You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth, and that propaganda didn’t exist prior to 2016. Read Manufacturing Consent for a brief overview of this history of widespread weaponization of information by innumerable actors.

Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.

This is the kinds of "both-sides-ism" that gives centrists a bad reputation. You're basically saying: "everyone uses media to achieve their goals, therefore all sides are equally bad." No. Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society.

Say what you will about the "establishment," but traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth. Now we're seeing that anyone with enough money and Twitter followers and completely ignore the truth. We have to draw the line somewhere.

I’m not a centrist and none of my points are making any centrist arguments.

Using misinformation to intentionally disrupt a democratic election is demonstrably dangerous to society.

And you think this is the first time in the history of American democracy that actors used misinformation to influence an election? Again, this is not a new phenomenon whatsoever. All that’s new is that more people have access to the technology, which makes the previous gatekeepers nervous.

I hope this is not an argument for giving powerful weaponized mass disinformation tools to more people, including foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society to the point of inciting conflict and dismantling democracy.

Yes, removing this type of speech from YouTube may be an imperfect / stopgap solution.

What are some better alternatives?

I’m not arguing for that, but it might actually be an indirect solution. By forcing everyone to deal with it, skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise.

As an example, I think a similar situation will happen with deepfakes. Once it becomes widely known that it’s easy to fake video, people will become more skeptical of it.

What is the difference between "forcing everyone to deal with it" and what we've been doing for the last four years? Or, alternatively, why do we think we'll get a different result by doing the same thing over again?

I mean, it seems to me like we already have scepticism in spades. There's two sides, and if one of them said the sky was blue the other would be sure it were green.

It looks to me like what is needed is detached, discerning thinking, which is not the same thing. What reason do we have to think that people will start to do better about it and it will take care of itself?

I'm not opposed to your view, I just don't think I'm on the same page as you and it I'd like to hear more.

One leaves control of speech up to the individual speaker while the other leaves it in the hands of an Oligarchy of people who think they are know better than everyone else because they have more money. There's a degree of arrogance behind the thinking, "I'm smart enough to discern fact from fiction but those less intelligent than I must need my help or else they might believe a falsehood"

Everyone ought to be allowed to speak but networks ought to shut down organized campaigns to spread disinformation and networks that exist purely to spread hate and misinformation ought to be challenged by the people lied about on such platforms. Its not an ideal solution but none is probably possible to implement or live through.

Why are people so afraid of lies and falsehoods? It’s accidentally shutting down things you thought were false but arent that is really terrifying

Almost entirely because of misinformation we just spent 4 years with a complete idiot having the key to nuclear weapons that if used will almost certainly lead to at minimum crashing global civilization as we know it. His mishandling will ultimately be responsible for hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

We can probably make individual expression possible without allowing organized disinfo campaigns to continue unchecked.

Acting like this is an unsolvable problem is an intellectual disservice.

You’re missing a key point — journalistic integrity. It’s something that can be measured and validated.

Second is experience in discerning fact from fiction — not everybody has it. And example is that guy who believed that the earth was flat, so he jury rigged a rocket and shot himself straight up in the air. He then died from his injuries. Elementary school mathematics taught us that he wasn’t going to be successful, yet he chose to reject even the most foundational verified truths.

Third are the mathematical concepts of probability versus possibility. People who choose to believe things that are untrue tend to lean on the idea of “possibility“ without considering it’s likelihood (“probability“).

And there are people who question things simply for the purpose of questioning them. This is where fear, uncertainty, and doubt comes from. These are things that hold us back rather than pushing this forward. This is also known as “conspiracy“.

But there is a dramatically smaller group which aims to _seek truth_. These are the people who not just have an opinion, but are willing to put in the effort to evaluate evidence and allow their opinions to be changed by what can be proven. They recognize that it’s easy to want to look for patterns which support their existing biases, and they do their best to guard against that. They also recognize that psychology has taught us the humans like to look for patterns in data which suggest cause-and-effect, even if none exists. An example of this is when someone correlates the will of God to finding a $20 bill on the ground, when in reality it’s simply coincidence.

When you see hoof prints, you should think horses, not zebras. The simplest conclusion is usually (has the highest probability of being) right. One simply has to look at Trump’s track record with the truth to realize that he’s probably just lying.

And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition. You’re not being censored, if you’ve broken the rules of that agreement. And in the end, it’s YouTube’s decision since it’s their platform you’re using.

"And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. "

The US Constitution restricts the Government from infringing on rights we, as citizens, already have.

The Constitution does NOT grant us rights. The whole freaking point of our revolution vs., say the French Revolution, is the PEOPLE have the rights and government is restricted - NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

YouTube's unequal and arbitrary application of rules is EDITORIAL CONTROL. As such they fall FAR more on the side of a publisher than platform and that's the part of 230 that needs SERIOUS overhaul.

Then again maybe not. Their latest antics have pushed even more people off onto other platforms; and ultimately that will be the best correction. De-aggregation is the best antidote.

> journalistic integrity. It’s something that can be measured and validated.

How do we measure integrity?

> And finally, the word “censorship”. This is an accusatory word used by people who think it relates to their non-existent “freedom of speech”. The first amendment applies to the agreement between the US government and its citizens. It does not apply to your relationship with YouTube. > YouTube is a corporation that has an entirely separate agreement with its users, which does not include freedom of speech. Therefore, it’s not censorship — by definition.

The first amendment and freedom of speech are not synonyms, quite obviously because there can be freedom of speech outside of the jurisdiction of the US government; and similarly, Youtube is a trans-national corporation with more than just US citizens using it.

Even if it were wholly within US jurisdiction and Youtube only served US citizens, the first amendment is still not a synonym for freedom of speech. The word censor comes from a Latin word for a governmental position in ancient Rome but it does not follow that all censorship is therefore only possible or enacted by government. Not only is there no supporting logic for that, it's not evident in practice. Companies like Twitter[1], Facebook[2] and Google[3] remove things from their platforms for political convenience (or, as Anand Giridharadas points out[4], for any convenience):

> When you look at the ways in which the winners of our age give back, help out, make a difference, they are often designed to protect the system - above all - that the winners stand on top of.

As ever, I suggest getting a copy of On Liberty[0] by J.S. Mill, where he goes over both the tyranny of government and the tyranny of non-governmental actors, with regards to speech.

