U.S. Politics - Thread

[Rodzilla]

I disagree. Other republicans are passive and willing to accept people walking all over them. Take a look at the rise of social media companies with the power to control (essentially) global opinion, without any pushback from these old republicans.

Look at the senate committees when Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey etc have to field questions. These idiot republicans barely even know what a tweet is let along understanding the power of something like the google or facebook algorithms to control what people see and hear.

i reject that example, give me another one

 

[CroydonDog]

Bannon is real piece of work. He is also one of the main guys behind the fake Hunter Biden shit.


Facebook removes pro-Trump Stop the Steal group over 'calls for violence'
Hasty ban of political group raised questions about consistency and transparency of Facebook’s content moderation

• US politics live – follow the latest in our live blog

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew

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Fri 6 Nov 2020 09.27 AEDTLast modified on Fri 6 Nov 2020 09.33 AEDT
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Protesters calling for stopping the vote count in Pennsylvania gather on the steps of the state capital on Thursday in Harrisburg. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Facebook removed a viral group falsely claiming that “Democrats are scheming to disenfranchise and nullify Republican votes” after it gained more than 350,000 members in a single day.
The hasty enforcement action against a political group was unusual for Facebook and raised questions about the consistency and transparency of the company’s content moderation.
The group, “Stop the Steal”, was established by a rightwing not-for-profit group, Women for America First, and run by a team of moderators and administrators that included the longtime Tea Party activist Amy Kremer. Members were encouraged to provide their email addresses to a website calling for “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote”, as well as to donate money.
The group exploded in popularity on Wednesday and Thursday, racking up more than 730,000 interactions, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics platform. Many of the most popular posts in the group were calls for prayer for Donald Trump, but the group was also rife with misinformation about the election and processes for counting ballots. Two of the group’s moderators, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, are connected to the “We Build the Wall” campaign, for which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was indicted for fraud, the Daily Beast reported.

“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”
The group was promoting about a dozen “Stop the Steal” Facebook events in cities around the US; some but not all of those event pages have been taken down.
Sites where ballot counting continues have become targets for a handful of protests as the process drags on – and the president encourages conspiracy theories about the normal process of counting votes. Trump supporters chanting “stop the count” converged at an election center in Detroit on Wednesday afternoon, while Trump backers in Phoenix, some reportedly armed, gathered at an election site to urge more counting.
One protester in Detroit told the Guardian he was responding to a call to action posted by a Facebook page “Stand Up Michigan” that formed to protest against Covid lockdowns. Facebook subsequently removed the page, and a related group, “based on the potential risk for offline harm”, a spokesperson said.

Soon after the Stop the Steal group was removed by Facebook, new groups with similar names began rapidly attracting members. Many stated their intention to go “private” to evade Facebook’s censors or urged followers to migrate to other social media platforms, including the rightwing Parler or MeWe.
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Facebook’s hasty action on the Stop the Steal group stands in marked contrast to its handling of other domestic groups that have organized on its platform. The company dragged its heels for months before taking action against the anti-government “boogaloo” movement, which has been linked to multiple murders, and against the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon, which has also been linked to violence and identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
The inconsistency and lack of transparency around Facebook’s approach to content moderation drew quick criticism from experts in the field and digital rights advocates.
“It really matters that platforms should be as clear in advance about their policies and consistent in their application,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard law school who studies online speech regulation. “That helps fend off charges that any decisions are politically motivated or biased, and gives us a lever to pull for accountability that isn’t purely about who can get the most public attention or generate public outrage.”

Evan Green, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, raised concerns about Facebook setting “an extremely dangerous precedent”. “Are people not allowed to form a group on Facebook to discuss if they truly believe their government is engaged in electoral misconduct?” she tweeted. “How does this play out globally?”
Facebook did not immediately respond to queries from the Guardian, including whether the group would have met the threshold for a takedown under normal circumstances, apart from “this period of heightened tension”, and the nature or volume of calls for violence. The company also declined to provide data or statistics about the scale of content takedowns since Tuesday.
“We don’t know what accounts have been deleted; we don’t know what hashtags or videos have been taken down,” said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “All we know collectively as researchers, journalists and civil society is what we’ve caught ourselves. Labeling the president’s tweets – that’s something everyone can see. But if we’re talking about paramilitary organizing around claims of election fraud, we need to know if Facebook is seeing that.”
She added: “There should be an hour-by-hour update from every one of these platforms about every action taken related to election misinformation.”

