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This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem. A lot of these videos are saying things that cannot reasonably be classified

This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem. A lot of these videos are saying things that cannot reasonably be classified as anything other than misinformation. For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. They also make up vague but scary claims about large numbers of illegal immigrants having voted, etc. All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post. More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation.

grawprog 6y ago
>This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics. >For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. Ok, so wouldn't it be the people who seek out and watch these kinds videos that would be the ones that would be too afraid to use mail in ballots? Seems like the people who think those videos are nonsense won't believe them anyway. >All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post How? From what I understand, there was a record number of mail in ballots this year, seems like it did nothing of the sort. >More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation. No, the government should not be allowed to decide what is or isn't real information, that's called propaganda.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  Do you think the spread of misinformation causes harm? It doesn't sound like it, by how you diminish the impact of political misinfo ("The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.") Not to take too strong a stance until I understand your position better, but record number of mail-in ballots doesn't imply there wasn't significant voter suppression.
  - nyolfen 6y ago
    this is an imposition of bounds on acceptable political thought; kto kovo. "misinformation" is a political label created to influence political processes. that is not to say that there is no truth, but rather that there is an official truth which is subject to the contingencies of power. the implicit justification for censoring this idea is that it delegitimizes the democratic process; it is ridiculous on its face to assert that overt censorship is any less delegitimizing. this is an expression of ideological power upon an opponent.
    - pii 6y ago
      So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge? I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena. We have experts, in other words. We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards. Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts? Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.
      - grawprog 6y ago
        >So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge? We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources. Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be. >I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena. We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does. >We have experts, in other words. No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us. >We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards. That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority. A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno. >Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts? >Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base. Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube. It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age. We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that. Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.
- swirepe 6y ago
  >One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics. Thinking dumb things about politics is how you end up bringing your AR-15 to investigate a pizza parlor... or trying to kidnap the governor.
  - claytongulick 6y ago
    So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them? I don't understand your argument here. An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories. Based on your argument, we also shouldn't report on police abuse because people may riot and burn down stores?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - quadrifoliate 6y ago
      > So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them? There is no "we". The platform is YouTube. It is their prerogative (and indeed their right to freedom of speech) to host content as they see fit. The Senators are merely asking them to exercise their freedom to a very reasonable extent.
    - matt_j 6y ago
      An astonishingly large percentage of the population are parroting this and all manner of other misinformation on social media, all day, every day, for months, and it's getting worse as one by one the dominoes fall and yet another impressionable mind is swayed and joins the chorus. I don't think censorship is necessarily the right approach to mitigate this torrent of bullshit, but it's clearly out of control.
    - swirepe 6y ago
      >I don't understand your argument here. >Based on your argument I was pointing out how "believing dumb things about politics" is a deliberate minimization of the effect of disinformation. >An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories. But an astonishingly large number of people are afraid of vaccines/black people/corona jihad/the deep state pedophile ring because they read something that isn't true. Can you think of any effects this might have had recently? Any you think of anything bad going on that isn't strictly a crime?
- content_sesh 6y ago
  The equivalence absolutely has merit. "People thinking dumb things about politics" absolutely has the ability to cause panic, potential injury, and death. You can look at Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide in Malaysia as a quick example. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-resists-handing-over-documents-in-genocide-probe/ar-BB189XcM https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-resists-handin...
  - largbae 6y ago
    Off topic, but I think you mean Myanmar (formerly Burma), not Malaysia here.
