This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem. A lot of these videos are saying things that cannot reasonably be classified as anything other than misinformation. For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. They also make up vague but scary claims about large numbers of illegal immigrants having voted, etc. All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post.
More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
>This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem
I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.
>For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with.
Ok, so wouldn't it be the people who seek out and watch these kinds videos that would be the ones that would be too afraid to use mail in ballots? Seems like the people who think those videos are nonsense won't believe them anyway.
>All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post
How? From what I understand, there was a record number of mail in ballots this year, seems like it did nothing of the sort.
>More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.
No, the government should not be allowed to decide what is or isn't real information, that's called propaganda.
>One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.
Thinking dumb things about politics is how you end up bringing your AR-15 to investigate a pizza parlor... or trying to kidnap the governor.
I’ll say everything sounds like a bad game of “telephone” — that maybe someone told a friend that there’s a guy Epstein that keeps videos of powerful people, and then somehow 10,000 stories later, the story becomes the “pizza parlor around the corner is a powerful pedophile ring”
For those unfamiliar, telephone is a game in the US (maybe western countries) where 12 or so children sit in a circle and one whispers a phrase to another around the circle, something like “there’s a banana in the cabinet.” Then everyone has a big laugh at how ridiculous the story began and then ended up after going around the circle.
An astonishingly large percentage of the population are parroting this and all manner of other misinformation on social media, all day, every day, for months, and it's getting worse as one by one the dominoes fall and yet another impressionable mind is swayed and joins the chorus.
I don't think censorship is necessarily the right approach to mitigate this torrent of bullshit, but it's clearly out of control.
> So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them?
There is no "we".
The platform is YouTube. It is their prerogative (and indeed their right to freedom of speech) to host content as they see fit. The Senators are merely asking them to exercise their freedom to a very reasonable extent.
I was pointing out how "believing dumb things about politics" is a deliberate minimization of the effect of disinformation.
>An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories.
But an astonishingly large number of people are afraid of vaccines/black people/corona jihad/the deep state pedophile ring because they read something that isn't true. Can you think of any effects this might have had recently? Any you think of anything bad going on that isn't strictly a crime?
What I didn't learn until recently was the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was the analogy applied to pacifists opposing the draft in WWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...). It was a bad ruling but the analogy itself stands.
So in that vein, should incitements for violence against the opposing party be unfettered free speech? At what point does it go too far?
Which has been done right? Practically all the states have certified their results, after recounts and legal challenges heard, etc. Google has left it until now for the precise reason that "legitimate" scrutiny was taking place.
At this point continuing to assert wide scale fraud escalates beyond "reasonable" and up to the level of "recklessness" that brings it into parity with "yelling fire".
Do you think the spread of misinformation causes harm? It doesn't sound like it, by how you diminish the impact of political misinfo ("The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.")
Not to take too strong a stance until I understand your position better, but record number of mail-in ballots doesn't imply there wasn't significant voter suppression.
this is an imposition of bounds on acceptable political thought; kto kovo. "misinformation" is a political label created to influence political processes. that is not to say that there is no truth, but rather that there is an official truth which is subject to the contingencies of power.
the implicit justification for censoring this idea is that it delegitimizes the democratic process; it is ridiculous on its face to assert that overt censorship is any less delegitimizing. this is an expression of ideological power upon an opponent.
So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge?
I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.
We have experts, in other words.
We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.
Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?
Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.
>So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge?
We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources.
Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be.
>I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena.
We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does.
>We have experts, in other words.
No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us.
>We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards.
That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority.
A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno.
>Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts?
>Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.
Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube.
It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age.
We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that.
Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.
The equivalence absolutely has merit. "People thinking dumb things about politics" absolutely has the ability to cause panic, potential injury, and death. You can look at Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide in Malaysia as a quick example.
