Biden Campaign Blasts Facebook for 'Regression' (axios.com) 198
On the eve of the first presidential debate, the Biden campaign is pressing Facebook to remove posts by President Trump -- and slamming the social media company as "the nation's foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process." From a report: By publicly escalating the conflict, the campaign is pressing Facebook to enforce its policies against misinformation more aggressively. "Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression," campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a three-page letter obtained by Axios. "Facebook's continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction," the letter says. "We will be calling out those failures as they occur over the coming 36 days."
Madness (Score:4, Insightful)
Does anyone else find it crazy that ANY political party finds it acceptable to demand to remove social media content from any other party?
You are supposed to win by having a better message, not by suppressing other messages you disagree with.
Re:Madness (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about "suppressing" a message you don't agree with. It's about having known, deliberate misinformation, designed to suppress voters or give false information about a subject removed.
What is crazy that any political party would stand by and not only allow such lies which are harmful to this country to be spread, but embrace them as part of their platform.
Perhaps we should start there.
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But who gets to decide what is disinformation and what constitutes voter suppression?
Where lines are to be drawn, etc. Surely voter registration suppresses some votes, but there is legitimate merit to registration, for example.
Re:Madness (Score:4, Insightful)
"But who gets to decide", I only seem to see this phrase when someone points the finger at an abusive power.
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I've often answered that question with things like "People who don't drown newborn daughters for starters" or whatever atrocities their group is guilty of.
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Precisely this. "But who gets to decide" is a gaslighting ploy, designed to distract from the reality and provable facts of the situation at hand.
Since many of those bad-people-who-aren’t-you no doubt vote, why are you so concerned about voter suppression? Since elections ostensibly give everyone an equal say, are you not advocating for these awful people to have the same say as you?
I mean, if they shouldn’t be allowed to post on Facebook, should they be allowed to vote?
It seems that your real
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"But who gets to decide", I only seem to see this phrase when someone points the finger at an abusive power.
In other words, “my party gets to decide”.
Re:Madness (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Madness (Score:5, Insightful)
- New York Times Jan 19, 2019
Re:Madness (Score:4, Insightful)
One screw up does not mean the whole system is broken beyond repair, especially since it was widely publicised.
Anyway we are not talking about that kind of thing, this is people posting verifiably inaccurate information about polling stations or voting procedures. Easiest thing is just to have a blanket ban on anything to do with voting beyond "go vote" and have Facebook themselves push out accurate info on how to do it.
Re:Madness (Score:5, Insightful)
CNN Mocked for Calling Kenosha Riots 'Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests'
- Newsweek, 8/27/20
Pick a number (Score:3, Insightful)
One screw up does not mean the whole system is broken beyond repair
How many then? As we are now in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands just what number is enough for you to make that determination?
this is people posting verifiably inaccurate information
You say that but offer no proof, and many many times claims of "inaccurate" have been made against people that turned out later to be quite accurate indeed.
Too many times arguments that something is "inaccurate" is used as a tool to stifle debate and c
Re:Pick a number (Score:5, Informative)
Well yes, the con artist has lied thousands of times since he assumed the office, and continues to do so every day. Just what number is enough for you to make the determination he's a liar?
You say that but offer no proof,
Bullshit. Many times proof is offered and you, and others like you, immediately deny the truth. For example, the con artist and his minions continue to repeat the lie that voting by mail is ripe with fraud and abuse. However, every single study, including by states themselves, shows such actions are insignificant out to four decimal places.
I say, once is more than enough to prove the case the system is broken and you cannot reliably block what may be considered "inaccurate" at the moment, by anyone.
Ah, so once and done. No chance to go back and admit a mistake was made and publicly state so to correct the record. And we're suppose to believe you are always, 100 percent of the time, accurate in what you say and write and never lie. Good to know you have a god like ability to do so.
Unlike the con artist who said he never slept with Stormy Daniels, never paid her off to keep quiet, who has said he's a billionaire without offering any proof (see above), who has stated a myriad of lies and yet it's always the press which is fake.
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How many times have you been wrong in your life? It doesn't matter, what matters is if you corrected yourself and tried to do better next time.
That's the problem with Trump. He's not just wrong, he's an unrepentant, deliberate liar.
Re: Madness (Score:2)
Fact-checking can be biased very easily. In practice I see fact-checkers nitpicking on one group of politicians, while excusing obvious lies and manipulations of others due to formalities.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not when purely subjective stances are being discussed. I've seen enough cases of Liberals claiming differing viewpoints on topics such as immigration and abortion are hate speech and therefore verboten.