- pstuart 6y ago
  What I didn't learn until recently was the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was the analogy applied to pacifists opposing the draft in WWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...). It was a bad ruling but the analogy itself stands. So in that vein, should incitements for violence against the opposing party be unfettered free speech? At what point does it go too far?
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  > I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury Wide scale misinformation about election fraud could result in a mini civil war. I don't see how you could be so sanguine about that.
  - GreenHeuristics 6y ago
    If only there was some way of auditing an election to calm peoples fears.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - zmmmmm 6y ago
      Which has been done right? Practically all the states have certified their results, after recounts and legal challenges heard, etc. Google has left it until now for the precise reason that "legitimate" scrutiny was taking place. At this point continuing to assert wide scale fraud escalates beyond "reasonable" and up to the level of "recklessness" that brings it into parity with "yelling fire".
      - tigershark 6y ago
        It’s not reckless. It’s criminal. And all the people that are spreading this misinformation are complicit of sedition.
jkhdigital 6y ago
You’re going to have to walk me through that line of reasoning. The chain of causation between yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater and someone getting trampled to death while attempting to flee doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination. You claim that YouTube videos with false information about the 2020 election have a “chilling” effect on democracy. What does that even mean? And how would you even begin to establish some concrete chain of causation between the videos and whatever it is you define as “chilling”? Do you see how hand-wavy your argument is?
- Amezarak 6y ago
  The argument is that we can’t talk about how we have an untrustable, unverifiable election system, because that would lead people to not trust the results. As long they don’t think about it, they can trust it. I press a button on a screen when I vote. I don’t know what the hell it is actually doing and it’s shocking to me the mainstream consensus is we can’t even talk about now horrifically broken American voting is compared to sane countries like France.
  - Raphael_Amiard 6y ago
    > sane countries like France You might want to look at what's going on in France right now before calling our democratic institutions sane :)
  - pfisch 6y ago
    In Georgia the machine prints out a paper ballot that you hand in. Yet somehow that is one of the states being accused of widespread fraud...? Only the swing states that Trump lost are being accused of fraud, but only in the presidential election. This is extremely disingenuous and lacks all credibility. Now the GOP seems to be arguing in court that there wasn't even fraud, but they just don't like the outcome and want to reverse the will of the voters in swing states based on weird technicalities. This entire thing is nonsense, and youtube should censor it because it is entirely just a scheme to subvert our democracy. That is extremely dangerous, more dangerous than yelling fire in a crowded theater.
cal5k 6y ago
That "fire" problem is not actually a problem. It's amazing how something that's straight-up wrong has persisted in popular culture for so long: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I'm confused, the article seems to jump to the conclusion that the entire metaphor is invalid because of the ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That doesn't make any sense to me. The metaphor still holds. To put it another way, regardless of the ruling I still doubt a person who walks into a the same theater every day repeatedly screaming "fire" and pulling the fire alarm with malicious intent to hurt the profits of the theater would have a 1st amendment case get very far against the theater when the theater decides to throw that person out.
  - mercurialshark 6y ago
    It's not just the ruling that was problematic, but also Oliver Wendell Holmes' often referenced grotesque metaphor. Holmes' used the metaphor to equate criticism of the government during wartime to being so dangerous for society, specifically speaking against the draft during WWI, that it was akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Clearly, criticism of the government, especially regarding matters of war and public safety, are protected by the first amendment. Not only was the metaphor used to justify an unconstitutional ruling, but it also furthered gross misperceptions regarding limits on protected speech that are still referenced today.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      I agree the metaphor was used incorrectly but I still would not say it was creating misconceptions. A better metaphor for the current day would be making prank 911 calls to the fire department when you know there is no fire. Doing this wastes taxpayer money, diverts resources away from actual emergencies and can cause real harm. If anything, the metaphor seems to have persisted because it's applicable in so many other scenarios, not because of that one case that rarely seems to get brought up in casual discussion.
wpietri 6y ago
Another good analogy is fraudulent advertising. Freedom of speech does not mean that people can say any old thing without consequence. If people were selling fake Covid-19 cures, Google would be well within their rights to take down ads and videos. And elected officials would certainly be allowed to ask about it if they weren't.
hammock 6y ago
>they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with Not "fraud." Illegal votes. In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing: that many mail-in votes were illegal, due to unconstitutional rule changes which allowed them to take place[1]. That's not ok to talk about on YouTube? [1]If you don't know what I'm talking about, just say so and I'll point you to a non-partisan, levelheaded explanation of the argument.