You’re going to have to walk me through that line of reasoning. The chain of causation between yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater and someone getting trampled to death while attempting to flee doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination. You claim that YouTube videos with false information about the 2020 election have a “chilling” effect on democracy. What does that even mean? And how would you even begin to establish some concrete chain of causation between the videos and whatever it is you define as “chilling”? Do you see how hand-wavy your argument is?
The argument is that we can’t talk about how we have an untrustable, unverifiable election system, because that would lead people to not trust the results. As long they don’t think about it, they can trust it.
I press a button on a screen when I vote. I don’t know what the hell it is actually doing and it’s shocking to me the mainstream consensus is we can’t even talk about now horrifically broken American voting is compared to sane countries like France.
In Georgia the machine prints out a paper ballot that you hand in. Yet somehow that is one of the states being accused of widespread fraud...?
Only the swing states that Trump lost are being accused of fraud, but only in the presidential election. This is extremely disingenuous and lacks all credibility.
Now the GOP seems to be arguing in court that there wasn't even fraud, but they just don't like the outcome and want to reverse the will of the voters in swing states based on weird technicalities.
This entire thing is nonsense, and youtube should censor it because it is entirely just a scheme to subvert our democracy. That is extremely dangerous, more dangerous than yelling fire in a crowded theater.
> it is entirely just a scheme to subvert our democracy.
If our democratic systems were transparent, verifiable, and understandable, it wouldn't be possible to 'subvert' our democracy in this way. The fact is that our democracy has already been 'subverted' whether or not any fraud occurred (and surely some did, just as it does in every election in American history; the only question is the scale - was it late 1800s scale or late 1900s scale - most people on HN would agree it was probably late 1900s scale, that is, minimal.) But the system is set up in such a way that we cannot actually prove anything. We just have to accept what we're told, because democracy.
The election systems in each state have their own problems. In Georgia the problems are with the tabulation, with absentee ballots, with chain of custody. I am not saying fraud did occur. I am saying that because of the problems I just mentioned, it is impossible to prove if fraud occurred or not. And things should not be that way.
At any rate, all you mean by 'subverting democracy' is 'decreasing faith in our institutions.' And I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the past few years and trust any of our institutions.
This is completely absurd. There has been no time in the entire history of the
US that our "democratic systems were transparent, verifiable and understandable" in the face of a president and an army of his minions spreading lies meant to confuse people and undermine elections. The elections have never been more secure than they are right now.
When NO fact finding court will back up any of your claims then how do you know there are "problems" with the ballots in Georgia? Your only source is partisans and the manipulated media they are releasing.
Just because trump has been working to blanket the airwaves with lies and half truths to sew doubt doesn't mean there is anything there. If there was they would be taking it to court and not losing 50+ cases.
There is no way to justify trying to overturn the vote based on technicalities while filling the airwaves with lies about fraud and that the election was stolen. If there is fraud they can prove it. If they can't prove it then they don't get to find loopholes to steal the election.
Can you actually not tell that trump is using marketing and con artist style manipulation to trick you into believing the election was stolen? There is no substance to these accusations.
> I honestly don't know how anyone can look at the past few years and trust any of our institutions.
Right. The faith is already gone, which is why allegations of election fraud immediately gained a large following. The cat is out of the bag, and nothing will be accomplished by censoring these videos except setting a bad precedent.
> Now the GOP seems to be arguing in court that there wasn't even fraud, but they just don't like the outcome and want to reverse the will of the voters in swing states based on weird technicalities.
The entire case that the supreme court just rejected for PA was about that. This isn't claiming fraud. This is trying to find a technicality to use to invalidate millions of legitimate votes.
I'm confused, the article seems to jump to the conclusion that the entire metaphor is invalid because of the ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That doesn't make any sense to me. The metaphor still holds.
To put it another way, regardless of the ruling I still doubt a person who walks into a the same theater every day repeatedly screaming "fire" and pulling the fire alarm with malicious intent to hurt the profits of the theater would have a 1st amendment case get very far against the theater when the theater decides to throw that person out.
