If this issue is the sticking point given the other differences in platform (many that involve fundamental rights and freedoms), then it sounds like Republicans have managed to find a good new wedge issue (you not voting is a known part of their playbook).

The whole idea that there are "sides" to be had is IMHO extremely sad in the first place. This whole bipartisan system bullshit is causing so much damage, and its been going on since at least the 70s.

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” -John Adams in letter to Johnathan Jackson, 1780.

That's an odd take on US history-- it certainly wasn't all roses before the 70s, what with political sides getting people blacklisted, killed, or even starting a civil war.

Is there a smoking gun here that points the blame to any officials representing the party, as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias?

I find the tweetstorm format to be not particularly coherent, and I haven’t followed the story closely enough to know who the actors are, but Ro Khanna (a Democrat) is one of the names I recognize and he seems to be against the censoring.

Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives, the executives specifically mentioned the "Biden Team", Ro Khanna wasn't necessarily against censoring the story she was upset that Twitter shut down the Trump admin's press secretary account for dm'ing the NY Post Story and that Republicans on the Hill were rightfully so making a big deal out of that.

Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.

More than one smoking gun here and yes this is a huge story. I doubt we'll hear much out of it on CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC oligopolists.

Just so you know Ro Khanna is a man. Also appears to be the representative for a substantial part of the Valley, like Cupertino and San Jose.

https://khanna.house.gov/

> Party officials were directly emailing twitter executives

Thinking that this isn't happening, particularly by parties during an election is massively naive. How Twitter responds to it, and whether there was any undue pressure made by those parties would be a scandal, but "VIP account has a direct line to higher ups" is nothing.

Nothing said by parent suggests that they think this wasn't happening on the regular, or by other administrations. The shark was jumped here.

Weird how you say it was blatant partisan censorship but ignore that the Trump administration did the same exact thing while they were actually in the executive branch. It's almost like there is something blatantly partisan here going on, but it's not the "censorship"

Both of these things are bad, yes?

If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of Trump's executive direction, does that not count as some kind of 1A violation?

You should be explaining this to the poster I responded to, not me. But, generally, no. I don't think it's a big deal that anyone emails twitter and then twitter's moderation team looks at a post to see if it violates the rules.

>If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

If that's the metric when why isn't Fox News and all the right wing media, and online Republican commenters not in-kind donations?

Not sure why you're singling out Fox News and "right wing" media here, but I certainly think it's a problem when major networks coordinate coverage with their preferred candidate. That certainly counts as a "service" to me.

> If Twitter was doing all of this at the behest of the Biden Campaign, does that not count as some kind of in-kind donation?

if this is our metric (and it very well could be) then every industry ever needs to be investigated--i guarantee you religions are massively guilty of this. we don't have to look far at all to see churches loudly preaching for one party right now. i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states. and i guarantee you countless other industries will be as well.

im sure elon himself has direct lines to many politicians. honestly i think this is a path we should explore with all monied/influential folks and politicians. lets mitigate quid pro quo with these people.

I clarified in a subsequent comment that what I'm talking about is explicit coordination. There's a major and consequential difference between a Priest telling his Parishioners during Mass that one candidate is better than another, or a media outlet saying the same thing during their prime time show, and some kind of explicit coordination between the campaign and those entities. The former is just run of the mill 1A protected speech, the latter is much more nebulous.

>i guarantee you we'd find all kinds of instances with politicians from oil rich states.

This is a dangerous subject, but KSA obviously does this all the time and it's not any different than Russian tomfoolery on social media, or what all these people did with Twitter, but we all just sort of let it happen because reasons. It's honestly disgusting.

sure, i’m just pointing that, if our metrics are that whatever-this-is should be considered scandalous and that it should be mitigated, then i can guarantee that we’d find way more of this out there. way more.

and i think we’d all win.

direct lines of communications, closed door meetings, etc… between religious leaders and candidates are widely known and id love for us to scandalize this and insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.

direct lines of communication, meetings etc… between oil execs and politicians is also widely known. i’d love to insist on some clarity and bring down all involved in anything sketch.

same with elon too. since the immediate realm we’re in surrounds twitter execs, i absolutely think we need to know which political influencers, politicians, and aspiring politicians he’s been in touch with and what exactly they’ve been discussing. this is absolutely 100% relevant to this exact tweet thread. twitter execs communicating with politically active people.

i can almost guarantee we will uncover all kinds of shady things happening across the board. we all can win here.

Zero disagreement. Maybe what we should be hoping/praying for is a deluge of leaks and whistle blowing from social media employees, explaining how all of this is Oz behind a curtain and Oz, as it happens, is rather stupid.

Yeah there is a difference, a priest telling his people to vote for one candidate while being a tax free organization is illegal.

Do you agree non consentual intimate images should be taken down?

If so, what Biden's team did is not an issue.

>Blatant, let me repeat in caps, BLATANT partisan censoring was happening at Twitter going so far as election interfering which is illegal in the US.

That's not illegal election interference in the slightest.

This one is pretty bad in my opinion:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598827602403160064

The government is not supposed to be censoring people's speech, however they are effectively doing just that using a layer of indirection.

