"The public" is not some perfectly rational collection of human beings. Rather, it's droves of people susceptible to propaganda and misinformation campaigns.
Let's be clear: there was no widespread election fraud, certainly not by large enough margins to overturn the election. Videos that purport otherwise are not improving public discourse; in fact, they're causing it to disintegrate.
I agree that Youtube should not have carte blanche to remove content that it finds objectionable per its own capricious standards. But that doesn't mean it should have no discretion at all. Truth seeking must be grounded in reality; these spurious claims of fraud are not.
Correct.
> Let's be clear: there was no widespread election fraud, certainly not by large enough margins to overturn the election.
I am not 100% committed to that being an impossibility, but I have yet to see any evidence to make me question the final outcome of the 2020 US election. I'm legitimately concerned about small scale voter fraud, but nothing significant enough to invalidate the final result.
> Videos that purport otherwise are not improving public discourse; in fact, they're causing it to disintegrate.
I agree. But far be it from me to determine what constitutes "quality public discourse". I have a history of being wrong about a great many things so I'd rather not have myself - or any individual or organization - arbitrate on what the public is allowed to discuss.
> I agree that Youtube should not have carte blanche to remove content that it finds objectionable per its own capricious standards. But that doesn't mean it should have no discretion at all.
Maybe I'd be less critical of Goolge if they actually had some sort of guidelines for objectively determining what content should be allowed on their platforms. This inconsistent "whatever we think is best" policy strategy is way too susceptible to abuse and Google hasn't proven themselves trustworthy.
It's impossible to be 100% certain about anything. Scientists often quote a 95% confidence interval. Why not the a 100% confidence interval? Because that would be the real number line.
> But far be it from me to determine what constitutes "quality public discourse".
Fortunately, you don't need to determine the cutoff. Fact-free conspiracies are so far removed from "quality public discourse" as to render the issue irrelevant.
> Maybe I'd be less critical of Google if they actually had some sort of guidelines for objectively determining what content should be allowed on their platforms.
I absolutely agree that transparency is the best practice here; but until there's evidence of abuse, I'm not going to assume the process is abusive. And even then, I'll weigh the harm done by YouTube vs the harm done by the conspiracy theorists.
What bodies of evidence count as "facts" and how much is necessary to surpass the "fact free" threshold?
> I absolutely agree that transparency is the best practice here; but until there's evidence of abuse, I'm not going to assume the process is abusive.
Google has a sordid history of suppressing information and ideas. Suppressing critisisms of jihad[0] and of course project Dragonfly to name a couple examples offhand.
[0] https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/08/02/google-mani...
Are you also 100% not committed to the 1969 moon landing being an impossibility? Big Foot?
There's no evidence of wide spread voter fraud, there's lots of a wide spread fair election occurring.
The burden of proof is on the accuser, because "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." To say you can't be sure fraud didn't change the outcome of the election at this point is ridiculous, and is exactly why youtube is banning such opinions.
There are obvious incentives and a huge, immediate payout for using voter fraud to overturn an election result. And voter fraud is an old, recurring phenomena - even if you only consider the history of the US elections[0].
On top of that, we're talking about an event from barely a month ago. The Russian collusion thing from the 2016 election went on for years.
While I would be astounded if the voter fraud investigations yielded sufficient evidence to overthrow the election results, you'll have to forgive me for not outright rejecting that potential. Of course, I would also be extremely skeptical if that did happen.
Besides, why do we have to be 100% committed to anything right now?
The US has become so incredibly partisan though, that both sides literally experience different realities. The same people that believe the pee tape is real will scream for censorship of Trump's lies and vice versa.
Both parties have dumb justifications for why they think the voting system should stay the way it is, but the reality is simply that the person/party in charge has no incentive to overhaul the system that go them there. They call foul and make a big fuss when the system doesn't work in their favor, but then they don't have the power to fix it. They've realized it's easier to just undermine the legitimacy of the winner and just patiently wait for the next opportunity.
I wish I knew what it would take to get the support necessary to fix it without endorsement from a political party.
There is nothing stopping me doing this again at a different polling place on the same day, but it would trigger an investigation if my name was marked at multiple polling booths.
And yet, there is basically no electoral fraud at all. In each election, this happens less than 10 times nationally with a population of 25M ppl.
It turns out to be forgetful senior citizens more often than fraudulent voters.
