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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

(techcrunch.com)
707 points patd | 4 comments | 27 May 20 12:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.02s | source
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itchyjunk ◴[27 May 20 13:42 UTC] No.23323027[source]▶
Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment.

Is there no way to consider social media as unreliable overall and not bother fact checking anything there? All this tech is relatively new but maybe we should think in longer time scale. Wikipedia is still not used as a source in school work because that's the direction educational institution moved. If we could give a status that nothing on social media is too be taken seriously, maybe it's a better approach.

Let me end this on a muddier concept. I thought masks was a good idea from the get go but there was an opposing view that existed at some point about this even from "authoritative" sources. In that case, do we just appeal to authority? Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view?

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Beltiras ◴[27 May 20 13:45 UTC] No.23323084[source]▶
There's a big murky middle where you can't really tell but in the case of what Trump is complaining about an informed observer would come to a conclusion really quickly.
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zaroth ◴[27 May 20 13:59 UTC] No.23323316[source]▶
Voter registration rolls are pretty notorious for being out of date and unreliable.

Personally I don’t have a problem with anyone who wants to vote by mail being able to request a ballot. Most states already allow no-excuse absentee ballets.

I think the problem arises when the State automatically mails ballots to every registered voter at an address.

If too many ballots show up at a house because someone requested it, there’s a paper trail. If too many ballots show up at a house automatically, there’s zero paper trail to be able to tell if they were all filled out and mailed back, besides the overall voter participation rate going up, which surely it will do.

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1. michaelt ◴[27 May 20 14:31 UTC] No.23323881[source]▶
Seems to me the solution there is to fix the voter registration rolls, rather than to make voting harder for people who are already on the rolls.
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2. makomk ◴[27 May 20 18:39 UTC] No.23327841[source]▶
The trouble is that fixing the voter registration rolls means removing names from them, and the other American political faction - the Democrats and all the others opposed to Trump - push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans. This happens even when the supposed voters both haven't voted in years and haven't actually been removed from the rolls or made ineligible to vote.

In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.

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3. thephyber ◴[27 May 20 23:02 UTC] No.23331228[source]▶
> push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans

Politics gonna politik. Neither team red nor team blue is above slimy tactics. That's not an excuse not to push for a viable, non-partisan solution.

I personally don't think periodically scrubbing rolls is either the right solution nor a good one. When they are scrubbed, the scrubbing is usually done by elected officials (who are almost certainly not above the corruption temptation) and who generally choose to over-scrub given too little confirmable data (causing false positive to be removed and increasing the burden on the average voter who doesn't know what happened or how to assure that their ballot isn't invalidated).

Citizens should demand that the government actually use the data is already has on us and keep our address and eligibility current. One simple PubSub system with {Post Office, DMV, Credit Bureaus} as publishers of address changes and {Elections, IRS, etc} as consumers would fix this pretty quick.

4. zaroth ◴[28 May 20 04:15 UTC] No.23333326[source]▶
It’s quite possible that “fixing the voter registration rolls” actually is worse at “making voting harder for people on the rolls” then simply letting people who want an absentee ballot to request one as they have always had to do.

Voting is a responsibility and a civic duty. It need not be effortless, and in fact it should not be effortless. It should be economical, practical, predictable, safe, and secure.

Registering to vote is one step in the process. It’s something anyone who wants to vote can and should know about. Typically cities/towns will send out a census every year which if you do not complete will result in you being removed from the voter rolls, but I’m sure it varies by state.

Once you’ve registered I think most people would expect they can lookup their designated polling time and place and arrive then to place their vote. You would not want someone who has registered and expects to be registered to be unexpectedly removed from the rolls, for example, and only discover this at the last minute.

This also doesn’t address the auditability concern. I would be extremely wary of any system which can associate a serial number on a ballot with who it was mailed to. Such a system is totally unacceptable in my opinion.

By comparison, I have absolutely no issue keeping a list of who requests a mail in ballot, just like I have no issue with keeping a list of who votes in person. Obviously people who receive a mail-in ballot cannot also vote in person, right?

So I don’t particularly like the idea of banning in person voting either. I’m sure many people will find voting by mail convenient, but I’m sure there are also people who find that physically voting in person is both an important ritual and more reassuring that their vote actually is being counted, but also could be more convenient for them.