The Biden campaign is not the government.

So if in 2016 the Trump campaign had done the same thing, you'd be fine with the response, "The Trump campaign is not the government."?

I would, yes. In fact, the Trump White House did just that, it’s right there in the thread. Without knowing what the tweets they had removed were, I don’t see evidence of wrongdoing. There are legitimate reasons to have tweets taken down: malicious impersonation, revenge porn (which apparently some of these were), death threats, etc.

But Biden was likely to be elected, members of his staff appointed to government positions and staff at Twitter likely understood that.

Were they? It wasn't clear even for most of a week after the election that Biden was likely to be elected.

it was clear for the whole campaign the odds were pretty even

Is that a defence or further proof of malfeasance?

The Biden campaign, which became the government, perhaps in part due to the assistance provided, requested and received assistance. If the campaign wasn't the government and didn't have the power to compel assistance, why did Twitter help?

Because at least some of the content reported by them was unequivocally bad? Like someone's nudes that were published without consent. Or are you saying that if NYPost decides to run some candidate's children's nudes all of a sudden it's journalism instead of revenge porn?

Joe Biden wasn’t “the government” yet, look at the date. I wish we knew what these tweets actually were. If it was suppressing a news story, that’s bad. If it’s asking for death threats to be removed, that’s not bad.

(Matt himself acknowledges that both parties had tweets taken down, his evidence for bias is apparently that Twitter employees donated more to democrats https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598828932395978752?s=46&...)

Surely Twitter still has the data in an archive somewhere, but it’s not clear from the thread that Matt knows what the content of these tweets was.

Many of the removed tweets flagged by Bidens team were literally nude pictures of Hunter Biden.

Wow, 99.7% contributions went to democrats... If that isn't damning evidence of partisan bias I don't know what is! I honestly wasn't expecting it to be that one-sided.

for 2022 mid terms, opensecrets.org reports 95.38% for democrats, 0.19% republicans, 4.42% others.

overview of 2022 mid terms for technology: https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=B&Bkd...

Twitter specifically: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/recipients?toprecip...

FTX: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D00007369...

The two "others" were Bernie Sanders and Evan McMullin, and the one Republican was Adam Kinzinger, a high-profile Trump critic who didn't even run for reelection in '22. There was a single individual donation of $200 to the RNC.

I don't know what anybody expects, though. Tech workers tend to be young, affluent, educated city-dwellers, and that demographic is strongly and increasingly inclined toward supporting Democrats. Twitter is headquartered in San Francisco, a liberal city in a heavily Democratic state. There's no conspiracy at work here. Republicans could choose to try to appeal to tech workers if they wanted.

Those are from individuals, capped at a few thousand dollars. The GOP raised more than the Democrats in the PAC arena, so we’ll never know the true balance when accounting for big donations at the top.

> as opposed to bad decisions made by twitter employees on their own bias

I thought that was the smoking gun.

A smoking gun for twitter maybe, but GP is talking about writing off “the left” because of this.

Ro Khanna for President. The only politician with any moral compass.

From a country with five viable parties: this picking sides thing, or even being a “moderate” is just weird and kind of horrifying how normal the populace thinks it is. It’s not normal. People should be FREAKING OUT that their governmental system is in such bad shape. They’re too busy cheering for whichever tribe they’re in.

All of politics being one dimensional is one of the biggest lies ever.

I don't think Americans are particularly likely to think politics is one dimensional. Each of our two parties is composed of multiple subgroups whose ideals and interests don't match - they regularly have disputes among each other, and it's less common but far from unheard of for an interest group to migrate between parties. What we call a "party" just mixes in components of what a European-style system would call the "governing majority".

I think I generally sympathize with your point. There’s probably truth to that.

I think it’s also perilous to collapse “Americans” into zero dimensions by speaking as if they’re one entity with one perspective. I would bet my house that a frighteningly many millions of Americans DO see it as one dimensional tribalism.

The difference between the multiparty countries and the USA is that in the USA the compromises needed to form a government are made before you do the final vote. In some ways I think that's better because the parties have to have a fuller and more realistic platform than in Europe where you can get a bunch of parties in power only caring about a few issues each and the tradeoffs aren't presented upfront

I find it works amazingly well in Canada where there is commonly no one party in power. That any one party must get the support of one or more other parties to pass any bill. This creates mandatory compromise.

During a majority government where a single party has enough votes, I generally agree with you.

You are grossly overselling how "amazing" Canadian governance is.

Canada has essentially the same two party system as the US, with one of the two major parties winning literally every election in the last 100 years, and all but one election since the country's inception.

Occasional minority governments gave us some nice things, but that was decades ago, in a whole other world.

Canadian elections are cursed by FPTP much like the US is, and much unlike all the other developed countries that have true multi-party governance with some form of proportional representation.

FPTP caused the Liberal party to be in power in Canada for most governments until they were ejected from politics for gross corruption. And since then they've been put in the corner for a bit, and slowly are coming back to being the prevalent ruling party.