Your name must be on the roll, or you can't vote. So fake names wont work. Nor will a name without the correct address.
If you turn up and your name/address combo is already crossed out, you will be given some sort of provisional ballot, while an investigation is started.
It would be trivial to learn someones address and turn up at a booth in their electorate early to vote in their name, but the irregularity would be obvious.
Also, it is very difficult to stay off the electoral roll or have an incorrect address, because most interactions with a government agency will automatically update it. ie: get or change drivers license details or get a passport, or enroll you kids in school etc.
You may be purged from the roll if another person legitimately enrolls at an address you used to be enrolled at, but this will be picked up quickly in practice when you change your address for any official paperwork.
In all of the civilized world, people are assumed to not be knowledgable about a myriad of problem domains such that only licensed professional can exercises certain classes of judgement.
You are not considered to be rational enough to determine what kind of chemotherapy you get, just to name an example of all sorts of prescription medicines.
You are not assumed knowledgeable about architecting a building, a car, investing, or all licensed occupations where it turns out that bad opinions can kill people by the millions.
So no, effectively we assume by default that people are mostly dumb and dangerous and we raise high bars of qualification for anything in society where there is a potential for huge damage from bad decisions.
If you claim that there's voting fraud and it turns out I'm not knowledgeable enough to evaluate that claim at face value, as a society we have a problem, just like a lot of the misinformation that leads to the voting public to support policies for erroneous reasons.
That's pretty much the basis for representative democracies (disregarding whether they're effective at it or not): choosing experts who have the time and inclination to decide policies that you would otherwise not be able to evaluate effectively on your own.
Edit: to cite a clear example: climate science is not a field where laymen can make useful opinions, although it's a field where anyone with a high-school level education can follow the reasoning behind the conclusions reached by the experts. And yet we have a political party that attempts to deny and politicize this topic without even a hint of qualifications to do so, and nonexperts believing that their opinions are useful, or a reflection of reality.
And, this is part of the problem: can you trust the government to decide what sort of speech is appropriate. I don't mean now, with regards to this particular issue. I mean every time this problem crops up for the next 50 to 100 years. It relies on the same theoretical. What if instead, it's the company which is telling the truth, but the government which is malicious, and wants to censor them?
This is not hypothetical, you can see this in many countries today like North Korea, Iran, India, etc.
Government censorship is extremely dangerous because it is backed by the power of the state. ISP censorship is extremely dangerous because there are very few options and circumvention requires expensive physical infrastructure. YouTube not allowing certain videos on their site… doesn’t seem to me to warrant these histrionics, since there are multiple other channels for video distribution (Vimeo, Twitch, Dailymotion, BitChute, Periscope, Twitter, and Facebook all come to mind off the top of my head). And, if there were no other channels for video distribution, a $5/mo server gets you one of your own.
Is it a huge bummer that we can’t have nice things and that the ‘free marketplace of ideas’ concept is fraying at the edges? Yes. Is this the end of the world, or even a slippery slope to a dystopia? Seems pretty unlikely. Distributors have always been allowed to choose what they will and won‘t carry; Barnes & Noble won’t sell books published by Amazon[0], and you know what you can do? Just buy them at Amazon. YouTube won’t carry your video? Fine, post it somewhere else.
[0] https://business.time.com/2012/02/06/in-latest-moves-barnes-...
On the other hand, I'm not a free speech absolutist (obviously) because I don't trust other people to behave reasonably. But if everyone were perfectly rational, I probably would be; and maybe you and I are rational enough that we can handle "dangerous" ideas without succumbing to emotional manipulation (but then again, maybe not). However, while perhaps we can watch a purposefully mis-informative video, evaluate the merits of those claims, and dismiss them out of hand, do you trust everyone else to do the same?
That isn't to say you or I should be the arbiter of truth, but there should be some bare minimum standard. In my mind, there are two pillars for public discourse:
1. Facts, upon which arguments are based.
2. Deductive/inductive arguments, which appeal to values.
Obviously different people will have different values, so they will evaluate the weight of the arguments differently; however, facts are facts -- those should be the common ground. When someone denies reality by positing conspiracies without meaningful evidence, public discourse is impossible.
> What if instead, it's the company which is telling the truth, but the government which is malicious, and wants to censor them?
If the government is malicious, the correct response is voting. Unlimited free speech won't help: a malicious government could censor free speech; or a malicious government could promote un-truths with as much weight as truths, transforming "matters of fact" into "matters of opinion".
