Twitter limits users interacting with Trump's tweets about 'stolen' election
thehill.com
thehill.com
Censorship and sanctions are less preferred because:
1. They create even more distrust and encourage conspiracy theories
2. More importantly, just like journalists (who have agendas), fact checkers also have agendas. The journalism problem is solved by pluralism: having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts. However, due to the monopolistic nature of the social platforms, we can't have that here. What happens is that a very small number of people controls what we know and what we don't. Just imagine if Fox News was the only news platform - devastating, isn't it?
For these reasons, social media should not be allowed to decide on they're own what is fact and what is not.
do they? everything i've seen seems to show that this sort of censorship really does work basically exactly as intended. for example, https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...
letting misinformation spread tends to spread misinformation. shutting misinformation campaigns down disrupts them, and if done broadly enough prevents new ones from gaining traction. yes, it might spawn new conspiracy theories, but if they only reach a few people they cause far less harm than the widespread misinformation that the actions are meant to disrupt.
But I don't think that's a problem. You'll never rid the world of viciously tribal behaviour, so your only hope is to herd the perpetrators away to a location where their actions will bother as few people as possible.
I’m sympathetic to that second point, but I don’t know if I agree isolation is what’s driving the gap in understanding. The tone of disagreement has veered heavily toward saber-rattling in the last decade, which predictably encourages opponents to embrace more extreme positions in an ideological arms race.
It doesn’t take long for that mechanic to generate a chasm of understanding or respect, since reversing it would require one side to “disarm” in hopes their opponent would do the same and meet them in the middle. The trust just isn’t there and so the chasm continues to grow, further eroding trust along the way.
Everyone has an agenda and when the people who label something as misinformation are in a small group and are unaccountable to the public, it’s almost inevitable this will happen, considering the incentives.
The argument, as I understand it, is that frequent and continued use of these techniques over time lead to those issues.
Anecdotally I have had several conversations with younger, misguided men, that considered the suppression of holocaust denial information was proof that it never happened. In their logic, why would would some much effort be placed in suppressing this information if it was so obviously false.
I am in favor of shutting down misinformation (although I also know the same tools can be used for bad reasons), but I think the field of digital mass communication is young enough so that we're best served by remaining open to new discoveries.
I do wonder if we'd be better off phrasing this as a conversation about discoverability rather than one about censorship.
What a world.
Speaking as a leftist, I assume that corporations view me and my ideology as an enemy and would silence me and others like me if we became too influential. I don't think compelled speech is the answer, and I don't believe I have any intrinsic right to use social media to amplify my messages.
Do tell? I haven't been there in a long time and don't have time to keep up with education policy.
>Department for Education (DfE) guidance issued on Thursday for school leaders and teachers involved in setting the relationship, sex and health curriculum categorised anti-capitalism as an “extreme political stance” and equated it with opposition to freedom of speech, antisemitism and endorsement of illegal activity
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/27/uk-schools...
Do you have a link about this? Because I would love to know of such a technique. Some of my family doesn't know how to identify conspiracy theories from truths.
In my experience, the tech community hates this form of education (the humanities).
> having many different media platforms with different agendas allows for balance and exposure to various facts
This can be a false balance. The Clintons aren't drinking the blood of babies. Cranks suck up all of the oxygen around a discussion, they don't expand it.
> This can be a false balance. The Clintons aren't drinking the blood of babies. Cranks suck up all of the oxygen around a discussion, they don't expand it.
It isn't. Social media hasn't decided on its own that Biden won the election. The state governments that perform the election and publish the results did that.
I've got a PhD in CS. I've spent 22 years in the organized education system. Yet I'm barely able to actually understand research results in adjacent CS subfields, let alone an entire scientific discipline. It is absolutely not feasible for even a dedicated person to become meaningfully expert in a large number of fields.
> What exactly do humanities courses help me with here?
The primary loop of humanities work is critical analysis of texts written by humans. A field like history is literally media analysis, except that the media was created by actors in the past rather than actors today.
Not that "we" are any better -- we can't even get technologists (or doctors) to understand statistics. How can we hope for a general-population understanding of scientific process?
My answer: We can't. We can hope for leadership that steers the conversation in a useful direction, but democracy sometimes gets in the way of the elevation of useful leaders, and the media has no interest in promoting good (mostly boring) governance.
I'm not sure exactly what makes them different from more focused forums, but it's something and – in my opinion – I don't think it's a net good for society.
Personally, I have no account with these services. I used to but I deleted all of them and it's made my life richer, not poorer.
Have you ever been on a smaller focused forum without mods or rules? I haven’t.
Pornhub (based in Canada) recently decided to allow uploads only from verified accounts due to political pressure. Twitter/Fb could also require ID verification, for example. They basically already do (require a cell number after account creation), but it's not enforced in all countries.
Anyway, no magic bullet, but if they are held accountable, they will find solutions pretty quickly, as Pornhub did.
Do you have evidence for that? What if you're wrong and your suggestion is making it worse? It's bold to claim in the age of social media that you know the best way to control it when we're in new territory.
It's not like the 80s or 90s when the only way to get and spread news was gated through a small number of newspapers and TV channels. If the media at the time refused to publish a story because of quality or trustworthiness issues, is that really so different here?
Are there simple ways to learn the above?
1. While reading, remember every writer has an agenda, and that you read a specific point of view, and there may be others
2. Differentiate between facts and opinions while reading
3. Actively expose yourself to an opposite opinion about the subject
Number 3 is the most important.
Actively exposing yourself is also not something I expect to be helpful. I dove into the 5G conspiracy theory and it's not like the statements or the people are retarded. They will bring reasonable-sounding arguments and respond to you in proper language. I needed to dig rather deep and have a really decent understanding of radio-related topics to know that there isn't a grain of truth to it. For example, digging into sources of sources of sources, you discover that the trail runs cold. Does that mean a statement was made up, or that you just can't find it? It's rather hard to prove that a certain paper does not exist (some of the court-submitted documents referenced papers published by reputable organisations and I figured "surely they don't lie to the court, this has to be somewhere?!" It's a huge time sink and I even got help from one of the believers in digging up the reference, but I never found it and they never got back to me). And even if you find the source, how can you tell if it's real if you don't have a basic understanding of the topic yourself? Exposing yourself to the other side mainly helps when you currently believe the conspiracy theory, which is exactly what you're trying to prevent in the first place. If you're susceptible to this sort of thing, I'd not be surprised if this advice gets more people sucked into the wrong things.