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Yes, this is the argument... and the courts keep rejecting it. As the rulings keep pointing out, you can't tell people they can vote one way, and then challenge it after they have already voted. It doesn't matter if it might be against some rules; the time to challenge was before people voted.
  - logicslave 6y ago
    Look if 20 states are claiming it, its not news that you can censor. You can censor half the government
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    The courts keep rejecting it because they dont want to take responsibility and see the country in riots. As simple as that.
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      Courts can't reject a case because they don't want to hear it (except for SCOTUS, although Thomas and Alito would argue they don't have that right for original jurisdiction). In order to reject a case, the case has to be lacking in merit or procedurally deficient. That so many of the cases have been rejected due to their procedural deficiencies should be in an indication of the quality of the legal teams pressing the issues. (Note that rejecting for procedural deficiencies doesn't mean that the court approves of the merits of the case, it just means that the court also doesn't want to decide the merits. Although if you piss it off hard enough, they will also go own to berate you on why your claims lack merit in addition to enumerating procedural deficiencies).
nostromo 6y ago
It's legal to shout "fire!" in a theater if you believe there is a fire in the theater. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that these YouTubers don't believe their allegations.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Anybody can claim that they believe whatever lie they spread. It is in fact impossible to asses whether they’re lying what they believe. If things are backed by evidence is a whole different story (but it is not)
rorykoehler 6y ago
I thought America was big on freedom of speech? The misinformation pisses me off too but you can't have it both ways.
- mike00632 6y ago
  America is also big on democracy.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    AFAIK there is no rule that it's not allowed to gaslight the electorate.
    - mike00632 6y ago
      What? There are a crap ton of laws that protect democracy. They are laws that decide how the votes are reported, where the votes are stored, even how the electoral college electors should vote. When you go into a court and swear an oath to tell the truth about democracy, that is our legal system censoring speech about democracy. Incidentally this is why Rudy Giuliani said in court that there was no fraud in the election. Because we have laws about what you can and can't say. Michael Flynn was prosecuted for lying to investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador; the heart of that investigation was the election and the Russian threat to the democratic process. No, you cannot legally say whatever you want about the election to whoever you want for self-serving ends. Even if it's in limited situations, there is a ton of censorship to protect our democracy. And private entities should go even further, at least to protect their brands. I will always think of Facebook as the place where the Rohingya genocide was organized and carried out, and Facebook is where violent protesters like Kyle Rittenhouse gathered before killing multiple people. I think about the platforms that allowed ISIS to radicalize people. Google doesn't want YouTube to be the video hosting site where you can watch the world burn. Reddit removed the sub where you could literally watch people die. You might see these actions as against some dearly held political beliefs but it's pretty clear to me that these are just adults trying to act with a modicum of responsibility.
arkh 6y ago
Mail-in voting really feels crazy from other countries. Just check why it was banned in France : https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-mail-in-voting-allowed-in-france https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-... "For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round." Doesn't it feel familiar? > Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [parliamentary] legal commission. Also the counting from some distant area with opaque machines and the fact not everyone is authorized to check the count is ripe for abuse.
- quadrifoliate 6y ago
  > Mail-in voting really feels crazy from other countries. Just check why it was banned in France This feel vaguely concern troll-y, but I'll engage. I am sure that there are valid security concerns, and some possibilities for fraud with mail-in voting. However the argument about "Oh look it's bad, there are so many possibilities for fraud" would look a little more okay if the President wasn't engaging in it [1] and his party wasn't also quietly pushing for more of it in areas where it benefits them. Of course they find some flimsy excuse to justify this “well, ours is called an absentee ballot because you have to request it”. You can't have it both ways. If mail-in voting feels crazy, the 2016 election where like 25% of eligible voters voted by mail should also be considered invalid. What is not okay is crying "Fraud" in nebulously defined ways for only the states you lost at the moment you start losing with the existing system. This is basic kindergarten stuff, so it's kind of funny that it has to be explicitly explained in such a big national event. ------------------------------------ [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903886567/trump-while-attacking-mail-voting-casts-mail-ballot-again https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903886567/trump-while-attacki... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/19/republicans-mail-in-voting-trump-398774 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/19/republicans-mail-in...
  - 6y ago

