These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit, like the guy who filed an affidavit about being prevented from observing vote counts because he drove to the wrong location, or the woman, central to the Texas suit against PA and MI, who claims the Obamas "funded the Wuhan lab where coronavirus was made". It is not the case that Google has to provide space for a claim simply because it's improvidently featured in a frivolous lawsuit.

As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.

I think the presence of court cases, frivolous or not, is completely orthogonal to Google's content moderation policies. An appeal to "this is pending in court" is a deeply unprincipled argument; plenty of things that a court would certainly countenance are forbidden by Google's policies.

I agree but that's not really my concern. I am most concerned about granting Google (or anyone) the power to decide what is true or false, and to prevent individuals from seeing the information used to make those judgements, or to decide for themselves.

See my other reply to you below.

> granting Google (or anyone) the power to decide what is true or false

Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.

> Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.

And half of America that politically was skeptical of anti-trust has the power to rethink that as well. (And they will, and Google will find out if the juice is worth the squeeze on that.)

Because of COVID-19 and the huge increase of mail in ballots, there is good reason to believe that fraud was higher than other years. Biden's margin of victory in key swing states is smaller than Trump's in 2016. These are not unreasonable things to discuss and I find unfathomable that this policy would be something Google would apply to say, Iran, or any other country where there was speech skeptical of government.

Acting as if speech discussing this on their platform is beyond the pale is ludicrous. It shows a sheltered, fragile group of people who think their views are more common than they are.

There is in fact no reason to believe fraud is higher than other years; for example, states where elections were administered by conservative Republicans found essentially no instances of it, despite huge incentives.

Another strong indication that there wasn't fraud? The ludicrous affidavits accompanying the highest-profile lawsuits against states.

What are these "huge incentives" you speak of?

What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).

Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.

Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".

Please.

It is a cliche that conservatives, who fare poorly both in urban areas and among the minorities who disproportionately live in those areas, accuse Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia of voter fraud. Nevertheless, no real evidence of fraud is produced; in fact, the rare cases we do see of actual voter fraud tend to be committed by older Republican voters.

The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.

This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.

What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.

Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.

> It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.

But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.

We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.

Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.

Here you go:

> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]

This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.

Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

> when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.

Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".

> Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election.

That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.

So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.

It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.

Every private entity is qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the US. They are not required to come up with plans you like.

>Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.

And people have to right to find this despicable. Although Google may not actually have that power (I don't know how much Youtube is considered a monopoly)

It's not pre-judging when the courts have dismissed the cases. They have been judged to have no merit.

You seem to be arguing that because cases 1-9 were without merit, case 10 and beyond are too. That may turn out to be true, but it is also quite literally pre-judging.

Your argument also accepts that the courts judged these cases to have no merit, while implicitly denying that such judging was necessary.

How should a Google staffer differentiate between case number 9 (dismissed) and case number 10 (still on the docket)? And what hope can they have of coming to a better understanding of the details and merits of a case than the exact body (a court) which is set up to do precisely this?

The whole legal system is premised on every case being judged on its own merits, and rightly so.

Cases 10 and beyond are, too. One way you can see that is the subsequent cases have been relying on the same batshit evidence as the dead cases.

If Google was a courtroom, you might have a point --- the courts are in many circumstances obligated to hear and dispassionately resolve batshit frivolous cases. Google is not.

My concern is that you as an individual have used your personal judgement to come to the conclusion that these cases are batshit (as have I incidentally), and in this specific case you are most likely correct. But had Google prevented you from seeing this information, you would not have been able to form any view at all. And that is the direction all these platforms are moving in.

I also have absolutely zero trust in Random Googlers being capable of determining truth and falsity in the general case (which is where this is heading), or in managing this power in such a way that is a net benefit to society. If they didn't have monopolies on information consumption I would be a little less concerned.

A different example: Google could have stopped people seeing "false" information about COVID earlier this year. Twitter and other platforms labelled this "misinformation", and Google could have censored it from YouTube, searches, etc. The tech companies anointed the WHO as the arbiter of truth, yet the WHO was wrong for quite a while about several important things. I would prefer to live in a world where individuals are allowed to see all the contested facts and arguments, and decide for themselves.

One last example: Ignaz Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and many others.

I suppose the real solution is to break up the information monopolies, then let them do all the censoring they want.