[0] https://www.bartleby.com/130/

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/12/15/facebook-twitter-donated-to-bi...

[2] https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-sup...

[3] https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/tulsi-gabbard-lawsuit...

[4] https://youtu.be/d_zt3kGW1NM?t=179

Sorry, you are in fact arguing for that.

But that won't work. It's well-known that misinformation propaganda works even if people know it's propaganda. People won't magically build up some kind of immunity and suddenly trust the scientific method - they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble. If employed by a state, this is often the goal of that propaganda.

> ... they will simply grow sceptical of all kinds of news sources and retreat further into their own bubble.

This is a central theme of the book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, which I found thought-provoking.

I've just been looking for a decent review. This is half-decent:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/10/this-is-not-pr...

As is this:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/10/13/bo...

Basically everyone trusts the scientific method.

However, there are a lot of people who don't trust certain types of 'scientists' because they've observed that those people don't seem to use the scientific method, even though they claim they do. That's a very reasonable and correct form of skepticism.

The lazy assumption that anyone who claims to be scientific actually is has been exploited by demagogues throughout history. Karl Marx was famously keen on presenting his own views as 'scientific' although there is of course nothing scientific about Marxism. Lysenko justified his beliefs on the grounds that they were scientific, and all sceptics of this claim were suppressed (i.e. jailed).

The way to tackle scepticism about the scientific method is to recognise that it's not scepticism of a methodology but an academic sub-culture.

The most prominent examples of modern anti-science in the US, such as in climate change, abortion, and epidemiology, do not find their roots in well-justified scepticism of particular scientists. Climate deniers don't care what science says, or how reliable peer-reviewed journals, and have no interest in the scientific method: they base their opposition in ideological grounds: "I don't believe climate change to be true, therefore anyone who does is a liar." They've made their decision because they have financial (or religious, or other) interests that make the truth uncomfortable for them. Why bother trying to understand the truth when you can just deny it?

You can't argue rationally with someone like that. They aren't skeptics, they're devout believers.

As someone who has rationally argued against epidemiology based on finding a constant stream of severe errors in their papers, I can assure you that epidemiology is almost entirely pseudo-scientific. I don't think I've ever encountered a field as disastrous as this one (though I've never really looked at climatology).

Epidemiology has so many massive cultural and methodological issues you could write an entire book about it, maybe one day I will. It is absolutely de rigueur in this field to make predictions without ever bothering to go back after an epidemic played out to study how well those predictions matched reality. They cherry pick data at an absurd rate: if they can get a more dramatic paper by using data that's 8 months old and based on a sample size of 7 people when they could use data published last week and which has a sample size of hundreds of thousands, they'll happily pick the former every time. Nobody in that field will notice or care, and they'll throw in a misleading citation or two to disguise what they're doing. There is no code quality control: these people happily publish papers based on models filled with memory corruption errors that can't even replicate their own output.

As for ideology, the fact that you can't explain what climatology sceptics believe should give you pause for thought. You appear to be projecting: a blind devout belief in "scientists" (they aren't really) is itself an ideology. Rather than engaging with the concerns of people who are pointing out problems in the published literature, you're just blowing them off as irrational.

> if they can get a more dramatic paper by using data that's 8 months old and based on a sample size of 7 people when they could use data published last week and which has a sample size of hundreds of thousands, they'll happily pick the former every time.

Do you have a particular example of this?

Heck more than one. Try "Determining the optimal strategy for reopening schools, the impact of test and trace interventions, and the risk of occurrence of a second COVID-19 epidemic wave in the UK: a modelling study"

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4...

Published August. Based on the Covasim model, paper describing it here:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20097469v...

The model takes its IFR data from Verity et al (see table 2), which is about 4x too high because it's taken from Wuhan evacuee data in January. The Verity paper that calculated this had access to a bigger and better dataset, the Diamond Princess cruise ship which they acknowledged they had looked at, and which yielded a lower IFR, but they didn't use it:

https://www.nicholaslewis.org/covid-19-updated-data-implies-...

"The Verity et al. CFR estimates were derived primarily from Chinese data, which reflected non-random testing ... When Verity et al. was prepared, the final death toll was not known. The data available only ran to 5 March 2020, at which point 7 passengers had died."

There's an analysis of the school re-opening paper that explains all this here. It also claims the paper used values for k (over-dispersion) from February, when there were hardly any cases on which to calculate that: https://lockdownsceptics.org/schools-paper/

Here's another paper that used an IFR of 1% in May:

https://www.nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-mi...

And another paper that assumed a 1% IFR in June:

https://github.com/ptti/ptti/blob/master/docs/PTTI-Covid-19-...

Analysis: https://lockdownsceptics.org/new-ucl-paper-on-contact-tracin...

That one didn't even bother to give a citation for its source, just assumed a value that was 4x too high.

Here are some current, reasonably up to date and sourced IFR estimating papers: https://swprs.org/studies-on-covid-19-lethality/

Epidemiologists know IFR rates fall over time because they always do. Yet they continued to use the earliest calculated value they could find, based on a tiny dataset that wasn't even the best available, because it gives the highest value and that lets them make the most dramatic results. This is a systematically untrustworthy field, they literally do not care about their own reliability at all.

In the U.S. we did actually have this system prior to TV news and especially prior to radio.

Newspapers were the preferred news media then and they were numerous, sensationalist and partisan (literally often party owned). Misinformation was abundant and often inflammatory.

I'm not implying we should want to return to those times. (Personally I think this is largely about trade-offs.)Just that this is not the weird time. 1950-2000 was the weird time when there was a majority or at least a plurality consuming most their information from a very small and concentrated media sphere.

Half of people have a below average IQ. More like 65% of older adults are both below average thinkers and above average voters.

Why would you think skepticism would be a suitable response to misinformation? The only mathematically viable way to combat such misinformation is to disenfranchise people too stupid to be in charge of anything that effects other people's lives.

Do you sincerely think that a person that manages to be elected is stupid?

An elected president might be a lot of stuff, some of them bad, but stupid he surely isn't.

Why is getting elected proof of intelligence? We literally elected the guy that convinced an overwhelming number of uneducated people that he was going to build a wall to keep the illegals from stealing their jobs.

Illegal Immigration does have an affect on blue collar jobs. You can research this yourself, btw. There is a truckload of studies.

https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/effects-immigration-africa...