grawprog 6y ago

>This is roughly the equivalent of the yelling "fire" in a crowded theater problem I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics. >For example, they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with. Ok, so wouldn't it be the people who seek out and watch these kinds videos that would be the ones that would be too afraid to use mail in ballots? Seems like the people who think those videos are nonsense won't believe them anyway. >All of this has a chilling effect on democracy and people exercising their lawful right to vote by post How? From what I understand, there was a record number of mail in ballots this year, seems like it did nothing of the sort. >More Senators (from both parties) should be joining the named ones about cracking down on misinformation. No, the government should not be allowed to decide what is or isn't real information, that's called propaganda.

edmundsauto 6y ago
Do you think the spread of misinformation causes harm? It doesn't sound like it, by how you diminish the impact of political misinfo ("The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics.") Not to take too strong a stance until I understand your position better, but record number of mail-in ballots doesn't imply there wasn't significant voter suppression.
- nyolfen 6y ago
  this is an imposition of bounds on acceptable political thought; kto kovo. "misinformation" is a political label created to influence political processes. that is not to say that there is no truth, but rather that there is an official truth which is subject to the contingencies of power. the implicit justification for censoring this idea is that it delegitimizes the democratic process; it is ridiculous on its face to assert that overt censorship is any less delegitimizing. this is an expression of ideological power upon an opponent.
  - pii 6y ago
    So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge? I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena. We have experts, in other words. We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards. Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts? Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      >So what do we do? From where can we possibly derive knowledge? We all have brains capable of thinking. The idea is to examine objective facts as best one can, this means yes overcoming personal bias, which can be difficult and assessing things from a variety of sources. Personally, I find, if you can't find an objective source, about the best thing you can do is listen to the extreme voices and assume truth likely lies somewhere between them, whatever that truth may be. >I would assert that, collectively, we have a vested interest in determining what's knowable about the material world. We have a tradition of allowing particularly well suited people to spend the majority of their waking lives in the detailed study of difficult to understand phenomena. We have a vested interest in figuring out what is untrue in the world, it's the only thing we as a species are truly capable of doing and what the scientific method is based on. Silencing dissenting opinions has never worked well at that, compounding observation and evidence does. >We have experts, in other words. No, we have people who have spent a lot of time doing one thing, those people are often times extremely knowledgable and correct many times, but they're still human with the same fallibilities and humanness as the rest of us. >We have a political process that encourages the cultivation of experts and even has rules allowing for personal consequences for when experts and politicians breach ethical standards. That comes down to the same thing that plagues a lot of science reporting and other things and is a logical fallacy called an appeal to authority. A 'so called expert' is never correct over logic and facts. This may come down to an education, knowledge issue, I dunno. >Is it here where we disagree? Should there, indeed, be no ethical standards to which we hold out experts? >Asking honestly, bc I don't follow your argument. Maybe I'm completely off base. Yes, but, a person posting videos on youtube isn't a expert just because they post things on youtube. It's fairly easy to post a video on youtube. The issue of people assuming every video posted on youtube or every word someone says on the internet, is the word of an expert is something that again I think comes down to a lack of proper education on such things as psychology, marketing, written communications other things at maybe a younger age. We live in a world where it's possible for anyone to say anything publicly. Censorship is not the solution to the problems that arise from that. Every person has a brain, everyone's capable of being taught critical thinking. The world seems to push subservience, acquiescencing blindly to the authority of experts and assuming the average person has the intelligence of a child instead.