It's not just the ruling that was problematic, but also Oliver Wendell Holmes' often referenced grotesque metaphor.
Holmes' used the metaphor to equate criticism of the government during wartime to being so dangerous for society, specifically speaking against the draft during WWI, that it was akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre.
Clearly, criticism of the government, especially regarding matters of war and public safety, are protected by the first amendment. Not only was the metaphor used to justify an unconstitutional ruling, but it also furthered gross misperceptions regarding limits on protected speech that are still referenced today.
I agree the metaphor was used incorrectly but I still would not say it was creating misconceptions. A better metaphor for the current day would be making prank 911 calls to the fire department when you know there is no fire. Doing this wastes taxpayer money, diverts resources away from actual emergencies and can cause real harm.
If anything, the metaphor seems to have persisted because it's applicable in so many other scenarios, not because of that one case that rarely seems to get brought up in casual discussion.
I appreciate you addressing this, because it speaks to the point.
Lies, falsehoods, misinformation and irrational statements are all protected by the first amendment. As is uttering insane and unintelligible thoughts in public.
If speech is used to further a crime or directly causes civil harm that result in damages (ex. assault or nuisance), there are existing applicable criminal and civil laws to either punish or provide a remedy.
If for example, the police were to execute a lawful warrant to search your property, it would not nullify or burden your fourth amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Similarly, civil remedies (i.e. tort law) allowing for compensation for damages due to negligence - say from getting trampled in a crowd that was spooked by someone yelling "fire" or "shooter" - would not place limitations on your protected right of freedom to assemble.
The biggest problem with the campaign to justify censorship or moderation of misinformation/disinformation under the guise that it causes harm, is that it removes the measurable injury element of tort law and replaces it with vague and abstract notions of either mass ethereal or psychic harm (which the Supreme Court has expressing found against).
If you mean something broader than this Youtube policy then it's not clear what campaign you're referring to. Certain types of misinformation/disinformation are already considered torts because they do cause harm, e.g. defamation/slander/libel. Continuing the metaphor, in the case of Youtube it appears that among other things they don't want to host videos of people encouraging others to make prank 911 calls because it causes lawsuits, bad press and lost profits in addition to it being illegal in a lot of places.
>they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with
Not "fraud." Illegal votes. In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing: that many mail-in votes were illegal, due to unconstitutional rule changes which allowed them to take place[1]. That's not ok to talk about on YouTube?
[1]If you don't know what I'm talking about, just say so and I'll point you to a non-partisan, levelheaded explanation of the argument.
> Texas and 17 other states...that's not ok to talk about on YouTube?
Firstly, this is a false equivalence. The kind of videos I am talking about are not ones discussing some frivolous lawsuit, they are the ones by wild-eyed zealots ranting about the Constitution that end up hatching plots to kidnap the Governor of their State [1]. The sort of videos that lead to people shooting up a pizza parlor because they believe it's the center of a Satanic organization [2].
But leaving that aside for a moment, restricting what's okay to talk about on YouTube is, by definition, YouTube's problem. They can restrict videos uploaded on the platform to be exclusively people wearing pink furry suits if they want.
Senators can ask YouTube to try and stop running videos peddling conspiracy theories on their platform, because they believe YouTube (despite the large number of complaints about them) is generally speaking, a responsible and fairminded platform; and they expect that YouTube is broadly trying to do the right thing – not be political, but also crack down on unreasonable crackpot theories being peddled on its platform.
Asking this of a less fair-minded source (say the vidoes on a Stormfront website) would be pointless, which is why the Senators don't do so. You will notice that the Senators aren't asking the creators of Gab to crack down on crackpot theories on their platform either.