(As an aside, I'm nearly a democracy absolutist despite my distaste for free speech absolutism. While that might seem contradictory, democracy thrives in public discourse, and unlimited free speech can hamper that: think Citizen's United, where money can give someone an outsized influence; or conspiracies, which deny facts.)
I don't either, but I still believe free speech is important, even if that means it certainly be abused, and cause some damage on a long enough timeline.
As a personal anecdote, I used to spend time on 4chan. (ie, within the last few months I finally blocked it.) I never picked up any of the crazier conspiracy theories that people might associate with the site. But, I was affected by reading all the extremist content. My intuitive sense for the likelihood of country-wide instability, as well as my sense for how bad that instability could be were well skewed. Having finally quit, I feel a bit silly now. I live in a very peaceful, suburban neighborhood, and it's the safest town in my whole state. I generally don't consider myself as susceptible to misinformation, but I think it's clear to me now that anyone can be affected, and everyone has a different blind spot for it.
Were I DO believe in censorship is in the home. ie, I believe it's ok to determine what media / ideas I ingest, since my abstinence won't prevent anyone else.
All of that said, I completely agree with you when it comes to facts and common ground. However, I believe that technology has fundamentally changed what it means to release and censor information. I haven't figured out a good way to articulate this yet. So I'll just say that pamphlets in the 1800s are obviously very different from youtube or social media now. I don't believe it's the same issues all over again, and I'm not sure what the right solutions are.
>If the government is malicious, the correct response is voting.
No doubt. The recent brush with populism has made me a bit nervous in this regard. It can be argued whether the founders really successfully produced enough bulwarks against populism, however I certainly agree with the intent of their efforts.
Governments continue to get bigger, with more power concentrated at the top. The president being the prime example, an office that was originally intended to be the top cop become an office invested with the hopes and desires of everyone in the country/world, looked towards to single-handedly address any problem.
Then there is the internet, where everyone has the opportunity to go viral, and we can all argue about everything.
Throw in huge multi-national corporations bigger than many nations, treated as people by law, and legally able to buy off politicians in the U.S...
So now in the U.S. we have two parties optimizing to stay in power moreso than act from principal, more manipulative media than ever, and implementing huge national programs based on the slim majority that voted for president that year.
I don't think censorship tweaks are going to fix this. A lot of people don't feel represented, and they are right.
There has literally not been a single case of "evidence" that hasn't been debunked and considered to be a laughable and ill-intended piece of lies.
It's a true sickness in this country. I don't know what it is, the racism, or what. Why seemingly functional people are taken in so easily by an obvious conman.
I think this is human nature rather than a flaw with members of a particular party but I think it is worthwhile for people to compare their own views before and after the election.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-poll-exclusi...
Lindsey Graham said out loud and clear on Fox News that Republicans must do something about votes by mail otherwise they will never be able to elect another Republican. He doesn’t seem to believe they can win without suppressing votes.
Latest example:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/georgia-count...
That still doesn't mean there was any fraud.
I'm sorry but that's just not it, at least not this time. When you have a narcissistic psychopath that needs to feed his ego, and army of yes-men who have no regards for laws and ethics, it pays to be extra careful. It was partially because of this dilligence that plans to remove drive-by ballot drop-offs by Republicans were thwarted.
They haven't had a single win. There hasn't been any substantiated claims. Zero. No evidence of wide spread voter fraud has appeared.
Yet they continue with these talking points.
Polite society needs to say "Enough!" to these liars who are tearing apart our democracy in service of Donald Trump, of all people.
No there isn't, and no one has yet even CLAIMED in court that there is. Every time the Trump legal team went before a judge, they themselves denied that they have any evidence or even CLAIM of fraud.
Sure, on TV they say all sorts of crazy stuff, but when it really matters, they back down.
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in this election whatsoever.
And yet marvel at the number of otherwise highly logical people who do just that.
> If Youtube feels obligated to correct what it thinks are misconceptions, they can present their arguments and evidence that contradict current allegations. They should hire a team of lawyers to put together the most up to date refutations of claims, and post that on relevant videos.