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/pub/Immigration/EffOnMinoritie...

https://www.c-span.org/video/?204714-1/illegal-immigration-a...

I actually can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

Intelligence is not a prerequisite for being elected, and in many cases intelligence is a disadvantage. Most people are stupid, and they would rather see one of their own in positions of power. Dumb people can more easily connect with certain areas of the electorate.

Examples of this phenomenon are so copious and obvious that I shan't point them out.

Calm down there stalin

> skepticism will grow and new solutions toward treating information and the media will arise

And you are willing to sacrifice democracy for just the chance of this happening?

This rhetoric makes no sense to me. People are already subject to incomprehensible levels of propaganda from every angle and have been for over a century. When and where was there a perfect democracy?

For traditional publishing there is at least one person that is ultimately responsible for publishing it. The person is in the vast majority of cases subject to the same jurisdiction.

On YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. I can push my agenda worldwide. Russia, China, Iran, and other non-democracies can make insane amounts of propaganda for very cheap to reach millions of people. The engagement algorithms even help the propagandists reach their target audience effectively. The algorithms help then widen the audience automatically through shares of their supporters and further engagement.

seems youtube is blocked in china and iran

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

I don't see how the Chinese and Iranian governments need to worry about YouTube being blocked when they want to spread propaganda in the US and Europe.

But you do acknowledge that certain changes in society have taken place during the last few years, do you?

The goal is not perfect democracy, it's functional democracy.

> foreign governments and other actors actively seeking to polarize society

> What are some better alternatives?

I have no idea if it's mathematically possible but I'd be optimistic about the potential of a (hypothetical) privacy preserving web of trust metric. It would be really nice to have at least some limited indication of how the person behind the account fits into the world at large. Right now you can't reliably determine (arbitrary examples) country or even continent of residence, paid posts by an organized campaign (PR, propaganda, etc) versus organic occurrences, etc.

Of course, Facebook is the ever present counterexample where people proudly attach their full legal name to hate filled streams. But at least I personally know for certain that they're local people who actually exist and aren't being paid for their posts! Silver linings and all that.

But web of trust is still something you have to know and consciously decide to use. What if a majority of people would simply ignore it because it conflicts with the opinion formed in their own bubble - or if they simply don't know about it or don't know how to use it?

Not if it's built into the communication platform you happen to be using. Just one or a few basic indicators to give you even the slightest bit of information about who wrote what you're reading. Just a simple "p = 0.03 US resident" or an aggregate trust score based on a combination of social graph connectivity and spam reports or something. Sure, people could intentionally ignore it, but right now there's no indicator to be had even if you want it!

To be clear, I'm not talking about present day clunky GPG web of trust with key signing parties and all that. I'm talking about a hypothetical (ie as yet nonexistent) magical web of trust that somehow doesn't destroy your privacy in the process of being used. (It's not as crazy as it sounds - we already have zero knowledge proofs, blinded encryption, and various other privacy preserving cryptographic schemes.)

I don’t like the word bothsidesism because it implies that in reality only one side is the bad actor. That is a massive implication considering how casually it’s thrown around. Moreover, it’s used like an accusation. Accusing people of acknowledging that things probably aren’t black and white. Full on groupthink.

Black and white ;)

It's more like 80% / 20%. The disparity is huge, documented, and factual.

How are you objectively going to document misinformation? How are you even going to assign weights?

Voter fraud is 100 points for Trump, the Hunter story is 50 points for the Dems, etc..?

The thing is that if you ask side X they’ll say it’s 80/20 for side Y and vice versa. Neither should be so confident that they’re right. And pointing that out is now called bothsidesism. The lengths people go to to avoid cognitive dissonance is beyond ridiculous.

People who want to shoot me for being "liberal" are not as good as people who don't want to shoot me

I don’t think I understand. Are you basically saying that all Republicans literally want to kill you?

Not all bad actors are equally bad.

Hillary wasn't perfect. People didn't like her, and we got Trump.

The Weimar Republic was corrupt and ineffective. The Third Reich was corrupt and extremely effective.

Democracy is the history of choosing the least bad. If you consider all bads to be the same, you are not a responsible voter.

> Democracy is the history of choosing the least bad.

Ok, so bothsidesism is justified since you acknowledge both sides are bad?

> If you consider all bads to be the same, you are not a responsible voter.

It’s a strawman to claim both sides are exactly the same level of bad. That’s not what GP was saying.

The Democrats ran maybe the biggest misinformation campaign in my lifetime following the 2016 election. Massive turmoil and investigations later, it was all found to be false. What is this about “sides” again?

Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections

ICA 2017-01D 6 January 2017

Key Judgments

Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations.

We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. ...

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

The investigations that lead to convictions were entirely fabricated?

No American on the Trump side was indicted of anything actually related to "Russiagate", but for unrelated procedural crimes discovered during the investigation. (You know the saying that everyone wittingly or unwittingly commits three crimes a day?) Several Russian agents were indicted for Russiagate-related things; Putin will turn his goons over to US custody any day now!

Then we have people like Carter Page, whose name was raked over the coals for years because a FBI lawyer intentionally altered evidence (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report...) showing that far from being a Russian asset, Page had for years briefed the CIA every time he met with suspicious Russians. (Got to love how the Times describes said altering evidence as a "serious error".) You want an actual Russiagate-related indictment and guilty plea? Kevin Clinesmith, said FBI lawyer, is your man.

Mueller found Russia attacked the 2016 election and the Senate Intel Committee report found that Trump’s campaign manager was feeding internal campaign data to a Russian Intel Officer. Roger Stone was caught and convicted for lying to Congress about communications with Julian Assange, and the whole lot of them including Trump lied to the American people about hundreds of contacts with Russian nationals (some of whom turned out to be spies and Intel officers).

Technically it was found to be "by policy we do not press charges against sitting presidents" rather than false

"traditional media still bear some semblance of the truth."

Seriously? Four years of "RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA" and it turns out that the same people knew before they started peddling that narrative that it was (and still is) at its core a smear campaign cooked up by the Clintons.

Hunter Biden - completely buried before the election, now all of the sudden that the election is over the media is "breaking" this important story?

I could go on but I'm sure if it didn't fit your preconceived notions of what the "truth" is you'd be too busy drawing your lines.

> Hunter Biden - completely buried before the election, now all of the sudden that the election is over the media is "breaking" this important story?

