I think this is a pretty terrible attempt to cater to both sides. Implying that an ongoing election is illegitimate is "against the rules," but saying the current incumbents are illegitimately there is "allowed?" Why?
There's probably a plan to preemptively "warn" that the 2024 election is rigged, then if you know who loses he can say that he's not a sore loser but in fact he warned us all along that it was rigged. We may expect overwhelming psyops to this effect from Nov 9, 2024 to Jan 20, 2025.
Their house, their rules.
I think this change is a bad call, but it’s absolutely their call to make.
anything? bomb instructions? child abuse imagery?
only legal things? legal where?
They are allowing ads to spread false information.
Not just some rando on the web with conspiracy theories. They are taking money to publish disinformation.
Public discourse squarely belongs to the public, and hosting it must be perceived and intended to be a kind of public service; otherwise we can just go back to the good old days of gathering and debating in public squares.
"Public" and "Private" and "Government" mean different things at different times.
In this case I think you mean Public Discourse is not controlled by the Government. And that's where a lot of confusion is coming in.
If you claim an election is "rigged" or "stolen", those scenarios require a culprit. Who rigged the election? Who stole it? A very serious smear is being made that has no basis in reality, and I don't think that kind of defamation is generally allowed just because the parties being defamed are ill-defined.
> While the Federal Trade Commission regulates truth in commercial advertising, the FCC does not do the same for political ads.
> Some have called for a "neutral government regulator" to oversee political speech, but there's no broad, serious movement in Congress for something like that.
> In fact, various courts have repeatedly upheld the First Amendment right of candidates to essentially say what they want on federally regulated broadcast channels. Local broadcast television stations (think ABC, NBC, CBS) can't reject ads, even if they're blatantly false.
Let's entertain this idea: They have much better behavioral and sentiment analysis tools than anyone else (this is why they are so much better at ad targeting! Their ads work and everyone in marketing says are worth this extra cost). And if they knew he will (obviously not certain, just with a high enough probability), wouldn't they try to play a bit safer for him to avoid an immediate retaliation?
Perhaps this is just my ignorance of boxing but I dare say that example didn't enlighten me. I can't think of any case in sports (or elsewhere) where I've seen "rigged" to mean illegal conduct. I thought that's generally called something else, like a foul.
I have no idea whether Trump would be an Authoritarian or not if he wins president again, but propaganda around Jews was why Germany had no issues with death camps being run in their name.
Unfortunately all media is profit driven, with the notable exception of PBS and NPR. At some point you're going to trust someone. My neighbor across the street trusts Fox News, e.g.
Of course I'm aware that the 'rigged' line is typically aimed at the Democrats "rigging" the election since they won - but there is no evidence of that, while there is a plethora of evidence that Republicans rig the heck of out everything they can.
Seems like it would be much better to just ban political advertising.
edit: I dont care about my groupthink points/karma, I truly would like an answer. I dislike both political parties equally and have no skin in the game so please, someone take a stab at an answer to my question.
The 2000 election was essentially decided by the courts based on mostly agreed upon facts. The outcome depended on interpretation of the law.
In the most recent election the facts themselves are not agreed upon and there are many many unsubstantiated allegations.
I can't think of any major company in the US that has been forcibly nationalized in the past 30 years, excluding failed banks.
Even general government advertising projects are extremely profitable for online advertisers since in almost all cases the only metric tracked is how much was spent by the project/department not how effective it was so you can get away with showing it to lower valued traffic(high bot chance for example) and still make the same amount.
They worked at, profited, conveniently left with vested RSUs, and then turn around and try to sell the solutions to a problem they supported. Like taking lung cancer advice from cigarette company scientists.
Such a morally bankrupt company, and only in a bad way bc they wrap up their work in such flimsy ideals.
Republicans in state legislatures submitted 425 bills that would restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states—with 33 of these bills enacted across 19 states so far, by October 2021.
It would seem to me a rather unified reaction to the election. Like as if they may have seen things in their state or other states which indicate they don't believe the election was fair.
Personally, I saw many things which left my perception that this was absolutely not a fair election. Perception is what matters here, not actual results because that's impossible to gauge.