In fact I see this as more often the case than any actual disinformation. Because facts are rarely ever disputed outside of fringe groups such as antivaxers, which exist across political lines anyways.
Your claim of gaslighting is in itself gaslighting. Asking who gets to decide is completely valid. Plenty of
Re:Madness (Score:4, Insightful)
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"But who gets to decide" is a nonsensical gaslighting ploy. There is such a thing as fact-checking and there is such a thing as objective fact.
An advocate for more election participation calls the suppression of election participation a ‘nonsensical gaslighting ploy’.
If what you’re saying is true, then what is the point of elections at all? I mean, what if people pick the candidate who doesn’t square with objective fact-checking??? Are you really willing to risk that? If what you
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There is such a thing as fact-checking and there is such a thing as objective fact.
Fact-checking sites have grades other than "fact" and "not fact." Politifact, for example, has an analog meter ranging from "true" to "pants on fire." Snopes and Factcheck.org are similar. One can post a 100% factually correct article that highlights things in such a way as to be misinformation.
Let me give you some examples:
I just recently got a Fox news article from my parents where the headline said that Covid-19 was ada
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However since Ferengi are basicall
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Re:Madness (Score:5, Informative)
Even Rand knew the difference between "objectivism" and "objectivity". If they were the same thing, she wouldn't have coined the word "objectivism".
In any case, the position that objective facts exist is not called either "objectivism" or "objectivity". It's most often called "realism", and it predates Rand by thousands of years.
In fact, realism (at least about most aspects of the world) was the default view for most of those thousands of years, although other views did and do exist. Realism is still the dominant view, among "academics" and everybody else, and most of the alternative views spend a lot of time trying to reconstruct the practical conclusions of realism without having to assume it. Anyway, realism is not what Rand was trying to sell, and it sure as hell wasn't something she invented. It was something she assumed, just like most other people do.
Rand said that Objectivism was "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute". Note that that doesn't in fact require that there be any externally defined facts, although again I'm sure that Rand was philosophically a realist.
If you understood Rand or anything else, you would know that. You'd also know that most of what Rand wrote was fiction, and nearly all of what she wrote was emotional ranting with no actually rigourous logical framework behind it at all. Which may explain why neither academics nor anybody else who actually understood anything has ever taken it very seriously.
In short, you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about, you haven't done your homework, and nobody should waste any time listening to you.
Also, you might want to take a look at Rand's opinions of liars. She didn't have a lot of patience for them.
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But who gets to decide what is disinformation and what constitutes voter suppression?
What’s interesting, is that those opposed to the phrase “who gets to decide?”’, and those who support their right to be the deciders, are the exact same people who claim to be concerned about voter suppression.
Irony.
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But who gets to decide what is disinformation and what constitutes voter suppression?
I would say common sense gets to decide. As an example:
Candidate A puts out several ads stating that there has been massive voter fraud via mail-in ballots.
There is no evidence of massive mail-in voting fraud (even an investigation by Candidate A's own people fail to find evidence of such fraud).
Is it really that hard to determine if the ad campaigns are disinformation? You could debate whether this disinformation constitutes voter suppression though I guess.
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That doesn't seem to be the issue at all. Facebook is already censoring on behalf of Biden at mass scale. Deliberately misleading 'fact check' posts are being used throughout on supposedly misleading material but when you read the fact check rational either it isn't actually based on facts at all, doesn't support the conclusion, or is beating down a strawman issue instead of what was claimed in the original post.
A great example crossed my feed the other day. A post indicating Kamela Harris had indicated sh
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Snopes, politifact, etc have all gotten bad. None of them stick to just the facts anymore.
The issue here isn't so much that the fact checkers are misrepresenting but that facebook is (via whatever process is used, maybe even submission) incorrectly associating strawman fact checks with posts which sound related.
Another I recently saw related to a law passed in California which suspended automatic sex offender registration between children at least 14 yrs old and adults up to 10 years older in instances of o
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Unfortunately, any entity that gains a reputation for being a fair and neutral "fact checker" will eventually be infiltrated and turned into an asset. It's only a matter of time.
Authority always needs to be questioned.
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Authority always needs to be questioned.
Unless it’s authority one agrees with or it’s been made socially unpopular to question it.
Hanlon's razor (Score:2)
I agree that these "fact checker" sites often have questionable quality. However, I've found mistakes & slop both ways. Without more detailed "flaw" statistics, Hanlon's razor should be the default.
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With Zuckerbergs stated stance of essentially 'staying neutral and out of it' I want to agree. That said Hanlon's razor is popularly known and exploited.
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I agree that these "fact checker" sites often have questionable quality. However, I've found mistakes & slop both ways. Without more detailed "flaw" statistics, Hanlon's razor should be the default.
