9 ms·

Fox News Is Sued by Election Technology Company for over $2.7B

111 points by nwotnagrom 6y ago

jandrese 6y ago
> Smartmatic, which provided services for the 2020 election in only one county > Smartmatic’s complaint takes into account not only the reputational and financial damage the company said it had suffered, but also the harm done to the United States by the claims promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies and the Murdoch-controlled networks he had long favored. It appears that they are also trying to add the United States of America as defendants after Fox News slandered them with lies during the post-election period. In other words, this lawsuit is going to be laughed out of court. I agree that Fox News lied a lot, maybe even more than usual and is at least partially responsible for the riots on the capitol, but these guys are nuts I don't want them representing me against a giant media empire.
ibejoeb 6y ago
> Smartmatic accused Rupert Murdoch’s network of promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right? If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it. Enough with the foreign companies creating and operating black boxes. Enough with the smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification while we have absolute top-tier experts regularly showing us that these systems are deeply flawed. Make elections trustworthy.
- JeremyBanks 6y ago
  Dang, you've got a lot of insurrection apologists in your disgusting community. You complicit sack of shit.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    This is unnecessarily rude and not deserved. I get that elections are divisive times in America but that's all over. We've had decades of technologists and cryptographers being wary of digital voting, however many years of the voting village at Defcon where the only challenge left now is how quick you can exploit it not whether you can. As an aid beside regular paper voting I think it's probably fine but disliking electronic voting is bread and butter for the types of people who visit this site. I don't see anyone supporting "insurrection" in the comments.
- xxpor 6y ago
  What makes you think people will accept The One True Machine from the feds is any better?
  - easton 6y ago
    Source code. If they don't like it, they can audit it themselves.
    - Traster 6y ago
      Or, you know, they can do what they always do - take a piece of totally benign information (in this case source code), confidently and wrongly contend that it's a back door for the socialists and scream about it on fox news.
    - Buttons840 6y ago
      How will they know the source code they're reading is what's on the machines? An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand. Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.
      - Errsher 6y ago
        You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately. Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction: https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard
        vlang1dot0 6y ago
        Ah yes, the average citizen will definitely trust that "homomorphic encryption" isn't just some nonsense made up so the election can be rigged.
- justaguyonline 6y ago
  The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election. >Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1] A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome. Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere. [1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Voting_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
  - rspeele 6y ago
    Yeah, one of the things you are expected to accept right off the bat going into the conspiracy "evidence" is that all of these companies are essentially the same entity: Diebold, Dominion, Sequoia, SmartMatic, and Edison Research. Once you buy that, you'll also buy that they're all owned by communist China.
    - us0r 6y ago
      I thought it was Venezuela?
      - triceratops 6y ago
        Same thing, as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned.
        spacemanmatt 6y ago
        That is a critically important point. Their willingness to conflate entities that are distinct to other people gives them a broken worldview that is very hard to understand.
- devwastaken 6y ago
  I agree with the anti black boxes, but it won't solve the disinformation. Once the code is available someone who is either ignorant or intentionally lying will make up some story about how it's vulnerable - and the lay people will eat it up because they want to believe it, and will believe they have proof.
  - jVinc 6y ago
    That seemed to have happened even though the code wasn't available. So yes, you are absolutely correct, people will lie, willfully or ignorantly.
- mikestew 6y ago
  I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right? When Fox talking heads are claiming Hugo Chavez had a hand in the design, and "The Smartmatic software is in the DNA of every vote-tabulating company’s software and systems", I don't think the ability to audit the machines will come into play. What will come into play is whether or not any of Fox's unsubstantiated shit-talking can be taken to be true. IANAL, and I have might have a particular dislike for all parties involved, but I don't think we'll get the evidence we'd like to see.
- rspeele 6y ago
