If they had just left it alone, maybe attached the standard "this might be false" disclaimer, it would likely have passed as yet another partisan thing, but now they've gone and infused it with a bunch of power it didn't have prior.
I think after the election we will have completely forgotten about this conduct while we still have to live with the spying on innocent people, non-sense travel restriction, and human-rights violating immigration system for years to come.
Making a scene of this decision just seems like stirring a storm inside a teacup, all the while we are experiencing a hurricane from the patriot act.
But we can discuss violations of what it is widely regarded should be universal human rights.
Here's a list of some that I consider should be universal human rights, which are often violated by immigration systems:
- The right of young children to be with their parents
- The right of spouses to be together and start a family
- The right to get married
- The right to legal due process, including appeals and representation
- The right to work for essentials for survival such as food, shelter and medicine
- The right to enter private transactions for things like shelter
- The right to access the prevailing currency system (basic banking in the modern world)
- The right to leave an abusive job, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to leave an abusive relationship, without enduring serious harm caused by the state if you do
- The right to stay in the country where you were born, raised and have never known anywhere else
- The right to vote in the country where you were born and raised
- The right to protection and safety when talking to the police about a crime where you are a victim or witness
This statement might be technically true in legal terms (I am not a lawyer so I don’t know), but there is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1], ratified by all 193 members of the United Nations. That is a good place to start. Additionally the UN has more in depth declarations (e.g. Convention on the Rights of the Child[2]; which my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them).
1: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
2: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CRC.aspx
---
PS. I truly encourage everyone to read the Declaration of Human Rights[1] in their native language. It is such a beautiful read and gives you a sense of shared humanity. It is not that long, and has over 500 translations. In my native language the translation is really clear and easy to follow.
> my native country of Iceland came within 5 minutes of breaking a month ago but the children were safely hid from the authorities who were going to unjustly deport them
A fine example answer to "How does the immigration system violate human rights?"
It begins with a legal dilemma: E.g. asylum is a human right, but how to determine who is eligible? In a timely manner that is. Especially if you have thousands of applicants and (almost) no documents. How do you house people in the meantime? What rights do they have?
Well, if it's a human right, then everyone. But it's not, which is why you have this twisted logic.
There is no right to freely cross borders.
Just as any bird has the "right" to go wherever it wants and any other animal hat the right to go wherever it wants, I have the natural right to go wherever I want.
I'm a free human. As I'm born on this planet, it's my right to go wherever I want to go on this planet.
That governments want to take away that right of mine, that liberty, is just one example of how governments are using the tyranny of power to force people to their will.
That governments are just the thugs with the best weapons is just Realpolitik. This still doesn't invalidate my right to freely cross borders. I never signed away these rights.
Though I might be stupid to try to exercise it.
Remember your rights are my responsibility. They don't work in a vacuum nor can you make up your own rules.
It means everyone has a right to put in a claim to asylum and have it assessed properly by the authorities.
> There is no right to freely cross borders.
In some circumstances, yes there is.
If there's a war in country A, and non-combatants flee to neighbouring country B out of genuine necessity for safety, yes that border crossing is widely regarded as a human right.
It derives from the basic right to life.
Doesn't mean country B will respect it.
Immigrant have no right to just live in another country, refugees fleeing war have that right as long as the danger remains.
Asylum is a human right https://ijrcenter.org/refugee-law/ https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ Article 14
But regardless if that is right or not, siblings have pointed out that open borders are in fact common-place in many parts of the world today, e.g. EU and USA’s internal borders are open. And (as sibling has also pointed out) historic precedent or existing examples are not necessary to justify any belief. Abolishing slavery did not need a historic precedent, neither did gay rights, and theoretically neither does open borders.
Doesn't that always happen step by step, with "early adopters" arguing on grounds of morality and other arguments, until eventually enough people start to believe something has a high moral value and should be raised to the level of a human right, enshrined in law?
Those who would argue for open borders as a human right are like "early adopters" of that idea.
We would all fit easily on Iceland, but most would die of dehydration or starve in a short amount of time.
I could be an early adopter of "cheese for everyone", but I would need to get a lot of cheese first to make that happen.
That said a world wide safety net would be a good thing to advocate for on moral grounds, no?
The EU has open borders for all EU citizens, and for the most part it's faring ok. There has not been a Europe-wide social safety net crisis as a result of this freedom, and crucially for this argument: there isn't an EU wide social safety net. It has freedom of movement without a universal safety net.
The USA's states are effectively countries. All USA citizens have open borders to travel between states in the USA. For the most part, it's faring ok and there has not been a USA-wide social safety net crisis caused by this freedom either.
Iceland and cheese for everyone: That sounds like what's called the slippery slope fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
That was set with our Constitution, and thoroughly tested in the 1860s. The idea has never really been seriously tested again since.
It’s a quite different setup from the EU.
I don't know. I think the people that are going to believe these kinds of stories at face value would have found this story on their own regardless. It is not like the NY Post is some obscure paper. It may make this story stronger with those that are already inclined to believe this stuff.