These sites should be taken over and given to the Facebook purifiers.
Those guys are never wrong.
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The fact check attempted to suppress that Trump made comments about 'grabbing them by the pussy' whereas Biden actually did it.
Say what? Trump has multiple accusations of raping women and is recorded saying he sexually assaults them. Biden has one by a woman that has pretty low credibility in part due to her admiration for Putin (someone who has previously claimed to interfere with the US election process in support of Trump).
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Burying the truth with cheap BS (Score:2)
Basically concurrence, but I think there should be additional focus on the cost of production. Doing actual research to get the truth is expensive, just starting the with value of the researchers' time.
In contrast, lies are cheap. For any (possibly expensive and hard won) truth, it's trivial to bury it under 20 cheap lies, which if taken seriously, then have to be refuted with additional research. Just to take the most obvious example-of-the-day, Trump has no talent beyond cheap lies. Trump is only special
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It's about having known, deliberate misinformation, designed to suppress voters or give false information about a subject removed
Funny enough, the definition of false information is far more subjective than one would imagine. Heck, the definition of news has changed from facts to opinion spin in most cases.
This isn't about picking sides because both sides are very clearly guilty of doing so. Each has their own flavor, but if you're sitting there going 'not my candidate/rep/party' then you've fallen for the same fallacy.
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It's not about "suppressing" a message you don't agree with. It's about having known, deliberate misinformation, designed to suppress voters or give false information about a subject removed.
The problem is that it's all "deliberate misinformation, designed to suppress voters or give false information", a.k.a. propaganda.
So either ban all social media or allow it all. Picking and choosing which groups get to spread their propaganda is way too easily abused.
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What is crazy that any political party would stand by and not only allow such lies which are harmful to this country to be spread
You do realize that both sides claim that their opponents do this on a regular basis?
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They don't even have to prohibit specific messages (though clearly 'up == down' false ones probably should be flagged or deleted). What needs to happen is to refuse access to the targeted ad system for political ads. Transparency would fix a lot of the problem and cost Facebook nothing. Actually, it'd probably get them more revenue, since campaigns would have to blanket Facebook to reach who they want to reach. Actually there should a special, lower ad rate offered for political ads, since the targeting
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- Word Salad
- Whataboutism
- DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim & Offender)
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Tactics seen in the previous post: - Word Salad - Whataboutism - DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim & Offender)
Tactics seen in your post: gaslighting & RVO. How long you wanna do this?
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Tactics seen in the previous post:
- Word Salad
- Whataboutism
- DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim & Offender)
What’s odd is not what you posted, but what you didn’t post.
You never said his post was incorrect, and if so, which part was incorrect.
Re:Madness (Score:5, Informative)
Much of what is in the Steele dossier has been shown to be true. Little of it has been shown to false. Even the dossier itself said some of the information was probably not true.
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No. It was known to be false and sourced from Russian intelligence officers.
https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
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It is well known that the information in the Steele dossier was gathered from Russian intelligence. That doesn't make it false.
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It is well known that the information in the Steele dossier was gathered from Russian intelligence. That doesn't make it false.
Kind of like the contents of Hillary’s emails, right?
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It's the job intelligence agencies from any country to find true information.
"What has been found true in that Russian spy document?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Madness (Score:2)
Why shouldn't I trust Russian spies? The President does!
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Why shouldn't I trust Russian spies?
Cause they’re filthy foreigners, and if there’s one thing Democrats won’t stand for, it’s non-US citizens getting their dirty, stinking hands on our elections.
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Which parts of the Steele dossier have been debunked? It's a raw intel report, even Steele himself says it's not 100% true, but that doesn't make it 100% false. Anyone posting it as absolute fact is acting improperly, but on the other hand anyone saying it's debunked or lies is just as bad.
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Found no wrong doing? The arrested several members of the Trump campaign team and only didn't charge Trump with obstruction because of some memo that a sitting president couldn't be charged
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Anyone posting it as absolute fact is acting improperly, but on the other hand anyone saying it's debunked or lies is just as bad.
You’ve certainly given yourself a great deal of latitude.
Let me guess, your party decides which parts are undisputed, objective, provable facts, and which parts are filthy lies which should not be posted on FaceBook?
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That right there is why politics in this country is so screwed up. If a politician admits he/she made a mistake, that politician gets attacked on both sides — on one side for not getting it right to begin with, and on the other side for getting it right.