 

[MatstaDogg]

I don't think civil war will happen, and if it does it will be shut down pretty quickly, regardless of who gets in.

I do believe this will be a catalyst for even higher numbers of voter turnout in 2024 and beyond.

The fence is falling over and people are having to choose a side, they can no longer sit on the fence.

If dems loose, they will remember this election for decades to come, same goes for the republicans if they loose.

The way things are going do you think the world will last to 2024? World has gone to shit and everyone hates everyone. The world will end at the hands of mankind.

 

[Dawgfather]

So you're happy to censor information if it calls on violence. If you're going to argue the "free speech" line then you argue FOR it from all avenues.

Once you start picking and choosing, then you are agreeing with Twitter and Facebook labelling posts fake news and removing massive lies from their feeds

I'd personally be ok with the social media sites being completely unregulated. But I don't think this is going to be acceptable to broader society.

I also think that it would reconcile with U.S. freedom of speech laws now which largely only restrict direct calls to violence.

The bigger that social media companies are growing, the more restrictions they are placing on people's ability to use their platforms to communicate in the ways that they want to.

For example this morning I went to share some stupid comedy video on whatsapp with a few friends, and a new message popped up saying Whatsapp now restricts the ability to send a video to more than one person at a time. The explanation refers to limiting 'misinformation'.

That's hardly the worst example of censorship. The most obvious one is twitter censoring the fourth largest newspaper in America because Twitter didn't like what the story said about the presidential candidate which they wanted to win.

 

[Caveman]

I think it would be a good idea to count ALL ballots at the same time, absolutely.

The problem with this is the American system allows mail in ballots to appear days after the election. This is idiotic.

In Australia you can vote before election day but there is a defined cut off day so that all the votes (as I understand it) are received by election day.

Postal votes can be received up to 10 days after the election (at least in state election in qld)
Qld are still waiting for thousands of postal votes before the can start counting secondaries.

My wife is currently working in one of the postal booths in Logan qld.

 

[Nate DAWG]

I think you'll find what really has a lot of Trump supporters offside is the 200k voted which showed up at 4am in Detroit which suddenly meant Trump 4% lead became a 0.4% loss. Not many people are going to look at that and not feel like something very dodgy was happening.

Doesn't mean that it WAS dodgy, but people are going to have strong views about it.

It was always known that the mail in ballots were going to be heavily democratic. The initial numbers were always misleading. This is a planned strategy from Trump to appeal the legitimacy of the election if he was losing. This was widely spoken about before the election. For a president to call votes illegal and an election rigged is something you expect to happen in a despotic regime. If election result is challenged through the courts for months there will be mayhem in the US and it will have a big impact on the rest of the world. Regardless of what happens there will be a large section of Trump fans who will believe that the election was rigged even if a conservative supreme court rule against it. IMO, History will not be kind to presidency of Trump

 

[Papa Emeritus]

So if all the votes get counted and Biden wins and then Trump wants all these investigations, what happens? Does Trump stay president until all of the investigations are complete? Is this just some stalling method to stop Biden being sworn in?

 

[N4TE]

So if all the votes get counted and Biden wins and then Trump wants all these investigations, what happens? Does Trump stay president until all of the investigations are complete? Is this just some stalling method to stop Biden being sworn in?

I think it’s 70 days before he has to transition out of the Whitehouse in a normal situation but with legal challenges pending fuck knows? Who makes decisions. Good question.

 

[CroydonDog]

So if all the votes get counted and Biden wins and then Trump wants all these investigations, what happens? Does Trump stay president until all of the investigations are complete? Is this just some stalling method to stop Biden being sworn in?

Swearing is isn't for about another 10 odd weeks (sometime in January I think). Not sure what happens between now and then officially (eg: can Trump stay in the White House until then?).

 

[CaptainJackson]

Swearing is isn't for about another 10 odd weeks (sometime in January I think). Not sure what happens between now and then officially (eg: can Trump stay in the White House until then?).

Swearing in is January 20th, I think they have more than enough time to get this resolved by the courts

 

[south of heaven]

Swearing is isn't for about another 10 odd weeks (sometime in January I think). Not sure what happens between now and then officially (eg: can Trump stay in the White House until then?).

