Elections misinformation policies
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How can we have an informed electorate when misinformation (whether intentional or not) is allowed to propagate? We know at this point that incendiary content tends to spread faster than the often-boring truth. Turning a blind eye is a race to the bottom that encourages political parties and those with an agenda to create more of this misleading content.
They give a list so you have some guidelines. Ultimately, you can argue with the guidelines and generally agreed-upon facts, and I'm sure many will.
The lab leak theory was misinformation at one point. Wearing masks was misinformation at one point.
The problem with censorship is that no man is fit to play the censor.
1A proponents need to understand that there's a grey area between outright incitement to violence and otherwise. Within that grey area lies conspiracy theories and hate speech which can motivate actual harmful and illegal activity downstream if these ideas become sufficiently widespread. It's plausible that the unmoderated hate speech on 8chan motivated numerous lone wolf shooters, given how many manifestos have been posted there.
While we may want this speech to be legal (I largely do), we should not want to voluntarily assist in the spreading of this speech above and beyond the legal requirements of 1A. Anti-1A sentiment is growing on the political left and that sentiment isn't totally invalid if we zoom into specific examples of speech motivating heinous outcomes. So nipping a real problem in the bud with private self-regulation seems to be the least slippery slopey outcome of them all.
That statement, if you stop to think about what it means for all other freedoms, should genuinely scare you. Freedom only matters if it includes the right to offend others. Anything less isn't freedom at all.
If you genuinely believe in the principles of freedom, you will trust that the free exchange of all ideas - good and bad, right and wrong - is the best and only way to bring out the truth.
All of this hearkens back to dark ideas in which one class of people exercise power over another. Remember what they say about power.
I don't believe this to be true. I only think the 1A is a good idea because it's too easy for an authoritarian government to co-opt speech restrictions. The free exchange in itself isn't what I care about.
People on the whole are pretty stupid, tribal and irrational creatures. I see no reason why a free exchange of ideas can't sometimes lead to a fascist or communist state if certain ideas get enough social contagion.
That's a fair observation, and making freedom a right comes with a host of risk and peril. But isn't that where the criticality of learning from history comes into play? Furthermore, name one dictator or authoritarian regime whose rise to power wasn't predicated on the necessity of government intervention and rule to protect the people. Everyone from Nero to Boneparte to Hitler to Chavez all claimed the mantle of necessity and greater good, and look where they all led.
The back-and-forth balance between freedom and containment of bad ideas can be tricky, but if you think you'll solve the problem of future authoritarianism through present-day authoritarianism, I don't know what to say.
You probably already agree that person A shouldn't be allowed to incite direct violence against person B. The thing is, hate speech laws for example aren't categorically different, since hate speech by A can lead to violence against B downstream. It's purely a difference in degree, difficulty to get right, and slippery slope risk.
I've thought about the case of Hitler and am unsold either way. On the one hand, the Weimar Republic had hate speech laws, and so in this N=1 they weren't effective at preventing the outcome they were supposed to prevent. On the other hand, it could be argued that such laws were merely too lenient. Hitler was genuinely popular and got 43 percent of the vote through mostly unfettered speech. He convinced people that his regime was a good idea. So this is a demonstration to me that unfettered speech can actually lead to the kind of outcomes that anti-1A people fear. Overall I just don't know enough about that history to say.
They are only pro speech when it comes to misinformation and fake news that their side falls victim too, much more than the left.
If no one was defending the takedowns, then that means people generally weren't in favor of them
I'll readily agree that we often argue about principles when it's our own content or people involved, and I see hypocrisy on both the left and the right.
But I have to give it to libertarians when it comes to consistent application of principles, even and especially when the specifics of a situation make them unpopular among the left or right. Conservatives find offense in the libertarian position on drug policy and media censorship of sex and violence. Leftists find offense in the libertarian position on economic policy, welfare, and immigration. Both sides find things to be offended about in their views on foreign policy. You know you're doing something right when you offend both ends of the political spectrum at the same time.
Regardless, if you read the GP's post, they're saying 'words' should never be banned. So I don't see the making an exception for even the kind of violent speech that you stated. Where were these free speech absolutists back then when their personal misinformation and racist speech wasn't being affected, but others' was?