Justin Trudeau made a campaign promise a few elections ago about replacing FPTP for a multi turn system and after being elected, promptly setup a sham study, which unsurprisingly found out that Canadian voters would be oh so confused if FPTP was to be replaced by a multi turn election system.

I wouldn't say Canada fares much better, in the long term. At least the Liberals are pretty benign.

A two party system works. I'm from a country with a 20+ party system and it's dysfunctional. In addition, you can't lump Democrats or Republicans in the USA in their respective boats. There's a hundred shades of grey within each party. But rallying behind one candidate versus a hundred in a primary makes for a better setup than anything else I've seen in other countries.

I don't really agree with you but you shouldn't be grayed out. The idea of a dysfunctional government sounds bad, but ironically that is precisely what the Founding Fathers endeavored to create. And it sounds absurd for all the reasons you're certainly aware of. Yet is the opposite desirable? In modern US politics, parties have become capable of enacting pretty substantial change on very narrow margins. This can be good in one manner of thought because "good" change can happen at an accelerated rate.

The problem is "good" is subjective. It was big news when the 2016 election was decided by as few as 78,000 votes, yet the 2020 election was now decided by as few as 45,000 votes [1]. The one thing everybody would agree on is that the country (and world) would look radically different today had the US election in 2020 gone differently.

And so we're living in a boat that keeps getting increasingly violently rocked back and forth, all based on who wins a coin flip. A bit of dysfunction to cool things (and people) down doesn't seem so bad.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...

> yet the 2020 election was now decided by as few as 45,000 votes

In 2020, the popular vor difference was slightly over 7 million votes, and it went the same direction as the electoral college.

> It was big news when the 2016 election was decided by as few as 78,000 votes,

It was big news, because the electoral college vote went against the popular vote, which had 2.8 million more voting for Hillary Clinton.

> A bit of dysfunction to cool things (and people) down doesn't seem so bad

Yep!

> The one thing everybody would agree on is that the country (and world) would look radically different

Heck, I think even some other planets might be affected. Perhaps the very Black Hole in the center of the Milky Way would shed a tear or two.

> I don't really agree with you but you shouldn't be grayed out.

Yes, but herein lies the issue with any "downvote" mechanic. How it should be used compared to how it actually used is quite different.

The discussion on HN in general does not follow the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

And on and on, the amount of comments in this thread alone that don't stick to the guidelines is too high, but I think the moderation team is very small (just dang?)

> A two party system works.

It's not working in the US at present.

"people on the left" have no better than than people on the right or anybody else in this regard. When it suits them, when they believe it will advantage them, they are all for suppression of peoples' rights.

What if enough of us could join the Libertarian party but “moderate” the Libertarian platform to make it more mainstream and … moderate.

Really we probably need to fix all censorship issues first somehow.

At that point, we are just hijacking the libertarian party and turning it into something it isn't, which its adherents today would oppose.

Most of the disenchanted voters from the Democratic/Republican parties can agree on policies that the libertarians abhor. For example, many of us would support foreign aid to Ukraine, but the LP takes an isolationist stance.

Or https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-former-republican...

The irony of that statement is that we're talking about a private company deciding what is or isn't appropriate on its platform, not de jure censorship. It is not Twitter's responsibility to facilitate the Republicans' attempted October Surprise.

On the other hand, where Republicans have political power, they are using it restrict speech and rights, by law.

"Both sides" are not the same.

This grants that Twitter is partisan though.

Twitter also removed posts at the behest of Trump’s team. But I will say they definitely lean left, which everyone knew.

No, because "partisan" would imply they work on behalf of a political party. The so-called Twitter Files themselves demonstrate that this is not true.

I'm not here to claim that people working at Twitter are unbiased. Everyone has bias. But also, there's extrinsic bias in what they're dealing with, in the sense that "both sides" aren't doing the same things. One trick is to behave egregiously and then when called out for it, claim bias.

It's also ridiculous to me that they think removing a couple naked pictures of Hunter is "censorship". As if you can truly "censor" information on the internet. You can maybe slow its spread, but if anything, the hardest thing is get things off the internet, not on.

These people keep blaming some vague magical power for the reason Hunter stories never went anywhere, but the real reason no one talks about them isn't censorship, it's because they're literally non-stories. It's just revenge porn videos of a known drug abuser.

To call this "authoritarian censorship" is honestly mind boggling.

> but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely

So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney, his forbidding of speech in schools, etc.? He's not passing literal anti press and anti speech laws to piss off the Trumplican base.

It's remarkable to me he so badly wanted to punish Disney for speaking he forgot he's supposed to be pro business and anti big government regulation.

Suppression of speech has to push you away from far left and far right, so that should cancel out. Then, if you're really prefering all the other policies as you say, you could vote center left ...

Or -- vote Forward:

"Dozens of former Republican and Democratic officials announced on Wednesday a new national political third party to appeal to millions of voters they say are dismayed with what they see as America's dysfunctional two-party system."

"The new party, called Forward and whose creation was first reported by Reuters, will initially be co-chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey. They hope the party will become a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties that dominate U.S. politics, founding members told Reuters."

-- https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-former-republican...