We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News. I don't find any of this persuasive. Google is also preventing me from forming my own opinions about content featuring firearms, hate speech, violent criminal organizations, sales of regulated goods, nudity, and sexual content. I'm waiting for an argument from you that would be persuasive to someone who thinks it's just fine for Google to ban porn from Youtube.

I'm not trying to persuade you that your specific personal preferences for a "Safe Mode Internet" are wrong. I'm saying that just because you are personally comfortable with Google's current set of moderation choices, this does not mean that it is right or optimal for Google to start enforcing these preferences for society as a whole, particularly when it requires them to become the arbiter of truth and basic facts, while also avoiding the normal regulatory obligations associated with this. That is the slope we are on.

There is also a difference in kind between porn and this sort of speech. Different laws apply, different social norms apply, different technical options (and trade-offs) apply, and so on. I have also heard that there are many other porn hosting websites, and Google does not enjoy any sort of monopoly.

Perhaps we're talking past each other here but to put my general point a different way, and it's only relevant because Google is effectively a monopoly: If you were told you could be born into a world with a free internet, or a curated internet, but you had no influence over who would do the curation, which world would you choose?

Google doesn't enjoy any sort of monopoly in any kind of video content. I don't think your argument is very coherent.

> We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, next to Google itself. I would say it's not beyond the realms of possibility for YouTube to eventually eclipse Google.

You are being trolled. The other user does not believe in their arguments. They are just saying it to waste your time.

How, even in principle, would google prevent a person from seeing legal documents? Most (all?) jurisdictions publish them on the web themselves? https://www.courtlistener.com/ is great.

I'm not arguing Google are censoring legal documents. But let's take this trend in that direction...

1. How would the average person find that website? A search engine perhaps?

2. How many search engines does the average person use? One, perhaps? Which one?

1. Well, I just told you about them. It's old fashioned, but talking to people works wonders. You're not the first person I've encouraged to go directly to legal documents.

2. Probably the median person uses several -- google, facebook, and the like.

Nobody has accused Google of burying search results about these court cases, so you can't reasonably pretend that's the debate we're having. Please keep the goalposts static, so we can discuss productively.

I already said it was off topic... it was a hypothetical.

The election occurred over a month ago. The counting of votes was complete enough 4 days later that any violations subsequent to then could not have changed the outcome. The relief sought--to prevent the results from being certified--would have been impossible to grant two weeks ago.

At this point, any case being filed now over the results of the election is doomed to fail either by the doctrine of laches (you should have filed it sooner) or inability to grant relief, and that's even without considering any other possible failings it may have (including merit!).

While the courts will operate under the assumption that a case is meritorious until proven otherwise, there is no reason for the court of public opinion to operate under the same assumption, especially when there is clear precedent and established case history demonstrating why the case must be dismissed that the filing makes no attempt to address.

I don't think "the court of public opinion" is a high enough standard for a prospective world-wide monopolistic censor of information. Such an authority needs to be completely rigorous, completely fair, completely objective, completely informed, and so on. Google cannot meet that bar.

By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.

Or for an even more recent example, the scientific community largely rejected plate tectonics initially

And was that borne out in the public square or in scientific journals and conferences? There are reasonable arenas for this material. In this case, that arena is the courts.

Just because the sun has risen every day of your life, that doesn't mean that you can expect it to do so tomorrow.

Of course we can, because it's a law of nature. Whereas man-made laws are subject to human action and interpretation, so outcomes are far less predictable.

They don't need to pre-judge them, they can look out at the actual outcomes of court cases that have already been litigated.

The "specific details" are a plethora of court rulings, election certifications, and statements from Trump's own lawyers that they are not bringing fraud cases.

Then let the courts decide that. There's no need for Google to get ahead of it. It's not like Youtube is running out of space.

That doesn't even make sense. There are all sorts of things a court won't strike down that practically nobody thinks Google should broadcast on Youtube. Go look at the Youtube content guidelines and see how many have anything to do with what a court thinks.

actually... sorry to gently disagree: the crazies are unfortunately amplifying each other and unchecked, the result will be people taking guns off the rack and people actually dying. Moving to wingnut-only platforms isn't a great solution, but at least it de-legitimizes the crazy and stops it from being "recommended" content on random peoples' screens.

example of crazy plot? hereya go:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl...