I think by this time people have already made their decision on whom they are going to vote and they will use any story that agrees with their decision as proof that they are right.
IIRC Trump was impeached for supposedly threatening to withhold foreign aid from Ukraine unless they investigated this incident.
Several governments and other organizations were concerned because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma properly, having laid the investigation he inherited from his predecessor dormant. The demand to fire him wasn't something that Joe Biden came up with himself out of the blue, and at the end of the day it was most likely to Burisma's detriment.
It's not an impeachable offense to threaten to withhold foreign aid for valid reasons that further the interests of the United States. It was (and should be) an impeachable offense to illegally withhold aid that was already meant to have been delivered, and to do so for personal gain.
They just said they checked his calendar and could find no such meeting, then later backpedaled and said they couldn't discount the possibly that it happened and just wasn't on the official schedule.
The computer repair guy’s story is just comically implausible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
You want a real corruption scandal? How about the $10 million bribe paid to the Trump campaign by a state-owned Egyptian bank right before the 2016 election (and immediately after candidate Trump met privately with President Sisi). Which the DOJ never finished investigating because Trump-appointed officials instructed them not to. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/politics/trump-campaign-donat...
It tells you that the story is being maneuvered for political advantage, because obviously. It tells you nothing at all about whether or not it's true.
What this story demonstrates more than anything is that Giuliani and Trump are getting pathetically desperate, because it is looking likely they will lose and both are facing significant criminal liability once they aren’t shielded by the Barr DOJ’s position that a GOP president enjoys absolute impunity and by the pardon power (which has already been corruptly used to let other Trump henchmen off the hook for crimes committed in his name).
If Twitter et al really want to be public resources they need transparency in their decision making and possibly independent oversight. If they want to just be regular businesses they need to take responsibility for the bullshit they propogate.
Straddling these two lanes hasn't been working for society and it seems like regulation or breakups are close to inevitable.
Maybe we’re all looking at it wrong, maybe a civil war increases shareholder value for Facebook? Because the way they went about this is another escalation. Nothing drives engagement like military engagements, right?
Here is a good example. Right wing media likes to point at the homelessness problem in CA and claim that that is proof that Democrats are bad at governing. The homeless issue is a fact, supported by data. And CA being a Democratic state is also a fact supported by data. But pointing to both those facts and claiming it as proof that Democrats==bad is a bad faith argument. Blue states have higher GDP, higher levels of education attainment, and lower poverty rates than red states. And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars. I could make a similarly bad faith argument, and point out that West Virginia has the highest number of opioid overdoses per capita, therefore Republicans==bad. But I don't need to do that because the statistics that most reasonable people would agree to use as an arbiter of state level success are already in agreement with my position.
As you can see from the length of the above paragraph. These bad faith arguments require a decent amount of effort and/or knowledge to effectively counter. So as we move into this post-fact world, can you really blame people for just sticking to the 'narratives'?
This is just filter bubbles and various cognitive biases. Stories from any cable news network are regularly full of major holes, which you overlook when they're on "your side" because you're not invested in finding fault with them.
Stephen Colbert's perception of reality has a known liberal bias.
> And homelessness is a weird metric to use as it is partially a by product of regional economic success, where a good job market coupled with an overheated housing market results in an increasing number of people willing to tough it out on the streets or in their cars.
But the overheated housing market is the criticism, and is completely valid. California is correctly criticized for letting housing costs get so bad that people who are making twice the US median income are nonetheless sleeping in their cars.
And California may be the worst, but it is actually a problem which is more severe in blue states than red states on average. Housing costs more in NYC than Austin, and more in Chicago than Charlotte, despite having a lower median income.
So sticking to the "narratives" doesn't get you there. It causes you to ignore the problems in your own back yard. You have to look at the facts, even when they're inconvenient, and admit it when it's your team making a mistake.
Everyone is wrong about some facts. Surely I'm wrong about some facts, as I'm not omniscient.
However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts. Some people are clearly more often wrong about facts than others.
When half the country disagrees with the other half as to who that is, I'm not sure "clearly" is the right word to use.
And if you don't entertain the possibility that it could be you, it will be you.
Nearly 48% of the electorate did not vote for either major party candidate. The two parties are both very much minorities. There aren't simply two sides to every story.
There's actually significant ideological diversity within each of the two major parties, though there are certainly attempts by powerful people on both sides to stamp out any dissent.
And assuming that everybody who didn't show up to vote isn't associated with a tribe is just... you can do better than that.
That's not a thing I said.
I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil. The enthusiastic party voters are a subdivision of the minorities. Indeed many votes are more defined by what they're against than what they're for.
Then it's not obvious what you meant to imply by bringing up the voter turnout rate.
> I also don't assume that everyone who did show up to vote is associated with a tribe. A lot of people just plug their noses while filling out the ballots for the lesser evil.