Makes me doubt their principles.
Is that really the side you want to root for?
Freedom of speech - not only as a legal value but an ethical one - is the only basis on which we can avoid letting a dominant voice shut out unloved truths.
If you want me to ask a similarly misleading line of questioning based only on trying to draw false equivalence from principles: Currently Youtube is self-censoring porn. Is the side of "youtube should become a porn site" really the side you want to root for?
> False equivalence is a logical fallacy in which an equivalence is drawn between two subjects based on flawed or false reasoning.
Are you suggesting Youtube, a media company, and Hollywood, a collection of media companies, are somehow not comparable?
So? We know more about it now, so the earlier wild claims without evidence or proof were definitely misinformation at the time, intended to deflect blame from the ineptness of the politicians in power in feb 2020.
Seriously?!? If the lab leak discussion had been suppressed just a little bit more, would we even be talking about it today?
Wrong ideas have always existed and always been part of life. From a pile of wrong ideas, a few right ones emerge.
I'm old enough to remember well the plethora of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Some of them were quite offensive to the people who suffered and died on that day. But I never called for suppression of free speech because of it.
Little has changed since then aside from Trump being voted out which then freed up the political left to consider this possibility in its discourse.
I would rather ten true facts be censored than let one piece of misinformation go free.
/s
It's not up to youtube to define what is Misinformation, if they even have a little tiny pretense of being a platform and not a publisher.
We've already seen how devastating misinformation can be; however, I still tend to err on the side of freedom of speech.
I don't want widespread misinformation, but who gets to decide what that is?
Misinformation can cause people to not get vaccinated or storm the capital building...
As much as we'd like to think people are "deciding" anything, it's simply not the case. They just take what they hear as fact because they believe the source is trustworthy.
No, they take what they hear as fact if they believe the source is trustworthy. So how do we determine which sources are trustworthy? Who decides that? And how are they held accountable when they're wrong?
These are very serious questions which need to be answered before I can support any effort to filter out misinformation.
And to go back to the bomb-on-a-plane comparison, there is one key difference between that and something like election conspiracies. The person who yelled "bomb" is only penalized if they were knowingly wrong - something that's generally pretty easy to prove when it comes to bombs and fires. They aren't prevented from saying "bomb" in the first place and they aren't reprimanded until it's known that they were lying.
I agree, this is exactly my hesitation I pointed out in my original post.
So life is just a harm reduction optimization problem that governments and/or megacorps need to solve? In that case install a king that takes away all freedom in exchange for drastically improved harm reduction.
The potential harm caused by this solution is enormous, but many people are content with it simply because that harm hasn't been realized yet and it makes their lives a little less uncomfortable in the short term. If we're lucky, someone will implement a better solution before this blows up on us.
But now Google is in charge of deciding which is which. Tech barons deciding what the truth is can't be good for democracy either.
What's bad for democracy is when elections are not auditable. That's why in many countries people do it the old fashion way, with paper balots, ID, and in person, with citizens watching the counting process. Anything else is just prone to be manipulated sooner or later.
What if the election was indeed stolen? You must accept the results? Do you just accept the results no matter what? It seems like you have to do that because it's bad for democracy otherwise right?
Lets say you accept the results, but what do you do in the face of probably a stolen election?
Isn't it over 50% of US states changed/updated their election rules since this last election? I guess actions speak louder than words. I don't know if I have seen so many states agree they needed to fix something so universally and so quickly. Politicians rarely work so quickly.
I for one welcome our new Silicon Valley free speech gate keepers.
Remember the old Soviet joke about there not being news in Pravda, nor being truth in Izvestia? The harder the censor squeezes, the more this becomes applicable to them.
Either roll your own server or get an account on some Peertube instance, use Odysee, use whatever distributed platform you care but do not rely on any of these centrally controlled organs to do your bidding - they listen to another master. Use Youtube (et al) as a content distribution network if you want, referring to your primary channel on that Peertube (etc) instance if you want but try your best not to become dependent on them. The more people do this and the more content is blocked by the censors, the easier it becomes to show the discrepancy between what there is to know and what they want you to know - or not know. This was true for Pravda and Izvestia, it may become true for Youtube-Google/Twitter/Facebook-in-its-many-guises/etc.