Of course, this assumes that the politician is moving from an incorrect position to a correct position, rather than being bought off and subsequently moving from a correct position to an incorrect one, in which case, yes, attack from all sides, but do
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Free speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Otherwise libel and slander wouldn't exist (and in the rare cases of yelling "fire" in a crowded place). I am somewhat torn on this myself, I think if people were less gullible we wouldn't need the torts of libel and slander. But I figure that real progress in this area is somewhat delayed by a few decades just due to the fact that old mindsets take some time to clear out.
I'm with Biden on this (Score:2)
It's also not hard to understand why Trump is doing that:
1. He wants to clog the polls (which due to COVID are undermanned) with voter so that young, Democrat leaning voters will give up. In Obama's 2 elections blue districts repeatedly reported wait times of 5-6 hours and polls being closed early.
2. Tru
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Sure you can (Score:2)
Re:I'm with Biden on this (Score:4, Informative)
So let me ask you something: do you really believe that mail in voting ISN'T a potential issue? What evidence do you have that it won't be? You claim to have OVERWHELMING evidence. Where is it?
No, no. The burden of proof with provide extraordinary evidence lies on those making extraordinary claims. How would vote-by-mail fraud work?
So this literally leaves having someone unseal each voting envelope, print a new fake ballot with that exact ballot number, fill it out, put it back in the envelope, and put it back in the mail system. I mean, it's theoretically possible, but it would be incredibly difficult to pull off on any scale large enough to matter. Either that or you would have to modify the vote tallying software to not check the serial numbers, which would mean you would have to compromise the electronic portion *and* the paper ballot portion.
By contrast, electronic voting is way, way, way easier to compromise than paper ballots. Just fudge the numbers consistently, and you probably won't ever get caught. Heck, just make one of the electronic voting stations record that someone voted for A, but then 20% of the time, record that the voter voted for B, and make it only do that during the narrow time window when the election is being held, and delete all traces of the hack immediately afterwards, and you almost *certainly* won't get caught.
No, I trust voting by mail way more than in-person voting. Way more. Anybody who doesn't either hasn't thought it through or lacks a proper understanding of security at a fairly fundamental level (or both).
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But you can canvass door-to-door and offer cash to give up official, unfilled out ballots, as Ilhan Omar is alleged to have done. [thepostmillennial.com]
You're right that paper ballots provides tangible evidence and should there be any question, makes an accurate recount possible.
I'd prefer a compromise solution where there are mailed-out ballots, but are required to be personally and individually delivered to official stations for being counted.
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You can offer people money in exchange for them voting a certain way and sending you a photo of their ballot, too (whether in-person or mailed in). If people are stupid enough to give up their right to vote, there's nothing that can realistically be done to prevent them from doing so.
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If people are stupid enough to give up their right to vote, there's nothing that can realistically be done to prevent them from doing so.
Well, we could execute those proven to have paid money to solicit votes. That's an extreme, but so is civil war when the democratic process can't be trusted.
Or at the very least we utilize the security and police agencies that we spend billions funding to actively patrol for it, rather than buy the narrative that "voter fraud doesn't exist". Why voter fraud as brazen as what Project Veritas has uncovered was undetected and unreported on for so long is disturbing.
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You're making it too complicated. Just collect the sealed ballots (by hand or through post office employees) and throw out ones from areas that predominantly vote for the other guy.
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This is like someone trying to promise a better future and laying out his plans while a bussed-in crowd screams that he's a pedophile.
Re:Madness (Score:4, Insightful)
Crazy? No, a disdain for free speech and taking 'direct action' to suppress and censor and use a heckler's veto is consistent and predictable behavior.
The claim that Dems and leftists value free speech is a component of their gaslighting tactics. You can say whatever you want, as long as they approve of it.
Anything else falls under the umbrella of "no platform for hate", where pulling fire alarms at speaking events is justified.
I predict this will be modded down, so take that as further evidence.
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Or maybe they just want Facebook to enforce its terms equally for everyone, which means just being POTUS or a politician doesn't mean you get to try to suppress the vote or lie about the other candidate.
You know, the thing you have been calling for, same rules for everyone evenly applied.
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Speaking of lies are you still pushing the teleprompter thing?
Turns out the Democrats were right, Trump is comprised. His debt is a major security risk.
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The teleprompter story is made up. Trump really wants to hide his own mental problems by claiming Biden has them.
Biden occasionally grasps for a word or mis-speaks. Trump talks rambling bollocks all the time.
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It was made up.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020... [factcheck.org]
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/0... [cnn.com]
https://www.oregonlive.com/pol... [oregonlive.com]
I'm a Dem and I value free speech (Score:2)
If the Government orders Facebook to take down a post that is an infringement of Free Speech.
If a Citizen, even if they are a politician suggests Facebook should take down posts for misinformation and/or incitement to violence that is not a free speech issue. That is the consequences of spreading misinformation and inciting violence.