It's interesting that:
- a centralized, slowly changing "balance sheet" approach like this, which is a standard in project management, is rarely taken toward matters of public concern - I am a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a resource that enumerated all of the "just(!) a conspiracy theory" claims and illustrated how it is known(!) that they are false, I would gladly read it. Rather, the public has to somehow sort out what is true based on hundreds of "news" articles that get released into the information ecosystem on a daily basis. Or, just offload their thinking to The Experts.
- we regularly hear that we need more "critical thinking" among the public, but we never get further than talking about the incredibly important need for this
It's also interesting that ~nobody seems to notice these sorts of things (and when they are mentioned, it seems to generally displease people, for reasons that are not stated).
I sometimes wonder if these sorts of information management oversights, apparently by thousands of people in positions of power, are purely accidental.
I think there almost certainly was some fraud, but not enough to change the outcome. (Whether or not "some but not enough to change the outcome" counts as "widespread", I don't know.)
But I also think it is true that the US electoral system is very poorly organised, creating a lot more scope for fraud–or at least the appearance of fraud, or the appearance of the possibility of fraud–than in some other countries. In a number of other countries, national elections are fully run by an apolitical independent national agency (e.g. the Australian Electoral Commission), not by a hodgepodge of state and county officials many of whom are politicians or political appointees. That system provides a lot more professionalism and a lot less opportunities for suspicion of fraud than the American system does.
Yet, I think some people are so committed to "everything Trump says is 110% wrong" that they want to shut down discussion of the flaws in the US election system. It is possible that both there are real flaws in the election system, including flaws that permit fraud or the appearance of a possibility of fraud, and that simultaneously those flaws while very real and in need of being addressed didn't change the outcome this time around.
Possibly, one outcome of this election might be support from Republicans for some reforms in the way elections are carried out. Given America's toxic political polarisation, there is the risk that Democrats will oppose such reforms simply because it is Republicans proposing them.
Yea, that's what he said.
Regarding the rest of your comment: I don't think _anyone_ is arguing that the US electoral system is without flaw. A large system of any kind will have many flaws. Ask any software engineer.
Indeed, I'm also not aware of any person that wants to avoid, indefinitely, having a discussion about how we can improve the US election system. That being said, RIGHT NOW is decidedly not the right time. I'll be all for having an honest, bipartisan discussion as soon as there are no longer parties actively trying to steal an election. When it comes to election integrity, 100% of our focus needs to be on making sure that the results of _this_ election are respected. Then we can focus on improving things for future elections.
Well, the two comments are not very far apart in substance, somewhat further apart in terms of emphasis. Often two people can be close to agreement on what the facts are, much further apart in which of those facts they think ought to be emphasised.
> Regarding the rest of your comment: I don't think _anyone_ is arguing that the US electoral system is without flaw. A large system of any kind will have many flaws. Ask any software engineer.
Every large system has flaws, yes. But how does the US electoral system compare to those of other countries? It is far from being the worst, but it is also far from being the best. If someone was pointing out flaws in one of the countries with the best organised election systems, then "A large system of any kind will have many flaws" may well be a decent response, but it is less so when pointing out flaws in a system which is at the best somewhere in the middle.
Imagine your product has lots of flaws which many of its competitors lack. In such a situation, the truism "a large system of any kind will have many flaws" is missing the point.
> That being said, RIGHT NOW is decidedly not the right time. I'll be all for having an honest, bipartisan discussion as soon as there are no longer parties actively trying to steal an election
I don't agree that anyone is trying to "steal an election". President Trump is being a sore loser, but I am certain he is leaving the White House peacefully come January 20th. His attempts to challenge the result in the courts have always been half-hearted. Back in 2000, each of Bush and Gore made sure they had the brightest legal minds of their respective parties on the case. Trump has not signed up the brightest legal minds of the GOP to challenge the result. I don't think he was ever really serious about it, he is just putting on a show. He can't steal an election, he doesn't even know how to pull that one off. But I think a lot of people – his supporters and detractors alike – fall too easily for Trump's shtick.
This line of reasoning doesn't jive with me, for the same reason a person trying, and failing, to commit a crime like murder is still guilty of committing a crime. If I attempt to kill you, and fail, a defense of "I was just putting on a show" isn't going to go so well for me in court. In short, his ineptitude doesn't make him any less guilty for what he's actually attempting.
Too many people - his supporters and detractors alike - give him too much credit when it comes to his abilities, and not enough credit when it comes to what he's actually capable of trying.