> * Any past U.S. Presidential election
> * The 2021 German federal election
I don't ascribe to election stealing myths; but my god, listing them out specifically really makes me question whether I'm wrong. It's like a blueprint for what to review further.
Illegal but not election fraud.
Why? Something going viral on social media is not proof or evidence that it happened or not. And as you know, without these policies anyone can spread false information about any election for any reason they want.
And the thing is: we know who won those elections. This is not a matter of dispute, it's legal fact. It's great to review things and to theorize about what would have happened if elections were run differently (there was a lot of this around the 2000 US election for example) but just saying something like "the election was fraud, Gore really won" is egregiously false and does nothing besides undermine the democratic process.
Yes, it is a legal and historical fact these elections had a certified winner.
This misses the point, though. If the integrity of the election is in question, then let people discuss it.
Perhaps, in due time, the consensus will eventually shift and historians will recognize some underhanded things took place. We now know the 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy election is suspect because of Chicago/Illinois. We know that there were major discrepancies in Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Texas Senate primary. It’s all pretty well documented at this point. People who “voted” for LBJ signed affidavits that they never voted in the runoff and yet ballots were cast in their name. Sure, it does no good to declare that Nixon really won, or that Coke Stevenson should have been Senator. But it does mean the election process is vulnerable to fraud and needs reform or oversight.
But you may want to be careful with statements like "We now know the 1960 Nixon vs. Kennedy election is suspect". The election is not suspect and the end results (Kennedy won) are not going to change. It was settled decades ago. Specific events like you mention might have been suspect, but the election itself was not, it was settled legally according to the way the system worked at the time.
>the election process is vulnerable to fraud and needs reform or oversight
But that's the thing though, just this saying this on social media in the context of any election is not meaningful and can cause harm, and is causing harm. Every election has statistical oddities, errors, disputes, recounts, and other issues. All of these mentioned election processes already do have oversight and formal reform procedures in place. That's all a normal and expected part of the process. It's a constant ongoing process to improve them. We can never make a perfect system so each election year we just do our best and then resolve the resulting legal disputes in the traditional manner. That's the way the system works.
From my point of view, “settled” does not mean the issue has been decisively proven or disproven. More often than not I see “settled” as meaning “nothing can be done about it”. Especially in terms of fraud and organized crime.
If you really dig into the 1960 election there are a ton of discrepancies and oddities that were investigated by partisan committees or had suspects end up having all charges against them dropped. In the 1948 Senate example, the SCOTUS case about the discrepancies was not taken up on jurisdiction grounds. So in that sense, no true ruling was ever made about the challenges in the case. But it is considered “settled” all the same.
>”In 1990, Robert Caro said, "People have been saying for 40 years, 'No one knows what really happened in that election,' and 'Everybody does it.' Neither of those statements is true. I don't think that this is the only election that was ever stolen, but there was never such brazen thievery." Caro said that Johnson was given the votes of "the dead, the halt, the missing and those who were unaware that an election was going on"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_Senate_el...
>does not mean the issue has been decisively proven or disproven
Yeah you're technically right but the point is: that doesn't matter to the election. It's of historical interest only, you can't use it to try to prove that an election didn't happen the right way because our system doesn't work like that. Elections aren't decided based on an investigation that happened 60 years in the future, if that was the case then we could never have an election because we'd have to wait 60 years for the results.
That’s not quite what I’m getting at. The reason why I’m pointing to these 60+ year old elections is because people aren’t as emotionally charged about those elections in particular.
Elections can indeed be decided in the here-and-now, but the integrity questions still remain. That’s the key.
I feel like too many people are declaring the suspicions as moot and settled without actually looking taking the time and effort to investigate fully and properly. Emphasis on the fully and properly, because in the historical examples as well as the more recent examples, I see investigations being dismissed along partisan lines or because the courts did not want to get roiled in a constitutional crisis or a political revolt.