The allegations were well covered before the election. The new story that they are covering now is the announcement by DoJ of the ongoing investigation. The media didn't suppress that before the election, Bill Barr did, doing a surprising simulation (given his past conduct) of professionalism in observing historical Justice norms around elections on that point.

>Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed. What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.

Beautifully put.

Better get ahead of it lest the proles gain class consciousness and use it against us.

I'm sure you mean that sarcastically, but you shouldn't. It's fun to complain about "the establishment," until it isn't there anymore. In the current case, "the establishment" means American democracy, which is built on people's faith in the institution of elections. If you erode that faith, democracy no longer works. That may be fine with you, but it's not fine with me.

>That may be fine with you, but it's not fine with me.

It is fine with me. If the choice is between continuing down the path we're on and some unknown chaos, I'm willing to roll the dice on the chaos.

At least it would be interesting.

Have you lived in a country where the establishment fails? Iran (1979), Soviet Union (1989), Turkey (take your pick)?

Yep, interesting times.

If boredom is the greatest difficulty you face, you're very fortunate. At least have consideration for those who value stability.

I said it would be interesting at least, and you can't deny that.

May I ask your opinion the below ? In your opinion, is this disinformation ? Something that should be suppressed and censored and to keep the establishment glowing ?

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/election-integrity-...

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/dec/14/forensic-au...

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2020/12/mi-judge-approves-r...

Then why base it on faith? Make it impossible to vote multiple times/places, or as someone else. Invalidate registration [6] for , and immediately flag when, a dead person tries to vote. Make it so you can instantaneously see that your vote was entered and confirm it to help with the anomaly detection. I think this is what everyone wants, and I think it would appease many worries. Unfortunately, this would almost certainly require voter ID, which has mixed popularity, and a reporting system, which requires tech, which the governments lowest bidder mentality appears to be wholly incapable of.

Additionally, harden these electronic voting machines, which have had constant press about their vulnerable for the last two decades [1][2][3][4]. Open source the software stack. Even simple, human, steps like each person puts a provided penny into the machine, so counts can be correlated, would be an improvement and add a real world aspect that people could personally understand, over the counter in memory that has no traceability.

The thing that I find most frustrating part about all of this is the perspective. Rather than silencing talk about fraud, hoping it will go away, we should tackle the reality of it and ask why people distrust the voting system, and find real world solutions, to increase that trust. The fact that every election before this one ended with sensational headlines of examples of voter fraud, but this year it's journalistic silence and social taboo, probably doesn't help (as insignificant as those previous stories were).

[1] 2018: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-vulnerabiliti...

[2] 2015: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/meet-the-e-votin...

[3] 2010: https://www.texastribune.org/2010/10/22/e-voting-suit-reveal...

[4] 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/29/technology/security-poor-...

[5] https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-steal-election-12824.h...

> harden these electronic voting machines

Make that voting computers, and abolish. If even HN readers can't get this right, there is no hope of electoral reform in the USA to raise it to an acceptable democratic level:

ODIHR election observers must not be blocked anymore.¹ Elections are to be held on a Sunday to not disenfranchise the working population. Votes are always counted and tallied manually.² Postal votes that arrive after the election date must be invalidated. Amend the constitution to require elections to be universal, direct, free, equal, secret, transparent and effective.³

If anyone is against these reforms, well, I'm certain Taibbi will not hesitate to call you too un-American, wrong and other things.

----

¹ The USA are a member state.

² This must be done so that the proper following of the procedure can be verified by anyone. Voting computers cannot be verified by just anyone. –– Using voting computers, being general purpose computers, are inherently easy to manipulate. Cracking just one model enables wide-spread fraud. Counting manually however means that wide-spread voting fraud requires undermining each location separately which is much harder to pull off and also multiplies the risk of detection.

³ These words have a specific legal meaning.

> Make that voting computers, and abolish.

I understand this perspective, and mostly agree, but I think that having a deep level of verification, traceability, and limits could really help with trust. I don't think that having a box of votes disappear into a, from our perspective, somewhat mysteries process filled with rooms full of volunteers counting things in relative secrecy, could provide as much confidence in the process. I'm not sure how that could be achieved without some digital system. Maybe a required mix of physical and digital systems?

For any system, I think some form of adversarial counting is required to know that someone "on your side" had a chance to count your vote. This could be implemented by having each party of interest select the counters, along with an "unbiased" automated system/digital results. The votes could be randomized between them. Some portion is then feed back through to help catch if any of the intentionally biased counters tried to tilt the system, to keep everyone honest. Regardless of the system, I think the minimum requirements for the counting process should be enough to obtain some level of trust, and be at a federal level, since we all have to live with the results.

Sure, but you also need to pair it with free Gov issued IDs for all individuals. The Voter fraud canard is a red herring when electoral fraud is an order of magnitude worse.

Other kind of media having issues does not disprove the comment you're responding to. You're also assuming some opinions at the beginning which we haven't seen in the parent's comment. Things don't have to be black or white - it doesn't have to be democratisation vs establishment. There's way more nuance here. Including platform protecting its existence in case they fail so badly at filtering content that they get regulated by... establishment.

>Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed

Agreed. The poster above invokes the special pleading fallacy.

>What is new is the democratization of it, hence the establishment’s hostility.

There's a historical precedent for this in creation of moveable type printing presses.

You have invoked the fallacy fallacy. Unfortunately, special pleading is only a fallacy if something isn't actually different from the thing it's being compared to. So I disagree fundamentally that it's special pleading.

The hostility is not just from establishment, it's from normal people like me, GP, and millions of other Americans that feel like we're taking crazy pills because of all the stupid shit people now inexplicably believe due to weaponized misinformation at a scale never before seen.

"Weaponized information" can mean everything from partisan hyperbole to observations that don't mesh with one's biases.

Addicts everywhere repeat the phrase, "this time is different". What makes it special pleading is the lack of evidence or even a reasoned argument supporting this assertion.

Kinda just seems like you haven't been listening.

You are cordially invited to qualify why "this time is different" and how speech or as you put it "weaponized misinformation", is equivalent to violence.

Defend the assertion with a reasoned argument. Otherwise, it is simply special pleading.

Well I will not pretend that I am the one to make a good case for it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to debate you about it.

