extensively covered in the Mueller report, and a large amount of social media activity around both email stories and other topics was conducted by the Russian Internet Research Agency. Comey had more significance but the flurry of allegations had more than minor involvement of Russian assets and people weren’t reacting to just one detail but the whole barrage. Pizzagate is still around now and that started with the Russian spearphisher who got Podesta’s emails.

Sorry to be clear I was talking about Hillary Clinton's misuse of private email as SoS. Didn't involve Russia to my knowledge - though I would not be surprised most larger nation states hacked there way in.

Sure Russia probably amplified it but it was wall to wall across ALL media a few days before the election - when undecideds are going to vote. And the big damage from the first hit.

The corruption, thinks she is above the rules, tarmac with Lynch etc. That hit really hard with the small slice of swing voters and maybe more importantly reduced turnout from Ds

I don't think anyone who would believe pizza gate would ever vote for Hillary lol e.g. not a swing voter to begin with

Sorry, my response needed to better clarify with a complicated mess like this. The idea I was trying to get at with “both email stories” was the attempts to blur everything together - trying to use the DNC email acknowledgment to lend credibility to all of the other stories. There were a lot of self-proclaimed infosec experts posting about how disqualifying it was.

I completely agree that Comey bringing it back into the front page played a bigger role but I wouldn’t rule out all of the social media trolling having more than a little influence. It seemed to leave a lot of reporters covering non-stories lest they be accused of bias again.

The problem is not just that the Russians tried to interfere with our election. It's that President Trump openly invited their illegal meddling and likely conspired with them and then tried to drop sanctions on then after the election

There was an investigation taking years and several million dollars that was politically motivated to prove that was true. The investigation couldn't prove it.

I know that for a lot of people the report ended up getting reduced down to a handful of 2-4 sound bites but there isn’t a single word in the parent post that is incorrect. The reality is that the report was almost 500 pages of nuance. This seems like an ok overview https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

The current Tech Companies news narratives makes no logical sense to me. Here is why:

We were told that Russia interfered in 2016 elections and helped to elect Trump. Now, we are told that 2020 elections were of the highest integrity. Why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Were they scared of Trump administration? But wait, we were told that Trump was Russian puppet, so they would be scared of him, right? So again, why wouldn't Russia interfere in 2020 elections? Or did Russia interfered in 2020 election, "just as they did in 2016", and elected Biden this time?

In short, Tech Media narrative does not make sense to me. And all censorship eventually fails, just take a look at the Fall of Socialism in the Soviet Union.

I'm with you bro. We are numbered 100-to-1 in forums like this where it's very kitschy to unknowingly assent to facist censorship.

I love that you mention Joe Rogan. He's one of the leading Progressives that is bringing up how hypocrticial censorship has in Big Tech.

Everybody knows how absurd censorship has gotten in the last decade –– most noticably since Trump was elected.

I guess the difference between 2016 and 2020 outcomes is that democrats at least didn't create any ruckus during the power transfer from Obama to Trump . Plus, since the Democrats did it , the Republicans have a right to create a bigger ruckus is not justified. Also the Russian interference was more about social media influence rather than raising questions on election or voter integrity. A lot of Trump supporters are openly coming out with arms these days , hence propagating rigged election claims is or so more dangerous.

>I guess the difference between 2016 and 2020 outcomes is that democrats at least didn't create any ruckus during the power transfer from Obama to Trump

Crossfire Hurricane wasn't enough of a ruckus?

It came out recently that Eric Swalwell was targeted by a Chinese spy, but cut ties after a 'defensive briefing' by the FBI. Hillary's campaign also received a 'defensive briefing' in 2015 when a foreign government tried to influence her campaign through a campaign associate. Trump's campaign never got one, instead FBI ordered an investigation on the flimsies grounds and outright lies to the FISA courts (and what turned out to be opo-research funded by the Hillary campaign and promulgating actual Russian disinformation)..

And then the next four years had Hillary going around saying explicitly that Trump is not a legitimate president - a claim not challenged by media and echoed by the Democrats. The media itself kept pushing the discredit Steele dossier throughout that time. So I do roll my eyes when political activists in the Democratic party and media are now all about 'election integrity' after what they did to the trust in the system over the last 4 years. And I'm not really worried about Trump bitching on Twitter and putting out lawsuits (as is his right), as some threat to Democracy.

He has the right to put out lawsuits. He looks like a buffoon, but he has the right.

He does not have the right to ask state governors to ignore the election results and appoint electors who will vote for Trump. That is far beyond the legitimate exercise of Trump's rights.

Is that true? Doesn't he have the right to ask the governors to do this, or to ask them to buy him an ice cream, or to sing him a love song? They have the right to decline - he can't compel them to do anything.

Whether he should do it is a different question.

Well, the courts have the legitimate authority to hear the cases. The governors do not have the legitimate authority to grant Trump's request. So filing lawsuits in court is a legitimate action in a way that the requests to governors are not.

Whether people have the right to request governors to perform illegitimate actions... that probably depends on your definition of "right", and I don't care very much about having that debate.