All we need to see are nationwide initiatives being planned, funded and executed broadly across education channels.
Could you provide some references that indicate this is happening? Or at least beginning to happen? Is this a viable proposed solution, or is it rather a theoretical or philosophical alternative to real solutions to the mass misinformation crisis?
Do we know how many "fact checkers" lost their jobs after they were 100% wrong about the "Hunter Biden laptop is Russian disinformation" claims?
This is why:
> you stop the spread of incorrect ideas
is a dangerous method - you do stop the spread, but who says you do it right?
Obviously in the past these small groups of people have made the wrong decision, and sometimes that's had very bad consequences. I am not arguing that this is a good methodology. I am arguing that we can't assume that public debate will generate a better set of decisions.
It's going to be quite something to see if twitter/facebook/google can create a digital ghetto for half the country.
I tend to be more on the left but I still value free speech and I'm anti-censorship. Can we talk about that?
1. Is what Twitter is doing censorship?
2. If so is it ok?
3. Are we setting dangerous precedents?
4. Should big tech companies be trusted with this power?
These are important questions and this community is well positioned to discuss these.
2. Yes, but it’s a real problem that they’ve created a platform where it’s necessary for them to do this.
3. Oh, absolutely. This is not a situation we want to be in.
4. No.
The harder question is how do we get out of this situation, and if its possible at all without shutting down all the social networks.
We'll need different rules for this new media.
The letter of the law might need to adapt, the spirit does not.
We don't need to allow the media to be weaponized with abject lies that are killing Americans are damaging our country.
Now people are complaining that corporations decide that they allow comments on their platforms. Big deal.
I already know what you are thinking: but these corporations are monopolies! Well, it's corporationS, so probably not. We have Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, various news sites, etc. Plus we still have all traditional things like TV, radio and newspapers.
If democracy didn't fall in the past 50 years, it's probably not because big corporations decide which information to spread.
All the misinformation that is now out there, spread by lunatics, is probably a bigger threat.
One reason this issue is worthy of debate is because it is novel - we have not been a position before where there are a few global scale 'public squares' under centralized corporate control, through which it seems inevitable the whole world's discourse will flow through in some form or another. Nevermind the fact that these corporations' business models are directly tied to influencing human behavior on those platforms - the incentives align in a direction that seems incredibly harmful both in theory and practice.
As society evolves and advances, particularly an advanced society like ours with many exponentially advancing elements, new emergent phenomenona appear. We ought to not appeal to tradition to guide us in all cases: we could be dealing with something genuinely new that our generation needs to address directly, because our ancestors could not foresee it, even though they tried to create generalized systems. I would argue that is the case now, much like it was the case in the response to large changes in society like the industrial revolution and the creation of nuclear weapons. In fact, your mention of monopolies is an exact example of this: we created this concept in a legal sense, in response to unexpected damages that come from having monopolistic actors. If anything, leveraging the argument of monopolies existing or not in your argument is a tacit concession that such structures can be created and have moral weight in determining how we should act.
In our era, arguing society needs to create new legal and policy structures to ensure social media and these global public squares best serve us all seems reasonable to propose. We seem less likely to do that insofar as people reject the idea that such a discussion is ridiculous, because we already have all the existing mental models and tools we need to address the problems they bring.
I'm sympathetic to the "we survived worse we'll survive this too" but it certainly is quite novel in many ways. I don't want to be cliche at this point but I'm sure the Roman Empire thought they'd survived worse too.
I don't consider myself one of the "scared of AI" people but I do approach it with caution. Even if "AI" doesn't gain some power, there's no doubt that using technology some _humans_ have gained _enormous_ power over others that hasn't historically been possible, even for the most vicious of tyrants. History has also demonstrated that some people can be really nasty when controlling others.
By no means am I saying FB, Twitter, etc are controlling tyrants. The idea that people don't do well with power seems relevant though.
I fully agree with that. But I think the point that I'm trying to make is different.
> we have not been a position before where there are a few global scale 'public squares' under centralized corporate control
I think that we differ in opinion here. The novelty from my point of view is not 'centralized corporate control', because we always had that. The novelty is 'global scale public squares', because we never had that at this scale.
So the real novelty and concern in my opinion is not that corporations try to control those squares, but more that those squares are opened up to everyone to say any crazy thing they want.
I'm not arguing for or against it, because I think it's a very complex topic. I dislike censorship just like anyone else, but I also dislike spreading disinformation to large groups of people.
“This claim about big tech’s power is disputed.”
2. Yes - you should be free to use the platform but there is no right to have your thoughts shared automatically to others.
3. No. People are extrapolating this into wild future scenarios.
4. This isn't power, it's responsibility. I think it's a good thing that Twitter is taking an effort to deal with this.
Not everything fits into incredibly simple one-sentence principles. There seems to be a bias in some communities towards trying to make absolute approaches to complex problems and the false conclusion that if we don't have an absolute principle that we have failed.
2. I don't think it's okay, but I think a proper response to it lies in the social sphere, not at the end of the government gun.
3. I think this is probably an inevitable outcome for humanity's first swing at social media. It's centralized and so will come under the control of some partisan group or another. I think the behavior will push us inevitably towards more decentralized platforms.
4. I'm not convinced they have power - not power that can't be removed from them by society, anyway. If they misbehave or underperform enough, society will move on. See MySpace.
Ideals are great until they are not beneficial.
I personally prefer a maximalist position of no censorship of any kind ever. I would also like to live in a world populated solely by philosopher-scholars in which reach is based solely on the intellectual content of one's ideas, and phenomena like spam and marketing did not exist. Alas, I do not.
Maybe Parler sticks for a while, IDK. Two is better than one. But that network effect is a pretty tough nut to crack.
Any shareholder would agree that the choice is clear - ban the radicals.
This is a private company and they are exercising their free market rights.
Maybe you think this is wrong, and the government should interfere by forcing Twitter to publish all content.
Well, good luck with that.
But I do think we're running out of time to do anything about it should action be appropriate. If Twitter is stepping over the line in taking down people that speak against the incoming administration, that said administration is going to protect them? I highly doubt it. (I wouldn't expect Conservatives would either were the tables turned for the record. In fact they have a history of jailing people protesting wars and what not, so I know they wouldn't).
