Facebook targets “stop the steal” content ahead of Inauguration Day

Seems to me like trump acknowledged his loss and was aiming towards a smooth and none violent transfer of power. De-platforming him was probably the worst thing to do in his supporters eyes.

> It seems a lot of people just refuse to accept things that disgree with their world view and dismiss the source as part of the conspiracy.

More educated people are less likely to do that. Also people who have no financial incentives to propagate such falsehoods are less likely to propagate it.

Flat earther movement is a good example. Some members made a business out of it to advance their personal goals. Like the guy that launched himself in a rocket to "check if earth is flat", but actually just liked lunching himself in rockets and similar things (had history of that), and claimed to believe in flat earth so that gullible people pay his bill.

We can't resign ourselves to defeatism and think that nothing can be done because people are stupid and ideas are toxic. Yes, some people are stupider and some ideas are more toxic then others but we shouldn't let that cloud the simple fact that we allow to exist the multitude of positive force feedbacks that promote more toxic ideas and more stupid people. We should work on those things first.

> I wondered if it'd be possible to make a honeypot website ...

Yes. We should forcibly mix those dumb ideas with solid education on the subject. Confront the two. Debunk one with the other in-place. At many different levels of complexity to reach as many people as possible.

You want to post you antivaxxer theories on facebook? Sure but your readers will get solid science next to it by courtesy of Facebook algorithm instead of ads and crap similar to yours.

There is a lot of critique that people don't read anything besides the headlines and sometimes it's suggested that this is one of the causes for the spread of misinformation. I think that Twitter even warns you before you can retweet something to make sure that you read the entire article, so you don't spread whatever they consider to be false. But there is the same problem with fact-checking. People just search for it, see the headline that it was "debunked" and assume it's not true, without reading through the actual article. Here are some of the examples of articles, that suggest the story is not true, but once you get past the headline, it basically says the opposite:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trump-kee... (https://archive.md/EK0rq)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-suppressed... (https://archive.md/hhWnv)

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president... (http://archive.md/HNgc9)

I don't disagree that it doesn't happen, but it's not always that people just "don't care about the facts". Sometimes it's that these so-called fact-checks are - to put it bluntly - complete garbage. When there were claims about the voter fraud circulating throughout the social media and Facebook and Twitter was putting the warnings on such posts, I happened to actually read those fact-checks, and let me tell you - they weren't good. Most of the time it was either a straw man or it had nothing to do with the actual claim that was being made.

People laugh at conspiracy theorists, but most of them are not any better.

> That’s unrealistic IMO.

Just ambitious. We shouldn't let Facebook off the hook with just letting them delete inconvenient stuff.

We should press them till they pay for their great power by picking up the responsibility of education.

> I can type out a hundred lies faster than you can fact check even one of them.

Yes, but you can't convince people of so many new different stupid things at this rate. Novel lies are rarely the problem. Most dangerous lies are not new. There's nothing new about antivaxxers for example. Trumpism works by the same rules that nazi propaganda worked. Snake oil. Flat earth.

How many new lies of this level of impact can you invent and publish and can you really do it faster than people can correct you if their voices are properly amplified?

> Besides we’ve already seen that facts don’t matter to a lot of people. They don’t care if something is true or not anyways. All they care about is having their world views reaffirmed.

Facts don't matter to them unless they understand them. Truth matters to them immensely. That's why they hold the (wrong) beliefs they hold. They care about being right. What they lack is education in the form and on the level that could reach them. For some of them, providing them with it might be very hard. But you can't give up and just censor whatever. It doesn't work. It didn't work. What works is education.

I'm not saying they were doing it perfectly. But at least they were trying to do something to address the root cause that people are gullible. You can't ban publishing lies because that's what more than half of human culture is. The thing you can and should do is put dangerous lies in factual context.

> There are plenty of nuts who'll happily do this for free.

I really doubt this. Not without somebody constantly shilling them into it.

If anybody has numbers, they'd be very welcome. I don't know how to even start measuring this. But one thing seems to be always the same, those people that get large reactions on social networks do have some amount of paid shills.

> All these actions from platforms is to prevent, limit, curb violence. That's it. There's no grand conspiracy. You're either for non-violence and a civil, reasoning-reasonable society - or you are living in ignorance is bliss and you don't care if there's chaos and the world burns.

I guess these platforms were on "team: chaos and the world burns" throughout the BLM riots, and were on "team: conspiracy theories" throughout the 2+ years of "Russian collusion" coverage.

And if you can't see parallels to this same statement you're making and echos throughout history when someone decides what's OK and not OK to say, I'm not sure what to tell you. Literally every authoritarian could make the case that silencing their opponents is worth it for the greater good.

> Also, no one's freedom of speech has been taken away. These are private platforms, they're not the public space - the internet itself is the neutral platform, likewise these people have other means to communicate. They don't get the automatic right to using the most convenient technology provided by private companies though.

People said this when it was just Facebook / Twitter. Then it's the App Stores on mobile devices, and now we're down to cloud infrastructure providers and payment processors.

That's fine--just be prepared to move your goalposts when people start pressuring ISPs to block the content, because that's what's happening next.

I suspect the logical outcome of this is a Parliamentary system where the President requires the explicit approval of both houses. If the two houses go one way and the presidency the other, the president will be impeached and removed. The Clinton presidency was the dry run for this.