> So as a moderate you prefer DeSantis approach to Disney

It's amazing how things change. In the past the left would have been happy to see the removal of subsidies to mega corporations.

Just to set the record straight, it was not a subsidy.

When Orlando papers did the math, they showed it will cost the tax jurisdictions more to provide the services than it cost to waive the taxes and let Disney provide them to itself. Further, Disney is far from the only private town with the same arrangement; it's how Florida does it all over the state any time there's a big enough planned development, because that saves the government money.

Republicans should love this, because it proves government services privatized can cost the tax payer less.

That narrative was inconvenient to "the right" so didn't get talked about much because then the entire thing would just look astonishingly petty. And "the left" didn't really want to have to talk about how it saves towns money to privatize services. So that whole angle, swept under the rug by 'both sides'.

UPDATE

After posting this, I just saw this in Financial Times:

> Florida prepares U-turn on Disney's 'Don't Say Gay' punishment -- Lawmakers seek compromise preserving theme park operator's right to run private government

> By Christopher Grimes in Orlando, Florida (yesterday)

Since FT is paywall, found a Reason link: https://reason.com/2022/12/02/is-florida-giving-up-its-fight...

But shhh...

DeSantis' actions are the will of the people. The only question is whether it's a violation of a corporation's free speech - and when does anyone ever really care about that.

Imagine a scenario where a corporation was talking anti-left stuff in a blue state. E.g. immigration, unions, etc. Would the people not be entitled to revoke their special privileges because they don't like what they are saying? This is the real test.

I'm actually not sure, but its interesting to flip the actors political affiliation to check for fairness.

> Imagine a scenario where a corporation was talking anti-left stuff in a blue state. E.g. immigration, unions, etc.

As if a coffee company HQ'ed in Seattle, WA was going about and trying to do union busting.

Or how about a large logistics and e-commerce company HQ'ed in the Seattle and its union busting attempts.

The will of the people, are you kidding?

Many of DeSantis’ politically motivated actions target counties/municipalities that overwhelmingly voted for a different candidate. The majority of “South Florida” is made up of diverse, densely populated, areas that lean slightly left of center. “North Florida” by comparison is sparsely populated and leans heavily right. Yet, for some reason the state government feels the need to consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities. Repeatedly overriding the will of the people in those areas.

> target counties/municipalities that overwhelmingly voted for a different candidate

In this case, it's clearly only an issue a state could deal with.

> consistently subvert the will of the people by preempting local governments and municipalities

Do you have some examples?

Speech by teachers in school isn't free. It is delivered to a captive and inexperienced audience (children).

That's why school should focus on teaching skills and not interpersonal issues. Overloading children with 50 genders is just nonsense and confuses them.

The same applies to Disney movies for minors.

This is confirmed by Garcetti 2006:

> that because his statements were made pursuant to his position as a public employee, rather than as a private citizen, his speech had no First Amendment protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcetti_v._Ceballos

This rebuttal is irrelevant. Desantis has nothing to do with Twitter here.

You're just arguing that he doesn't really believe what he says. Why communicate in words at that point?

The point is that the principle of free speech is far more important than any topic of the day. Enemy of my enemy situation.

Everything bad in politics has come from the downward cycle of political parties censoring each other.

It takes a lot of courage because the defenders of free speech, to also defend the right for those to campaign for the destruction of free speech. Things become really bad when exceptions are made to restrict the free speech of those campaigning against it.

You can see how easily people can fall into the trap though, because humans can only take so much abuse while being attacked by people they are inadvertently helping.

Now that Musk is in charge of Twitter, you start to see them take more interest in free speech and the importance of it.

> his forbidding of speech in schools

Garcetti 2006 - legal free speech only applies to private citizens not public employees.

The will of the people of the state should democratically determine what should be taught and what should not.

If creationism was to be taught in schools, I would certainly want the right as a private citizen to campaign against my children having to listen to that crap, without being impeded by "free speech" (a good way to evaluate free speech is to think about things you agree with and disagree with and see if you are happy with the law both cases).

> DeSantis approach to Disney

This is a interesting case indeed. Hacker News at its best when I have an excuse to dive into a case I'm not familiar with.

Personally, I think their speech is not being restricted by the new law. And the law is the will of the people.

As a voting citizen, would I really want to be denied being able to enact a law because a company complains about it's free speech rights? Probably not. I don't relate as much to a corporation than I do to an actual person - regardless of what the law says.

The retaliatory aspect is interesting though - and I would defer to the supreme court for this.

> the more division they create, and the more moderates and people on the [opposite side] grow to resent them

This feels like a universal to me that applies to both parties.

And I’m sorry, “authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas” is pure propaganda. No mainstream left leaning politician is actually perusing such an idea, it’sa boogeyman created by the right and by the looks of things it’s working great.

It's very common on the left to demand suppression of "hate speech".

Of course, that commonly ends up mostly meaning "speech I hate".

You’ve made a very vague statement there.

There are extremes in every political movement, no doubt. I don’t deny that there are people on the left out there protesting against “hate speech”. There are also people on the right that are out and out racist. I think choosing whether to vote Democrat or Republican based on either of those extremes is a poor choice.