Philosophizing is not going to get you anywhere, really. It's a technique of the past. There are many competing effects at play here. I think the more rational approach is to actually study the real world system to find a policy optimum that achieves a set goal. Philosophy should be relegated to figuring out that goal e.g. should it be democracy over all else or maybe individual rights or something else.
Who's outcome is most important here then? Is it Twitter's, is it the users, or the public at large? And how do you determine which is what? Draw a line at 50% and say if it benefits (a subjective measure) more than 50% then it's a good outcome, otherwise bad?
Obviously everyone has different opinions on the matter, but I’m beginning to suspect that the Venn diagram of the two sides of this debate has a lot of overlap in the middle. It seems we’ve entered an era where it’s trendy to despise social media platforms regardless of what they do or don’t do. Cynicism reigns supreme in the public discourse about social media platforms.
Everyone seems to carve out an exception for their preferred platform, though. Twitter users mock Facebook and brag about deleting their FB accounts. Redditors mock Twitter users. Hacker News comments are frequently self-congratulatory for “quitting” other social media platforms and so on.
Ironically, the more we hear about social media platforms, the more people seem to forget that these are really driven by concerning underlying social issues. Why are so many people willingly subscribing to the people peddling misinformation in the first place? It’s hardly limited to one platform. The prevailing narrative that a handful of engineers are shaping the thoughts of the nation by manipulating “the algorithm” to emphasize divisive content ignores the fact that people seem more eager than ever to engage with it. Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out. Now that the genie is out of the bottle and everyone can access global communication with ease, we need to accept that these are societal problems, not just the side effects of a few engineers tweaking algorithms.
It’s also time that we start expecting people to take some responsibility for their own social media usage. We’ve spent so much time blaming “the algorithm” that people now treat social media as an uncontrollable black box or even an addictive drug. It’s time we normalized things like muting the friends you don’t want to see in your feed, unfollowing people who rile you up, and otherwise curating the content we all consume. Contrary to what I read online, it’s trivially easy to tune my Facebook feed and use social media responsibly. However, we never hear about responsible use. It’s always just “delete your Facebook account” or other extreme measures that don’t work for grandma who really just doesn’t want to miss out on photos from family. It’s time we start educating people on responsible use instead of preaching social media abstinence as the only solution.
When they take steps that are consistent with one of those roles' responsibilities, they undercut the other. To the extent that they quite intentionally did their best to assume both of those roles, it's not entirely ridiculous to give them flak for failing to meet the expectations of those roles.
I'd be more sympathetic if not for the fact that they got into that position entirely intentionally.
I don't smoke Marlboros like some kind of animal, I smoke Parliaments.
>Some times I suspect that what the social media cynics really want is for us to return to a time when the communicating on the internet was only accessible to the few of us who were willing and able to figure it out.
I think you're close, but I don't think the inaccessibility made that time period so charming. Not every website used to have a cookie policy and push notifications and a recommendation engine showing you the hottest articles you have to read.
People here like to believe there’s only one bad guy, and before internet being available to non-geeks (who view themselves as smarter than rest of society) and social media, we were all living in one big global kumbaya.
I don’t want to remove all blame from social media - they do contribute to a divide, but their impact is vastly overblown.
Social media is an entertainment outlet to rid the boredom. It gives people excitement through conflict and conspiracy theories.
Reality is much more boring than people want.
That being said, I wish this sort of Twitter treatment extended to people that aren't the president, who enjoys some sort of special exemption from the normal ToS.
You want to remove this? So the runners of every forum on the internet will be responsible for content posted?
What part of that process is different from what Twitter is engaging in here?
Courts have departed from the most natural reading of the text by giving internet companies immunity for their own content. Section 230(c)(1) protects a company only when content is "provided by /another/ information content provider". Nowhere does this provision protect a company that is itself the information content provider.
And an information content provider is not just the primary author or creator, it is anyone "responsible, /in whole or in part/, for the creation of development" of the content. (words of justice Thomas)
They currently enjoy unlimited immunity in a way the spirit of the law does not allow. You can't enjoy tax breaks etc. of being a platform and then go and ban content that you don't agree with, but which is not harmful in the way the law lets you do. I.e. the law lets you remove illegal content, but if you are being treated as a platform, you can't just go and, oh, I don't know, not let the New York Post show a breaking story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
In the print world there is an in between: distributors, such as bookstores, newsstands, and libraries.
They do not become liable for false claims in books they sell. It is the authors or publishers of those books who are liable. If the bookstore itself produced libelous material, such as in a press release, they would be liable for that.
Lets control the Internet, let us use it only for Digital ID,contact tracing, face recognition,IOT software and corporate approved messages, lets DRM every bit of entertainment a put an order in this chaos. If you don't agree with this, sorry you have no choice, we are the owners you are the slaves. This is the future. This is the big reset. You are polluting the Earth, here listen to this autistic kid, she is our mascot, because of the children. Don't ask about pedophilia in high levels of society, don't ask about covert operations and psyops, this is conspiracy, there are no such things, the powers that be always have your interest in heart.
This is the beginning of a very dark moment in human history, freedom of speech is not a relative idea. Factually freedom of speech is the reason for us to advance. Debating with clear intent to objective analysis is the way forward. This shit reminds me of dark ages of Inquisition, and actually is fascism and big corporatism in action. Do not expect people to applaud or comply. People will revolt. Just saying:)
How does this help? Also it's not about being tech-savvy or not, yes we're all normal people. It's trying to maintain a level of reason on this forum. I'm genuinely interested in what people think of what Twitter does, but the tone of nearly every reply in the thread is somewhere between mildly polarized and extremist/conspiracy theorist.
Trusting in people's good nature alone has never worked. If the community doesn't implement some mechanism to control the activity it doesn't want, then it will be done. You can refuse to believe that if you want, but I think you will find that belief challenged by reality.
Not coincidentally, a mechanism of control for dealing with undesirable behavior is exactly what this whole Twitter thing is about in the first place. Since we've agreed that people here are not inherently better than the general populace, what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
> what makes you think that HN is more immune to this sort of thing than a community like Twitter or reddit?
