4 ms·
US state voting literacy tests were problematic because (i) the criteria for being able to skip the test tended to be racially discriminatory and (ii) it wasn't
by chrchang523 9y ago
US state voting literacy tests were problematic because (i) the criteria for being able to skip the test tended to be racially discriminatory and (ii) it wasn't practical for most of the affected citizens to move to a state which treated them better.
(i) does not apply; regardless of whether you intend to argue for or against a point made in the article, you're responsible for knowing the same things about what the publishers think they said. Furthermore, even oarsman:regatta-style test bias is of negligible relevance because (ii) also does not apply; as we can see from the 2016 election results, enough people "disenfranchised" by NYT/WP/etc. policies were able to communicate effectively in other Internet venues to produce a catastrophic outcome for the old gatekeepers.
Most of the Internet comments that produced 2016 were either written by folks who'd easily pass this sort of test, or on venues that won't add this sort of test in the future; I wouldn't worry about the impact of this on dissent. If you want to fight against anything a specific media organization does, fight against selective reporting/censorship [1]; but it's not a big deal, the Internet has demonstrated itself up to the challenge of routing around it.
1: If you have a signal with 0s and 1s, and a filter that lets only the 1s through, what is the information content of the original signal? The filtered signal? Incidentally, this is also a major problem in science today.