OP said:

> I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression

So we’re not talking about vague “leftists” here, we’re specifically talking about the Democratic Party. You’re going to have a rough time arguing they are campaigning on authoritarianism.

So in this specific case, for one example, we're talking about Biden's team requesting the removal of revenge porn. Do you think it's acceptable to make that request? Should Twitter be obligated to leave revenge porn up? Is this an example of the 'suppression of "hate speech"' you're referring to with scare quotes? Because it doesn't seem like one to me.

There are several countries in Western Europe where there are such laws, and it never means that.

In theory yes. But Twitter isn't a mix of liberal and conservative. Its straight left.

Twitter is (or was) filled with young, affluent, highly educated (at least college graduate) city dwellers. By any metric that's a demographics that leans heavily left. How is that a surprise that Twitter was straight left?

Because tech workers aren’t always straight left. HN is a fantastic example — it leans much more right than a lot of other internet forums. Partly just because entrepreneurship means you have to get along with capitalism at some level.

Saying this as someone who is progressive. It’s definitely a relatively progressive field, but maybe not as much as you’d think!

One of the curses of democracy is you have to form coalitions with other humans instead of ideals. At least in the US it is out in the open. Many countries have worse problems and bigger, more friendly smiles.

This is a good time to plug 3rd parties and candidates. Organised pressure to make the situation better is more important than winning elections - even if they don't get voted in they may force change for the better. At some point the best options amongst two evils is still too evil to tolerate.

Pedantic reminder that the US is not a democracy, and representing it as one is missing the point of the US. We are a constitutional republic, because democratic decisions need reigning in.

> I'm a moderate

The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.

Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.

Over the last few years the rail companies have furloughed ~30% of their staff to the point where covering sick staff is a real problem. They've so far made $20 billion on profits this year. The excess profits have routinely been used in share buybacks and dividends.

Biden, who claims to be pro-labor, has sided with the rail companies in directing Congress to use an old law to rob these workers of their right to industrial action and mandate a contract. With no paid sick leave.

How can anyone with a straight face in good faith argue there is any leftist power in politics when Democrats side with capital and routinely go out of their way to eviscerate labor and the progressive elements of their party?

> I think people on the left have a blind spot here

So you've made two false premises here:

1. There are peeople on the left in politics. As I noted above, this is a falsehood; and

2. The "left" is a monolith and wanted to suppress the Hunter Biden story. This is right-wing propaganda because conservatives treat Trump like a cult leader who is above the law.

Speaking as a leftist (FWIW), I don't care about Hunter Biden. Throw in jail. Hilary too. I don't think Twitter should've blocked the NY Post story but ultimately it's a nothing burger because there's nothing of substance on this laptop. If there was it would've been passed on to law enforcement instead of being passed raround right-wing operatives (to the point of destroying any chain of custody) in an effort to smear the administration and nothing came of it, which is why they just fell back to the old playbook of pedo allegations.

> ... people on the right grow to resent them

People on the right already call people on the left groomers, pedos and criminals.

> ... this authoritarian suppression of speech

What suppression? Everyone knows about this story. The only "suppression" (which, again, I personally disagree with) is you couldn't share a link to one post on one site (Twitter). to believe this is "authoritarian suppression" belies successful right-wing propaganda.

> ... both sides ...

Bothsidesing American politics does nothing more than show how normalized right-wing ideas have become (and how far right the Overton window has swung). You have the former president espousing QAnon conspiracies, election denialism at every level of government and white supremacy (which is a core tenet of the Republican Party and America's founding and history) spilling over to where the likes of Kanye are saying the quiet part out loud, Elon Musk tweeted (then retracted) a conspiracy about Paul Pelosi and his attacker and the #1 "news" program in US openly pushing Nazi propaganda (ie Tucker Carlson and the Great Replacement Theory).

Bothsidesing this doesn't make one enlightened or "above the fray".

You're comment is a little greyed out which means people are downvoting it. The core aspect being that democrats are center right and republicans are extreme right. The both-sides enlightened centrists can't accept this. The do-nothingness tenant of being in the middle regardless of ideology simply shatters.

Doing nothing is doing something.

You don't have to agree with it.

> Don't believe me? Example: we've got the ongoing threat of a strike tby rail workers who want paid sick leave. They currently have no paid sick leave. Calling in sick will come off their vacation days. It may even get them disciplined and fired. They asked for 15 paid sick days. Some in Congress wanted to compromise and give them 7 days.

The current Administration is the one forcing rail workers to accept a deal that doesn't give them what they want and forces them not to strike.

> The Overton window in the US stems from center-right (Democrats) to extreme-right (Republicans) so if you're in the middle of that you're firmly a conservative.

This is something Europeans have been saying online since at least the early 00s. It might be worth splitting it up into "social" policies and "economic" policies.

Democrats are a socially very left (dissenting views are not allowed), economically right party. republicans are a socially right, economically very right (taxation is theft) party.

> it up into "social" policies and "economic" policies.

I understand that inclination but you cannot separate economic and social policy.