When in Detroit you throw out all republican challengers/observers, lock the doors, and board up the windows. I have no manner of saying they cheated, but the perception is that cheating occurred.
But more importantly, Biden straight up said the Democrats have "most extensive VOTER FRAUD organization” in history." You can watch the original, it's not modified, it's not any sort of deepfake going on.
After he said this, you cannot just brush it off as a verbal gaff or misspeak in that he meant VOTER PROTECTION. Nope, no way. It was upon the entire democratic party to fix the perception. If indeed they don't have an extensive voter fraud organization... it's their responsibility to prove it. They had to prove a negative... or realistically the gaff is that he shouldn't have admitted to it publicly.
Have we completely given up on making a good counter argument instead of disallowing things to be said in the first place?
Suppressing speech has downsides (loss of trust, centralization). Allowing speech also has downsides (misinformation, instigation, hate). How do we decide which is the way forward?
Before the internet, information control and media capture by the state was near total, and lying to the entire population was the default practice.
Could you elaborate on the changes you're taking away from the article that made people wonder about the integrity of the election?
Jesus fucking Christ. If any of you work at any of these places you are part of the problem.
One allegation was that Russia assisted by providing information, basically corruption or collusion, the other allegation is that democracy is dead because votes were literally thrown out.
If not, then we're all fucked.
Hopefully this makes it clear that misinformation control in practice really benefits whoever the platform wants to hedge against being in power with no concern for our own interests.
Here is the ruling if you would like to see what they have been doing: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/23/23-30445-CV0.pd...
Techdirt / Mike Masnick's post about this ruling, the district court's insane prior one, and trying to square the circle of free speech and government coercion:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/5th-circuit-cleans-up-di...
If you add in gerrymandering, it's the truth that most of our elections are "rigged" or "unfair" in a very real sense to anyone who believes in majoritarianism.
I’m aware of the “stop the steal” and dominion nonsense from the right. But what hard evidence exists that the Republican Party rigged the 2020 election?
Destroying equipment the USPS would use to handle the unusually large number of mail-in votes: https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/21/politics/usps-mail-sorting-ma...
All coinciding with a large, engineered, split in pandemic cautiousness about attending in-person voting stalls between the two main parties. There are more examples, gerrymandering is a decades-long one, but most of what I've read & heard about 2020 was about forcing people to wait in long lines or vote in person when that would favor one party over the other.
But of course the last hail mary was to have the fake electors and all that. People will literally do prison time for that. And "tampering" might be part of the description of those crimes somewhere.
I try to push back on using the word "rigged" for these things because A) Just describing the actual things is equally convincing and B) It normalizes that kind of verbiage in political discourse, whereas I think it's definitely better that such verbiage remain kooky. Not endorsing it, just observing a common sentiment.
https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-government-and-poli...
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/republican-mail-b...
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2021/12/13/3-residen...
In short: yes. I haven't given up, nor has everyone. But my experience has been that a shockingly large number of people (possibly even a majority) in the US simply assume bad faith from those with whom they disagree. They aren't even trying to discuss, because they believe that their ideological opponents are unable or unwilling to have a civil discussion. So they are trying to use tools like control of the public square (Facebook in this case) to suppress ideas they believe are dangerous.
I personally believe that this view is quite mistaken. I've had plenty of discussions with people I disagree with, and while we may not have changed each others' minds we at least could walk away with respect for each other at the end of it. But I certainly seem to be in the minority, and that troubles me deeply. Sidestepping discussion in favor of other, more heavy handed, approaches is imo far more dangerous to a democratic society than the ideas that people are trying to suppress in the first place.
On virtually any hot button topic, ready made points, counterpoints, and counter-counterpoints have already been disseminated and tested via the crucible of social media.
I don’t even bother engaging in impromptu debates anymore, because it feels like extremely lame high level chess where everyone knows all possible openers and defenses 72 moves out.
You can argue that the election was fair all you want, but who is going to pay to run all the ads to impress that message on everyone?
It's already the case that clickbait headlines and lies are naturally more engaging, so amplifying them with money seems to drown out any rational counter dialogue.