It is Google's responsibility

They provided the forum, they need to moderate it

They don't need to; they can be Gab.ai if they want. But almost nobody in the world wants to be that.

The nasty question becomes:

How do you know the more non batshit accounts haven't already been taken down?

>These claims are being slaughtered in ongoing court cases, and many of them are objectively batshit,

The Mike Kelly case in PA, arguing that the law allowing mail-in ballots was illegal, was ruled by a judge as completely legally valid, but was thrown out of the state supreme court because "they waited too long to complain".

So, no, not objectively batshit. If the GOP had filed that case in January, Trump would have won PA...assuming the same supreme court didn't throw out their case for some other arbitrary reason like "filing too soon."

The Democrats outplayed Republicans. Democrats passed an un-Constitutional law that helped them stuff ballot boxes with ballots that were almost certainly harvested or bought. If we're to believe the election results and voter turnout in, say, mostly black Philadelphia, Joe Biden is a more popular politician than even Barack Obama. Only an idiot would believe that. But still, it serves Republicans right for underestimating the extent to which Democrats would cheat.

The judge emphatically did not rule on the merits of the case, simply that there was no reason to proceed further due to laches. A ruling on laches says nothing about the validity of the argument.

Trump is absolutely hoovering up money from his followers since he started on his election fraud rant - he's up to something like $250M, and he personally gets to keep something like 70% of it.

Most of the lawsuits are so ridiculously bad, it makes me wonder if it's just part of keeping up the act in order to keep his followers riled up and throwing cash at him. Inciting such intense hatred with so very many lies all for personal money and power - it's devisive, dangerous, and absolutely terrifying that this is happening in the USA, a country that spent decades forcing democracy on other countries.

20 states are now making this claim. Are you saying that half the government should be censored?

The state attorneys general of 17 states have filed amicus briefs in a case, in some cases over the public objections of their Republican governors. They're all supporting a grift run by the President --- you know it's a grift, because substantially more than half of the hundreds of millions of dollars he's raised isn't going to the lawsuits. It's no surprise that feckless Republican officials in heavily-Republican states are willing to kowtow; the President has deluded his true believers into a frenzy, and they don't want those people outside their house at 1AM. I'm fine if Google "censors" them. This is what Parler is for.

Look, I hate to tell you, but still, 17 AGs running this is news. Forget what ever you think about the case, its blatant censorship not to report this information. I'll tell you what, I'm not right leaning, but if push comes to shove, which I think it will eventually, I will join the right and fight for political freedom. Go back to your big house and your consulting blog, this isnt for you

Look at the title, Youtube will remove content that alleges widespread fraud. Not content that alleges that 17 AGs are showing legal support for the president. Anyone can broadcast that information.

> Its also deeply hypocritical to claim that this is "in line with [Google's] approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections.

Indeed.

I was told by all the right people that Russia hacked the 2016 election for 4 years.

To this day, Stacy Abrams acts like she's governor of Georgia and claims the election was stolen.

All of that content will not be taken down.

But yes, given the fact that 1) "safe harbor" means nothing historically, 2) there have been electoral contests in the U.S. decided within days of inauguration, and 3) there is active litigation being pursued, this chilling of speech can't be seen as anything other that Google pushing their hands on the scale here.

There's a difference.

There is evidence[1, 2, 3] of Russian interference in the 2016 election. There is evidence[4, 5, 6, 7] of interference by Republicans in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia. That content will not be taken down because it is true.

There is no evidence[8] of fraud in the 2020 election. Trump's own lawyers have admitted[9, 10, 11] that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2019/04/18/714810702/muellers-report-sho...

[2]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-report-russian-interfere...

[3]https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[4]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/10/georgia-elec...

[5]https://apnews.com/article/fb011f39af3b40518b572c8cce6e906c

[6]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/6/18068492/g...

[7]https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/30/18118264/...

[8]https://apnews.com/article/barr-no-widespread-election-fraud...

[9]https://time.com/5914377/donald-trump-no-evidence-fraud/

[10]https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-lawyers-no-ele...

[11]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/us/politics/trump-electio...

Well. I guess the Ministry of Truth has spoken.

There couldn't possibly be other dissenting views on that. It's _true_ my friends.