I've always perceived HN as fairly elitist, e.g. composed of many top earners and skilled people. The term is often meant negatively; in this case it might be a positive feature. Reminding people that they're on HN, where I think most expect a higher standard than on Twitter or reddit, might make them try to be better. I'm not saying we are composed of some elite, just observing that it's often perceived that way and that we can actually try to use that notion in a good way, to improve the conversation.
Your naivete is being taken advantage of by bad faith actors.
* This is not true because <some sound logic or data source>
Instead, you just wrote that I'm naive and pretty much left it at that.
Why does this topic make you do that?
(Edit: just noticed that your profile even says you're a data scientist of all things!)
If you are not an American, I suppose it makes sense that you are not aware of the current political climate. If you are American, then you've been deliberately ignoring the obvious.
There's enough. Aggregating various recent polling, it seems that about 1 person in 8 is OK with that, and maybe 2 more (for a total of 3/8) are passively in favor - that is to say, they won't do anything about it, but won't object if it happens. You don't need a majority of people to support a coup; indeed, that's kinda why it's such an attractive option to the unscrupulous.
An important problem nowadays is that our media and interpersonal communications take place at lightning speed, but out political technology is many respects still rooted int he 18th century, and our administrative technology covers a span from 19th century unresponsive bureaucracy to 21st century oppressive surveillance. Politics as presently constituted does not work well for a lot of people, and so they are not invested in maintaining the status quo.
Put simply, our economic infrastructure is highly distributed, but power is highly centralized and that makes a lot of people angry.
1) Have you taken a look at Parler?
2) The Chair of Texas state GOP has called for the state to secede in the wake of the supreme court ruling
3) Diamond and Silk (and they are famous in the US in some areas) have called for a coup.
4) General Flynn who was once the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency endorsed a call for Trump to declare martial law and redo the election
The left-biased media was worried about election fraud for months before the election (good!) and are now declaring it the "most secure election in American history" in spite of the broad introduction of mail-in voting.
People living in democracies should scrutinize the hell out of their elections.
https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-elect...
https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/23/5-more-ways-joe-biden-m...
That's called a coup attempt. A pathetic one, sure. But a coup attempt nonetheless.
I agree with you int hat I think people should have a chance to deploy their arguments but you need to bear in mind that there are a lot of people who are willing and able to resort to force in place of argument.
Consider the Voter Integrity Fund by Matt Braynard. It's one of the more convincing arguments I've heard to date, and involved making many thousands of phone calls, analyzing the resulting data, generating reports, and collecting sworn testimony. All that didn't happen overnight, and they didn't begin immediately after the election.
But the frivolous ones are being made by a team of "presidential" "lawyers"...
> If your argument is simply "No good case has been made yet, therefore no good case can be made"
That's not my argument, nice effort trying to use your powers of deduction, but I'd take it back to the supplier and tell them it's defective.
> we can't know until they are presented.
So should we give Team Total Landscaping all the time they'd like?
I would bet some money that there was at least 1 fraudulent vote during the whole election. I would bet more money that there weren't that many fraudulent votes that if they were cancelled it would flip the results and give Trump the win. Trump and Giuliani are screaming "massive fraud", which sounds like they have a good case, but they've shown up to the court empty handed. Some have argued "they're just preparing the very good case", geezus christ that's not how that works, and besides, their time is running out.
If a team of astrophycists from a famous university started screaming "Something's happened to the sun, it won't rise tomorrow", we'd pay attention. If we ask them to show us what data they have, but they refuse, and they just continue yelling shit, we'd start wondering if they're still sane. And if the sun rose tomorrow, we'd be more certain that they've lost the plot. Maybe they'd change their claims, still offering no proof, but if the sun still rose the next day...
If a group of homeless people claimed the same thing, we'd probably laugh and continue with our day. Sadly some people are being fooled by a bunch of "homeless" people, probably willingly because they can't admit to themselves that they've been fooled by conmen.
I think he's made it clear that he will not do that, and election fraud challenges are just the easiest strategy currently available to pursue his objective of staying in power.
But certainly there are limits to how far the challenge can go. I'll be right there LOLing with you if he needs to be bodily removed from the WH. I disagree that he's given any indication that he'd go that far, though. Once his options are exhausted, he'll leave.
It's actually nice that instead of Twitter just hiding/deleting the offending posts, the posts are still there for you to see (in a less convenient way) so you can decide yourself that you're happy with the standards Twitter is trying to set.
If you're not happy, you're free to go find or create another community online that has moderation you're happy with. I don't understand how anyone can feel they should be allowed to inject themselves into a community and act however they want with no repercussions, and everyone else just has to put up with it.
The proper analogy to HN's moderation would be the owner of a FB Group kicking someone, which I believe is fine and good. What Facebook and Twitter are doing, and especially as they move beyond the less-controversial "hate speech" to the more controversial "disinformation", is the whole global platform moderating everything, and is veering dangerously close to being... I'm struggling with the word, but something like partisan but less one-dimensional. It's not hard to see this path leading to these global platforms simply causing the speech that occurs on them to match the politics of the people in charge at Facebook and Twitter. And nobody needs to hear for the billionth time about the rights of private companies and the law - we know, so save your keystrokes, please.
Why do Facebook and Twitter not have an "I hate this" reaction (I'm aware Facebook added "angry" but this was fairly recent)? Or a way to mark people as enemies as well as friends? Why do they prevent you posting certain kinds of graphic videos or images? Why don't Twitter let you post messages of any length? These are all limits to your freedom to express yourself.
They let you create your own groups/communities, but Twitter and Facebook clearly have their own idea of what they believe to be healthy discourse and what kind of interactions they want to nurture, and they encourage that through their UI features and moderation. Same with HN with upvotes/downvotes, who gets to vote and dedicated site moderators.
> is the whole global platform moderating everything,
It's not as simple as you're making out. I'd be against my ISP moderating what I post online, but there's more to the internet than just Facebook and Twitter. They might be popular but they don't have absolute control and aren't a prerequisite to other forms of communication or self-organisation (unlike your ISP or mobile provider).
The policy on claims about elections appears to be outlined here:
> We will label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process. This includes but is not limited to:
> disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself, such as unverified information about election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying, or certification of election results; and
> misleading claims about the results or outcome of a civic process which calls for or could lead to interference with the implementation of the results of the process, e.g. claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent the procedural or practical implementation of election results (note that our violent threats policy may also be relevant for threats not covered by this policy).