  Can you give an example of what you would characterize as "smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification"? And while you're at it, who you consider a "top-tier expert"? It seems to me that the people getting served with lawsuits weren't just concerned about vulnerabilities and calling for verification, they were outright claiming that the election was stolen. And stating made-up ideas about how it was done as facts, at that. Like Sidney Powell saying Dominion machines were designed to count Biden votes as 1.26 and Trump votes as 0.74. If all they wanted was verification, well, Georgia recounted all the paper ballots by hand and compared the results to what the machines scanned. So did Antrim county in Michigan. So did Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin -- which Trump's campaign paid $3M to recount. Those recounts didn't show a problem with the machines. If you believe it was stolen, you have to believe they faked the recounts too, or that they recounted fake paper ballots fabricated to back up the original numbers. But at that point, is it really about the voting machines? You could take the machines out of the picture completely, have an all-paper election, counted by hand starting on Nov 3, and have the exact same allegations that you don't trust the count.
  - ibejoeb 6y ago
    > who you consider a "top-tier expert"? The authors: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-repor...
    - rspeele 6y ago
      Fair enough, I agree those are experts. Have they been hit with lawsuits or smears? Are they alleging that the attacks they demonstrated were actually used in this election?
- stonesixone 6y ago
  > If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it. Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks https://github.com/votingworks For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.
  - ibejoeb 6y ago
    Awesome, thank you.
redis_mlc 6y ago
It's suspected that the CCP bought Dominion/Smartmatic the summer before the 2020 election for $400 million. That would make these lawsuits "lawfare", a CCP non-kinetic warfare strategy. The various holding companies all deleted the names of Chinese directors when the ownership started to be investigated shortly after that. (The State of Texas dropped Dominion after the ownership was unclear, but 29 states kept using it.) You'll notice the NY Times article uses the leftist keyword narrative word "debunked" about ownership questions, without, you know, naming the owners. (The other keyword narrative words and phrases you see used in a coordinated fashion across news channels are "insurrection" and "no widespread voter fraud.") The CCP also used a front organization in the US in some of the recent banned app defense lawsuits.
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ashneo76 6y ago
To all the naysayers, is there any other way to hold fox accountable for all the propaganda and division that they have down for that 5 years at least? And to hold rupert murdoch accountable?
- blablablerg 6y ago
  And still are doing! It's disgusting how selective their reporting is.
- glial 6y ago
  Not just 5 years. They were lead cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq War.
  - stevesimmons 6y ago
    And Murdoch's media in UK were cheerleaders for Brexit, and in Australia for climate change denial. At least Rupert Murdoch's son James has split from the family media interests and spoken out: * https://www.ft.com/content/9eab68e1-7afb-4282-95fa-3149bd091efa https://www.ft.com/content/9eab68e1-7afb-4282-95fa-3149bd091... [paywall] * https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/media/james-murdoch-election-disinformation/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/media/james-murdoch-elect...
  - refurb 6y ago
    So was the majority of both parties and most of the mass media.
  - rufus_foreman 6y ago
    Almost all of the news media were cheerleaders for the Iraq War: "It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus, which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia. The New Yorker of Remnick, who himself wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces, including a pair written by current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart. Other prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar) were on board, as a Full Metal Jacket character put it, “for the big win.” The Washington Post and New York Times were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict; MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism; CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck even worse: In a two-week period before the invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting." - Matt Taibi, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
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jimjimjim 6y ago
There must be repercussions for lies. There must be. It's not a free speech issue.
- jandrese 6y ago
  This has come up before for Fox News in the courts. They won. Because they are not a news channel and only air opinion pieces they aren't subject to the Fairness Doctrine. Also, Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine so it doesn't really matter. Basically Fox is free to lie as much as they like and it's perfectly legal because some politicians found it to be beneficial. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-... https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-shepard-smith-opinion-commentators-entertainment-dont-really-847106 https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-shepard-smith-opinion... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-the-whole-newspaper_n_5c651a10e4b0233af971861e?guccounter=1 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-the-whole-newspa... Any time a Fox News host is pressed about their lies they fall back to the "nobody would believe these obvious lies" defense, and it works. Accountability is dead.
  - treeman79 6y ago
    Ah, so glad that only one side lies. So nice of the other side to keep telling us constantly. Wonderful how we can trust big brother on everything.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      The whatabboutism sure came quick. Dude, you messed up the playbook. Deny first then deflect. Or were there too many sources posted and you thought the denial would look silly? Also, put up or shut up. Find a legal case where an NBC, ABC, PBS, Washington Post, NYT, etc... reporter uses the "I only broadcast opinions so the truth doesn't matter" defense. I'm waiting.
