I have distant family that has bought into the conspiracy theories. But now that Youtube has started directing traffic away from their channels and putting up these warnings they feel under attack and have only doubled down on their beliefs. It makes it a lot harder to work with them/discuss these issues.
When 49% of the country voted for a man who is currently the sitting president by law, and you can't even retweet his tweets it's pretty upsetting to them. They feel like they are under attack by the Big Tech companies. I know why Twitter did this. But it's only creating far more polarization between the rich people in power (aka Big Tech) and these people.
The bias here is that the election has concluded with a clear winner in accordance with state law and the Constitution, and one man is using their platforms to make people doubt the integrity of the election.
Given how difficult it is to build trust in democracy and how easy it is to collapse it, I think that these companies would be irresponsible to continue providing a megaphone for these claims.
Alternative sites dedicated to the people who feel like they are "under attack" fail to launch because it turns out that catering to these people leads to nothing but misinformation, racism, and content that is either borderline or outright child pornography.
My 2c on this issue is that we will not resolve this situation by accommodating conspiracy theories and racism. Instead, the only way that we can reconcile these two groups of people is by ensuring that everyone sees the same news - recommenders that have partitioned the world in half need to be done away with, even if it reduces user engagement.
Yes, and because of the partisanship it’s mainly liberals that don’t want to take claims of election fraud very seriously.
When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
There has been no evidence to support any of the claims being made about systemic election fraud.
Zero. What is there to take seriously?
> When Trump won in 2016 there were claims of fraud for that in addition to claims of support from Russian hacks into voting machines. None of these were taken down.
I don't think those ideas were mainstream at all on the left, and even if they were, they weren't being made by people in positions of power. There's a difference between someone anon on the internet claiming fraud (because that's meaningless) vs the sitting president doing so.
I don't call Barack Obama spending the time between Nov and Jan drumming up support for an insurrection against the government. Can you show me where that happened?
I don't recall Hillary Clinton ever making the claim of election fraud, or any elected official saying those things.
Right now you have the majority of Republicans in the House making those kind of claims, in addition to the President and several Senators. The fact you would equate the two shows you are too deeply biased to talk neutrally on this subject.
When one side of the partisan divide has willfully abandoned all pretense at adherence to facts, to protest that people call them out for this, while not calling the other side out for something they're not doing in any meaningful sense is...well, it's frankly absurd, and smacks of the same kind of party-over-reality logic that the aforementioned side is operating on.
It doesn't matter if 9%, 49%, or 99% of the people choose to follow someone who spits on facts when they don't get him everything he wants: the people asserting that reality is still reality are just as much in the right, no matter who or how many dislike it.
As for the rest, I would think that channeling more people into conspiracy theories (which was the previous status quo) is more harmful.
A woman died yesterday for QAnon.
Here's an amazing suggestion for you: if you don't like someone's opinion, don't watch their videos. Amazing. Super easy to do. Just click that little X button at the top right and move on with your life. No draconian censorship, no 1984 bullshit required. Just walk away.
Adults who can handle contrasting opinions should be allowed to see, read, share, and issue them to their hearts' content. Even if you think they're wrong. It's kind of the whole damned point of free speech, which is being pissed away by childish morons who never understood why people fought and died for it to start with.
I've offered an idea for an experiment that could plausibly lead to a (partial) solution here:
You sound like a high-church advocate getting mad that angry parishioners have started to question the orthodoxy. You should understand that America was founded on that kind of questioning and that kind of rejection of power in favour of open discourse, even by people who are wrong.
> amplified by radicals
Meanwhile the propaganda side is amplified by the people who own the media; ten thousand times louder than any dissident.
I pray this sort of thing just ends up pushing people towards decentralized platforms where they can speak their mind without censors, moderators, and goody-two-shoes apparatchiks complaining about "misinformation". It's so patronizing.
The rest of us will stay secure in our belief that Coronavirus is real, that 5G isn't a government conspiracy, and that Donald Trump lost the election.
Each of those three items have very specific dangerous implications for the people spreading disinfo about them.
Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America. Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
Saying this demonstrates the false dichotomy. I believe all of those things, too. Guess what: I also believe that flyover Americans deserve a shot at the world their forefathers were working toward. Wedges have been put into place to make it difficult to hold a position like this politically; who represents me?