Example: consider post-WWII development in the US. The GI Bill gave cheap loans and college education to returning servicement but not if you're black. The rise of the automobile lead to the explosion in suburbs, which became completely car-dependent. These suburbs and the required infrastructure (eg roads) were government subsidized. This allowed some to build up generational wealth.

In building those roads (and the Interstate system) these tended to divide communities along racial lines and in many cases wiped out minority communities.

Further you had redlining.

Once segregation was officially outlawed you had a bunch of communities that became effectively segregated because black people couldn not afford to live there (because restrictive zoning drove up prices) but black people had been denied the ability to build up wealth.

That's an example of what people mean by systemic racism.

Likewise, economic policy creates over-policing and mass incarceration that predominantly affects the poor and economic policy has made sure that black people are disproportionately affected.

> Democrats are a socially very left

I disagree. Biden was the architect of Bill Clinton's 1994 crime bill that ushered in mass incarceration and over-policing shows where Democrats stand: in the same place Republicans are, which is protecting capital and capital owners.

Literally the only reason people accuse Democrats of being very far left is the support of trans people. I would urge people to really examine their feelings here and really ask themselves why they think not being transphobic is an extreme position.

I think something a lot of people miss is the difference between Democratic voters and Democratic politicians.

Democratic politicians generally lean substantially farther right than their voters.

"Centrists" typically take the position that Democratic politicians are too left-leaning. This puts them very far to the right of the Democratic voter. It puts them much closer to... Republicans.

Bigger problem is that the next Republican administration with Musk in charge is likely to retaliate by doing it 10 times worse. Democrats invent the weapon and Republicans perfect it, and you can't object because the other side started it first.

It doesn't look good that a lot of credible media outlets had to walk back their stances on the Hnuter Biden laptop and lab-origin covid. Both proved to be plausible enough that they never should have been censored or suppressed.

It’s useful to read what the media actually wrote at the time rather than how Republicans portray it. I’ve included a number of links below but the main thing which is obvious is that coverage was dominated by the questions of authenticity and especially the challenges of not having a forensic trail which wasn’t tainted by Giuliani, who was so unreliable that even Fox News warned reporters not go trust him. A lot of that coverage also focused on how Fox and the WSJ passed on the story because they couldn’t verify key details, or how the Post’s own journalists had reservations because they couldn’t verify details such as whether an email ever got a reply or particular meetings actually happened. Years later, the story remains the same: some relatively boring details have been confirmed but nothing explosive has been found and evidence of tampering likely means that if something was buried in there Giuliani would have helped Hunter Biden by tainting the evidence to the point that it wouldn’t stand up in court.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/media/new-york-p...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/22/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bi...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/ratcliffe...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-twitter-limit-sharing-...

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hunter-joe-biden-ema...

I agree that the story of the laptop is sketchy. First, it's surprising it was abandoned. The shop owner just happened to have horrible eyesight and couldn't actually identify Biden. Then Biden doesn't collect the laptop, and the owner, rather than wiping it and selling it, eventually gets it to Trump's lawyer?

When the Washington Post finally looked at it, it was pretty tainted, and about the only conclusion you can draw is that there are some authentic emails on it, but that doesn't make the device authentic.

Or even if the device is authentic, every bit of data has to be assiduously validated because there’s known evidence of modifications after it left the repair shop. DKIM signatures did that for some emails but a lot of stuff has no obvious path to validate like that and now the repair shop guy is expressing concern, too:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/12/now-warni...

I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm millions of Americans in very significant ways. Tucker Carlson and Libs of TikTok all but encourage violence against LGBT people. Republicans are trying to prevent Black people from voting. Many Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election and are actively working to be able to overturn future elections. Republicans have gerrymandered many states so that Democrats don't have a chance. Women have lost access to abortion which is medically necessary in many cases and has left them in situations where they don't get treatment until sepsis or other serious complications have set in even if they survive, it can have a huge recovery time (and they may never fully recover) and it can end up costing a lot of money due to lost wages and healthcare costs.

Yea, Democrats are annoying sometimes, but the situation we're in has consequences for a lot of people.

> At this point both sides suck and I want nothing to do with either.

I wish I could say that. For a lot of us, we can't say that. The Democratic party might be pissing you off, but the Republican party is truly harming millions of Americans. The Republican party is no longer John McCain and Mitt Romney. I have my issues with them, but both seem to genuinely care for people and want to make America a better place. Today, so many seem to want to weaponize hate.

I guess I'd ask you what you think the Democrats should do differently while protecting women, Black people, LGBT people, and other minorities. I guess I don't completely know what you mean by the Democrats having an "authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas". In most of my experience, it's been pushing for more inclusive language and not being mean to people while Republicans are forcefully trying to censor a lot of topics as they ban books and pass "don't say gay" bills. Is it that Democrats think Ye (Kanye West) shouldn't be given a massive platform to hate on Jews? Is it that Democrats think places like Netflix and SNL shouldn't pay Dave Chapelle millions to hate on Jews and trans people? I'd note about this is that the instant anyone says something bad about White people or men, Republicans all line up to say that they shouldn't have a platform to say that. Republicans try to "cancel" people just as much as Democrats do.