Vox is clearly an impartial observer. The Senate hearings which led to impeachment hearings on Trump (because he investigated Hunter Biden, who has been under FBI investigation for over a year now... a materially true fact) could not _possibly_ have been politically motivated.

Shutting down speech does not lead to "facts" or "truth", it leads to uncertainty. YouTube is basically the Catholic church, claiming they know the facts, they know the truth, and Galileo is spouting nonsense.

If you're so confident, then let those people speak and use arguments (even your ludicrous wall of links) against them. That's rational and dare I say it, scientific.

You have not actually provided evidence to the contrary, instead went for a string of logical fallacies.

> You have not actually provided evidence to the contrary

YouTube is arguing that I shouldn't be able to provide evidence to the contrary, which is the point.

I'm not arguing with the list of bullet points. I'm arguing with the very silly implication that there is an obvious "truth" that some MegaCorp should be able to hand down and enforce on this.

You are free to host your video evidence on your own website, following your own internal moderation rules for what is deemed credible or not. No one is taking this right from you.

> No one is taking this right from you.

Correct. But it's tantamount to saying "you can't speak in this public square, how about you pretend your front yard is a public square and speak there."

Eventually, people are going to say the hell with that and that Google's "private" management of 90% of inbound searches and content is, in fact, public.

After that, maybe we can start calling it Gov-gle or something once it's nationalized.

There are no public squares on the internet. Every DNS resolution leads to privately owned 'land'. You can be escorted off the property for nearly any reason.

Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.

> Maybe Youtube gave the misconception that they were a public square when they weren't moderating as heavily.

Welp. Time to get rid of Section 230 then!

Apparently these companies aren't neutral carriers and should be held liable for what they censor in their editorial discretion.

Great citations. I think the general point is that there are more specific examples of election irregularities than there are specific examples of Russia interfering.

you add this to your list: https://hereistheevidence.com which provides a detailed breakdown with citations.

> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.

Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to. Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?

> Do we reserve judgment on these topics just because someone sued someone else over them?

No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims. It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.

> It seems to be the attitude of many big tech companies that their users are too dumb to look at information and decide for themselves what is and isn’t true.

This seems demonstrably true for vast swathes of users, who have become enamored with Flat Eartherism and other such nonsense. Not saying censorship is necessarily the right solution, but arguing on behalf of the reasoning capabilities of the user base is clearly misguided.

Swathes how vast? Have you checked? Everyone seems to know of one, nobody seems to know one. And what happens when the big tech companies start pushing wrong information, or censoring right information? Or, a better question, how do you know they haven't started already?

>This seems demonstrably true for vast swathes of users, who have become enamored with Flat Eartherism and other such nonsense.

The alternative you're condoning is to make decisions for these people and tell them what to think; that is tyranny.

E.g. By not assuming good cognitive ability for people, you are setting them up to be controlled, that you agree with censorship or not.

> The alternative you're condoning is to make decisions for these people and tell them what to think; that is tyranny.

TIL not repeating lies is tyranny.

You're being disingenuous. But I think you know that.

> You're being disingenuous. But I think you know that.

No I'm not. Transmission is a kind of repetition, but some people seem to think that YouTube has some obligation to transmit (i.e. repeat) their lies about "widespread election fraud." It's not a government service, so there's no First Amendment aspect to this at all, and the allegations themselves are disingenuous lies, so YouTube's moral obligation is on the side of removal.

Youtube has been bullied by governement officials into adopting this policy. This is hardly about "forcing someone to repeat lies".

Also my argument wasn't even about this, it was that if you assume stupidity of a big portion of the population, you have no alternative but to turn to tyranny.

I rather categorically did not condone anything. You've made some truly astounding logical leaps here.

Is it such a big leap? How do you propose we deal with people who cannot think for themselves but to tell them what to think?

A couple hundred years ago these people never would have a platform and would be relegated to the depths of society, as their idiocracy rightly deserved.

Now the uneducated masses can yell and yell and yell, which gives other uneducated masses the false belief that their opinions are to be respected.

Yes, and the superior, educated mass (that agree with me) should have all the say?

> No, but we also shouldn’t censor people for making those claims.

This is not the same argument as

> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.

I think your argument is definitely worth considering, but the “there are court cases” is clearly wrong.

While in theory this is true, in practice we have seen in recent years that misinformation has as much weight (if not more) as true information in our fragmented global media landscape.