> Seems like an easy wedge to exploit if you were a hostile country looking to conduct psyops on America.
Which country is that, and why make the assumption that it comes from outside your own borders?
> Did you consider the wider security implications of half the country no longer believing in fair elections?
Seems like this is a mandate to produce a more secure election. Shouldn't that make both sides happier? Isn't it possible to believe that the election systems are rife with opportunities for fraud and miscounts? Did you live through the 2000 Gore/Bush election? America can do better.
If I can criticize a tv channel for running dumb shows, then I sure as shit can criticize a website that knowingly chooses to spread lies that predictably get people killed and destabilize democracy.
I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but there is a story behind that analogy — it isn’t bubblebath that hides medieval infants in a washtub’s waste water.
"""Police Chief Robert J. Contee says two pipe bombs and a cooler with Molotov cocktails were also found near Capitol grounds."""
- https://www.fox5dc.com/news/over-50-people-arrested-14-offic...
Normally I consider Fox to be right-wing.
> did you post vociferously about how misinformation started those?
My argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
As it happens, I believe those riots were triggered by people who believe their lives do not matter to the police on the basis of personal experience. You believe I am wrong about that? Sure, ok, now tell me: why does being wrong about that change my argument that misinformation can cause real harm? You consider the BLM riots to be a bigger event, and that it was based on untruths, so tell me: on what basis does your claim mean that I should stop being concerned about mobs being goaded into action by lies?
You don’t need to convince me I’m wrong about the BLM movement to do that.
> The same argument would apply to all riots caused by disinformation regardless of if I recognise the disinformation as false rather than true.
You make a fair point about the misinformation from a purely argument-logic standpoint (both classes of events being spurred on by some amount of misinformation).
The greater gestalt of my argument is that it's asinine to consider any side of the mainstream media in the USA to somehow not be a biased source of misinformation, malicious and deliberate or otherwise. You can pick your side, Fox or MSNBC or anything else, and get the bias you "prefer", but no matter what you're getting bias, denial of reality when it's inconvenient for the narrative, and propaganda designed to spur you into particular thoughts and actions. If you're going to get mad about it for this event, if you're a principled person, you should have been mad about it for prior events too, even if the results don't run in favour of your own priors.
We can fight about the particulars of the situation, or work together to understand how we're being manipulated into arguing about particulars instead of looking at who's manipulating us, how, why, and in what overall direction.
If this was driven by courts, they would have an order to show it.
One side is detached from reality and they happen to have the same political allegiance. Doesn't give any more merit to their claims.
And the thing is, the reality of the situation is so apparent that I don't even have to specify which side I am talking about!
People right of center tend to overestimate how much biological differences matter (versus societal forces), people on the left tend to underestimate it. That's been true for a long time. I don't think either point of view is particularly censored though.
We're talking about censoring outright lies (the kind that the Putin government puts out, say)
And what exactly are you talking about? The women can't do math as well as men? Please do share.
Were you referring to gender or race? Because racism (and ideas of racial supremacy) is not not rooted in science. That would be another right wing conspiracy theory.
It's really hard to have a discussion when the examples you use are so vague.
I swear, the amount of people here blatantly and blindly support everything tech media does is rather interesting. I'd almost say there is a concerted effort here to push a pro-censorship and pro-tech narrative here backed by a political faction.
Oddly enough, you can still say Trump stole 2016 on youtube.
That's the way it always has been everywhere. If you believe otherwise then you're being naive.
There's always a line and it's moved by the platform owner at their will when it suits them. These platforms are a big like cities with eminent domain, most people are aware of it but don't care until the city is taking away their property.
The position of the government is that Trump lost the election.
The position of the sitting president is that he won.
If Trump signed an executive order saying “Actually I won” that would then be him acting as the government, but I suspect that such an order wouldn’t actually succeed and so the position of the government would still, at the end of the day, be Trump losing.
I could say the same thing about your ask that YouTube allow a free-for-all on their platform but that's only because I'm witnessing the logical conclusion here in the US. We have to do something different or these events will repeat themselves.
The way to make the population aware is not through videos that people "MUST SEE!!11". Or typical manipulative ways of steering the masses.
Of course the winners write history, if they were correct or not is in the end "less important" in some ways and more important in others
It's quite literally the seeds to fracturing a society.