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/election-inte...
Twitter is really building a quagmire for itself here. It's trivial to "dispute" a claim. Who "verifies" a claim?
What Twitter really seems to be saying is that they'll remove content they don't like. There's veneer of process and impartiality, but it crumbles even on superficial examination.
Why not just come out and say that Twitter owns the platform and will delete or manipulate anything at any time for any reason?
Less easy, at least for me, is to imagine a future where this strategy results in a more civil and evidence-based dialogue. If the surface on which claims can be compared and evaluated, absent restrictions placed by the platform itself, continually narrows, it seems to me that the civic dialogue necessarily narrows with it.
A desirable future for the information age is one in which quackish claims are endemic but ineffective.
In fact, the idea that someone could check these facts for you, almost explicitly stipulates that you, the reader, are somehow less capable. But we are not talking about changing oil in the car, or doing brain surgery, we are talking about maybe the only thing that each individual can do on their own, unsupervised, to the beset of their ability - use their brain.
This is not going to end well.
In the large majority of topics, there exist huge numbers of people who are far more expert than I am. I don't just prefer expert "fact checkers" in fields like medicine, law, science, plumbing, wiring, etc., I depend on them. Similarly, there are certainly journalists who have much more time and experience when it comes to these topics than I have.
And to the extent that people do, it subjects them to manipulation - a strategy crudely referred to as 'flooding the zone with shit' in order to waste the time of the most discriminating and thoughtful on studying bullshit claims which take far less time to produce than to evaluate.
I wonder if toxic content on Twitter could be dealt with more by limiting content that only gets engaged in an extremely polarizing way, with lots of brainless replies, or maybe content that is way more interesting to a person's followers than the rest of Twitter should be voting-ring-censored.
Fighting misinformation needs a lot more structure. Otherwise it’s a slippery slope of censorship. I hope they keep on tweaking it until the majority of public can trust it.
- Fix the law. Punish the lawyers, officials who violate the law.There should be some fucking fear for misusing the common people. - Regulate social media and popular sites. For example: prevent actions (post, repost, likes etc) on social and political posts by unverified accounts.
After election: Feds are on Hunter Biden case (before the election even!) and it is real. Coverage on news networks now.
All of this editorializing and censoring is setting a dangerous precedence. It's obvious there's some sort of agenda, just not sure what it is. Could it be that they (who is they even?) want Biden elected and then make him step down due to his son affairs so Harris becomes the first female president with a migration background?
To those who are downvoting: he lost pretty much every legal case he threw at this problem. He lost the election. It wasn't stolen. Give it up. There's no Kraken, just a bunch of grifters trying to take your money (including Trump himself).
Time to move on.
hasn't this already happened?
It'll take a long time to recover the damage done to foreign policy. even worse is the division, which was already present thanks to how distant people are if they are a few income brackets apart. he really knew how to worsen all this and make the chaos work for him.
whoever repairs the damage in the coming years has their work cut out. maybe we've learned something as a collective? (I don't think so because while humans are smart humanity is the worst)
It doesn’t take too long to mobilize the troops and get back to active war in the Middle East.
The CCP also managed to take control of eastern Africa and managed to make an indian ocean trade route that COMPLETELY avoid India. Well done. Also during the squabble between Trump and Kim-Jun-Un, the CCP just send 4000 troups in 16 different location around the Indian ocean, to "secure their investment".
TBH i'm glad there is a little competition to the US, and that the CCP successfully outplayed the US on a diplomatic standpoint, but please don't conflate foreign policy and war. War is such a small part of foreign policy overall.
On the topic of foreign policy fuck-ups, another consequence of Trump is that countries about to do deals with the USA under Biden will ask, "So, will this deal be undone in when the next administration comes to power?" and will be more hesistant or they'll manage to get a better bargain because of the US's loss of reputation.
That’s an understatement. After the second loss in the Supreme Court he and his allies are at 1 win, 57 losses. He lost the election and lost every case that mattered, while winning one inconsequential case. What a loser.
https://spectator.us/reasons-why-the-2020-presidential-elect...
My take is that the federal government has accrued far, far more power than was ever intended. The entire population of the US has to fight over who is in charge at the federal level in order to live their lives the way they would like.
The founders had the right idea - a federation of states with a variety of laws that the people could choose among, glued together by a weak federal government.
The article is about Twitter exploring new ways to shape interactions with the content from Trump, a retreating politician, on their platform.
This development is far more relevant to me than the largely US american pro/contra Trump debate, as my own societies discourse is dependent on those very same platforms.
I therefore believe that it is completely wrong to justify Twitter's continuing trials on discoursive influence over the notion that it's alright since Trump might be a particularly bad actor.
I think that's off topic and misses the point.
I just thought I'll explain since the thread appears to be very heated right now. People might attribute up & downvotes to a far smaller set of reasons than they should on a platform as global as HN.
Those people with molotov cocktails have been almost exclusively targeting property rather than people, and specifically corporate rather than personal property. I'm not suggesting you should approve that, but it is categorically different.
As for your question, it makes a huge difference. While any weapon can be used to inflict harm (by definition), some make that significantly easier than others. It's facile to ignore this and pretend all harms are equivalent.
...
> I therefore believe that it is completely wrong to justify Twitter's continuing trials on discoursive influence over the notion that it's alright since Trump might be a particularly bad actor.
what you see is a global company acting locally and so not too surprising, no? Algorithmic biases and assumption engineered so the service is successful with a US ideology. Nobody asks the question in any tech company does the product only work in my market (unless you're outside the US). There are plenty of German companies (start-ups especially) which first design for a market that works in the US. Even language support is first English before they become local. FAANG and every SV start-up thinks first whether that works here in the US. It's just normal business sense and no big scheme of why they do this. Twitter does it because it makes sense for them to fight back against lies and disinformation that end up killing people. Free Speech ends here.
I get everyone thinks free speech is essential, but we live in a world where free speech is not a thing for very valid reasons. Germany only promises freedom of opinion; they don't actually promise you can tell anyone that opinion, try denying the holocaust. And in Germany, you're not legally allowed to insult someone (civil matter, but still not legal), in Berlin, and someone got convicted (eventually overturned but the fact it happened is massive) for farting on a police officer. The US, which claims to be the centre of freedom, has one of the lowest press freedoms and a multitude of laws to keep things secret. There are things that we know people shouldn't be allowed to say. Freedom of speech is a myth and should not be used to enable the destruction of democracy or to spread propaganda (in any sense).