For those previous elections? No, they don't. The elections themselves are settled. You are asking questions about something different which is future elections, that's an entirely different question and it's a mistake to conflate them entirely with past elections.
>I feel like too many people are declaring the suspicions as moot and settled without actually looking taking the time and effort to investigate fully and properly
I really wish you would stop coming at it from this angle, it's not a productive way to look at things. The suspicions are moot and are settled by the courts. That is a fact. The elections are over. No amount of investigation is going to change the results of those past elections. No matter how many more people you get to investigate this, it isn't going to change it. An investigation could change future elections, but we would only know about that if an investigation was conducted during the period of time when it's legally allowed to happen.
And just to make it clear, there is nothing wrong with having suspicions about holes in an electoral process and discussing what we can do about it. Where you going into bad territory is when you slip in things like "there are open integrity questions" and "the election needs more investigation and isn't settled" and other things that are sowing doubt about the validity of the whole process. In the best case, those statements are misleading, and in the worst case, they're completely false. We may not like that some concerns are dismissed for partisan reasons but you're leaving out how in a lot of cases, that is completely legal and is the system working as intended. I'd love to fix this too but engaging in this type of rhetoric on social media is not going to help there.
If there’s election fraud going on, it literally does not matter because they found a way to get away with it.
All suspicions are moot. The system has been designed to be investigation-resistant and I just have to accept that. Because, again, it is literally settled and utterly futile to look into these things.
It’s also a vicious cycle. It’s pointless to investigate past elections, and upcoming elections - if contested - won’t be investigated because all the past elections turned out just fine. We didn’t go looking for fraud, and we know that our elections have virtually no fraud because we didn’t find any.
The practical effect is, no matter what vulnerabilities and exploits can exist in our elections, none of that matters because you’re not allowed to look into it.
Actions speak louder than words. More than half the US states have updated their election laws after that election.
The winner of the election in question publicly admitted to "the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics" That needs much more explaining than has been provided.
By Biden's own words, he's the most popular US president in history. This isn't Trump, this is Biden who created this problem.
It only looks like it's real when you're banned from talking about it.
Even worse, the left is pushing very hard to censor any and all information about elections getting hacked. That may or may not be the right solution - I don't know and I don't care. However, if there is any election fraud in 2024 on the part of the GOP, no matter how obvious or visible, the left will have an extremely difficult time convincing anyone that it took place unless they hard-180 on their election fraud stances here.
[0]https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/93385-can-the-voti...
Hard-180s are done all the time, people usually can't remember claims of politicians more than 8 years back. When Trump won there was a significant portion of the left crying election fraud due to "Russian interference". A significant portion of the left claimed Trump "stole" the election from Hillary. The party roles have now reversed, nothing to see here, the roles will surely flip again whenever a party doesn't like the outcome of an election.
I'm not saying any elections were hacked or fraudulent, but how does YouTube determine which claims are true or false?
They will contact the Ministry of Truth
Video: “Mail in ballot discrepancies (In Russia)”
Clearly if you're a candidate and know a report is going to come out showing some questionable conduct you need only anonymously publish it yourself as the result of a purported "hack", and youtube will apparently suppress it.
Multiple generations of Americans worked tirelessly to create a neigh absolute immunity for the press and, subsequently, internet platforms to publish material, even illegally obtained, that shines light on our government and our politicians. A right not exercised is a right lost.
No doubt big tech would suppress it if their buddies in DC asked them to.
That hasn't stopped the losers from continuing to claim that there must have been fraud.
There is an algorithm but it's less malicious than you might think.
Apple recently developed a feature for its phones to detect when its users are depressed - just one more baby step and phones could detect when its users are misinformed. And then the phone could do subtle things to manipulate the user into being less misinformed, for example by serving pro-vaccination links when the user searched for anti-vax articles. In this way we will achieve a utopia where everyone is informed and united in thought and purpose.
YouTube (Google) will never change.
Is that you Hillary?
This reads to me like - "do not dig / publish dirt on candidates". Well I'd prefer for government people to stick to their own mantra that they are trying to impose on us: if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. Do not do anything that "may interfere with democratic processes" in a first place.