But none of this is really addressing the original point, which is that the red tribe and the blue tribe are of approximately equal size, and their members are not at all in agreement as to who the liars are.
Is the best policy to combat climate change a carbon tax which is refunded to the population, or a WPA-style "Green New Deal"? According to most economists it's the former, according to AOC it's the latter.
School choice programs have a strong record of giving low income families with children in failing public schools a better alternative, but public school teachers unions are a large Democratic voting block and major campaign donors, so they have a perverse incentive to oppose such programs even when they're succeeding, e.g. by shutting down the popular one in D.C.
Immigration has a multifaceted economic effect. High skill immigration tends to bring domestic economic benefits, because the immigrants spend much of the money in the domestic economy and pay more in taxes than they consume in services. Low skill immigration tends to have the opposite effect, and to suppress wages for unskilled labor or increase unskilled domestic unemployment. If you combine the two the total effect is positive, because the former effect is larger. But the Democratic party has a stronger incentive to promote the latter, because unskilled immigrants from socialist-leaning countries are more likely to vote for Democrats, so they regularly conflate the two and adopt policies that promote the latter, even if it harms the domestic population.
You can undoubtedly find some Republican to argue that all immigration is bad and some Democrat to argue that a carbon tax would be a good answer to climate change, but there remains much wrongness on both sides. The filter bubbles show people who live on one side or the other the reasons why some subset of the other side is wrong and not the reasons why some subset of their side is wrong. It creates an impression that isn't true.
Even the premise is basically nonsense. If one Republican says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change is a hoax, does that mean Republicans are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because it is real? We know which one will be on CNN. If one Democrat says we should have a carbon tax and another says that climate change will cause human extinction in twelve years without a Green New Deal, does that mean Democrats are right because we should have a carbon tax or wrong because humans won't go extinct if we don't immediately raise taxes to 75% and spend the money on government windmills? You know which one will be on Fox.
Start with something simple: the in-person attendance and TV viewership of the President's inauguration. This is completely irrelevant to policy and has no long-term implications whatsoever. Yet somehow it became a major "partisan" controversy, when it was never controversial in the past for Presidents of any party. Of course crowd size estimation isn't a perfect science, but this particular controversy had nothing to do with science. And if you're going to tell me the problem there was "both sides", I'll have to disagree.
This is just one example of extreme reality denial. What makes it notable is again that the dispute was of no particular importance in the grand scheme, and yet reality was still vehemently denied.
I mean, this kind of shit comes right out of George Orwell, where the test of party loyalty is how you can make yourself believe things that are obviously false.
What was the attendance at Lincoln's inauguration? FDR's? Who knows. Who cares! The only person who truly cared was Donald J. Trump himself. But Republicans have been primed to take anything critical of what he says as a partisan attack by the "liberal media". Every fact, no matter how trivial, is now a political controversy.
The issue is that they both do it. For example, the left made quite a kerfuffle about "Trump" separating families at the border, but the truth is the separation policy was preexisting and what changed was only how many detentions there were when he started to detain everyone crossing the border illegally. They also like to play word games, like saying "no existing policy of separating all families crossing the border illegally" which is intentionally misleading when what changed wasn't the separation of those in detention but rather the detention of everyone crossing the border illegally.
Which isn't even to say that family separation was a good policy, but the persistent implication that it was a policy established under Trump is ridiculous and politically-motivated.
No, that's not the issue. That's never been the issue. As I said much earlier:
"Everyone is wrong about some facts." "However, this does not imply that everyone is equally wrong about the facts."
There's neither time nor space here to numerically compare mistruths of the 2 major parties. I would just like to see acknowledgment of the general principle that 2 groups of people can be ignorant in some ways while having very different levels of ignorance. For example, compare high school children and elementary school children. Generally speaking, high schoolers have a lot more knowledge than grade schoolers, and yet high schoolers still have quite a bit of ignorance. The 2 groups are not at all equal. This is a very common situation, and "both sides are wrong about things" is not a useful description of that situation.
Where you see gaps are in discrete issues that are highly politicized, such as climate change and COVID. In those areas, valid differences in policy approaches get muddled together with differences in facts.
Left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias takes this on in the context of climate change in his new book: https://www.aei.org/economics/the-case-for-one-billion-ameri...
He explains that according to experts, climate change will be “like really bad, but not that bad” such that the solution is to take steps to address it while continuing to grow the economy. He explains that the people who think we’re all going to die from climate change (folks on his own side) are probably wrong.
> Taking those problems seriously means investing in solving them, not telling ourselves, “Well, we’re just going to whittle the population down, or somehow everybody’s going to go live in a shack in a hillside there.”
> Still, it is a fundamental difference in worldview. Some people are very driven by a pastoralist notion that we can conserve our way to solving the problem. A billion Americans is not about that. It is about a bigger, richer, more dynamic society.
The facts around climate change are complicated and when it trickles down into the political sphere it tends to get cast in binary terms, because that’s the nature of public political debate. The reality is nuanced: https://reason.com/2019/04/05/rep-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-i...