It doesn't become a free speech issue unless that Citizen uses their power as a government official to fo
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"I'm a Dem and I value free speech, but not consequence free speech."
Then comes the part where "if it isn't the government doing it, then it's ok", plus the usual obfuscation that excuses eroding respect for the very principle of free speech that leftists will use after they slash your tires because they don't like your political bumper sticker. We're back to "you can say whatever you want as long as we approve" or else there will be "consequences".
GRB's death comes at a significant loss, because it is a se
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Crazy? No, a disdain for free speech and taking 'direct action' to suppress and censor and use a heckler's veto is consistent and predictable behavior.
The claim that Dems and leftists value free speech is a component of their gaslighting tactics. You can say whatever you want, as long as they approve of it.
Every time, it seems, that right-wingers want to defend outright lies, they come up with this "free speech" / "permission required" crap.
You're aware that Trump (a non-leftist president) is the one calling the media "the enemy of the people" and frequently suggesting tougher libel laws so nobody can say anything bad about him?
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The media will only take anyone they want, anyone at all, and callously ruin their lives if they think they profit from it and get away with it. The corporate media absolutely is no friend to the public. It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that ethics in corporate "journalism" is a myth. All it takes is for your to be involved in circumstances beyond your control, but marketable to the public interest, and you absolutely will be used as fuel for their propaganda machine.
"anything bad about him"
Re:Madness (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Madness (Score:5, Informative)
If only the government had the power to protect us from lies, eh? What could possibly go wrong?
Yet another straw man. Read the summary. Biden is asking Facebook to do what they said they would do. Not about the Government protecting us from lies, my dude. Not this time, anyway.
I don't think we can really say "both sides bad" (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't about politicians lying anymore. This is about whether we'll be a democracy on Nov 4th. Biden lies, but he at least lets us decide whether to believe those lies or not. Trump is taking that decision away from us. Likely to save his own skin from his creditors.
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Don't worry. Our electronic voting systems are already thoroughly compromised by Russian hackers. They'll just cancel each other out.
Both of those things are pro Trump (Score:2)
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It’s a lie eh?
Tell me one American politician who provably didn’t. That includes George Washington.
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They don't want to moderate (Score:4, Interesting)
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Facebook moderates. Likely, the bigger problem is that Facebook seemingly isn't taking a more active role in putting their thumb on the scale like their sibling Google/Alphabet is. [projectveritas.com]
Because, you know, "it’s like a small company cannot do that."
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They don't want to moderate. They saw what happened last time. No matter what they do somebody will blame them for the election outcome somewhere.
Are you implying they "moderated" last time? Holy shit, if that's "moderated" I'd can only assume that most of Facebook underneath is actually the worst of 4chan, but daamn, ... they fucked up.
Literally anything they do would be better than last time. There's a shitton they could do if they wanted. They are afterall the self proclaimed best data analytics company on the planet.
Problems (Score:2)
Censorship is always bad. (Score:2)
You like censorship? Tell me why. (Score:3)
1) We are afraid our message is not compelling
2) We think voters are stupid and cannot be trusted with making their own judgements
Having lived in both sophisticated urban enclaves and simple towns, and been both well-off and poor, I can tell you that the average guy or gal on the street has a much stronger bullshit detector than most elites. If you think 'simple people' need to be protected from misinformation, I think you're either a liar or horribly sheltered.
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Oblig xkcd quote... (Score:3)
Trump has a stronger astroturf campaign. (Score:2)
how about some accountability for ads! (Score:2, Interesting)
Biden knows regression when he sees it. (Score:2)
He wrote the damn bill!
Earpieces for the debate? (Score:2)
NEW: Joe Biden’s campaign agreed to an inspection for electronic ear pieces at tonight’s debate several days ago but are now declining, a source familiar tells me. — Ebony Bowden (@ebonybowden) September 29, 2020
Question (Score:2)
Does the Biden campaign oppose posts regardless of which party they support?
Or do they just oppose posts that are critical of Biden's campaign?
The answer to this would make a huge difference.
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Australia allows mail-in voting for anyone who wants it and other than taking a bit longer to count the mail-in votes (due to having to wait for the cut-off for the mail-in votes to arrive) it has worked without issues.
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It's the dominant form of government. 32 of the 50 countries in Europe use a system where people vote for party representatives who then decide on and elect the leader of the government. It's also common in other former British colonies and 10 of the 13 Caribbean countries. The big difference is that in the U.S. those electors are independent of the legislature, while in most other places they compose the legislature. That makes the President an counter-balancing power, rather than purely a creature of the