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Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

bbc.com

191–200 of 311 posts

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#191
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The poor vastly outnumber the rich, so what point are you making exactly?

precisely that one, that the poor vastly outnumber the rich

So doesn't it stand to reason that the poor should have a greater say in the operation of our government than the rich do, given that vast outnumbering?

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#193
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! He didn't win the popular vote.

The popular vote has never mattered, and Americans have never changed that, despite having a couple of centuries of ample opportunity to do so.

Americans whose votes are counted in the current system have never changed that.

States representing a large majority of the US population have all passed legislation for a national popular vote, and no one doubts that a national popular vote on whether to have a national popular vote would succeed.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#194

The warning links to this page: https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384 It's a sort of article (I didn't know Twitter had this type of format, I really like it, weirdly enough) that contains an introduction text and a 'What you need to know' paragraph, followed by fact-checking tweets from press organizations. I know where the tweets come from, but who has written the introduction and summary paragraphs, and…

Here’s the Twitter trends FAQ, which is where I would expect the answers to your questions to be found, yet there’s not much info on this page. Basically they say trends are determined by an algorithm, but that there are also humans in the loop.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-trending-f...

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#195
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't too much voter turnout bad though? Do we really want every poor ignorant impoverished (or rich) American voting? Or just the people that take democracy seriously and vote after having puzzled it out? If you reduce the friction too much (or even force people to vote) you'll get a lot of voting based on who promised the most goodies/handouts or emotional appeal rather than rational reasoning.

Poor and impoverished? No need to repeat yourself. Maybe there should be a writing test before one could vote. We could come up with all sorts of elitist barriers.

How about the one that R. A. Heinlein proposed, that one needed to serve honorably in the military to earn a vote.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#196
post #40
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if that happens, take note of which political parties/groups fight tooth and nail because they know that voter turn out is bad for them. (It's not difficult to predict.)

Isn't too much voter turnout bad though? Do we really want every poor ignorant impoverished (or rich) American voting? Or just the people that take democracy seriously and vote after having puzzled it out? If you reduce the friction too much (or even force people to vote) you'll get a lot of voting based on who promised the most goodies/handouts or emotional appeal rather than rational reasoning.

Voting is not a structured intellectual exercise like taking a test or writing a paper. There's not a single "right" answer that you have to be smart to figure out.

Voting is an exercise in representation. People vote based on what they want, not what they know. Desires, dreams, and concerns are not knowledge. Smart people, educated people, still have emotions, can still have hugely different values, and want wildly different things.

The purpose of democracy is to adjudicate between competing desires without violence. If you try to exclude a category of people from this process, you harm its legitimacy and it stops working well for everyone. The end point of that trajectory is revolution.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#197
post #119

Before I clicked on the link, I assumed this was yet another egregious lie. But this one really doesn't qualify. It falls squarely in the category of reasonable opinions. Let's look at the claim: "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent". Clearly the veracity of the statement rests on the word "substantially." It's inconceivable that no one ever takes, for exam…

California has been running absentee ballots for a long time. Are you saying all of them had "substantial fraud" ? If so, why didn't the President, who had control of 3 branches of govt and had a commission to prove election fraud, couldn't find any evidence ?

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#198
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The edit was "by Fox News viewers" which was previously implicit. To them these are hard left, but to moderates and the left they aren't. It is a matter of perspective. > but honestly Fox News viewers seeing CBS as substantively representing the left in any capacity is a large part of the problem here. This is something I agree with and is actually the crux of my post.

Hmmm, okay. I missed your point then. My bad.

Apparently, given how many downvotes I have, you aren't alone. Given that I'm agreeing with a lot of people that are arguing with me, I'm pretty sure it was my messaging. I think part of that is that since we are so politicized and language requires us to fill in parts that because I tried to dampen it to those on the right that it came off as supporting them.

Pretty much my point was: this links to only stuff on the left and so it gives the right an easy target to point to to continue with their claim (which I believe is false) that the left media is trying to control the people.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "preserving the words of the president" probably fits pretty squarely in the realm of public interest, even if they're blatantly false.

I know for a fact my aunt mails in ballots for her husband, her father and her mother. Claiming that there is no mail-in voter fraud among 300 million Americans is quite absurd in my opinion.

It's a bit absurd when claims of rampant mail-in voter fraud come without evidence from a New Yorker in the District of Columbia who votes in Florida by mail.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#200
post #33

I'm finding the response people are having to this mail in voting thing to be...puzzling. It's not a ridiculous thing to wonder about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud, and it seems like some of us are putting blinders on simply due to our distaste for the current president. If we were to hold a hackathon with a $100,000 prize for the most plausible path to exploit mail in voting in order to swing an electio…

There is no need to do this much intellectual work on behalf of the president.

If he has an argument to make, let him advance it. If he fails to make a compelling case, it's not our job to look up citations and write paragraphs to fill in the gaps.

Also, please remember the context. The only reason so many states are considering mail-in voting now is because they are concerned that huge numbers of voters will stay away from physical polling places.

This is not a matter of "pick the theoretically best voting system." This is a matter of "how can we hold an election without accidentally killing thousands of old people by communicable disease."

I don't have to think that mail-in voting is perfect to prefer it over radically depressing turnout.

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