I'm sure the majority of people here would agree terrorism propaganda videos shouldn't be hosted on twitter or youtube, and people shouldn't be allowed to promote terrorism. Well, this is basically the same, in many of the Trump supporter stuff, I've seen calls for domestic terrorism.
Also, I think a lot of people don't realise why we're seeing an increase in companies stepping up here. Biden has offically won, now. All states have certified who won. The election is over. All that can be done now is stirring up hate and starting a civil war.
The ability to run a standing army can be used for ill. Yet we have an army.
The ability to regulate corporate pollution can be used for ill. Yet we have pollution regulations.
The ability to throw people in prison via the justice system can be used for ill. Yet we have laws and courts and prisons.
This is why “platforms” like Twitter need to lose their liability protection when they engage in such behavior. They are no longer playing the role of independent platform in need such protection; they are a publisher that is deciding what can and cannot be viewed. That is perfectly acceptable, as long as they are held accountable for that content. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
You may use Parler, Gab, and countless federated services; along with Facebook and other giants.
Freedom of Speech has never been a guarantee of platform access or forced association.
Filter bubbles and shadow bans already exist, and while I think they are particularly insidious for people wanting to find multiple opposing views on something, they are invisible to the average user. Just make sure that Trump's tweets and interactions don't get shown on any feed except his own page, and any retweets are only shown to the people that retweet him, and be done with it.
People still think they have the freedom to read and speak about naughty opinions, but they never get further than the "desk" of the person that wrote those opinions.
The way out of this was for the winning side to get out ahead of it and do everything in their power to legitimize the election for these people. They didn't have a moral duty to do so, but it was foolish not to, since now by not doing so we've seen a deep, cemented, hatred and distrust of the outcome and the other side that from my vantage point is materially worse than before and could have been avoided to a large degree.
We're in trouble. People on the "winning" side of this dispute seem to be celebrating as the other side's hopes are dashed and their speech is marginalized, but in fact they ought to be terrified, since insofar as the other side isn't persuaded of their error and their beliefs deepen in light of the coercion being used against them being seen as a form of confirmation, things are going to be worse for everyone going into the new year.
A strange irony from this situation that I hadn't realized is that it seems that if one is on the winning side of a dispute its the point of maximal confidence the other side will be coerced into submission that one actually should be the least confident that the dispute is going to be settled, since it means coercion has been accepted as the only possible method to settle it. In fact, its that moment, the one where persuasion is understood to not be viable, which presents the greatest danger.
Our history points to another example of the point of presumed capitulation in fact being the start of anything but, but I won't make the analogy at the risk of it (rightly) being torn apart.
How does one do that when the people you are trying to convince are inherently unconvincable? They refuse to acknowledge experts, legal authorities, or any application of logic. If one of them steps out of line and goes against the narrative they are torn apart for it.
I would imagine to actually get to that point there are really only a few simple steps needed: full forensic audits of the disputed states, as well as a day in court in SCOTUS. I believe so far those have been largely denied or blocked (the merits of doing so are irrelevant) - if those were acquiesced by the winning side and accelerated at the outset it seems highly likely to me we would be nowhere near the precipice it seems we are now.
If any person still thinks the election was stolen after that, they're not a reasonable person.
This doesn't mean they're right. Unfortunately, no matter how "unreasonable" you think these people are, when they exist in such numbers and feel with such confidence they've lost the ability to have fair elections, the result of suppressing, ridiculing, and marginalizing them is fairly predictable.
[1] https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3685
Did you read the poll? Literally, in the first three paragraphs:
- 98% of Dems think election victory is legitimate
- 97% think there was no widespread voter fraud
Please stop trolling HN. Take it to Parler.
> a margin of error of +/- 3.1
The number of Dems you've claimed to support your position is less than the margin of error.
That leaves 2% of Dems that disagree. They aren't wrong in saying their stated figure includes Democratic party voters, just misleading.
> 97% think there was no widespread voter fraud
Assuming this reflects all polled people and not just Democratic party voters, then yes, 3% ≠ 1/3 and they are wrong. Assuming this figure only reflects Democratic party voters, that seems to suggest that 1% of Dems believe that there was widespread fraud, but still think the victory was legitimate.
In fact, it's much worse than that: a third of Americans believe it (which shows its appeal to centrists and/or the depth of Republican belief), and if you dig into the crosstabs, the number of Independents who believe it (approx 1/3rd) and Republicans who believe it (approx 3/4ths) is quite concerning. For such an extreme question ('widespread fraud') I would have expected this to be a fringe belief. The belief that would have made these numbers less surprising would have been questions such as "do you believe there is some evidence of targetted fraud" etc. Given that I'd suspect nearly 100% of Republicans believe some form of fraud occurred. If so, the entire losing party believes they were cheated to some degree. This isn't a recipe for reduced conflict from here. It means that the radical end of the party is large enough to be meaningful, and it means that large parts of the population will be less likely to condemn actions they take given the widespread shared beliefs.
> Do you believe there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, or not?
> 77% R
> 3% D
> 35% I
To feel secure that this isn't going to spill over into a conflict, we should expect to see a similarly marginal number of I's and ideally less R's (this should be a fringe belief in the Republican party, but it's not.) This question is the most extreme form of the issue, as well. (Few ought to believe widespread fraud definitely occurred, many more likely believe it’s possible strategically targeted fraud occurred, a much weaker stance but similarly dangerous.)
I'm guessing you'll just assume the I's are closet Republicans. But don't blame me if you aren't willing to face reality that this skepticism is not just going to go away through coercion.
While this may have shifted a bit since 2019, 38% of the public identify as independents, but 13% are R-leaning independent, 17% are R-leaning, and 7% aren't leaners. [0]
If you assume leaners are exactly like partisans and further assume the non-leaners are stealth leaners split equally between the two parties, you'd predict 36% of I’s would believe in large scale fraud. If you force all non-leaners to the D side or all to R side, you get a predicted range of 28%-44%.