> According the report: "Under the no-policy baseline scenario, temperature rises by 3.66°C by 2100, resulting in a global gross domestic product (GDP) loss of 2.6%," as opposed to 0.3 percent under the 1.5°C scenario and 0.5 percent under the 2°C scenario. In the baseline 3.66°C projection, the estimate of future GDP losses ranged from a low of 0.5 percent to a high of 8.2 percent. In other words, if humanity does nothing whatsoever to abate greenhouse gas emissions, the worst-case scenario is that global GDP in 2100 would be 8.2 percent lower than it would otherwise be.
There is a legitimate argument that a Green New Deal type solutions that involve a WWII-style economic mobilization would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science. (Note the EU’s Green Deal has a price tag that’s one-sixth of the price tag for the Green New Deal as proposed.)
Of course by the time this filters into the public debate, it gets reduced to “climate change isn’t happening” versus “we have a 12 year expiration date.” And on both sides, the understanding of the actual science case be very shallow. I know college-educated people who say they won’t have kids because of climate change. This is either pretextual, or pretty misinformed about what scientists think will happen. A lot of people don’t really care about the facts, they just repeat what people on “their team” say.
In terms of bad faith/good faith arguments. One can argue in good faith, that the large amounts of uncertainty associated with the climate models means that the worst case outcomes can not be definitively ruled out and therefore humanity should plan for the worst case scenario as a precautionary measure. And based on this argument, made in good faith, and also based on the fact that it has been extremely difficult to get the necessary global political buy-in to actually make any progress on the problem, one could justify being extremely alarmist about the problem.
I will give you credit though, for attempting to make a good faith argument for why climate change alarmism might be overblown. But I think you fail to acknowledge the large uncertainties involved with climate modeling, and you are also ignoring some of the more alarming risks that were well with in the realm of possibility based on the models. And I also think your economic argument is just flat out wrong. WWII mobilization was followed by some of the most prosperous decades in US history.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/world-... [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-climate-repor...
But despite all of the complexities in the science, I think people have missed the human element. The hundreds of thousands of people that have already died from climate change, such as: the increase in tropical cyclones, the crop failures which sparked the Syrian civil war, the mass migration therefrom which has sparked the rise of nativism and right populism in Western democracies, expansion of harmful insects into environments that used to be too cold to support them that cause fires or famines, and the water shortages worldwide which add economic stress to the people. None of these things are directly attributable to climate change, but collectively they set a story that we're already in the middle of a climate disaster.
Will we all die? No. But the mass death and destruction is already around us. And if we keep burning fossil fuels, it can only get worse.
> would be worse for the economy than just letting climate change happen, at least based on the current science
Uhm, I don't think peoples primary concern about climate change is that it may hurt the economy somewhat?
Homeless is not a weird metric to use. It's absolutely a failure of government in the worst possible way. Democrats deserve all the criticism in the world for tolerating that situation.
Still, you're correct that there is bad faith: the bad faith is that Republicans care about homelessness, which they generally do not either.
Democrats deserve criticism for the failures of Democratic-controlled governments, and Republicans deserve criticism for the failures of Republican-controlled governments. In my opinion, they're both bad. Are they "equally bad"? Maybe not, but I won't accept that homelessness is a weird metric. There's a lot of bad faith is ignoring one's own faults.
This doesn't really give the impression of actually deeply caring about homelessness...
I agree with this. The Constitution is outdated in the extreme. We're long overdue for something new.
> A divorce is coming and it’s better for everyone if it’s peaceful when it happens.
A divorce? I don't think that's going to work. Who gets custody of Wisconsin?
Some warlord from Michigan?
You can make a pretty decent argument that this is already happening.
Actual police mostly have better procedures for this sort of thing, but still sometimes get the wrong guy or go to the wrong address. Somehow I doubt such groups will do better than them.
Which could, if you ask me, be a risk in case trump wins but it is rather clear that the election was fradulent (not saying it will be, but let's assume for the arguments sake it was). In which case the military would have to decide which "president" to follow, or to follow congress, or the senate, or someone else. Which could tear the military appart, let alone to speak of the national guard.
Anything short of a clear landslide for one of the two candidates is going to result in a seriously tense/chaotic situation. Best to hunker down and hope the civilians sort their shit out before giving an order you know is going to result in a lot of resentment and formerly good, dependable people being locked up for insubordination (best case), or entire organizations dissolving in an orgy of mutiny, violence, and/or desertion (worst case).
As far as a split goes, it wouldn't be "clean." Unlike in the 19th century, individual units aren't constituted from people drawn from the same geographic area. There's a centralized bureaucracy managing personnel, so most units really are a cultural melting pot made up of people from all over the country. So I don't see the military splitting, I see it falling apart.
I just hope that the outcome will be chrystal clear, hopefully democrat. And that if it is not unit cohesion is strong enough to prevent the US forces from falling apart.