>Senators can ask YouTube to try and stop running videos peddling conspiracy theories on their platform, because they believe YouTube (despite the large number of complaints about them) is generally speaking, a responsible and fairminded platform; and they expect that YouTube is broadly trying to do the right thing – not be political, but also crack down on unreasonable crackpot theories being peddled on its platform.
>Asking this of a less fair-minded source (say the vidoes on a Stormfront website) would be pointless, which is why the Senators don't do so. You will notice that the Senators aren't asking the creators of Gab to crack down on crackpot theories on their platform either.
That's an interesting theory. Someone else might argue they are targeting YouTube and Facebook because there are more swing voters on these platforms and because these platforms are far more viral than Gab or Storefront.
I don’t really understand the argument that taking away free speech will somehow prevent acts of violence. Violence is illegal regardless of if you saw it in a YouTube video or not.
As a matter of great irony to folks in the tech industry, this same argument was being used in the 1990s to ban violent video games. Of course it failed, because it was a terrible idea and was based on debunked science.
> I don’t really understand the argument that taking away free speech will somehow prevent acts of violence.
No one is taking away free speech in this case, that's where I think people are talking past each other.
Isn't not allowing videos on your platform also a form of freedom of speech? The senators are simply urging YouTube to exercise their freedom of speech to run fact-checked, non-crackpot videos on their platform. Why do you want to force YouTube to carry videos of bizarre conspiracy theorists on their (private) platform?
If the Senators ordered YouTube (or indeed, Fox News) to suppress specific videos, that would indeed be taking away free speech.
So, tell me, you would be perfectly fine with someone putting videos on YouTube asserting that you are a pedophile and adding also your home address just for completeness’ sake?
It’s the same freedom of speech that caused a commando of terrorists to plot to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor.
> In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing
This is incorrect. The other states' attorneys general, partisan elected officials that they are, filed amicus briefs. They didn't join the suit and aren't speaking for their states. The actual precedent that this case would set would be nightmarish for every state. Nobody wants this, it's a stunt.
This suit is going to be immediately rejected by the SC just like all the other frivolous lawsuits. The best way of predicting the future is to look at the past, and the past 50+ lawsuits have been dead on arrival.
Yes, this is the argument... and the courts keep rejecting it. As the rulings keep pointing out, you can't tell people they can vote one way, and then challenge it after they have already voted. It doesn't matter if it might be against some rules; the time to challenge was before people voted.
Courts can't reject a case because they don't want to hear it (except for SCOTUS, although Thomas and Alito would argue they don't have that right for original jurisdiction). In order to reject a case, the case has to be lacking in merit or procedurally deficient. That so many of the cases have been rejected due to their procedural deficiencies should be in an indication of the quality of the legal teams pressing the issues.
(Note that rejecting for procedural deficiencies doesn't mean that the court approves of the merits of the case, it just means that the court also doesn't want to decide the merits. Although if you piss it off hard enough, they will also go own to berate you on why your claims lack merit in addition to enumerating procedural deficiencies).
A reminder that states are sovereign and don't run their elections according to the Federal Constitution. This whole idea that states can't determine the course of their elections because it's "unconstitutional" is farcical.
If states were sovereign, then they could secede, and we already settled that issue. The U.S. Constitution is the law of the land; see the Supremacy Clause.
They are sovereign on this matter. There are no laws in the Constitution to micromanage the state elections (that's where the "Supremacy Clause" would come up). This simply isn't a matter of the US Constitution.
You do know of course that the governor of Texas expanded early voting by personal proclomation, right? I suppose other states which did not have early voting, or a shorter window, can now claim TX has created substantial illegal votes by similar 'equal protection' arguments. Likewise, I believe one of the states that filed amicus briefs allowed counting of ballots days longer than did PA.
[EDIT: I choose to use strong language because it's important to speak the truth. Simplicity and clarity, combined with honesty, always are friends of truth. Sometimes you gotta say that the emperor has no clothes, and that shit does indeed stink. And this is shit that stinks.]
> In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states ...
