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Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

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Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#161
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.

This line of reasoning isn't new and has been used numerous times historically to disenfranchise, prohibit or otherwise block "undesirable" groups of people.

To answer the question, yes. You absolutely want every single eligible person in the electorate to vote.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is taking away his 1st amendment rights to free speech Does he have to be on Twitter? I mean, if Hillary can set up a mail server, surely Donald can host a Mastodon instance.

Or shoot, get a dev team together to write a microblogging platform hosted at whitehouse.gov. Then they could even write a client that was secure enough to run on the president’s cell phone, and they don’t have to worry about third-party interests (if they exist). Just have whatever is posted on that site mirrored to @POTUS on Twitter, and if that get suspended, then the primary source still exists.

I'm really torn with this idea. It would be really good solution to the problem for him and twitter/facebook.

But, thinking of this from the new network point of view - I do not wish any good alternative social network to suddenly receive an influx of extreme trumpers following him. That could basically make it the new Voat and poison the idea unless there's some serious coordination around which nodes are excluded. Imagine the effect of him twitting that he's moving his presence to Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@usercount claims ~530k users now. Trump has 80.2M followers. Even if only 1% of them is ready to move, that's a new mastodon.social by itself.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#163
post #158
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bad-faith take. Technically, no, twitter's statement is not a fact about the future, but merely a fact about California's policies. In the utmost of pedantry, it should read "According to California's election policies, ballots are only to be sent to registered voters at the addresses listed on their registration ." But if we're really drilling into semantics, you posted a link about dead people on the registr…

A multinational company just decided to put their finger on the scale of a US election. I think that decision and the way it was made invites scrutiny.

He's the president of the United States operating on a private platform owned by a private company! No one should be above reproach on such a platform and that includes the president.

If he doesn't like it, he can direct Lockheed Martin and tell them to spend a couple billion dollars on making Litter. At least then it'll go to something slightly more productive than whatever contracts they're currently siphoning money off of.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#164
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…

People have been voting by mail for decades, in the US and many other democracies. There haven't been any incidents. And, yes, I am convinced wide-scale fraud would be almost impossible to hide: you can't pull off any fraud without, for example, many voters turning up at polling places even though they have been mailed a ballot. Or people noticing the voter rolls show them having voted when they didn't. Or whatever s…

>>in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening

Which of these examples of election fraud are...not examples of voter fraud?

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been a more polarising American politician than Trump in living memory? Voter fraud is not a constant. It is completely dynamic. Just his Tweet completely changes reality. Now, if it does proceed, we'll see increased scrutiny of mail-in voting, which in turn would reduce fraud. This would then be cited by opponents as another counter-example, when in reality the increased scrutiny was the catalyst.

This isn't what I was asking. You're changing the argument now to try and claim that Trump's tweets would have increased scrutiny on mail-in voting, when in reality most states have had mail-in voting before the Trump presidency and has seen low levels of voter fraud. You're trying to do a post-hoc justification in attempt to rationalize Trump's tweets rather than answer my argument. I'll ask you again: Where's the v…

> Where's the voter fraud data showing that vote by mail causes a massive amount of fraud?

Where's the data showing that wearing a red hat causes a lot of abuse to be yelled at you by strangers?

The answer is historically, not much. Well, unless it happens that we're talking about a Trump (MAGA) hat.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#166

Trump is currently tweeting about how this warning message is taking away his 1st amendment rights to free speech, and constitutes interference in the 2020 election. Can't wait for these tweets to get the same warning. [1]: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12654275381401886...

Jesus goddamned Christ, even the President of the United States doesn't realize that a corporation is incapable of violating your First Amendment rights.

That’s not even the issue. If the government said he was lying, that wouldn’t impact his first amendment rights; pointing out a lie is not censorship.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not Twitter's job. There are people who are supposed to do this.

When you have become one of the de-facto news sources for a sizable portion of the population, it does sort of become your job. Whether it’s good that they have become a news source or not is a valid question. But right now, they are, and I think preserving the president’s tweets seems like a pretty easily defensible decision. Even if it is also (or primarily) motivated by their own business interests.

Do you need Twitter to preserve the words of the President, though? Rephrasing, can the President’s words be preserved just as well without Twitter?

If the answer is yes then Twitter isn’t performing the civil service it claims as it is not an archival medium.

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#169
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…

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.

You scoff at the reaction yet you've surgically extracted the political context of Trump's motivations for disparaging mail-in voting from your analysis. There isn't a new developing threat to mail-in votes, Trump has a clear political agenda. In Trump's own words a couple months back:

The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again

Can you at least pretend to understand why some people might have a hard time accepting Trump's credibility on the issue?

Re: Twitter tags Trump tweet with fact-checking warning

#170
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.

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.
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