      - barbacoa 6y ago
spaceisballer 6y ago
I don’t think this is going to go anywhere, probably just handing out lawsuits. I do believe they may be able to win their case against Giuliani. Read a long article going into depth about it and seems like a strong case that he was very negligent. I mean there are court records of him saying they have no evidence for his claims yet he continued to spew them in public.
harry8 6y ago
And this right here is why so many people have been dead against voting machines. Even if you think you understand them, most voters can't. Most voters have no idea what to look for to see signs of fraud. Ballot papers are understood by everyone. Just about every voter knows when they're seeing something happen with ballot papers that is suspect. Just about every voter knows when there really isn't anything remotely credible about ballot papers marked and properly counted and scruitinised. It's not perfect but it is so much better than litterally anything else it's not comparable. Justice must not only be done it must be seen to be done. Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever. To hell with these election tech companies for doing anything else. Undermining the proper functioning of democracy for profit is something for which I will never, ever forgive them. The whole point is I should be convinced, everyone should be convinced that the election was run and counted fairly when I loathe and hate the result. When I can't understand how it could be true I should be utterly convinced that it is. So here we are with baseless claims of election fraud and yet there's some fertile ground to sew them where there should be NONE. Cheering these assholes for suing fox is just because I hate Murdoch is beneath me and should be beneath us all. So here's the question. Will America reform its electoral process to increase citizens confidence that the voting and counting is free of political and/or corporate interests? Including gerrymanders and such or will the disease march on ever worsening to more and louder cries from all losers of "We were robbed!" See Neera Tanden's "Russia tampered with the election to make Hilary lose" if you need examples for the whole "both sides" thing.
- rspeele 6y ago
  > Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the machines used in this election do. Some counties use touchscreen ballot marking devices that print a ballot for scanning, others have the voter fill out their ballot with a pen and then feed that into the scanner. Of those two variants, I believe election security experts prefer the latter type. But as far as I know all voting machines used in the US do use a paper ballot as the permanent record. Didn't help, here, since when they recounted those paper ballots the argument shifted to "well you have to re-check the signatures on the envelopes, those could've been fake ballots", or "well there was a lot of traditional fraud with mail-in ballot harvesting and dead people voting". But the same people were still saying the machines cheated, too -- especially whenever they were talking to a receptive audience. I'm all for more openness in elections and publicly auditable data (and open-source voting machine code), but let's not pretend that it would've changed much here. People believed the election was stolen because they wanted to believe it was stolen.
exabrial 6y ago
This is best case scenario. Lets see the source code! ALL voting systems should be open source or have the source somehow publicly reviewable!!!
myrandomcomment 6y ago
The opening of suit is priceless. “The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable. Defendants have always known these facts. They knew Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. election. They knew the election was not stolen. They knew the election was not rigged or fixed. They knew these truths just as they knew the Earth is round and two plus two equals four.” https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/04/what-smartmatics-giuliani-lawsuit/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/04/what-smartmatics-giul...
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  > Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable. Fascinating! I look forward to someone demonstrating these facts.
  - sidenote 6y ago
    Do you believe all American elections are most likely stolen unless someone presents you with facts that satisfy you? Trump, Obama, Bush, all the result of rigged elections too? What could ever satisfy you that you know, without a doubt, how millions of Americans voted?
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      > Do you believe all American elections are most likely stolen unless someone presents you with facts that satisfy you? No, not all elections. > Trump, Obama, Bush, all the result of rigged elections too? Perhaps, how would one know? Are you at all aware of the allegations about Bush 00 and 04? > What could ever satisfy you that you know, without a doubt, how millions of Americans voted? The results of a system that was designed to be verifiably resistant towards fraud would go a long way towards removing reasonable doubt.
supergirl 6y ago
instead of finding ways to improve technology or marketing to remove peoples doubts they start suing for cash.
- sidenote 6y ago
  Can you prove that they have stopped improving their technology? Marketing is one of the most dishonest fields out there, I would prefer that voting system companies (much like I’d prefer that pharma) not focus on marketing. Do you wish that they didn’t use the only tools available to them when someone is trying running a smear campaign against them? Would you sue someone for trying to devalue your company and it’s reputation? Why do you believe it’s inherently wrong to sue someone?