swirepe 6y ago
>One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury or death as people rush to escape a non-existant fire. The other leads to people thinking dumb things about politics. Thinking dumb things about politics is how you end up bringing your AR-15 to investigate a pizza parlor... or trying to kidnap the governor.
- claytongulick 6y ago
  So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them? I don't understand your argument here. An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories. Based on your argument, we also shouldn't report on police abuse because people may riot and burn down stores?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - quadrifoliate 6y ago
    > So we should keep people safe from any information that might upset them? There is no "we". The platform is YouTube. It is their prerogative (and indeed their right to freedom of speech) to host content as they see fit. The Senators are merely asking them to exercise their freedom to a very reasonable extent.
  - matt_j 6y ago
    An astonishingly large percentage of the population are parroting this and all manner of other misinformation on social media, all day, every day, for months, and it's getting worse as one by one the dominoes fall and yet another impressionable mind is swayed and joins the chorus. I don't think censorship is necessarily the right approach to mitigate this torrent of bullshit, but it's clearly out of control.
  - swirepe 6y ago
    >I don't understand your argument here. >Based on your argument I was pointing out how "believing dumb things about politics" is a deliberate minimization of the effect of disinformation. >An astonishgly miniscule percent of the population commit crimes as a result of news stories. But an astonishingly large number of people are afraid of vaccines/black people/corona jihad/the deep state pedophile ring because they read something that isn't true. Can you think of any effects this might have had recently? Any you think of anything bad going on that isn't strictly a crime?
content_sesh 6y ago
The equivalence absolutely has merit. "People thinking dumb things about politics" absolutely has the ability to cause panic, potential injury, and death. You can look at Facebook's role in the Rohingya genocide in Malaysia as a quick example. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-resists-handing-over-documents-in-genocide-probe/ar-BB189XcM https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/facebook-resists-handin...
- largbae 6y ago
  Off topic, but I think you mean Myanmar (formerly Burma), not Malaysia here.
pstuart 6y ago
What I didn't learn until recently was the "yelling fire in a crowded theater" was the analogy applied to pacifists opposing the draft in WWI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...). It was a bad ruling but the analogy itself stands. So in that vein, should incitements for violence against the opposing party be unfettered free speech? At what point does it go too far?
zmmmmm 6y ago
> I don't see the equivalence. One of those has the potential of causing very immediate panic and potential injury Wide scale misinformation about election fraud could result in a mini civil war. I don't see how you could be so sanguine about that.
- GreenHeuristics 6y ago
  If only there was some way of auditing an election to calm peoples fears.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    Which has been done right? Practically all the states have certified their results, after recounts and legal challenges heard, etc. Google has left it until now for the precise reason that "legitimate" scrutiny was taking place. At this point continuing to assert wide scale fraud escalates beyond "reasonable" and up to the level of "recklessness" that brings it into parity with "yelling fire".
    - tigershark 6y ago
      It’s not reckless. It’s criminal. And all the people that are spreading this misinformation are complicit of sedition.

jkhdigital 6y ago

You’re going to have to walk me through that line of reasoning. The chain of causation between yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater and someone getting trampled to death while attempting to flee doesn’t require any stretch of the imagination. You claim that YouTube videos with false information about the 2020 election have a “chilling” effect on democracy. What does that even mean? And how would you even begin to establish some concrete chain of causation between the videos and whatever it is you define as “chilling”? Do you see how hand-wavy your argument is?