I think it's also important to note that there are differences between government restriction on speech and social condemnation of speech. People use speech to organize. Sometimes that's great and other times you get Nazis. There is a pretty big concern in many communities over the increase in violent attacks from right-wing groups. These are groups that are pushed forward by many main-stream Republican commentators and many Republican politicians. Sure, they'll say it should stop just short of violence, but it's an effective strategy.

I'm not arguing that the government should control speech, but any respectable person or organization should probably not promote Nazis. Would you hire a Nazi to give a speech at your company about their ideology? If you owned a newspaper, would you hire a Nazi to do your editorials? If you didn't, are you suppressing their speech? If you published a letter from a Nazi and put a big warning alongside it that your newspaper condemned the views expressed by the letter, are you suppressing that speech?

I'd also note that speech has real-world consequences. People used speech to create the political will to suppress Italian and Irish immigrants. People used speech to build coalitions to keep Black people enslaved. Nazis used speech to get the power to murder two-thirds of the Jews in Europe. Bad ideas should be fought against. Not all ideas are equal or equally good. Some ideas are evil and we need to make it known that they're evil ideas. Again, I'm not saying that the government should control speech, but I do expect good politicians to speak out against evil ideas and to call the people promoting those ideas bad. Hitler was a very bad person and Ye is a bad person for promoting Hitler as good. That's not suppression of speech. That's noting that Ye is supporting evil that should be opposed.

I genuinely understand that it's difficult to know where the line should be, but I'd also note that the past was never a bastion of free speech. You needed to be wealthy to publish things in the past. Most people didn't have free speech beyond who could hear them at the pub. In the 21st century where our communication is often less in-person, what does that mean for platforms like Facebook or Twitter which are kinda like newspapers, but also kinda masquerade as a personal communication device (or a common carrier as some people argue they should be)? What did it mean when newspapers controlled information and only some ideas were pushed by the newspapers with the biggest circulation? What does it mean if the in-person communication of yore is replaced by the Facebook of today?

I'd also note that speech always had consequences. People have always been "canceled" when a powerful person or their community decided that their speech was wrong - Senator Sumner argued against slavery and was beaten half to death on the Senate floor by pro-slavery Senators. During the American Revolution, lots of people faced dire consequences if they said something that might have sounded too loyalist. People have always lost jobs because they said something a higher-up didn't like - or something a third party didn't like who had power with one of their higher-ups. People have been fired for coming out as gay. Are we talking about the same consequences that have always existed and have often been wielded (and continue to be wielded) by the right?

If you have constructive ways the Democrats could be better, I'm open to hearing them. I guess I'll close with hoping that you'll think of the LGBT people, women, Black people, and others in your life that will be harmed by today's Republican party. I hope you'll value us more than you're pissed off by Democrats. I want my life to be worth more than your resentment. I don't mean that as any kind of slight against you or anyone else - I understand how hard it is to vote for someone who genuinely pisses you off. I just truly hope that you'll choose me. I don't really know how else to say it. I like my life, I want to continue living it, I want to be protected by my government with the same rights as everyone else and not persecuted by it. Please choose me.

> constructive ways the Democrats could be better

Reorient the gun control efforts around the statistical realities of how guns are actually killing the most people. Throwing away all their political capital on banning semiautomatic rifles, in a ‘maximum success’ outcome, would prevent something like 2% of all firearm related deaths. I did some napkin math a couple months ago and children are more likely to die of leukemia than in a school shooting. No doubt school shootings indicate a moral failure in our society, but if you wanna budget out your political capital to do the most good, that’s not the place to look.

Drop the attacks on 2A and watch how much wind you take out of Republican sails. Dems love talking about how racist the Republicans are, but stick an AR15 in a Black woman’s hands for a photo op and boom she’s elected.

Every human being in the world understands that guns are a clear threat to civil society, except for this bizarre hyperminority of americans who seem to stuck in some anachronistic fantasy universe. Move on.

Every human in the world agrees on precisely nothing.

Cool cynicism bro. Really makes a super interesting argument.

Don't the Swiss and Canadians have similar gun numbers? Most of the murders are due to gang violence, school shootings and the like are a rounding error.

No, they do not.

You've clearly put a lot of effort into this post, but I think you need more one on one time with the more reasonable people who now vote Republican as I don't think you'd pass an ideological Turing test atm.

Understanding the perspective and desires of those voters (rather than just the impression one hears from social media and the news) is important to then figure out how to appeal to prevent them being alienated.

I sometimes lurk in a far(!) right internet forum and even there the vast majority also want to protect women, black people and LGBTQ people and think their policies will improve things.

I don’t think this is very true, and I have spent time with conservatives. While they don’t think they’re racist, they also think racism is a solved problem (as if all the racist folks in the civil rights area only 60yrs ago just became good somehow?) Religious folk in general (huge part of the GOP base) don’t accept LGBTQ people at all. Policy-wise, the party never even tries to show they support these groups by collaborating on bills in congress, for example.