The major criticism for S230 is that social media companies are rampant with fake news, and not doing enough to combat misinformation. If anything, it gives FB and Twitter a defense against an accusation of spreading political misinformation.
Neutrality is only an option if you limit yourself to making cuckoo clocks.
Heretic! True clocks look like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/Hexadeci...
> You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
> In Italy under the Borgias, they had thirty years of murder, bloodshed and warfare. And they produced indigestible noodles, boring operas and the FIAT. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The Swiss bank account, the best cheese in the world and Heidi!
:)
It's easy to be a free speech advocate when it benefits your own views. It's not easy when it doesn't.
Few free speech advocates think you should be free to call for violence. That's free speech that does threaten them. Speech that calls for discrimination against groups they don't belong to, however, is perfectly fine -- they know that they're too important to be threatened by it.
So practically all self-described free speech advocates do put limits on free speech, and there aren't any True Scotsmen.
If you're not being suppressed, you won't even realise you have it, and will happily advocate for censorship.
My political opinions are reasonably mainstream, but I'll happily defend the free speech rights of groups I disagree with (e.g. pro-lifers.)
'Free speech for my side, but suppress the other side' is not free speech. This is what Facebook / Twitter is engaging in.
You didn't see ANY suppression from them when Trump's tax returns were leaked like they're attempting to do with Hunter's emails.
If the roles were reversed and a similar story came out about Trump and his son, would Twitter and Facebook have taken it down as part of a misinformation campaign?
Yes.
Parroting Russian disinformation during an election campaign because your owners don't like the politics of said disinformation target should be removed.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/14/biden-campaign-lash...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/hunter-biden-...
There needs to be more censorship on FB and YouTube which are in addition to Fox News doing WAY more damage to the United States than any foreign terrorists could ever dream.
> There was no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails that the Post obtained, but its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at the 2020 election.
So the only proof that it comes from Russia is basically "that's the kind of thing the Russians would do." Aren't you spreading disinformation yourself by claiming that it is Russian disinformation?
> To reference, CrowdStrike’s account of their DNC investigation, published on June 14, 2016, “CrowdStrike Services Inc., our Incident Response group, was called by the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the formal governing body for the US Democratic Party, to respond to a suspected breach. We deployed our IR team and technology and immediately identified two sophisticated adversaries on the network – COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR…. At DNC, COZY BEAR intrusion has been identified going back to summer of 2015, while FANCY BEAR separately breached the network in April 2016.”
0: https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democ...
You're talking about an ineffective hack that's used for scaremongering, that was caught and had little to no effect on the out come of the election.
https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/131658513181811507...
YouTube has spent the summer censoring doctors because their views didn't match the WHO. The WHO has changed its own views so much that it's now contradicted itself many times, showing how terribly naive Google's policies are on this. Google never used to be naive, but clearly, times have changed.
The real problem is that YouTube inexplicably chose to base its public health "ground truth" on WHO guidelines, when as a US company their appropriate source would have been the CDC. The two were often in conflict, particularly with regard to civilian usage of masks.
The WHO spent a lot of time being wrong -- or, at best, confusing -- and a lot of people got sick unnecessarily as a result.
Twitter, FB et al made a mistake ( calculated or otherwise ) and it is now hard to argue in good faith that tech companies are neutral arbiters.
To address your specific claim, if you showed me, say, RT post prior to yesterday that said what NY post posted, you would have a point. Instead, you have claims from Biden campaign staff and thanks to FB, Twitter, you now have a perceived bias in tech community that diminishes credibility of all those publications.
The fact that you seem to suggest that more like bias is needed, is, and I put it mildly, counter productive.
The story is already in full swing streisand effect mode.
edit: corrected some prepositions
^ This is the actual disinformation.
Their coverage in the lead up to the Iraq Invasion did more damage to this country, Her military, and the rest of the world than some mean tweets or made up BS about Russia. Should we ban the NYT, too?
Since the roles are not reversed, they're working together to bury it and trying to pretend it doesn't exist, because they're con-artists and fake journalists completely in bed with the Democrats and very willing to conspire to throw an election and commit election interference.
The barely existent election interference by the Russians is trivial compared to what big tech is doing out in the open (hell, they're practically bragging about it at this point it's so brazen).
Several executives at big tech need to be put in prison for election interference. Start with Dorsey.
Yeah, I remember when the editor-in-chief at WaPo settled a Federal suit for $20M to avoid facing charges for his role in running a fraudulent university. Good times. Then there was the NYT board member whose namesake cancer charity foundation was shut down by the state attorney general's office because it turned out to be a front for his own business and political interests. What a con artist, huh. Not to forget the time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee stiffed his contractors for $70 million on a casino project that later went bankrupt. There oughta be a law.
Re-examine your own biases, then post.
Poster didn't say "they are con artists", they said "they are doing this and this, because they are con artists".
Your response was tu quoque mixed with ad hom: "oh yeah? Well the other guy is a bad person!"
(If it does, take the opportunity to freshen up on your Kierkegaard.)