111 points by nwotnagrom 6y ago

> Smartmatic, which provided services for the 2020 election in only one county > Smartmatic’s complaint takes into account not only the reputational and financial damage the company said it had suffered, but also the harm done to the United States by the claims promoted by Mr. Trump’s allies and the Murdoch-controlled networks he had long favored. It appears that they are also trying to add the United States of America as defendants after Fox News slandered them with lies during the post-election period. In other words, this lawsuit is going to be laughed out of court. I agree that Fox News lied a lot, maybe even more than usual and is at least partially responsible for the riots on the capitol, but these guys are nuts I don't want them representing me against a giant media empire.

ibejoeb 6y ago

> Smartmatic accused Rupert Murdoch’s network of promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right? If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it. Enough with the foreign companies creating and operating black boxes. Enough with the smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification while we have absolute top-tier experts regularly showing us that these systems are deeply flawed. Make elections trustworthy.

JeremyBanks 6y ago
Dang, you've got a lot of insurrection apologists in your disgusting community. You complicit sack of shit.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  This is unnecessarily rude and not deserved. I get that elections are divisive times in America but that's all over. We've had decades of technologists and cryptographers being wary of digital voting, however many years of the voting village at Defcon where the only challenge left now is how quick you can exploit it not whether you can. As an aid beside regular paper voting I think it's probably fine but disliking electronic voting is bread and butter for the types of people who visit this site. I don't see anyone supporting "insurrection" in the comments.
xxpor 6y ago
What makes you think people will accept The One True Machine from the feds is any better?
- easton 6y ago
  Source code. If they don't like it, they can audit it themselves.
  - Traster 6y ago
    Or, you know, they can do what they always do - take a piece of totally benign information (in this case source code), confidently and wrongly contend that it's a back door for the socialists and scream about it on fox news.
  - Buttons840 6y ago
    How will they know the source code they're reading is what's on the machines? An important part of elections is for people to understand and trust the process. Paper is easy to understand; you and a bunch of your neighbors counting paper votes is easy to trust. Maybe mix in a machine to speed up the process that is also verified by hand. Yet I can't help but think nothing will convince those who so easily believe in a vast conspiracy to alter election results spanning multiple states with different political leanings and cultures.
    - Errsher 6y ago
      You can use homomorphic encryption that allows the vote (after-the-fact) to be auditable but secure and allows individuals to validate that their vote was counted accurately. Microsoft has a project that seems to work in this direction: https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard https://github.com/microsoft/electionguard
      - vlang1dot0 6y ago
        Ah yes, the average citizen will definitely trust that "homomorphic encryption" isn't just some nonsense made up so the election can be rigged.
justaguyonline 6y ago
The most incredible factoid for me: These machines, the Smartmatic machines, weren't even really used in the election. >Smartmatic technology was used only in Los Angeles County, California in the 2020 election. The system we provided to LA County does not count, tabulate or store votes.[1] A single county in the whole of the United States used them. Verifiable or not, there's nothing this company could of done to change a national election outcome. Someone somewhere started repeating that Smartmatic currently owned Dominion when their only connection was that they had sold off Sequoia Voting Systems——which Dominion currently owns, more than a decade ago.[2][3] Once that false factoid got in the system it was a convenient enough fact for some political factions that it got repeated everywhere. [1] https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ https://www.smartmatic.com/us/smartmatic-fact-checked/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Voting_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartmatic#Sale_of_Sequoia_Vot... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems
- rspeele 6y ago
  Yeah, one of the things you are expected to accept right off the bat going into the conspiracy "evidence" is that all of these companies are essentially the same entity: Diebold, Dominion, Sequoia, SmartMatic, and Edison Research. Once you buy that, you'll also buy that they're all owned by communist China.
  - us0r 6y ago
    I thought it was Venezuela?
    - triceratops 6y ago
      Same thing, as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned.
      - spacemanmatt 6y ago
        That is a critically important point. Their willingness to conflate entities that are distinct to other people gives them a broken worldview that is very hard to understand.
devwastaken 6y ago
I agree with the anti black boxes, but it won't solve the disinformation. Once the code is available someone who is either ignorant or intentionally lying will make up some story about how it's vulnerable - and the lay people will eat it up because they want to believe it, and will believe they have proof.
- jVinc 6y ago
  That seemed to have happened even though the code wasn't available. So yes, you are absolutely correct, people will lie, willfully or ignorantly.
mikestew 6y ago
I can't wait to see the evidence. That'll prove that the devices are auditable. They are, right? When Fox talking heads are claiming Hugo Chavez had a hand in the design, and "The Smartmatic software is in the DNA of every vote-tabulating company’s software and systems", I don't think the ability to audit the machines will come into play. What will come into play is whether or not any of Fox's unsubstantiated shit-talking can be taken to be true. IANAL, and I have might have a particular dislike for all parties involved, but I don't think we'll get the evidence we'd like to see.
rspeele 6y ago
Can you give an example of what you would characterize as "smears against people who call for entirely reasonable verification"? And while you're at it, who you consider a "top-tier expert"? It seems to me that the people getting served with lawsuits weren't just concerned about vulnerabilities and calling for verification, they were outright claiming that the election was stolen. And stating made-up ideas about how it was done as facts, at that. Like Sidney Powell saying Dominion machines were designed to count Biden votes as 1.26 and Trump votes as 0.74. If all they wanted was verification, well, Georgia recounted all the paper ballots by hand and compared the results to what the machines scanned. So did Antrim county in Michigan. So did Dane and Milwaukee counties in Wisconsin -- which Trump's campaign paid $3M to recount. Those recounts didn't show a problem with the machines. If you believe it was stolen, you have to believe they faked the recounts too, or that they recounted fake paper ballots fabricated to back up the original numbers. But at that point, is it really about the voting machines? You could take the machines out of the picture completely, have an all-paper election, counted by hand starting on Nov 3, and have the exact same allegations that you don't trust the count.
- ibejoeb 6y ago
  > who you consider a "top-tier expert"? The authors: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-report-defcon27.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2027/voting-village-repor...
  - rspeele 6y ago
    Fair enough, I agree those are experts. Have they been hit with lawsuits or smears? Are they alleging that the attacks they demonstrated were actually used in this election?
stonesixone 6y ago
> If anyone in government really wants to have a notable legacy, here's how: petition the USDS to create an integrated open-source election system, and get people like Matt Blaze and Harri Hursti to run a red team against it. Check out the nonprofit VotingWorks, which is far along in already doing this: https://github.com/votingworks https://github.com/votingworks For example, their system has been used in Mississippi in real elections.
- ibejoeb 6y ago
  Awesome, thank you.