So, yeah, the results actually seen (35% of Is believing in widespread fraud) are very consistent with the “independent" numbers being entirely predicted by partisan bias of “independents” combined with whatever factors drive the distribution of beliefs among party identifiers, with nothing nonpartisan about “independents” on this issue.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/03/14/political-in...
No, the US distribution of political beliefs is not a unidimensional center-weighted distribution. More independents are either extremists outside the main parties on the main axis between the parties or sitting equally far off on axes orthogonal to that axis than are centrists.
And most centrists are in the neoliberal capitalist faction of one or the other for the major parties.
Not in any meaningful sense; largely for related limits to those discussed upthread for general centrism: research on voting behavior that has shown those who identify as independents are not particular independent, and contain an identifiable major subset as reliably partisan as those who identify with a major party.
If by “average, non-partisan belief” you simply mean the belief of the average person who doesn't identify with a major party, then, sure, you will have defined it such that independents are key. But this isn't useful information.
There is no such thing as apolitical observers.
Otherwise, I see the extended "election fraud" campaign as an excuse to squeeze out more money for Trump (bad), generate emotional support for the Georgia election (good), and help a guy in Texas get a pardon (lol).
I realize how what I wrote could be construed saying D's support the claim, especially if you presume I'm some kind of partisan hack trying to troll you. In fact, what I was emphasizing (poorly) was that the population sampled from which has one third of support includes Democrats and Independents, since I would have found one third of just Republicans believing there was widespread fraud to be somewhat surprising. I should have written "sampled from a population that includes Democrats and Independents" - I'd like to assume everything else I've written in this thread is evidence I'm not trying to trick anyone or score points. I am genuinely concerned at the level of dismissal, ridicule, and suppression of skeptics of the election, since the floor on this is a third of the country and history tells us what to expect when you leave that many feeling powerless to overcome a presumed deep injustice via speech, voting, and the legal system.
> [...] get out ahead of it and do everything in their power to legitimize the election for these people.
When the people in question refuse to hear anything other than what they want to hear?
Actually, no. If there was no election fraud (as it seems to have been proven) then they all have the same wrong belief, regardless of degree.
> The goal isn't to convince all of them...
Actually, it is since "conservatives" keep pushing lies.
> only a few simple steps needed: full forensic audits of the disputed states, as well as a day in court in SCOTUS
Both of those have happened. So why do you, a reasonable(?) person on HN trying to convince us that it hasn't?
> Actually, no. If there was no election fraud (as it seems to have been proven)
Your claim here seems to be that there was no election fraud, and it seems proven. Two problems with this statement:
- You cannot prove there was no election fraud, it is unfalsifiable.
- Beyond that, the idea that there was no election fraud is absurd on its face. We should expect there to have been some election fraud, with some liklihood of finding evidence of it, since in an election as large as this one there is always election fraud to some degree.
What I think you're trying to say, is there is insufficient evidence to prove there was sufficient election fraud to have an impact on the result. If that's the case, I agree with you. But commentators who say things like "there is no evidence of fraud" or "there is no evidence of widespread fraud" are wrong in the former case and creating a strawman in the latter. And of course, the effect of saying fallacious things like this is it just serves as confirmation for the other side that you are acting in bad faith. The specific claim made is that there was targeted fraud in specific districts in swing states to tip the result. I don't think there is sufficient evidence to show this.
> then they all have the same wrong belief, regardless of degree
My point is the degree matters if we care about avoiding a conflict.
> The goal isn't to convince all of them...
I don't know what you are saying here. My point is that if you are trying to persuade people of their errors in reasoning, you shouldn't expect to convince all of them, just a sufficient amount to reduce their confidence in their wrong beliefs to change the dynamics of the situation enough to avoid the worst possibilities.
> Both of those have happened. So why do you, a reasonable(?) person on HN trying to convince us that it hasn't?
This is objectively false. A full forensic audit of all the states has not occurred (some local forensic audits of sampled ballots in specific counties in some states has) and SCOTUS has not heard any cases (yet) about this issue. I don't know why you state obvious untruths, beyond just being ignorant of the facts or something.
(And yes, before you construct a strawman response, YouTube is within their rights to do this. But that has nothing to do with if it's something we think is morally correct to do, nor how we should think about the second order effects of doing so, and the dangerous precedents it sets.)
YouTube has tolerated this for much longer than the never we previously had.
It would be impractical for the US to ban either the democrats or republicans without either authorizing secession or experiencing a conflict comparable to one of the world wars. It’s doubtful there would be any winners in either scenario.
There is no prospect of a rebellion overcoming the US military machine, and its presence would allow the GOP to be purged and suppressed. Maintaining a low level of guerilla activity would allow this to continue.
The GOP is playing a very dangerous game for themselves moving in this direction.
What do you think happens if half of the country sees that government as illegitimate, including many members of the military? Governments aren't magic. They exist only if enough people see them as legitimate. The scenario you outline, as supported by polling data, implies to me approximately a third of the country would reject this outright as a legitimate government, with a high bias towards the military.
Are you really thinking this through? Do you know how easy it would be for there to be a guerilla war in the US, which is organized in part by military defectors? All it would take would be for enough belief that the country's goverment had become tyrannical. This is exactly the premise of the two prior situations where Americans mobilized for war on our own soil. The scenario you outline is precisely the situation that most strong supporters of the second amendment believe it was created for, and why they exercise it - to provide a deterrence and eventually, if needed, a mechanism to overthrow a tyrannical government.
If someone talks up rebellion and civil war to try to prevent some legal action of a democratically elected government, I will just look in them in the eye and say "Rebel and be damned."
The thing that really scares me in all this is how each side is 100% certain about all the bad the other side is and how a single comment can land people as labelled as "the other". I know for myself and in my bubble that Trump and his cohorts are terrible and playing dirty, and responsible for thousands of corona casualties. But I take a look at the other side and see how absolutely hardened they are in their view that they got conned. They are equally convinced as I am about them backing the correct side.
It's no longer only about who got conned but by how discourse in this climate is impossible. It's easy to just hope things are going to settle if only the right kind of leadership steps in. But the amount of work that camp has cut out reuniting this division is almost impossible.
