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YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

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Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#671

If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. Bad ballot Rejection rate of 6% in previous election to now 0.02%, with mail in ballots. Mismatched signatures resulted in a rejection for only 0.02% of all absentee ballots cast. How is that even possible. They counted almost everything. For those of you that think its unfair to reject ba…

Is there any evidence that signature matching is an accurate way to ensure correctness? As a useless anecdote, my current signature looks _nothing_ like the one on my state issued ID from 10 years ago.

Something that someone else said is quite important here: the time to fix these things is before an election, not afterwards. It doesn't take much imagination to see how invalidating large quantities of ballots after-the-fact is a dangerous road for a democracy. Put the rules and methods in place prior, in a bipartisan way.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#672
This leaky bucket approach seems ineffective, ignores the root cause, and likely emboldens people adhering to these ideas. As bizarre as it sounds, I think the root cause for the rise in supply and demand for misinformation is the decline of the church/religion. Couple that with technology and it's uncharted territory. Many people need something to believe in, whether it's luck, god, nature, whatever, beliefs are complex frameworks that order a chaotic world. They help people handle a number of difficult circumstances from inequality and injustice to fear and uncertainty, to loss and sadness, to dealing with difficult people, finding motivation, the list goes on.

Like religion, conspiracy theories fill many of those voids, but they are much better equipped to thrive in the 21st century. Where churches build communities in buildings, conspiracy theories form communities on social media and internet forums. Where churches hold the carrot of an afterlife or ultimate application of fairness, the conspiracy theory holds the carrot of a future leak or whistleblower leading to your team's ultimate victory and subsequent righting of wrongs. Where church uses god as the reason for everything, conspiracy theories use mini-gods arising from issues, responsible for all sorts of machinations and plots. Where churches use imperfect human leaders capable of hypocrisy and moral shortcomings, conspiracy theories often lack formal leaders, and when they are present, the bar for morality is low compared to the alleged crimes of the conspirators. Churches ask for money, conspiracy theories ask for time. Churches offer boring lectures on people who lived thousands of years ago, conspiracy theories are engaging and tie directly to real world events.

Whack-a-mole with ideas that keep popping up does nothing to solve the underlying issues: there are many people out there who feel empty in some way and they are desperate to fill that void with just about anything. Containment of misinformation has failed and will continue to fail, just like prohibition of drugs fails, and abstinence only sex education fails, and religious persecution fails.

I think the best approach is to ignore, minimize, monitor real-world impact, and organically counter. With that approach you avoid creating martyrs, and you can exploit a major weakness conspiracy theories possess compared to formal religion: Conspiracy theories operate in the realm of the living, there is no promise of truth in death as with many religions. Because of this, very few conspiracy theories truly stand the test of time, eventually they're either disproven, evolve to become too outlandish, or simply become boring and fizzle out.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#673

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should…

That's not how the human brain works. Repeat a lie often enough and it become true no matter how analytical you pretend to be.

As far as I can tell "True" and "False" in any context are way more like popular consensus rather than some natural immutable objective state.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#674
So, after 4 years of constant unfounded public "Russia gate" allegations, now it is too much to look into hundreds of sworn wittness statements, video footage, statistical anomalies, and whatnot, for even a few weeks?

That type of behaviour is what is fishy.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#675

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should…

"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation…

I happen to agree that false balance is a truly profound problem. And I would go so far as to say it's one of a small handful of ideas I wish could be drilled into the head of every consumer of news. I find it to be one of the most underappreciated and incredibly important ideas of the past few decades.

All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#676
I have mixed feelings about this subject. On the one hand I would like Google/FB to remove antivax content on all of their platforms as it's immediately dangerous to people and unanimously debunked by scientists. On the other hand I know once the big tech gets comfortable with the idea of censorship they gradually start expanding their editorial reach and start censoring things left and right with double standards as I believe applies in this case. You can find a ton of videos on YouTube claiming Russians made Trump president, one could argue this is equal to claiming voter fraud got Biden elected. I happen to think both are completely false conspiracy theories. There's so much fabricated information on internet and YouTube that the idea of censorship based on truthfulness seems crazy to me. Google, FB, and other big tech should come up with clear red lines for what's acceptable and apply it consistently across the board. Immediately dangerous information and unanimously debunked could be a good red line.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#678

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should…

This would indeed be excellent. Unfortunately, "surrender to authority and do as you are told" is the main lesson of modern schooling, as they're mostly concerned about controlling (as in keep them physically close and supervised and presumably safe) as many students as possible with a limited budget and staff.

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#679
post #476

Holy shit, this thread is scary. Sure, there are some implications worth discussing based on this news. However, the number of people directly posting doubts on the election results is way more concerning and shows that Youtube might be doing a good thing in this case.

If you dont have doubts about this election, you've been thoroughly brainwashed.

You don't have any secret evidence that other people haven't already seen and already debunked.

Ask yourself this: is there anything that could convince you that the election was on the up-and-up?

Re: YouTube to remove content that alleges widespread election fraud

#680

Unpopular opinion: it is much better to have a leader hated by the media and who's every move is scrutinized by the press than to have a leader cowtowed by the press and given a free pass on anything. How do I know? I'm from Russia. Authoritatism begins with tight control of news sources.

This is definitely true when the boss-man doesn't change. But these people aren't against power, or even against power used abusively against the people - they're only against "the other team" and clearly happy to cover up just about any bad actions of their preferred team.
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