But he will techinally just be a renter at the white house do we need to send boost in if evictions are required

 

[Caveman]

The way things are going do you think the world will last to 2024? World has gone to shit and everyone hates everyone. The world will end at the hands of mankind.

"Wars and rumours of wars" will be with us till the end.

I don't think a (improbable) civil war in the USA would would result in WW3.

Tactically I suppose there is no better time to launch a physical war on the USA, but I think the other world powers will just be happy to see America imploding, and may potentially do a few little things to assist in the "collateral damage" of such an implosion.

 

[CaptainJackson]

I'd personally be ok with the social media sites being completely unregulated. But I don't think this is going to be acceptable to broader society.

I also think that it would reconcile with U.S. freedom of speech laws now which largely only restrict direct calls to violence.

The bigger that social media companies are growing, the more restrictions they are placing on people's ability to use their platforms to communicate in the ways that they want to.

For example this morning I went to share some stupid comedy video on whatsapp with a few friends, and a new message popped up saying Whatsapp now restricts the ability to send a video to more than one person at a time. The explanation refers to limiting 'misinformation'.

That's hardly the worst example of censorship. The most obvious one is twitter censoring the fourth largest newspaper in America because Twitter didn't like what the story said about the presidential candidate which they wanted to win.

Social media companies also have to adhere to other nations laws.

The inciting violence bit you speak of can also be accomplished without directly inviting violence. This rhetoric (that democrats are stealing the election) that Trump and his family are going on with, can incite violence without actually directly inciting violence. And its blatantly false the narrative hes spinning. What's even more concerning is that because of this "deep state" narrative he has also pushed, his supporters are unlikely to accept any investigation or court decision which finds the election results to be legitimate. And again who knows what his supporters will do.

 

[Dawgfather]

Bannon is real piece of work. He is also one of the main guys behind the fake Hunter Biden shit.


Facebook removes pro-Trump Stop the Steal group over 'calls for violence'
Hasty ban of political group raised questions about consistency and transparency of Facebook’s content moderation

• US politics live – follow the latest in our live blog

Julia Carrie Wong in San Francisco
@juliacarriew

Email
Fri 6 Nov 2020 09.27 AEDTLast modified on Fri 6 Nov 2020 09.33 AEDT
Shares
59


Protesters calling for stopping the vote count in Pennsylvania gather on the steps of the state capital on Thursday in Harrisburg. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletter
Facebook removed a viral group falsely claiming that “Democrats are scheming to disenfranchise and nullify Republican votes” after it gained more than 350,000 members in a single day.
The hasty enforcement action against a political group was unusual for Facebook and raised questions about the consistency and transparency of the company’s content moderation.
The group, “Stop the Steal”, was established by a rightwing not-for-profit group, Women for America First, and run by a team of moderators and administrators that included the longtime Tea Party activist Amy Kremer. Members were encouraged to provide their email addresses to a website calling for “boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote”, as well as to donate money.
The group exploded in popularity on Wednesday and Thursday, racking up more than 730,000 interactions, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics platform. Many of the most popular posts in the group were calls for prayer for Donald Trump, but the group was also rife with misinformation about the election and processes for counting ballots. Two of the group’s moderators, Jennifer Lawrence and Dustin Stockton, are connected to the “We Build the Wall” campaign, for which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was indicted for fraud, the Daily Beast reported.

“In line with the exceptional measures that we are taking during this period of heightened tension, we have removed the Group ‘Stop the Steal,’ which was creating real-world events,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “The group was organized around the delegitimization of the election process, and we saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group.”
The group was promoting about a dozen “Stop the Steal” Facebook events in cities around the US; some but not all of those event pages have been taken down.
Sites where ballot counting continues have become targets for a handful of protests as the process drags on – and the president encourages conspiracy theories about the normal process of counting votes. Trump supporters chanting “stop the count” converged at an election center in Detroit on Wednesday afternoon, while Trump backers in Phoenix, some reportedly armed, gathered at an election site to urge more counting.
One protester in Detroit told the Guardian he was responding to a call to action posted by a Facebook page “Stand Up Michigan” that formed to protest against Covid lockdowns. Facebook subsequently removed the page, and a related group, “based on the potential risk for offline harm”, a spokesperson said.