I'm sure you could engage with it directly and without fallacy, you're obviously bright, but your replies were very low-brow ad hominem and tu quoque.
PS I don't invest "moral authority" in almost any leading politician today, though I certainly rank Biden higher than Trump in the "personal morality" stakes.
None of the information was verified (even the easily verifiable bits) and the source, who was doxxed by the NYPost, is a Seth Rich conspiracist: https://www.thedailybeast.com/man-who-reportedly-gave-hunter...
In some hypothetical "whatabout the other party", the only way to test it is if it were to happen.
I don’t know what to think anymore because I don’t understand how this censorship will have any effect other than causing the story to spread like fire.
Does it really? I haven't seen anything on Reddit or the likes. Seems to me that the censorship has been rather successful so far.
For instance, many left news organizations that were critical of NATO have seen their posts substantially deprioritized on FB.
When looking at the legalities keep in mind that these companies have been explicitly warned by the F.B.I. of such possibilities and have spent time combing through their own databases and have identified such events.
God. I’m on the Left, but can you all not see the blatant paternalism behind stances like this? It’s a pretty explicit: “we know best, don’t worry your pretty little head about this misleading content, we will take care of it”
This explains why individual billionaires bought all the newspapers.
I can't find this stated anywhere except HN posts. What is the original source for this?
The GOP is prioritizing § 230 reform. Given their likely fall from power and prioritization of the SCOTUS confirmation, as well as Democrat control of the House and its focus on stimulus bills, the short-term threat is minute.
From an amoral government relations perspective, heavier moderation makes sense. A Biden spoof going viral during the election would attract the attention of incoming Democrat legislators. That creates a medium-term threat where there isn't one.
That said, I'm surprised they chose to block the content over de-prioritise it algorithmically and flag it with a warning.
EDIT: for those unaware, not only did the republican party take control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2016. They also made big gains in state elections. In fact, the republican party had a 'trifecta' (house, senate, and executive) in 25/50 states. It was a very significant shift in power: https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016
I’m not. The above analysis only depends on a lack of confidence in a GOP trifecta. That’s the only case where pissing them off could result in unilateral action and thus consequences for these moves.
Previous result are only predictive to a point.
For comparison, the Republicans did very well in the 2014 mid term, convincingly taking over both houses of congress.
The democratic party had every advantage for a convincing win in 2018 and they instead had a very poor showing. The party is not good at elections and I don't see a reason why we expect this election to be different.
Dems did well in 2018, the issue was that the 1/3 of senators that happened to be up that year were in very bad states for dems geographically.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-democrats-won-h...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-horrible-2018...
Its a fair point that polls missed in 2016. 2020 has kicked the hornet’s nest (rather, the last four years), voter turnout appears to be higher than previous years, and I’d bet an expensive bottle of bourbon current polls align close to what results will be (with modeling lessons learned from 2016).
Tangentially, quite a few Trump voters have simply aged out over the last four years (roughly 1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die each year). Broadly speaking, much older voters skew conservative compared to younger cohorts (per Pew Research), hence the confidence in a shift towards the left across branches in government representation during this election cycle. GOP support is quite literally dying out.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/907433511/trumps-base-is-shri...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-chance-taking-senate-fore...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/12/biden-tops-270-poli...
While your point about ideology drift over time has some merit, I don’t believe it to be significant enough to materially consider.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889?jou... (https://doi.org/10.1086/706889 if you want to grab the full paper from SciHub)
“Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.”
If only a worldwide event would take place where the entire business world deemed it acceptable to change policies so employees can work remotely, then realize they can save boatloads of money by not paying inner city office rents and reduce employee salary expenses by vastly increasing their applicant pool, coinciding with significant increases in inner-city violence sparked by rioting protestors demanding to get rid of the police or else they'll burn the entire city down......oh wait
I'd point out that it's not the polls that are predicting such things. Rather it's people who are interpreting those polls.
Polls are just a snapshot of opinion in time. They are useful and can provide information about public opinion, but they certainly aren't predictive in the way you're stating.
Making predictions like "Biden is 80% likely to win" is a guess. Possibly based on polling data, but are not a poll.
A poll reporting[0] that the respondents of that poll prefer one candidate over another is not a prediction, rather it's data.
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
Some rural counties that are know to be republican strong holds by a huge margin are favouring Biden by ridiculous amounts. Its not going to happen. Its obviously an error, and the accumulation of these errors are the final polls. (Source https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YqKDpqkYBOKV)
Its true that the democrats are winning the early mail in voting. But since republicans don't trust mail in voting, as Trump told them to vote in person. They will come out on election night, by a large margin.
“Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.
More than 26 million people had voted as of Saturday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. That's more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016.”
Doesn’t that mean older generations have more influence?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials... (Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation)
Young voters outnumber older voters, but this is mutually exclusive from an aging populace and a declining birth rate. You can chalk it up to population momentum and previously higher levels of immigration. It does mean Millennials will hold on to their electorate influence longer though.