How do I put this delicately?
That case is bullshit.
Texas knows it, those 17 states know it, the Supreme Court knows it, and every single lawyer in the United States knows it.
And now you know it.
The Supreme Court will probably, like it did to the Pennsylvania Republicans, issue an order consisting of a single sentence rejecting their application:
"The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied."
Let’s do it - I love a good intellectual conversation!
Examining what facts we have it’s very clear that the Republican Party has put forth a number of specious lawsuits with no grounds - all of which have been vehemently rejected by every court in the land - and that the goal of these lawsuits is either to overturn the legitimate election results and/or undermine people’s faith in the election.
Many or most Republican politicians know the lawsuits will fail and are on board because they know they have to keep their base riled up in Georgia to win those Senate runoff elections.
And also because Trump still has a vise-grip on the Republican base, so these politicians have made the calculation that they’d rather do what Trump wants (so they can win re-election) than reaffirm what is America’s most fundamental small-d democratic process: voting for our president, having our leader be elected by the people.
Considering how fundamental voting is to a democracy, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call an attempt to undermine the electoral process itself seditious.
It’s not very patriotic to put the success of your own political party ahead of the good of the country. Both sides do it a lot but in this specific case it’s clearly the Republicans and it’s a pretty egregious breach of faith of our social contract. In America we expect our elected officials to respect the rules of the game, and acknowledge an electoral loss.
Do you agree that these lawsuits are un-patriotic and seditious? If not, why?
I look forward to your reasoned, cogent, and rational response so we can have a nice intellectual discussion about policy.
Please don’t share evidence or whatnot which the courts have already examined and rejected - it doesn’t seem like a very good use of time to cover old ground, unless of course you wish to disagree with the decision of the courts.
Be careful what you wish for - you just might get it! ;)
———-
My point, of course, is that not all of our political conflict is blind “tribal warfare” where blame can be equally distributed between the two sides. There really are some important issues where one side is wrong, and where it’s important to fight for what’s right.
That’s not to say all partisan conflict is good and necessary. But I do think the facts show that (and I don’t deny the many flaws of the Democratic Party) the Republican Party has embraced obstruction as a technique to achieve and maintain power and continues to inch closer to “If I can’t have it, well then nobody can.”
And that they’ve embraced a figure who is very comfortable with undermining democracy itself and would love to become an authoritarian leader.
The rough gist of the argument is that only legislatures are empowered to choose the method of selection of electors, and therefore governors (like Texas's governor) or courts (as in North Carolina) that order changes to election procedure render the entire count of the election invalid.
(You'll note that the examples I cite are not states that Texas is suing, and that should give you some indication of the likelihood of success.)
[Side note: that's one of the arguments. The actual brief is kind of a legally incoherent mess, so it kind of hops around from argument to argument a bit; the other main argument, which most of the amici seem to want to focus on, is that PA's Supreme Court improperly adjudicated PA law's propriety under the PA Constitution, and therefore Texas has right to settle that dispute in front of SCOTUS, despite SCOTUS dismissing an appeal alleging exactly that just yesterday.]
> The rough gist of the argument is that only legislatures are empowered to choose the method of selection of electors, and therefore governors (like Texas's governor) or courts (as in North Carolina) that order changes to election procedure render the entire count of the election invalid.
It’s a bad argument. The US Congress has delegated some of its power to the Executive Branch (FDA and IRS, among others), just like I’m sure some of these states have. If a state legislature passed laws allowing the governor to change election rules, then the legislature is still choosing the electors, not directly, but by having delegated that power to the executive branch of the state.
I’m not a lawyer but this argument sounds flimsy at best.
1) You should cite where the federal government has authority over state-run elections.
2) You should also explain more clearly why you think it could be rational to discount the decisions of state courts which rule on the laws passed by the state legislature on the basis that they aren't the state legislature... That is like saying the Supreme Court shouldn't have a say over how Federal laws are applied. It's their entire job.