Soon after the Stop the Steal group was removed by Facebook, new groups with similar names began rapidly attracting members. Many stated their intention to go “private” to evade Facebook’s censors or urged followers to migrate to other social media platforms, including the rightwing Parler or MeWe.
Advertisement

Facebook’s hasty action on the Stop the Steal group stands in marked contrast to its handling of other domestic groups that have organized on its platform. The company dragged its heels for months before taking action against the anti-government “boogaloo” movement, which has been linked to multiple murders, and against the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon, which has also been linked to violence and identified as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
The inconsistency and lack of transparency around Facebook’s approach to content moderation drew quick criticism from experts in the field and digital rights advocates.
“It really matters that platforms should be as clear in advance about their policies and consistent in their application,” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard law school who studies online speech regulation. “That helps fend off charges that any decisions are politically motivated or biased, and gives us a lever to pull for accountability that isn’t purely about who can get the most public attention or generate public outrage.”

Evan Green, the deputy director of Fight for the Future, raised concerns about Facebook setting “an extremely dangerous precedent”. “Are people not allowed to form a group on Facebook to discuss if they truly believe their government is engaged in electoral misconduct?” she tweeted. “How does this play out globally?”
Facebook did not immediately respond to queries from the Guardian, including whether the group would have met the threshold for a takedown under normal circumstances, apart from “this period of heightened tension”, and the nature or volume of calls for violence. The company also declined to provide data or statistics about the scale of content takedowns since Tuesday.
“We don’t know what accounts have been deleted; we don’t know what hashtags or videos have been taken down,” said Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “All we know collectively as researchers, journalists and civil society is what we’ve caught ourselves. Labeling the president’s tweets – that’s something everyone can see. But if we’re talking about paramilitary organizing around claims of election fraud, we need to know if Facebook is seeing that.”
She added: “There should be an hour-by-hour update from every one of these platforms about every action taken related to election misinformation.”

The Hunter BIden emails and texts (and pics) and (his physical laptop) were all confirmed as being real.

The only thing left to debate is whether it shows that Hunter Biden was corrupt or not.

 

[Hacky McAxe]

I think you'll find what really has a lot of Trump supporters offside is the 200k voted which showed up at 4am in Detroit which suddenly meant Trump 4% lead became a 0.4% loss. Not many people are going to look at that and not feel like something very dodgy was happening.

Doesn't mean that it WAS dodgy, but people are going to have strong views about it.

That's why I posted this earlier

 

[Psycho Doggie]

I think this was a complete screw up. The states were very vocal about which votes would be counted first (some states postal, some states in person), and they were vocal about the majority of mail-in ballots being registered Democrats, but people weren't going to grasp that. If they counted mail-in ballots and in-person ballots at the same time it wouldn't look so dodgy.

It is a screwup, but it may also stand as an example of the law/state being well behind technology. It fine doing things this way before internet, it was actually pretty ok before social media. It is woeful in the face of the way information sharing and algorithm decisions on social media have created the division and bloody-mindedness that we see now.

 

[Dawgfather]

That's why I posted this earlier

Yes and I can see the humour in this but quite clearly the difference is that the swings to Trump were from votes cast at election booths where it is essentially impossible to commit voter fraud.

Mail in ballots and absentee ballots on the other hand are a completely different discussion point.

Again, I'm not saying there was fraud on the scale that helped Biden beat Trump. But there should certainly be a lot of discussions about the system and whether mail in ballots and absentee ballots should continue to be allowed in the absence of strict rules around how they are used.

 

[CroydonDog]

The Hunter BIden emails and texts (and pics) and (his physical laptop) were all confirmed as being real.

The only thing left to debate is whether it shows that Hunter Biden was corrupt or not.

LOL. "confirmed" - what? By these guys?

All hail the New Federal State of China ...

 

[Psycho Doggie]

"Wars and rumours of wars" will be with us till the end.

I don't think a (improbable) civil war in the USA would would result in WW3.

Tactically I suppose there is no better time to launch a physical war on the USA, but I think the other world powers will just be happy to see America imploding, and may potentially do a few little things to assist in the "collateral damage" of such an implosion.

It is pretty clear that when the US had their first Civil war in the 1860s most of europe was pretty happy about it, and indeed hoping that several nations would arise as a result so that North America would be as fractured as europe is.

 

[Hacky McAxe]

The way things are going do you think the world will last to 2024? World has gone to shit and everyone hates everyone. The world will end at the hands of mankind.