I mean every individual has different concepts… plenty who aren’t racist but super homophobic. And plenty of religious folks doing good community work and hot hurting anyone (assuming no one came out to them in the church!) So while conservatives vary a lot, it just doesn’t seem the party itself tries to reflect that.

> I find these kinds of comments hard to respond to. I want to respond in a way that's constructive, but it's hard. It's hard because many Republicans are pushing the US in a direction that will harm ...

Just realize you bee-lined straight into partisan politics. Speech policies need to be above that.

Good, don't ever choose a "side". "Sides" are for corralling people into manipulable herds. Every issue should be considered individually using logic and data, rather than following the blind recommendations of a "side" down the line.

I think a story one could tell about more recent events is that Twitter banning various extreme right wing views was good for the Republican Party because they could make arguments about free speech or whatever and not need to deal with those extreme views being associated with the Republican Party. If such views aren’t hidden, maybe it will force Republicans to work harder to separate themselves from such views, similarly to the way that Democrats expend much effort trying to show that they aren’t secretly communists or whatever.

Hunter biden laptop story isnt really a right wing view and clearly benefits Biden. There is a performative aspect to banning "extreme" views that certainly domt help Republicans.

    I'm a moderate
    
    Democrat ... authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas
    
    both sides suck

This is a great expression of what is commonly described as a South Park republican. That is, someone who believes they live in a political space between republicans and democrats which does not actually exist. The fundamental emotion is cynicism, which manifests as active hostility towards any notion of empathy for any other dimension of society, and ultimately distills down to status-quo-ism.

Of course cynicism is non-falsifiable, and there is no coherent notion of a moderate or independent in American politics, because there exists no coherent political position between democratic and republican policy. Anyone claiming to exist in this middle space is in practice a republican, just without the conviction that's typical to that party's base.

> Anyone claiming to exist in this middle space is in practice a republican, just without the conviction that's typical to that party's base.

So it's basically, "If you're not with us, you're against us?"

Maybe you missed this part in the parent message: "I would have identified as a Democrat on pretty much every issue, but this authoritarian suppression of speech and ideas has just pushed me away from that side completely."

It's so absurd as a statement, no one does a 180 "because free speech".

Both parties are so clearly distinct that if you claim to be something in the middle you'd better explain what you mean. But I'm not an american, I could be wrong, I just watch the show from the outside and sometimes it's sad.

   > But I'm not an american, I could be wrong

Yes, this is the case here. There are a number of issues that matter enough to make people switch parties, particularly the more moderate people in each party. In fact you can see entire swathes of voter blocks having changed parties over the last 20 years as party platforms have changed focus on some core issues.

They won't necessarily switch from D -> R or R -> D. They will often switch to a 3rd party or Independent. Over time they may eventually find their way into supporting the opposite major party. Occasionally they will switch directly from one major party to the other. Just depends on the issues and where people are at in their lives.

Does that make it good?

Single issue voters, like those who only vote for/against abortion, are literally throwing aside every other issue. It’s a disservice to themselves and a disservice to others who have to live with their decision.

Switching to a third party which agrees on a subset of topics with the original party they come from is completely understandable. But again, doing a complete 180, especially knowing what parties stands for in the US is hard to believe. It should takes years, and I mean more than a decade.

It depends on what matters to people. In the US, there have been a number of significant platform shifts in the major parties over the last 10 years. Think of Trump vs mainstream Republicans, or the shift in the Democratic party from support of racial equality to support of racial equity. These are foundational changes that can completely alienate large blocks of voters.

In fact, I would argue those least likely to switch parties are the single issue voters (esp. gun control or abortion) since the parties have not shifted on those issues. Whereas blue collar whites have been abandoning the Democratic party in droves lately despite that being their home for a century. It started after Clinton signed NAFTA, but has really excelled over the last 5-10 years.

Also, a lot of people vote a split ticket where they support people form different parties depending on local/state/federal or even if they just don't like a candidate in their preferred party (see the difference in votes for Walker and Kemp in Georgia for instance).

Single issue voters are incoherent politically and not relevant to any reasonable discussion.

No, it is not the case. There is no coherent political position which exists between the American democratic and republican parties. Anyone who believes they exist in such a middle space is lying to themselves.

Your comment is wrong.

No it isn't. Checkmate! Boom!

Perfectly explained, there is no such thing as moderates, considering what the factions stand for in the US.

Both sides suck teammember here too.

I've almost completely detached from all news because none of it passes even the stuffiest nose in a sniff test.

My two favorite realizations: - Data is the best liar. - You can get -one- expert to say literally anything.

You can always find one expert with an opinion that matches what you want to say.

This is such a ridiculous political narrative. The Democrats are not for policing speech, Twitter can police whatever it wants. Imagine being a conservative and thinking government regulation of corporations is wrong and simultaneously thinking you have a right to post stuff on twitter.

The tweets the Biden campaign asked Twitter to take down (you can verify this yourself) were all non consentual intimate images of Hunter. That is both against the Twitter ToS, hence flagging to them, and illegal in 48 states + DC, including California, where Twitter is based.

ranked choice voting can chip away at polarization.