Fair enough, I shouldn't have argued the semantics. I agree with your general point.

Generally no, because trying to convince a state actor to break his own state's laws is criminal conspiracy (though the details are specific to each state). These states have laws about how elections are run, most/all of them criminalize election fraud, and none of them allow the legislature to select electors directly.

The theory here is that the US Constitution, because of wording in Article II ("Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors [...]") that if interpreted hyperspecifically[1] implies that the legislature alone, and not Governor or state law, has the power to appoint electors. That has never been tested in practice.

But regardless, it would still be a state crime to do it. So no, he doesn't have the right.

[1] Obviously the reasonable interpretation of this line is "States decide for themselves how to choose electors", not something that makes assumptions about the structure of state government.

Very interesting, thank you.

>He does not have the right to ask state governors to ignore the election results and appoint electors who will vote for Trump. That is far beyond the legitimate exercise of Trump's rights.

I want you to step back and really consider the reporting on this by taking into context the kind of reporting of the behind-the-scene Trump Administration actions that came out of the media. And given that, I have no idea how you can possibly take this interpretation at face-value.

For the last 4 years, there has been an egregious claim after another, each more bonkers than the next, unverified, stemming from some 'anonymous sources' against Trump that has time and time again proven to be without merit. Every.single.week.

Just recently, a news cycle was devoted to the claim that Trump will barricade himself in the office if Biden wins. Just prior to the election, multiple news cycles were devoted to reporting on Trump destroying postal boxes to prevent mail-in voting. A little before that, Trump was accused of ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers (another meritless claim that was disavowed by the the Taliban, Russian, American Intelligence and Army with no evidence presented by NYTimes). Again, this occurred every single week for the last 4 years.

And you don't even have an ounce of skepticism of reporting that Trump in a private conversation asked governors to break the law, given how this kind of stuff has been reported, time and time again?

The gaslighting of the last 4 years has been insane and the media is simply incapable of objective straight reporting on Trump. I know how that sounds, but that's what it is.

This is satire, correct?

Obama did not obstruct or delay transition of power. It was quite peaceful.

Trump clearly has not facilitated a good faith, peaceful transition of power.

And this matters - the 9/11 commission noted that the rushed transition due to Bush v Gore contributed to the intelligence lapses that lead to the attack. And that wasn't even a bad actor harming the transition like we have today.

I remember the Mueller Report being kind of a big deal...

Dems didn't delay transition of power, but they did spend a huge amount of political capital trying to convince the country that Trump's victory was invalid or fraudulent.

> Dems didn't delay transition of power, but they did spend a huge amount of political capital trying to convince the country that Trump's victory was invalid or fraudulent.

No, they spent a lot of political capital on the idea that Trump was corrupt and aided by foreign powers, basically no Democrats (in national office, at least) seriously advanced the case that Trump's election was either invalid or fraudulent (that his conduct, including conduct after the election, warranted impeachment and removal, yes, but that's a very different case than the election being fraudulent or invalid.)

As a parallel with subordinate offices, Democrats generally think Barr is a bad attorney-general, and his appointment was a result of improper motives, and some have made calls that he should be impeached, but none have claimed his appointment is invalid.

On the other hand, Chad Wolf’s appointment as Acting Secretary of Homeland Security has been described and challenged as invalid (and, in fact, found to be so by courts, invalidating official acts dependent on his appointment to that position.)

There is a difference between acheiving an office by unethical means, or having bad conduct warranting removal from office, on one hand and illegitimately claiming office on the other hand. You are improperly conflating accusations of the former with accusations of the latter.

The Mueller investigation uncovered plenty of actual criminality.

Manafort (plea deal and convictions), Roger Stone (convicted on all counts), Cohen (plead guilty and convicted on multiple counts), Flynn (plead guilty to lying to the FBI, pardoned) are the big names.

All direct associates of Donald Trump, and all their criminality was for his benefit.

The main reason Donald Trump hasn't been charged with anything himself is because he is using the office of the presidency to shield himself. We will soon see if he can survive without a scratch without that shield.

“Virtue signaling”

Being a good person? No one needs to tell you anything again, you got it right the first time.

> the entire Democratic party, with media allies, promulgated for the last 4 years and pressured social media leadership to adopt as well.

Democrats have claimed pretty every election for the last 20 years has been stolen, or at least could have been stolen, due to dominion's voting machines having the ability to flip votes undetected. Bev Harris's book Black Box Voting literally came out in 2003.[1]

Now apparently not only was this election the first not to have been stolen, but it's not even a possibility that something like that could happen. Go figure.

[1] https://blackboxvoting.org/

The content being taken down isn't just harmful in theory, or from the perspective of one political party. It kills people.

https://www.wired.com/story/christchurch-shooter-youtube-rad...

Of course, if YouTube (and others) actually cared about helping, they would change or remove their algorithmic feed, which is the real crux of the problem. But that hits their bottom line more than pulling down individual pieces of content does, so here we are.

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