I never said it was equivalent to violence. However, if it leads to violence, speech is absolutely dangerous. See murder cases where people are convinced to kill others under false pretenses. Or they are just talked into doing it by a charismatic individual. This sort of speech is actually already illegal. I'm sure it's not difficult for you to imagine speech that leads slightly indirectly to violence. That isn't necessarily the type of speech we are discussing here, I just thought I'd point out the extreme case where we already acknowledge the power of speech.

As you have heard said and I'm sure will disagree with, the internet has lowered the bar to attaining a widespread audience. It used to be that you would have to be eloquent enough and thoughtful enough to throw your ideas into a coherent book, show, essay, or whatever. And there would be people vetting your material for quality before deciding it should go before an audience.

Obviously, that doesn't stop all the bullshit (and actually leads to other bullshit), but having a higher barrier to information exchange meant that content was much more likely to vetted by one or more people who had some critical thinking skills. As a publisher, you couldn't just put out anything because it would cost you something. Now, any half baked idea you have you can put it out there, and similarly minded people who maybe formed the same sorts of half baked ideas or are just incapable of vetting the truth for themselves can find each other and form large groups of people who all now believe the same bullshit. This was always possible with word of mouth, but the internet is a much more effective medium for bullshit and allows it to be much more viral and widespread in nature.

The vast majority of widely available "information" out there is no longer authored by experts, thanks to the internet. It's authored by people who mistake their layperson knowledge as expert knowledge, or believe that their "common sense" is enough to tell them how the world works. The audience can now choose what "information" to consume and doesn't have to believe the unpleasant things experts say or the understand the complicated stuff if they don't want to. They can just pick and choose whatever simple or comfortable truths they desire.

As for evidence, most hard social and political problems are impossible to agree on. That problem is exacerbated by the type of misinformation we're talking about here, because it's even harder to agree on what the facts are. For example, somehow we are still arguing about global warming despite mountains of evidence. The the same thing happened with smoking and lung cancer. I don't have any evidence to share with you, but I'm sure that if I did you'd find a way to dismiss it with your own.

I'm confident that you have heard similar reasoning before.

The bar has been lowered for entry. The bar has continued to lower throughout history. To advance this point, you would need to establish a demarcation point where "this time is different".

Above you suggest that credentialed gatekeepers somehow did a better job of protecting the public from misinformation which results in dangerous violence. A cursory examination of history debunks this.

The Pulitzer prize (a coveted credential) is named for the originator of "yellow journalism". Half truths, mistruths and outright fabrications have always been with us. Look no further than the media's uncritical promotion of Iraqi WMD as a prelude to war. Experts were trotted out to tell us that Saddam had yellow cake etc. Hans Blix was silenced.

If communication can be equated to violence, then the sources of record trumpeting false justifications for war must be the most dangerous and violent of them all. Yet, these are the gatekeepers you suggest are more responsible and accountable. There has been no accountability for this propaganda. Many would suggest that the same methods continue today.

Youtube's censorship is a natural continuation of establishment gatekeeping. A cynic might even suggest that gatekeeping is the purpose of walled gardens.

More of the same, this time is not different. It fits perfectly with historical precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism#Hearst_in_Sa...

The appeal to experts and technocracy is a separate error worthy of another discussion.

You argue that the scale of the problem does not make it different ("more of the same"). I disagree. I could not draw you a line in a gradient of white to black to demonstrate exactly where light-grey becomes dark-grey. That does not mean that there is no distinction between the two hues or that it cannot be demonstrated.

Also, you keep talking about equating it to violence, which I never said.

Manufacturing an argument the other party didn't make, ("You are assuming that the regular media is the default, the truth"), and choosing to rebut that strawman then their actual key point ("It's about combating weaponized misinformation"), is disengenuous in the extreme.

The weapons now are bigger, faster, have greater reach, higher fidelity, multimedia appeal, vastly more intelligence and data, can be tuned in realtime, and delivered with precisionnto higly selected audiences completely under the public radar.

All of which "Weaponized misinformation has existed as long as human speech has existed" utterly ignores.

People have been killing each other and themselves for the supremacy of fairy tales since the beginning of time, but please tell me how getting someone to believe a conspiracy theory and vote "badly" is somehow a society-breaking new invention.

Scale. Anonymity. Impunity. Rate. Effectiveness.

The problem is that now we have weapons of mass information distraction.

I agree - you can't trust the main stream media anymore. Always verify their reports by yourself. They are careful about directly lying - but twisting and omitting information is something they are genius at.

Calling the opinion of someone you disagree with “weaponized disinformation” doesn’t mean it’s anything but someone else’s opinion. It is chilling that you don’t seem to know the difference between a free Press and an immediate threat to your life.

Facts are not opinions. More and more, people are distrustful of large media organizations, which at least historically have a commitment to doing what they can to report true facts. If you believe that those organizations are untrustworthy, that's your opinion that you have a right to. However, you don't have a right to hold up another set of facts as valid without evidence. The truth doesn't care about your opinion.

> Facts are not opinions

They're also not handed down from God. A "fact" is socially constructed, and while the simple-minded among us can afford to pretend that a "fact" is handed down on clay tablets by a deity, they can only do so because they're downstream of a complex and decentralized system for determining what we consider high-confidence enough to communicate as "truth" to those in need of it (eg children). This process includes dissent and "disinformation", and it's baked into everything from our media environment to the scientific method.

> More and more, people are distrustful of large media organizations, which at least historically have a commitment to doing what they can to report true facts

Lol. Forget picking up a history book, all you need to do is read the news for a week as critically as you would read a blog or tweet and you can find plenty of examples of agenda- or simply ignorance-driven inaccuracies in the most mainstream and well-regarded publications. It's ludicrous to claim that media as a whole "does what they can to report facts" and that that inoculates them from being challenged. They've certainly got standards that the average person doesn't, but those standards are barely even commensurate with the responsibility they have, and the divine right to Facts that the ignorant blindly imbue them with. If you're reading any source uncritically and assuming it's Fact, you're doing it wrong.

> However, you don't have a right to hold up another set of facts as valid without evidence.

Another loaded assumption which doesn't hold up on its own. Nobody cares about the case where a wild assertion is made with no attempt at evidence. ~Everyone has "evidence" for their claim. The quality of the evidence varies wildly, both in its internal consistency and in how it comports with external models of the world. What's determining your worldview is what you implicitly dismiss or accept as evidence, based on your own biases and unconscious reasoning (given that your proposal is tantamount to turning off conscious reasoning about the truth). It should be obvious why this is far inferior for anyone with a brain to reading different sources, weighting them by credibility, and synthesizing your own model. You don't need to be particularly smart to be a journalist, and layered on top of that are all kinds of perverse incentives that don't point towards "truth". The notion that you should blindly outsource the process of a final determination of your model of the world is beyond insane.