Impossible because the division has been instigated from the top so we automatically trust that it gets mended by the top. But the real work is in bringing those families back together that no longer talk, or those friends people lost due to "politics".
the only reason I still tune into my own biased news bubble is to scour it for signs of rhethoric, or ideas in how to mend this mess. and what scares me is I haven't seen anything yet that addresses some of the root causes here. class divide, racial divide, and the richest of this world (those leaders HN often celebrates, Bezos, Musk etc) having become richer even during the pandemic. Maybe we wouldn't have all this discussion if a human life was valued differently than just in terms of the revenues they generate for society. It also shows me that the place to find peace isn't a "democracy", or certain pocket of society, but within myself.
I am an extreme pessimist. I think our perspective is so warped, and our cognitive biases so deeply baked that meaningful collective healing and growth will take place if and only if it’s partially energized by psychological healing & opening on the individual level through psychedelic therapy.
I am routinely laughed out of serious discussion for this view.
Amongst the republicans I know they are happy to believe anything Mr Trump says and denounce any party dissenters as Rino’s. When their trusted media sources such as fox and tucker Carlson didn’t confirm the party line - they jumped to newsmax and OAN. They’re shocked and dismayed when courts and institutions don’t embrace what they view as reality.
I doubt that restricting misinformation on major platforms will do more than move the audience to Parler and other friendlier mediums. This is a demand problem and not a supply problem. And I’m not sure how to fix the demand problem.
People need to stop and consider the meaning of that phrase and how it applies in the modern day. People don't seem to care that we're making "lies" a justifiable basis for censorship. Whether you believe Trump is lying or not, we are accepting and normalizing the existence of a third party that censors things deemed to be "lies" for the greater good.
What's more, is that it being defended under the guise of "well, they're a private corporation, etc etc." Yes, and they do have the right, but that is orthogonal to the fact that we are normalizing and welcoming it. Twitter having the right to do it and we as a society supporting their actions are separate from each other. But people like to muddy the waters by claiming that it isn't "censorship" because it's a private corporation. But it is censorship on their platform, and again, the support for the censorship in general is the disturbing part. It's not as if the people supporting Twitter's actions are saying "we should only censor people on Twitter"...they want it everywhere that there is a platform.
There's also voices that say "well, it's Trump, and he is the President, so there should be an exception because he can influence a lot of people." Taylor Swift has as many followers (~88M) on Twitter. Do you think if she started saying similar things as Trump, people wouldn't be calling for her censorship too? Can Taylor Swift start a civil war as easy as Trump can? Probably not, but who makes the determination of "you are censored because we believe people will listen to you" ?
Controversial speech only seem to be acceptable so long as nobody listens to you. Is that what we want?
The principles behind the United States are that we prefer a mess to tyranny and noise to suppression.
It's not about Trump. It's about whether we trust anyone to make decisions about what is right and not right for someone to say, because whoever has that power will inevitably abuse it.
If you feel fine about this now because you disagree with the person being silenced, then just try to imagine being on the other side of that - calling out what you perceive to be a great injustice only for someone to have the power to take away your voice completely.
This is not a constitutional argument, as Twitter isn't government and not bound by first amendment, it's a principles argument. If you support suppression of speech that's "obviously wrong" to you, you're gonna be in a lot of pain down the road when someone finds YOU obviously wrong.
Having been born and lived in the USSR, this is very real. A lot of folks who were on the "right side of history" in 1917 when it came to suppressing/killing "the obvious enemies of the people", found themselves against the wall in the 20s and 30s. Once you create a system that's more powerful than people, it's just a matter of time before it decides that you're not good enough either.
We should always be looking into voter rolls of who voted versus things like change-of-address filings and death certificates. We should always be checking the math on percentage of registered voters and looking at outliers. We should always be investigating provisional ballots, for example people who came to vote in person and were told they already voted. And probably many other things along these lines.
I think the other side of this is that the Constitution puts States firmly in control of their own voting process and procedures, which means there are 50 different sets of rules for how these elections can be held, and then in the months and weeks leading up to elections there’s a flurry of lawsuits that try to change all the rules one way or another, sometimes with changes being made up until the final moments of the election. This hugely erodes public trust in the entire process.
Now, I think Twitter has made some objectively very bad calls in the name of censorship the last few months. Freezing the NY Post’s account after the Hunter Biden story in particular. I think the “this tweet is disputed” flags are ultimately another failure on their part. Aside from being objectively the wrong thing to do in some cases, mostly I just doubt that these actions will have remotely the intended effect.
What I took away from reading the texas lawsuit is that what you had happen was states were making changes to their election practices due to covid without actually changing the laws. Think how divisive things like voter ID laws are and it's not hard to imagine no election rule changes are going to get passed in a hurry.
Specific examples are pennsylvania allowing absentee ballot 3 days after the election even though by law any ballots arriving by mail after election day are void.
Poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.
Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.
The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. And no court is going to nullify an election.
None of these things are evidence of voter fraud but the fact that election officials were allowed to deviate from the legal requirements dictated by law is something I find controversial and is something we should be allowed to talk about.
That is incorrect. PA Supreme Court ruled that there is no specific law against that ...Pennsylvania Republicans had sought to block the counting of late-arriving ballots, which the state's Supreme Court had approved last month..... [1]
B) >>>poll watchers who monitor votes being counted were not given meaningful access to monitor even though by law they must be given access.<<<
That is also incorrect. The dispute was about how far away they should be. Both Democratic and Republican observers were at the same distance which was at least 6 feet because of COVID. One of the Judges allowed for the distance to be narrowed for everybody
C) >>>Due to the huge number of absentee ballots election counters did not verify ballot signatures as required.<<<
That is also incorrect. Where state law mandated it, this was done.
D) >>>The reason all these lawsuits failed is because there is no real injunctive relief you can seek. <<<<
This is incorrect. The lawsuits failed because
a) the lawyers actually stated in court that they were not alleging fraud but were 'concerned'
b) the lawyers said in court that there were some irregularities but not enough to change the outcome
1. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/19/922411176/supreme-court-rules...
I get the appeal of getting sucked into partisanship. Your comment reads like someone who has a conclusion and is searching for evidence.
Specifically to your claim about Pennsylvania mail in ballots see below.
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/li/uconsCheck.cfm...
Act 77 of Pennsylvania law:
"a completed mail-in ballot must be received in the office of the county board of elections no later than eight o'clock P.M. on the day of the primary or election."