And all this is ignoring the idea that the legal system ought to represent the democratic will of the people and the institutional processes they put in place, whether it's via upholding the laws of the legislature or the vote.
Just to be clear, I believe that Texas' argument here is complete and total bullshit, and I do eagerly await seeing the reply brief for an epic teardown of the arguments, as SCOTUS likely will deny the leave to file without explanation of why it is doing so.
Ok, and I just want to continue to point out that there are various legal standards a case must meet before proceeding towards a victory and the mere existance of the case is not one of them. People today, 9 December 2020, keep citing this particular case because we are currently living in the hours of human history where it is not thrown out of court so they would like to say the matter is unsettled, as if there won't be yet another frivolous lawsuit tomorrow when this one fails. The matter is settled legally and this lawsuit doesn't seem to open any questions. I really want to end this comment with, "let's see what the courts have to say," to seem amicable but my point is that the courts already have weighed in on this many times.
Another good analogy is fraudulent advertising. Freedom of speech does not mean that people can say any old thing without consequence. If people were selling fake Covid-19 cures, Google would be well within their rights to take down ads and videos. And elected officials would certainly be allowed to ask about it if they weren't.
America is really big on freedom of speech. That's why the Senators can't order YouTube to do this, they can only request.
They could also request (but not order) Russia Today, Fox News, One America News Network, and Stormfront to do some basic fact-checking on the videos they host; but that would be a complete waste of the Senators' time, so they don't bother with the request.
What? There are a crap ton of laws that protect democracy. They are laws that decide how the votes are reported, where the votes are stored, even how the electoral college electors should vote. When you go into a court and swear an oath to tell the truth about democracy, that is our legal system censoring speech about democracy. Incidentally this is why Rudy Giuliani said in court that there was no fraud in the election. Because we have laws about what you can and can't say. Michael Flynn was prosecuted for lying to investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador; the heart of that investigation was the election and the Russian threat to the democratic process. No, you cannot legally say whatever you want about the election to whoever you want for self-serving ends. Even if it's in limited situations, there is a ton of censorship to protect our democracy.
And private entities should go even further, at least to protect their brands. I will always think of Facebook as the place where the Rohingya genocide was organized and carried out, and Facebook is where violent protesters like Kyle Rittenhouse gathered before killing multiple people. I think about the platforms that allowed ISIS to radicalize people. Google doesn't want YouTube to be the video hosting site where you can watch the world burn. Reddit removed the sub where you could literally watch people die. You might see these actions as against some dearly held political beliefs but it's pretty clear to me that these are just adults trying to act with a modicum of responsibility.
"For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round."
Doesn't it feel familiar?
> Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [parliamentary] legal commission.
Also the counting from some distant area with opaque machines and the fact not everyone is authorized to check the count is ripe for abuse.
> Mail-in voting really feels crazy from other countries. Just check why it was banned in France
This feel vaguely concern troll-y, but I'll engage. I am sure that there are valid security concerns, and some possibilities for fraud with mail-in voting.
However the argument about "Oh look it's bad, there are so many possibilities for fraud" would look a little more okay if the President wasn't engaging in it [1] and his party wasn't also quietly pushing for more of it in areas where it benefits them. Of course they find some flimsy excuse to justify this “well, ours is called an absentee ballot because you have to request it”.
You can't have it both ways. If mail-in voting feels crazy, the 2016 election where like 25% of eligible voters voted by mail should also be considered invalid.
What is not okay is crying "Fraud" in nebulously defined ways for only the states you lost at the moment you start losing with the existing system. This is basic kindergarten stuff, so it's kind of funny that it has to be explicitly explained in such a big national event.
> You can't have it both ways. If mail-in voting feels crazy, the 2016 election where like 25% of eligible voters voted by mail should also be considered invalid.
And those before. It's like most things are done in a way to make it possible to fudge results.
More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.