Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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?

The issue is that this is not just a random social media post, it's coming from the President of the US, and most people expect that someone in that position will not post clearly false messages, specially when those messages affect something as fundamental as the election process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

> Yet votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show. Election officials reject almost 2 percent of ballots cast by mail, double the rate for in-person voting.

You could say that 1% increase in problems is small, but in close elections that could easily be considered huge.

Seriously. I am getting a "we have always been at war with East Asia" vibe from this latest uproar.

If you use Google search tool to look up "mail-in voting fraud" and limit the search to before April 1st, you get a lot of concerned articles from NPR, NY Times, Propublica, etc, that mail-in voting fraud is a problem to worry about, and that expanding mail-in voting might lead to more fraud (and they also think Republicans will benefit from this expansion): https://www.google.com/search?q=mail-in+voting+fraud&source=...

But then Trump tweets about and there is a 180 and now it is disinformation to claim that a massive increase in mail-in voting will lead to a massive fraud problems.

Two old quotes are interesting to me:

From NY Times in 2012:

> “Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”

From Pro Publica in March 2020 ( https://www.propublica.org/article/voting-by-mail-would-redu... ):

> “To move from a couple of thousand to a couple of million requires an entirely different infrastructure,” said Tammy Patrick, a former county election official who is now a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund in Washington, D.C.

Just from those two quotes, it is not at all unreasonable to extrapolate and predict that massively increasing mail-in voting on a tight schedule is going to be a huge fricking problem. I don't know what the answer is, and I don't which party is going to benefit more. And even if you think Trump is wrong, he is still making a prediction that is based on real concerns, which is something that politicians do all the time, it is not a blatant error of fact.