Was it "fact" when the media universally reported that the pandemic was to be ignored[1], and wrote articles mocking companies for distancing? Was it fact when they universally and confidently rejected masks as useful? Should I have been protected from the "disinformation" that sounded the alarm early, leading me to look into the science and determine that both of these narratives were dead wrong[2], or at the very least suffered from a cultural inability to reason under uncertainty?

The key insight here is that the interaction is two-way: if enough heterodox ideas are on firm footing and contradict your external model of the world, you should be digging into your external model and considering its weaknesses and what to tweak.

The pandemic is an incredibly bizarre time to choose to tear down society's truth-generation system. At every single stage, I've been at least partially at odds with public health advice due to 1) noticing flaws in public health reasoning, 2) exposing myself to contrary narratives/analysis that your definition would call "made-up facts", 3) reading the relevant science, 4) shifting my understanding of the risks. Again and again and again, "the Truth" has caught up to me weeks or even months later, while my friends have blindly been following the narrative off a cliff and exposing themselves to more risk _and_ more restrictions.

Again, I'm aware that most people are not remotely capable of this, and I don't begrudge them that anymore than my basketball teammates begrudge me being too short to dunk or block as well as they do. But the idea that we should tear down the process by which we arrive at truth because having to use their brains make the black-and-white crowd uneasy is infuriating. By all means, continue to uncritically swallow media narratives; you'll be wrong a lot more often, but at least you won't have to use any neurons. But it's insane to decide that nobody else should have access to analysis that isn't pre-approved just because you don't want a reminder that being an adult in a complicated world is difficult.

[1] "Get a grippe, people", as the Washington Post so memorably phrased it in just one example.

[2] This isn't just theoretical: I told the older folks in my extended family to stock up on non-perishables while The Truth was still saying "forget the pandemic myth, go to the parade today!", which meant my parents and other high-risk family members (some in areas hit very hard in the first wave) were able to ride out the risky first month of the pandemic without leaving their house. The reason everyone listened to me without question is because I have a track record of being right when the media is obviously wrong, due to, you guessed it, my exposure to what you'd term "disinformation" and ability to avoid uncritically swallowing whatever Vox tells me is true.

I think you don't know what the weapon is. The weapon is wielded by people who know better: by Trump, by Giuliani, by Hannity. They know the truth, but are cynically using their platform to manipulate the population. The consequences are destructive.

The opinions are not the weapon. The opinions are the wound, caused by the weapon.

Your point raises a couple of questions. First, do you think it is only your outgroup (Fox News, Republican politicians, etc) that would use misinformation? Democrats and other media outlets don't stand to gain from its use, or are too moral to resort to it? Second, the precedent this sets is that the government can state one set of facts to be true, and force compliance to that truth from media. Do you not see this as a potential problem? Even if you believe that your group would never abuse that power, do you think that they will remain in power eternally? Is it not possible for this "defense" against "weaponized misinformation" to be used against you?

> First, do you think it is only your outgroup (Fox News, Republican politicians, etc) that would use misinformation?

Can you point to any evidence anyone on the Democratic side of the fence has questioned the legitimacy of the last election even though control of the Senate may still easily fall into the hands of the group that prevented legal court nominations by an elected president while, under the very same conditions, rushed through the nomination to a SCOTUS seat of a judge that has barely three years of experience in that function?

The evidence that you request does not match the quote you pulled out. And even if the Democrats did want to further solidify their victory, that would be an extraordinarily foolish way of doing it, as any doubt cast on the legitimacy of the election furthers Trump's agenda, not their own.

You can switch elections to 2016 though, where Obama and Hilary could have been suing to throw out Texas's votes because they didn't like the results

> If you don't believe it's a weapon, you're wrong. If you don't believe weaponized misinformation is dangerous, look at the regimes it's toppled. And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.

I don't see anyone here arguing those points, so I think this is a bit of a strawman.

> It's not about banning disagreement. It's not even about opinions. It's about combating weaponized misinformation.

The argument, as I see it, is that "weaponized misinformation" and "disagreement" are not cleanly separable categories, and than anyone with the power to ban the former will almost certainly use it to ban the latter.

They are definitely separable, based on intent.

The marketplace of ideas works only insofar as everyone involved operates with good faith. Weaponized misinformation is the opposite of that: expressing what appears to be an opinion, but is actually a manipulation tactic. Look in particular for arguments that appeal to emotion (especially anger), nationalism, and in-group/out-group. The fascists understood, and still understand, these strategies.

If you can't tell the difference between a genuine opinion and a misinformation tactic, you are ill prepared to participate in today's media environment.

> They are definitely separable, based on intent.

That is frankly naive. Many earnest people repeat dangerous lies, and wicked people are more that willing to use the truth, especially if it is an uncomfortable truth that is important but overlooked by polite society.

> If you can't tell the difference between a genuine opinion and a misinformation tactic, you are ill prepared to participate in today's media environment.

On the contrary, I can do a much better job at the scale I operate at than YouTube can do at the scale it operates at.

Furthermore, I take the very liberal view that I have both the right and the responsibility to make up my own mind about others' speech. I hold in low regard those who try to take that from me.

> That is frankly naive. Many earnest people repeat dangerous lies, and wicked people are more that willing to use the truth, especially if it is an uncomfortable truth that is important but overlooked by polite society.

Correct. That's why I said the difference is intent. You have not contradicted that.

> On the contrary, I can do a much better job at the scale I operate at than YouTube can do at the scale it operates at.

Congratulations. I'm not concerned with weaponized disinformation in your social circle.

> Furthermore, I take the very liberal view that I have both the right and the responsibility to make up my own mind about others' speech. I hold in low regard those who try to take that from me.

Good for you. If everyone were as intelligent and enlightened as you are, then the world would operate a lot more smoothly.

> Correct. That's why I said the difference is intent. You have not contradicted that.

You are mistaken. The earnest falsehood can cause great damage, and the truth - even when spoken by someone of ill intent - is still important. Your standard of intent is simply not sufficient.

