Re:Romanian court annuls result of presidential election fir...
by mike_hearn on Sunday December 08, 2024 @09:55AM
(#42357465)
My blog posts go over the factual ways in which the claims of Russian bots on social media have been incorrect in the past. Bad use of statistics and logic, things like that. To my knowledge there are no factual errors in my analysis but if you find one, let me know.
To make this clearer: if someone asserts something objective about the world and their proof is invalid or missing, we have to assume they are wrong. There have been many claims about politicians being successful only due to Russian influence campaigns, and each time those claims were investigated the proofs were invalid or missing. That is a factual claim.
What's a subjective opinion is that this generalizes: if the last 99 times were wrong, the 100th time is probably wrong too, even without a deep investigation. You can disagree with that, but why would you? Your priors should be strongly against these claims having any merit by now.
> The candidate himself declared 0 campaign expenses despite obviously spending for a campaign. The court also noticed this obvious fact.
And yet that's not the justification for annulling the vote that's being presented. The rest of your paragraph slides smoothly between assertions of fact and speculation - that he must have spent lots of money, that the money must have been coming from foreigners, that those foreigners must be Russian, and that such funds are the reason he won. Those are all very subjective. For instance, Trump was outspent massively in both elections that he won. Apparently you can't just "sway" an election with money: other things matter more.
To make this clearer: if someone asserts something objective about the world and their proof is invalid or missing, we have to assume they are wrong. There have been many claims about politicians being successful only due to Russian influence campaigns, and each time those claims were investigated the proofs were invalid or missing. That is a factual claim.
What's a subjective opinion is that this generalizes: if the last 99 times were wrong, the 100th time is probably wrong too, even without a deep investigation. You can disagree with that, but why would you? Your priors should be strongly against these claims having any merit by now.
> The candidate himself declared 0 campaign expenses despite obviously spending for a campaign. The court also noticed this obvious fact.
And yet that's not the justification for annulling the vote that's being presented. The rest of your paragraph slides smoothly between assertions of fact and speculation - that he must have spent lots of money, that the money must have been coming from foreigners, that those foreigners must be Russian, and that such funds are the reason he won. Those are all very subjective. For instance, Trump was outspent massively in both elections that he won. Apparently you can't just "sway" an election with money: other things matter more.