I see it more as doing their part to reduce the noise rather than contribute to the problem. And it’s a big problem.

It's not that their users are too dumb. It's that weapons grade psychological tactics work and they don't want to be a part of that.

But what if they are?

That's the problem here. I'm guessing you think you are too analytical to succumb to such tactics. But you aren't. None of us are. We are all human.

For the most part, people ARE too dumb.

I can also claim in court that I have been wronged by an ethnic group, and that the proper remedy for that is genocide. Again - "there's a pending court case alleging this" is not a reason not to take down that kind of content. The decision needs to be on the merits of the actual content.

> Anyone can make any crazy claim they want in a lawsuit. I could probably sue someone today claiming the earth was flat or Elvis is still alive if I wanted to.

And, yet, YouTube isn't censoring flat earthers.

No, but they are adding fact check notifications: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-alphabet-youtube-fact...

> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases. It's far out of Google's ambit to claim to resolve "the truth" at this juncture.

Aren't you an actual lawyer? Do you think any of Giuliani's cases have enough merit that you would argue one and think you had a good chance of winning?

I could probably engineer a frivolous court case claiming Joe Biden's a space alien and is thus ineligible to be president, but that doesn't mean that anyone should withhold judgment on my claim before I inevitably flame out in the first hearing.

LOL, ongoing court cases!

The fact that politicians and private actors choose to beclown themselves in front of state and federal judges shouldn't prevent businesses from being able to see the plain truth that is staring them in the face. This is farcical.

> These same claims are being made in ongoing court cases.

Of which what % have been tossed? 95%+? And the one (!) that hasn't have had zero impact on the results.

The election is over. Biden won. The votes will be certified, but not after Trump's team has done a great deal of damage to the American democracy.

I think Trump's behavior is abhorrent. But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened. It's worse this year than usual, because Trump is worse than usual, but the losing side believing the election was stolen has become a feature of American politics during the last two decades: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

After elections, half of people on the losing side now regularly believe the election wasn't free and fair.

You're right of course. I recall in 2004 some people complaining about Bush stealing Ohio. I was living in Ohio in 2004, and I voted for Kerry, but even I thought those accusations were a bit silly at the time.

I think it just underscores the responsibility for platforms to not allow obvious misinformation to spread because it does erode faith in democracy.

The presence of any major platform acting as the unilateral arbiter of what is and isn't misinformation for many people in society erodes faith in democracy as well.

Well Gore and Hillary both won popular vote and didn't win the election so it basically is a feature of American politics.

Gore's election was especially disputed because it literally came down to stopping a recount in a handful of key districts. I can't tell for sure what the result would have been otherwise but I think there's more legitimacy to that claim than here where people are complaining about millions of votes in multiple states.

>But I've been complaining for years about Gore, Kerry, Clinton, and Abrams laying about stolen elections, and nobody listened.

If you said complaints about 2000 being stolen lead to skepticism about the outcome in 2004, and are part of a set of ideas that may have inflamed democratic skepticism about 2016, I would probably disagree that there is anything super concerning about that, but at least understand the thread that connects those pieces.

As it happens, I think stolen is a perfectly fair characterization of the 2000 election, even in retrospect, and would confess that that experience lead me, for a time, to incorrectly believe 2004 may have been stolen as well, which I believed for a time but no longer do. And I can see how it launched an unfortunate trend of liberals believing future elections either were or would be stolen. Greg Palast, for instance, is a celebrated journalist in some circles despite incorrectly claiming that the 2006 election would "go down in infamy" as a stolen election, and saying the same thing again in 2008. Despite being a Democrat, I find Palast's record to be deeply inaccurate and I am disappointed in the lack of critical reflection on his record by people who cite him.

But those claims come from a completely different universe than the 2020 claims, and I don't think they had anything to do with explaining the sociological forces driving election skepticism in 2020. Instead, that breed of skepticism has come from Trump and a media ecosystem that established an entirely alternate reality, with fever pitched adversarial thinking.

The content, social forces and motivations are completely independent, in their sources, in their character and in their scale and should not be equated to each other.

What does it matter that suits are tossed out? Do you realize how silly it seems to ban critizing the election process unless you also aknowledge Biden as winner?

There are like, what, a dozen states' Attorney Generals that you can't tape a press release off and put on Youtube according to those rules.