So called "hateful" people are sometimes necessary to break the stranglehold bad ideas have on society. Socrates was executed for "corrupting the youth".

> Congratulations. I'm not concerned with weaponized disinformation in your social circle.

The point here is that YouTube (or any tech platform) is not in a position to implement any reasonable standard at scale. Even if your standard of intent were reasonable (it's not) intent doesn't just vary between people, intent can vary within a person over the course of a single conversation! And a person's intent can also be mixed. There is no way any of these platforms can capture that level of nuance in human social interaction.

> Good for you. If everyone were as intelligent and enlightened as you are, then the world would operate a lot more smoothly.

True, but beside the point.

I want to be very clear about this. If you value democracy in any way, you must support the right for everyone to make up their own mind. That is because, unless you have that right, you do not have a democracy. All you have is the oligarchy of the gatekeepers of acceptable opinion.

> The earnest falsehood can cause great damage, and the truth - even when spoken by someone of ill intent - is still important.

I didn't say that earnest falsehoods can't cause damage, I merely said that it's not a weapon. Someone who is weaponizing information to achieve their own ends definitely knows what they're doing. And obviously, speaking the truth, regardless of intent, is not a case of misinformation.

To draw an analogy: I'm not saying we should outlaw guns. I'm saying we should outlaw murder. The problem is not the spread of opinions the problem is the intentional use of insincerely held opinions to cause damage.

I support the right for everyone to make up their own mind, which is exactly why I oppose weaponized misinformation. I don't even know what it would mean to oppose the right for everyone to make up their own mind. Reminds of the caps from the Tripod Trilogy.

The power of those with great wealth to influence others should not be underestimated. We're not immune. If you want to live in a society where everyone makes up their own mind, don't let them join a cult.

> And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.

If anything, it makes us so much more vulnerable.

I’m probably older than you and heard this exact same argument used by the Indian government to censor television (we had exactly 1 channel of government run TV growing up).

Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a religious zealot hundreds of years ago arguing to ban the technology of books because they might say things you disagree with. ‘Ban Martin Luther, he is trying to destroy the Catholic Church’.

It remains a mystery why so many Americans are so incredibly ignorant of history. Is it because school systems became overrun by propaganda because of teachers unions?

1. There is a quantifiable difference between banning dissenting opinions and banning intentional weaponized misinformation. No ban will be perfect, but a failure to fight back against misinformation is the same as giving power to anyone with enough money and enough Twitter followers. The loudest voice controls the most minds.

2. We're not in the middle ages anymore. Back then, a malicious individual seeking to spread misinformation was limited in their options. The target audience wasn't literate, so the best you could do was stand shouting on the street corner. These days, unlike any previous time in history, we have fast, effective, cheap methods, that adapt to the user's preferences, to tell them exactly what they want to hear. We know from plenty of historical examples of both wartime and peace-time propaganda, that lies are effective. How can you be so ignorant of history?

In short, it's not Martin Luther I'm fighting against, but rather the Catholic Church.

What is the harm model here? After the 2016 election, more than half of Democrats disagreed that the elections “were free and fair.” https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/e...

> Of registered voters surveyed, 53% said the 2016 election between Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton was free and fair and 33% said it was not.... 39% of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters said it was. Half of Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters said it wasn’t free and fair.

I’m not trying to create an equivalence between what Clinton said and what Trump is saying. I’m talking about the beliefs of the voting public, which are clear in the polls. Half of the people who lost in 2016 thought the election wasn’t fair, but democracy didn’t end. What’s the danger here that justifies censorship?

Very different situations though. Hillary conceded. And no one I personally knew really thought that Trump would not become president. Most people believed there was Russian interference, but most didn’t believe they were literally changing votes. The Senate agreed with that assessment.

While I’m no fan of Trump and vote mostly Democratic I do think Trump won in 2016 and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t. I have a much smaller social circle of Republicans and they ALL believe Trump won this year.

So why not then support the process of:

1. Signature matching on mailed ballots

2. Broadcasting the hearings in the accused states (MI, PA, GA, WI, AZ, etc)

3. Actually hearing the cases at both the state and federal level, and then throwing them out on the facts presented, instead of refusing to hear them on "lack of standing" to begin with?

Win in the court of transparency. Make the crackpots look like crackpots, loudly and publicly, through a process of transparency that then becomes impossible to challenge or cast doubt upon, except for the most hardened of partisans.

Why is there such a refusal for this to happen?

So you're clearly not actually following the proceedings of any of this anyway, so what difference would it make?

Testimony has been broadcast, court rulings are public, the reasoning and legal procedure is all happening in the open.

You're demanding transparency because it suits whatever narrative you have in your head, yet demonstrating you won't put any effort into following the process which is already public.

To make it easy, here's a summary of the cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-election_lawsuits_related...

Be sure to click the links for each case to get details, and from there most of the references are the actual court documents.

Thanks for the link. This seems to prove the point though? The vast majority of official cases were dismissed on procedural issues (standing, filing in the "wrong" court, etc etc). You'll need to click through to each of the sources of why each case was dismissed, but the majority of linked cases seem like no decision was made on the facts presented, if they were allowed to be presented to begin with.

So if a crime is committed, but a judge refuses to hear it, did the crime not happen?

A dismissed case means that a lawsuit is closed with no finding of guilt and no conviction for the defendant in a criminal case by a court of law. Even though the defendant was not convicted, a dismissed case does not prove that the defendant is factually innocent for the crime for which he or she was arrested.[0]

https://www.recordgone.com/articles/definition-of-a-dismisse...

Huh? You're innocent until you've been proven guilty. While the case is ongoing, you're still innocent. You aren't proven to be not guilty, sure, but you're still innocent

Like I said - if you're not given due process, did the crime not occur? Or did you not get justice because of a corrupt institution? The discussion is about getting the evidence judged on its merits (or lack thereof), which has not happened in this case, and looks unlikely to happen at this rate.

You provide facts while you're applying for the court to take the case.

Not having standing means you haven't argued that there is a case, since you haven't been wronged. These are transparent already - there are documents where the crackpots have shown themselves to be crackpots already. Just because you don't want to read, doesn't mean it has to be presented on your format of choice

They could also take this case to Russian courts or Canadian ones, but what exactly are you expecting them to do? Courts have a limited scope of what they rule on

> Actually hearing the cases at both the state and federal level, and then throwing them out on the facts presented, instead of refusing to hear them on "lack of standing" to begin with?