I'll add that, "Trump has not signed up the brightest legal minds" is an absurd justification for the opinion that this isn't a legitimate attempt to steal an election. At what point during Trump's presidency has he EVER selected the "brightest minds" for any post. This is Trump being Trump.
People pretending like this isn't happening, frankly, should be ashamed of themselves. And if it ISN'T happening, pretending like feigning an attempt to subvert American democracy to steal an election isn't a big deal, is also a shameful act in my opinion.
Go get 'em tigers!
[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/10/texas-dan-patrick/
He figured out a great way of proving there was no widespread fraud seeing as he's not handing out free money by the busload.
Imagine if President X had military on their side, supressed courts, had many militias supporting them and spreading misinformation day in and day out.
And getting 100 million votes and had a trifecta (House, Executive Office, Senate) + Supreme Court. Can you imagine?
I have one idea (usually these ideas are fragile and blow up in my own mind, but bear with me).
What if anyone that posts something on social media requires x ratio of likes/dislikes (before spreading) from anonymous users from a truly random selection of people. What would the information landscape look like?
What if we self-censor through some small but liberal consensus - the ratio threshold is up for debate.
Can you talk about the alternative? I hear you but I feel like there is no choice. We're in a shitty situation and it is natural to feel fear and have a knee-jerk reaction at any solution (not just the one Google proposed).
Every contentious issue in US politics gets divided into two major camps, each championed by one of the major political parties. Those parties use their resources to plant the seeds of powerful echo chambers, which eventually become self-perpetuating thanks to our natural tendencies for group preferences and confirmation bias. The misinformation crisis is just a result of an echo chamber throwing crap at the wall to avoid questioning itself.
The problem of echo chambers is a hard one to solve, especially when it comes to politics. However, I think an improved voting system would actually do a lot to help in the long term. By introducing a transferable vote, citizens could vote for third-party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Over time, that should hopefully empower more moderate political groups and make the middle ground between echo chambers more accessible.
A more accessible middle ground should result in fewer echo chambers. Fewer echo chambers should result in less incentive to create and circulate misinformation. At least, that's my two cents.
Curious of your thoughts there.
Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.
Any time I watch a video from CNN, Fox, or NBC, YouTube suggests political crap for weeks afterwards. I bet political content is one of their most "engaging" subjects, so I doubt Google would ever do the responsible thing and put a stop to that.
Modifying the algorithm to show "both sides" instead might help, but I don't think that would do much to encourage a middle ground. I'm worried both sides would just get more and more extreme.
Yeah, that ain't happening. We need some FCC laws around targeted content to audience (spawning echo chambers) to optimize engagement.
Please don't pretend that their voices carry equal weight to those who have authority on the matter.
T's effectiveness has been through manipulating that ideological pretext beyond campaign politics and beyond the requirement of even narrative cohesion with reality. He wields his populism to coerce even the interests of power themselves, with little regard for the overall homeostasis of Republican party's ideological pretext[0].
If he continues his ideological schism off-the-rails from an oval room at Mar-A-Lago, he has the precisely the same leverage in 2022 elections which he is wielding today.
[0] see Loeffler's catch-22
So are YOU arguing in bad faith to ignore this very obvious problem?
No one is saying accusations with evidence and merit cannot be made. They are saying that after losing over 50 lawsuits and having substantiated exactly zero claims, then we are losing patience with offering good faith.
I find likening fact-checking Trump to censoring a private citizen a disingenuous comparison that plays down the power of the office he holds. If he goes off the deep end doing any of those things, there won’t be much the media or the house can do to stop it, so I think some preemptive action is warranted. Whether YouTube have got it right here is another question.
You've already made an assumption of what is garbage and what isn't. You ever wonder if you could be wrong?
Regarding the former situation, the president is one person with clear, self-serving motives. His actions are constantly examined under the critical eyes of the media and his political opposition. The public itself can also use social media to provide additional scrutiny (with varying degrees of quality and professionalism).
The public has to search through garbage to find the truth. It's all easy to access, but there's a lot to go through.
In the prior situation, businesses are trying to denying the public access to provide scrutiny based solely on the content of the message, regardless of quality. Those same businesses also happen to facilitate content discovery for the overwhelming majority of internet users. There are still political opponents and a few media organizations which might broadcast the message, but it will unquestioningly reach a much smaller audience.
The public still has to search through garbage to find the truth. Now, though, some of it is much harder to access.
Neither is good, but the prior situation sounds much worse to me.