Amezarak 6y ago
The argument is that we can’t talk about how we have an untrustable, unverifiable election system, because that would lead people to not trust the results. As long they don’t think about it, they can trust it. I press a button on a screen when I vote. I don’t know what the hell it is actually doing and it’s shocking to me the mainstream consensus is we can’t even talk about now horrifically broken American voting is compared to sane countries like France.
- Raphael_Amiard 6y ago
  > sane countries like France You might want to look at what's going on in France right now before calling our democratic institutions sane :)
- pfisch 6y ago
  In Georgia the machine prints out a paper ballot that you hand in. Yet somehow that is one of the states being accused of widespread fraud...? Only the swing states that Trump lost are being accused of fraud, but only in the presidential election. This is extremely disingenuous and lacks all credibility. Now the GOP seems to be arguing in court that there wasn't even fraud, but they just don't like the outcome and want to reverse the will of the voters in swing states based on weird technicalities. This entire thing is nonsense, and youtube should censor it because it is entirely just a scheme to subvert our democracy. That is extremely dangerous, more dangerous than yelling fire in a crowded theater.

cal5k 6y ago

That "fire" problem is not actually a problem. It's amazing how something that's straight-up wrong has persisted in popular culture for so long: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

cycloptic 6y ago
I'm confused, the article seems to jump to the conclusion that the entire metaphor is invalid because of the ruling in Brandenburg v. Ohio. That doesn't make any sense to me. The metaphor still holds. To put it another way, regardless of the ruling I still doubt a person who walks into a the same theater every day repeatedly screaming "fire" and pulling the fire alarm with malicious intent to hurt the profits of the theater would have a 1st amendment case get very far against the theater when the theater decides to throw that person out.
- mercurialshark 6y ago
  It's not just the ruling that was problematic, but also Oliver Wendell Holmes' often referenced grotesque metaphor. Holmes' used the metaphor to equate criticism of the government during wartime to being so dangerous for society, specifically speaking against the draft during WWI, that it was akin to yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Clearly, criticism of the government, especially regarding matters of war and public safety, are protected by the first amendment. Not only was the metaphor used to justify an unconstitutional ruling, but it also furthered gross misperceptions regarding limits on protected speech that are still referenced today.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I agree the metaphor was used incorrectly but I still would not say it was creating misconceptions. A better metaphor for the current day would be making prank 911 calls to the fire department when you know there is no fire. Doing this wastes taxpayer money, diverts resources away from actual emergencies and can cause real harm. If anything, the metaphor seems to have persisted because it's applicable in so many other scenarios, not because of that one case that rarely seems to get brought up in casual discussion.

wpietri 6y ago

Another good analogy is fraudulent advertising. Freedom of speech does not mean that people can say any old thing without consequence. If people were selling fake Covid-19 cures, Google would be well within their rights to take down ads and videos. And elected officials would certainly be allowed to ask about it if they weren't.

hammock 6y ago

>they typically refer to things like mail-in voting as "fraud" to begin with Not "fraud." Illegal votes. In fact, there is a case brought to the Supreme Court by Texas and 17 other states (36% of the United States) alleging this exact thing: that many mail-in votes were illegal, due to unconstitutional rule changes which allowed them to take place[1]. That's not ok to talk about on YouTube? [1]If you don't know what I'm talking about, just say so and I'll point you to a non-partisan, levelheaded explanation of the argument.

cortesoft 6y ago
Yes, this is the argument... and the courts keep rejecting it. As the rulings keep pointing out, you can't tell people they can vote one way, and then challenge it after they have already voted. It doesn't matter if it might be against some rules; the time to challenge was before people voted.
- logicslave 6y ago
  Look if 20 states are claiming it, its not news that you can censor. You can censor half the government
- ekianjo 6y ago
  The courts keep rejecting it because they dont want to take responsibility and see the country in riots. As simple as that.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    Courts can't reject a case because they don't want to hear it (except for SCOTUS, although Thomas and Alito would argue they don't have that right for original jurisdiction). In order to reject a case, the case has to be lacking in merit or procedurally deficient. That so many of the cases have been rejected due to their procedural deficiencies should be in an indication of the quality of the legal teams pressing the issues. (Note that rejecting for procedural deficiencies doesn't mean that the court approves of the merits of the case, it just means that the court also doesn't want to decide the merits. Although if you piss it off hard enough, they will also go own to berate you on why your claims lack merit in addition to enumerating procedural deficiencies).