The system is working relatively well - though there can be tweaks; if Biden didn't win then we'd be in a lot more trouble. Trump in fact has allowed the swamp to be cleared as he promised, as we can see the treasonous Republican senators who allowed all of this behaviour to continue by not removing Trump - the House impeached him, then it was the Senate"s job to confirm. Trump exposed the rot, how far they're willing to go, showed us all their true colours that Trump's a wannabe tyrant and the Republican senators are happy to fall in line with that. He's also exposed the flaws in systems that allowed him and others to manipulate Americans for decades. Thankfully Biden won and I believe full out civil war can be avoided now, so long as these systems including the duopoly and mainstream media's ability to lie, to only tell one narrative; the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated as review recommended by Andrew Yang, along with his core policy proposals will adequately counter these problems.

>Why would any president not commit crimes to hold power and then need to keep it within his allies to prevent his prosecution?

It hasn't worked. Trump's chances of holding power would have been greater working within the system. He had his 9/11 moment with COVID and chose to squander it.

I do agree that the executive office has too much power. For a nation that prides itself on having spilled blood to avoid monarchy, The US seems to really want their President to be King/CEO In Chief of the entire government, rather than simply being the head of one of three equal branches of government. The Presidency simply should not be as important as it is.

I think that I would prefer the President have a single six year term, after which they can never hold the office of President or Vice President again. Then at least they would have to spend half of their first term campaigning for a second term. Presidential pardons and executive orders should also either be done away with or should require Congressional approval.

That said, it is surprising how many checks have worked. Most of the chaos Trump has really wreaked has been outside the system, with a band of loyalists willing to help him undermine it. But he's been stopped within the system numerous times, from repealing DACA to getting his wall built to forcing American companies to to his bidding to sending the military in to Portland. He couldn't even get the Supreme Court to rule in his favor over his election lawsuits, and he specifically stacked it for that purpose.

So yes, it's not the best possible timeline, but it's also not the worst, and let's not forget that Trump is a symptom, not the disease. If they had managed to drag Nancy Pelosi bound and, no doubt beaten, out to the gallows and hanged her for whatever imaginary treason, the whole crowd would have cheered it on.

That's the bigger issue American needs to deal with, the effect of two centuries of glorifying and romanticizing the archetypes of the stateless cowboy and revolutionary patriot, and normalizing the pretense of the white American right wing being the just inheritors and righteous executioners of American culture and liberty. And no, I don't believe that and America's desire for Presidential strongmen are at all unrelated. Many, many people have pointed out the stark difference between the government's response to BLM protests in Washington and the Capitol riots. That's also not unrelated.

The real checks and balances we need to work on are societal and cultural. Government is an expression of culture. We got Trump because we wanted Trump. We got chaos and dysfunction because we wanted to throw a brick through the window of the establishment. We got violence because the tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants or whatever. We fear BLM more than we fear neo-nazis because the former threatens the status quo far more than the latter. We'd hate Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton less than we would if they were men.

Maybe at some point we should stop looking for faults in the stars and start looking at ourselves?

Youtube started removing election questioning after the safe harbor deadline in mid-December. There had not been any violence at that point.

And the elephant in the room: Gerrymandering.

You may have noticed that The Squad & Co. has been exhorting violence for 4 years. The violent idiots on the 6th probably just assumed that's how things go now: you lose, you get to be violent now, and the news will quietly sweep it aside and call you peaceful.

This is more of a comment on our broken communication and information apparatus as a species than on anything political.

>the distributed nature of American election

>Their results come from the county level, of which there are over three thousand in the US, many of which are heavily Republican, and each of which is responsible for its own election setup, count, and verification.

>You'd have to convince tens if not hundreds of thousands of election officials and volunteers to participate and cover it up.

Tell that to Al Gore.

Our elections are so "distributed" that every presidential election in the past 50yr or so has comes down to a number of counties you can count on two hands in a number of states you can count on one hand. The election may be distributed but the results in the overwhelming majority of states is a foregone conclusion.

I don't see how anyone can call our (presidential) elections distributed with a straight face. Take Georgia, the example you picked. As usual the rural areas went red, the suburbs went a red or blue shade of purple and the city went blue. At the end of the day the question was whether there was enough blue in the city to exceed the red everywhere else. And this is why there's always a big argument over whether or not a fraction of a percent of inner city voters at the margin are being disfranchised by this or that policy. Basically every state goes down in this manner, albeit that in most of them the proportion between red voters and blue voters is different enough you can be reasonably sure of the results in advance. So the presidential election always comes down to a handful of city counties that will or won't flip their states red/blue based on turnout. (See also, why using gerrymandering to carve up cities to minimize or maximize their representation is such a big problem).

Our elections are "distributed" in name only.

2a. Quite a few of the people alleging "steals" were themselves reelected in those same "stolen" elections. Oddly, they're not contesting their own seats as similarly fraudulent.

I agree with everything except 4, anytime someone says the debate is over I almost automatically take the other side, shutting down discourse is never ok, even when keeping it open costs lives, we need to talk more about things we disagree on, not less. Otherwise we will continue to polarize. I'm also leary of stigmatising phrases like stop the steal or all lives matter even when only 1% of uses are anything but incindiary.

5 I agree with but wonder if we should change it, network news uaed to have an equal time for both candidates thing despite being private. That and what is happening with whatsapp in EU make me think some sort of legal recognition of the effective duopoly facebook and Twitter have.