Right now in the US, the political state has degraded to the point where I this this is a truer statement than anyone wants.
Kinda depends upon the subject. I assume you've never argued with a flat earther or a pizzagate believer. It's a waste of time. You can ignore them or silence them, bringing good counter arguments is gonna be a waste of your time.
This paragraph, from the opening section, seems a fair summary of the work:
> Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.
Indeed, the article describes a non-partisan project staffed by organizers from both major political parties:
> “We had rabid Trump supporters who agreed to serve on the council based on the idea that this is honest,” Wamp [the former GOP legislator] says. This is going to be just as important, he told them, to convince the liberals when Trump wins. “Whichever way it cuts, we’re going to stick together.”
From reading the article, I really don't understand what it's meant to show in the context of the conversation. The claim was that the election is "admitted to have been unfair", but what I see documented is a lot of people working to ensure fairness. What might I be missing?
Well -- maybe. There are limits on free speech, and while the current regime rests on the concept of corporations having Constitutional rights, there's certainly a robust debate as to whether or not that's a reasonable approach.
(I admit, the challenge here is finding a reasonable line to regulate.)
You can't assume the government wouldn't censor based on the exact same criteria.
An entity with control will exercise it.
When it's a private entity there's a theoretical other place you can go. When it's public (government) there is fundamentally no other place you can go.
not sure what is confusing?
your initial comment was:
> Why is a private company calling the shots on speech in a free society to begin with?
so...what should private companies permit to be published, then, if you don't want them doing that?
should they allow absolutely everything? nuclear secrets? gruesome murders?
or just everything "legal"? legal where? the US? which bit? so the lawyers at Facebook need to be enforcing Mississippi's laws on everyone? or just people in Mississippi?
do they have to publish abusive but legal stuff? what about when their advertisers leave in disgust? can they stop then? are advertisers allowed to leave or is that also "calling the shots"?
why do you feel the "free speech" of child murderers to publish their videos is more important than the "free speech" of the sysadmin operating the video hosting platform who doesn't want to spread that?
That doesn't make sense... the fight is rigged (and you're claiming this would be illegal in the fight) because people happened to gamble on it? I've never seen a sport where the legality of a move depends on whether some outsider had gambled on it.
Wouldn't it be the gambling that would be rigged at that point, instead of the fight?
I haven’t looked too much into it though, if someone can add more detail I would be interested too!
Your posts here are a perfect example of why we need to fight disinfo so strongly because people will parrot random things they hear all over the place and by second level it becomes truth to many.
I said that I haven't read this article. I do assert that a) state electoral process is generally decided by the legislature b) leading up to the 2020 election the mail-in ballot option was greatly expanded in many states c) in at least several states, the ballot option expansion was enacted by the executive branch, not the legislative branch, as part of the emergency response.
Which of the above isn't true?
Getting into details, I am not sure exactly how many states were involved in (c), or whether the (c) possibly could have affected the outcome. Figuring these out would require significant analysis. I would have to go state by state and read the electoral process laws, and then find the state by state records of electoral process change, and then cross reference those, etc.
I haven't seen this analysis done anywhere, but I would be grateful if anyone could link such an analysis since I am still curious. It seems like people generally don't get into the details, they just start yelling.
Carl Sagan has a good short story to this effect about a dragon in his garage: http://people.whitman.edu/~herbrawt/classes/110/Sagan.pdf
> Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3...
I think the problem he’s addressing is when people use beliefs in lieu of evidence. Believing the election was rigged is fine, but without evidence you haven’t given Sagan or other evidence-based evaluators reason to believe your claim.
Wrestling is a different beast but boxing is heavily regulated in the US
I asserted that a, b and c are true. I am 100% sure about that. I have not asserted anything beyond those in this thread (or elsewhere). If you can rebut a, b, or c I would be very interested, since I prefer to become more right over time.
In order to make a stronger claim than I am making, I would need to do more work. Where that work isn't "looking things up on the internet", it's "performing professional level legal analysis".
Beyond that, as you say, would require legal analysis and courts, and there has been a lot of hand wringing and not much legal analysis and the courts have mostly ignored the issue.