nostromo 6y ago

It's legal to shout "fire!" in a theater if you believe there is a fire in the theater. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that these YouTubers don't believe their allegations.

tartoran 6y ago
Anybody can claim that they believe whatever lie they spread. It is in fact impossible to asses whether they’re lying what they believe. If things are backed by evidence is a whole different story (but it is not)

rorykoehler 6y ago

I thought America was big on freedom of speech? The misinformation pisses me off too but you can't have it both ways.

mike00632 6y ago
America is also big on democracy.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  AFAIK there is no rule that it's not allowed to gaslight the electorate.
  - mike00632 6y ago
    What? There are a crap ton of laws that protect democracy. They are laws that decide how the votes are reported, where the votes are stored, even how the electoral college electors should vote. When you go into a court and swear an oath to tell the truth about democracy, that is our legal system censoring speech about democracy. Incidentally this is why Rudy Giuliani said in court that there was no fraud in the election. Because we have laws about what you can and can't say. Michael Flynn was prosecuted for lying to investigators about his conversations with the Russian ambassador; the heart of that investigation was the election and the Russian threat to the democratic process. No, you cannot legally say whatever you want about the election to whoever you want for self-serving ends. Even if it's in limited situations, there is a ton of censorship to protect our democracy. And private entities should go even further, at least to protect their brands. I will always think of Facebook as the place where the Rohingya genocide was organized and carried out, and Facebook is where violent protesters like Kyle Rittenhouse gathered before killing multiple people. I think about the platforms that allowed ISIS to radicalize people. Google doesn't want YouTube to be the video hosting site where you can watch the world burn. Reddit removed the sub where you could literally watch people die. You might see these actions as against some dearly held political beliefs but it's pretty clear to me that these are just adults trying to act with a modicum of responsibility.

arkh 6y ago

Mail-in voting really feels crazy from other countries. Just check why it was banned in France : https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-mail-in-voting-allowed-in-france https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/57152/why-isnt-... "For context, electoral fraud was and is more prevalent in Corsica than in the rest of the country. The article goes on to mention that in Ajaccio (the largest city in Corsica), one list had obtained 33.5% of the physical votes but 90% of the mail-in votes in the first round, and similar figures in the second round." Doesn't it feel familiar? > Here also — observers generally agree on this point — mail-in voting is one of the preferred methods for fraud. The idea of removing mail-in voting and replacing it by proxy voting has therefore been generally admitted in the [parliamentary] legal commission. Also the counting from some distant area with opaque machines and the fact not everyone is authorized to check the count is ripe for abuse.

quadrifoliate 6y ago
> Mail-in voting really feels crazy from other countries. Just check why it was banned in France This feel vaguely concern troll-y, but I'll engage. I am sure that there are valid security concerns, and some possibilities for fraud with mail-in voting. However the argument about "Oh look it's bad, there are so many possibilities for fraud" would look a little more okay if the President wasn't engaging in it [1] and his party wasn't also quietly pushing for more of it in areas where it benefits them. Of course they find some flimsy excuse to justify this “well, ours is called an absentee ballot because you have to request it”. You can't have it both ways. If mail-in voting feels crazy, the 2016 election where like 25% of eligible voters voted by mail should also be considered invalid. What is not okay is crying "Fraud" in nebulously defined ways for only the states you lost at the moment you start losing with the existing system. This is basic kindergarten stuff, so it's kind of funny that it has to be explicitly explained in such a big national event. ------------------------------------ [1] https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903886567/trump-while-attacking-mail-voting-casts-mail-ballot-again https://www.npr.org/2020/08/19/903886567/trump-while-attacki... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/19/republicans-mail-in-voting-trump-398774 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/19/republicans-mail-in...
- 6y ago