Prior to Section 230, if you censor ANY content (say, child pornography) then you are "moderating" the discussion and are liable for ALL content. If Twitter deletes a death threat tweet, why didn't they delete the defamatory tweet against Hunter Biden or whomever? Biden could sue. So Section 230 allows websites to delete the kiddie porn without becoming a "publisher" of everything that gets posted. Biden can sue the poster but not Twitter.
Reforming (weakening) 230 would force Facebook, Twitter, etc. to choose between allowing all content, and blocking anything that could be the basis for a lawsuit. Of course Facebook and Twitter are not going to become an 8chan free-for-all, so they would be forced to crack down harder, censoring much more aggressively.
Also far-right sites (e.g. InfoWars) very much do not want increased liability here.
So "230 reform" is a useful rallying cry for conservatives who feel censored (rightly or wrongly) by social media giants, but the idea is so obviously bad that I can't imagine they'll go beyond minor tweaks.
<meta> It's rather sad that it has been downvoted, and those doing the downvoting should think a bit about their motivations. </meta>
Almost. That is the situation it would create for small venues like Hacker News-- extreme liability issues and heavy handed moves to mitigate them (if not just a shutdown as would probably be the case for many non-for-profit venues).
But Facebook, Google? These multibillion dollar companies have very little to fear from a lawsuit by the likes of me or you.
They could just staff up their legal team and work anyone who sues them into bankruptcy-- they already do. It isn't like litigation against parties for content they post in the US is easy to begin with even when you're not going after a 900 lb guerilla.
It would be bad news for them but ultimately just a cost of doing business. It might even ultimately be the best for their businesses as the ability to endure lawsuits would be one hell of a moat.
“Congress shall make no law” is the text of the first amendment, which is in regard to limiting free expression, not expanding it.
Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
If I own my own business and I'm the only employee, let's say a plumbing business. For years I did my own work, own accounting, own taxes, etc. I decide to add an apprentice who I hire in full time. This apprentice starts evangelizing his political views while on jobs. This turns off customers and doesn't agree with my political views. I don't want my employee to do this. It is not my point of view and it's affecting business. Now in your world, I can't fire this person, or tell him to stop. But by not being allowed to fire this person, and allowing his speech to continue via my company, the government is forcing me and my property to endorse his speech. Why stop there? Why can't I put a Trump sign in my neighbors yard?
Now we're in a contradiction. Who's right to speech matters more in a private setting? Typically the owner of said private setting. By and large, this is true. Does this lead to sticky situations where people are profiled racially? Yes. But I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
> Do you think making it illegal for employers to discriminate against their employees based on their race is a violation of the employers’ rights?
Do you think it making it legal for an employee to bark racist words towards their minority colleagues all day at work is a good idea? Because under your free speech rule, that would be OK. Oh look, another contradiction. In any case, we have laws for these scenarios that are largely constitutional because the constitution largely ignores these private settings, thus it is up to us to legislate, hence we have laws on discrimination.
In “my world” where free speech is protected as a civil right, you would be allowed to fire an employee who is using his position to evangelize instead of doing his job. In my world the employee is simply protected from being fired for having a dissenting view when sharing their view in a forum where that would be otherwise appropriate. Or people cannot be censored on social networks for sharing inconvenient truths to any political side.
We already have laws that restrict discrimination in the workplace, setting it up so that protecting free speech in the work place necessarily contradicts that is either intentionally dishonest or an unintentional demonstration of lack of imagination.
The reality is that it’s possible and moral to legislate the protection of free speech civil rights without harmfully violating the employers’ rights. You just don’t believe in free speech civil rights.
Freedom of speech means the government will not target you for expressing your opinion. It does not mean that your employer has to tolerate it. If I write an op-ed about how my employer makes a shoddy product, they are well within their legal rights to conduct their business how they see fit and terminate their business relationship with me. You seem to confuse freedom of speech with freedom from consequence of speech.
Free speech is already a civil right. You are not talking about free speech. So employees would not be allowed to quit working for an employer because that employer used their free speech to support a position they were morally opposed to? Anti-discrimination laws almost exclusively protect who you are i.e. race, gender, nationality, religion, physical ability. Free speech is about the viewpoints you choose to express and the actions you choose to take. You have the freedom to speak and act how you choose, but I also have the freedom hear you and choose how I interact with you or choose not to at all. You can’t legislate that person A is free to speak but person B is not free to react to that speech, as you are restricting the basic freedom of person B. Of course, when B uses their speech and A is not free to react, you are now restricting everyone’s freedom and everyone loses their freedom. As opposed to not legislating the speech or the reactions to that speech and individuals have the freedom to make their own choices and live with the consequences of those choices.
If a website is always responsible for whatever the users post you won't have much of a free internet anymore. However I think the issue with FB and Twitter is that they haven't had any repercussions for breaking the law in the first place.
This is not new. You will be censored or banned on Hacker News for not following rules. You will not see the distribution of the NY Post's material on this site.