Standing is a threshold issue without which there is no legally cognizable case to hear, but I suppose if you are backing a campaign against democracy being against the rule of law as well isn’t surprising.

It's not anyone’s fault but Trump's that the main party that actually has standing to bring a case challenging the results as improperly reached (the candidate who claims to be improperly defeated) keeps voluntarily dismissing the ones they initiate rather than trying to get them to trial, almost as if they are filing cases as a PR strategy with no intent to actually litigate them.

There’s refusal because it’s not sincere. If we did all that and Biden still won then it would just lead to the next conspiracy that the judges didn’t listen to the facts really. And the signature matching wasn’t stringent enough. And then they would argue that they didn’t let everyone required speak at the proceedings. Next they need to actually interview everyone who did a Mail in ballot and if they don’t show up then the vote doesn’t count. Etc...

And having standing is pretty important in something like this.

Lastly the crackpots already look like crackpots.

As I said, I’m not comparing the candidates and judging their behavior. I’m comparing what the public believed: “Two out of three Democrats also claim Russia tampered with vote tallies on Election Day to help the President – something for which there has been no credible evidence.” The point is to understand what’s the effect of people believing the election was not fair.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...

It always existed and education is a great way to treat it. Banning certainly is easier.

> It's strange for Americans to be on the business side of a propaganda weapon, as we're more used to using against our enemies.

Funny that no top replies pounced on that starting axiom. USA have been widely known as a propaganda massive producer firstly toward its own citizens, even today. From military cult, pledge at schools, commies witch hunting and globalisation hammering, and of course, all your religions and sub-religions, you all have been living and keep living inside daily propaganda.

Yes. The difference was, back then, the US government had a monopoly on propaganda in the US. I'm not saying that's great, but at least it's stable. Now we're in an age where propaganda literally goes to the highest bidder.

Propaganda is a weapon, and I'd rather my own government hold it, than unknown entities.

What happens when the "weaponized misinformation" ends up being true?

From the article: Hunter Biden was announcing that his “tax affairs” were under investigation....That news was denounced as Russian disinformation by virtually everyone in “reputable” media, who often dismissed the story with an aristocratic snort....That tale was not Russian disinformation, however, and Biden’s announcement this week strongly suggests Twitter and Facebook suppressed a real story of legitimate public interest just before a presidential election.

Contrast this to the accusations of election meddling in the previous election.

At this point the farce has exceeded its self. Yet raging partisans still manage to suspend their disbelief where it suits their biases.

When you can’t call something a lie but you still want to invalidate its legitimacy, you say “misinformation”

So Trump’s campaign manager shuffling internal campaign polling data to a Russian Intel Officer (the Senate Intel Committee’s characterization, not mine), while Russian Intelligence is busy waging a directed psyops campaign against the American public, and then lying about it to the FBI is not evidence of collusion? Trump’s close associate Roger Stone had advanced knowledge of hacked DNC materials from Wikileaks and told Trump, but not the FBI, then lied about it to Congress. Not evidence of collusion? Trump’s son, son in law, and campaign manager met with a now convicted Russian spy in Trump’s house, who laid out terms for delivering materials damaging to Clinton - relaxed sanctions. Trump lied about this meeting’s existence to the American public. Not evidence of collusion?

To summarize:

Trump knew Russia was trying to help him. He knew they wanted to offer dirt on Clinton in exchange for better relations. The hacked information was indeed delivered, meanwhile Trump’s campaign was funneling internal data to Russian Intel, which was attacking The election. And surprise surprise, the Republican platform that year was softer on Russia than it ever had been in the last 40 years. Suddenly Republicans don’t care about Russian annexation of Crimea? For no reason at all?

No evidence? Really? Let me guess, you only read the Bill Barr memo, which a Federal Judge has noted seemed to be intentionally misleading of the Mueller Report. I guess you also haven’t read the Senate Intel report, which lays out 900 pages of evidence related to Russian interference of the 2016 election, and the Trump campaign’s entangled involvement with it.

Maybe you don’t believe they colluded, but let’s remember that the original, official Trump campaign line was that they had zero contacts and zero deals with Russia. This turned out to be a complete lie.

To the extent that you think those things constitute evidence (and some of them are clearly wrong/lacking context/misinformation), you should also believe that these things constitute evidence of voter fraud:

- Jurisdictions with more votes than voters

- Dead people voting

- Individual alive people who claim to not have voted, being counted in the voter roll

- Literal videos of ballot counters marking ballots

- Thousands of "mail-in" ballots that have literally one mark, only for president, all in sequence of each other, without even being creased

- Thousands of claims of harassment and blocking of poll watchers

- Thousands of votes being flipped by the polling machines, all in the direction of Trump -> Biden

- Statistical analysis of the unlikeliness of the authenticity of the ballots in the contended jurisdictions, all of which stopped counting in the dead of the night, when they subsequently received mass piles of fresh ballots that leaned unrealistically heavily in one direction

- Non-enforcement of the only way to sort-of authenticate ballots: signature matching

- Not necessarily "evidence," but the unlikeliness of republicans winning literally every single hotly-contended house seat, yet losing support for the president

I think your information is weaponized misinformation, so now it’s just a game of “who has more power?” Live by the sword...

>It's about combating weaponized misinformation.

Nah. It's about whether or not we are okay with giant corporate tech companies deciding what is and what isn't "weaponized misinformation". I'm fully up to speed on the history of the United States using information as a weapon abroad, but what makes me uncomfortable about this situation is that tech folks seem to have dropped our usual skepticism about that strategy, and are somehow now okay with this happening domestically. Maybe I'm being naive, and this skepticism was never really justified, or is easily overrided by feelings about "making the world a better place". Whatever. It's still going to be weird to me to watch my friends who work in tech, who in literally any other circumstance would be freaking out at the prospect of tech companies deciding what you get to see on these gigaplatforms, jettison their skepticism in order to "protect democracy".

>And if you think the "American spirit," or somesuch nonsense, makes us immune, I hope we won't have to find out.

Not sure this invocation makes the point you think it does. Seems to me the "American spirit" you're invoking in the negative is one built on a mythos of telling totalitarians, be they government or corporate, to go fuck themselves. Recent history gives one good reason to be skeptical, give the corporatism and financialism rampant in the US economy. But that's still the mythos. I've still got a little Faith left.