I applaud them for enforcing rules, but not for being lenient with these actors. Free Speech has limits especially in someone elses' house, you should all know this.
Furthermore Reform Section 230 is political crap going nowhere. Any invokation of that here is political nonsense.
As a legislative move, this is changing their bet to the horse that's about to win. The social media companies are clearly more afraid longterm of what happens if they let this kind of stunt spread than they are afraid of the lame duck.
That's what I'm trying to say, here. Either way you slice it, 230 is in the crosshairs, it's just a matter of who's holding the gun and for what purpose.
I also wouldn't bet a cent of my own money on the GOP being "wholesale evicted". I heard very similar, equally confident talk in 2016.
It’s hard to see this as anything more than an attempt to change their bet on a losing horse in this race, as the commenter you replied to pointed out.
And I’m not sure if we’re remembering the same 2016 election. We’re both talking about the same election, that resulted in the largest win for an American political party in history, right? 2016 was absolutely horrendous for conservatives and their saving grace was the senate cycle was particularly bad for democrats. If there’s a similar performance this election there’s a good chance that they take both branches.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/29/21274812/joe-biden-donald... : "Joe Biden doesn’t like Trump’s Twitter order, but still wants to revoke Section 230"
They may not be raising specifically 230 concerns. But democrats are absolutely bringing up anti-trust concerns regarding major tech company.
Arguably, anti-trust breakup of major tech companies would be much more destructive to those tech companies, than merely removing some tech companies ability to moderate content.
My comment that you replied to says that democrats in the house have been bringing up anti-trust concerns. Anti-trust and 230 regulation are two separate things done for different reasons. They are not equivalent actions nor do are they being pursued out of the same concerns. Trying to conflate them is wrong.
I think that from a higher level principle, they can be conflated.
The way that they can be conflated is that many of these tech companies, just don't have many friends left.
Even if the exact reason as for why they don't have many friends left may be different, the end result is still the same.
The left and the right may be going after them from different angles, but that is still pretty bad, because nobody is there to defend them.
People who may have stuck their neck out to defend them in the past, just aren't going to do so anymore.
And sorry, they are still not conflatable - you’re still trying to create a false equivalence. They are not the same thing, the desire here to misrepresent facts to fit into a narrative is intellectually dishonest.
Well, in the legislative bodies, they have much less ability to defend itself, than in the past, due to both parties having significant, albeit different, problems with these companies.
> trying to create a false equivalence.
They are equivalent in the specific aspect of them having less allies in congress, and that this makes them more vulnerable than in the past.
IE, less people in our legislative bodies will be willing to stick their neck out to defend them.
> to fit into a narrative
It is absolutely accurate to say that these companies have less allies in congress, than in the past, and that being hit, from both sides, on these 2 issues, hurts these companies.
You can use different words to describe having less allies, or allies that are less likely to support them, if you want.
But my point still stands. They either have less allies, or those allies are less likely to look at these tech companies through "rose-tinted glasses"
Glad you agree that their former "allies" are no longer looking at these companies so favorable, using " rose-tinted glasses".
Arguments that would essentially allow monopolistic behavior has pretty much always been firmly inside republican laissez-faire circles, and those allies are still very much there. Railing against tech elites may play great for tv, but let’s be honest - Peter Thiel, strong advocate of monopoly, still spoke at the Republican national convention. There’s a good reason they overruled fact-checkers when conservatives violated their prescribed rules, they know where their bread is buttered.
https://www.engadget.com/facebook-overruled-fact-checkers-to...
What's more likely to happen is that the progressive dream of celebrity politicians in places like NYC will run aground of what the party is actually game for, because, as you observe, huge portions of the Democratic coalition are far more conservative than the Take Factory gives them credit for.
Nikki Haley is not as popular as republicans think she is - she's largely irrelevant right now.
> In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
Trump has plumbed the bottom of the non-white vote. The protests rankled many Latinos. In recent YouGov polling, a narrow majority of Latinos rated “the breakdown of law and order” as a “bigger problem” then “systemic racism.”
Meanwhile, Millenial Black voters are twice as likely to have favorable or somewhat favorable views of Trump than older Black voters: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/ucla-study...
> The data collected from April 2-May 13 by the Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project, an initiative that conducted weekly surveys of thousands of potential voters for nearly a year, found that 29% of percent of black voters ages 30-44 and 21% ages 18-29 have a "very favorable" or "somewhat favorable" view of President Trump. This compares to just 14% of black voters 45-64 and 9% of those 65 and older.
It’s not going to be Mitt Romney’s Republican Party. But Democrats shouldn’t be popping champagne corks assuming that the opposing party will never be in power again.
There's no way you don't block a newspaper, and the press secretary, and prevent anyone from even private messaging the link to each other, and blocking people who share screenshots, and not invite serious scrutiny or action.
The legislative blowback is going to suck. Section 230 is an ordinary law, not a constitutional right or based on one, and that means it's exposed to all the usual political fighting.