redis_mlc 6y ago

It's suspected that the CCP bought Dominion/Smartmatic the summer before the 2020 election for $400 million. That would make these lawsuits "lawfare", a CCP non-kinetic warfare strategy. The various holding companies all deleted the names of Chinese directors when the ownership started to be investigated shortly after that. (The State of Texas dropped Dominion after the ownership was unclear, but 29 states kept using it.) You'll notice the NY Times article uses the leftist keyword narrative word "debunked" about ownership questions, without, you know, naming the owners. (The other keyword narrative words and phrases you see used in a coordinated fashion across news channels are "insurrection" and "no widespread voter fraud.") The CCP also used a front organization in the US in some of the recent banned app defense lawsuits.

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ashneo76 6y ago

To all the naysayers, is there any other way to hold fox accountable for all the propaganda and division that they have down for that 5 years at least? And to hold rupert murdoch accountable?

blablablerg 6y ago
And still are doing! It's disgusting how selective their reporting is.
glial 6y ago
Not just 5 years. They were lead cheerleaders for the 2003 Iraq War.
- stevesimmons 6y ago
  And Murdoch's media in UK were cheerleaders for Brexit, and in Australia for climate change denial. At least Rupert Murdoch's son James has split from the family media interests and spoken out: * https://www.ft.com/content/9eab68e1-7afb-4282-95fa-3149bd091efa https://www.ft.com/content/9eab68e1-7afb-4282-95fa-3149bd091... [paywall] * https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/media/james-murdoch-election-disinformation/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/15/media/james-murdoch-elect...
- refurb 6y ago
  So was the majority of both parties and most of the mass media.
- rufus_foreman 6y ago
  Almost all of the news media were cheerleaders for the Iraq War: "It’s been forgotten this was actually a business-wide consensus, which included the enthusiastic participation of a blue-state intelligentsia. The New Yorker of Remnick, who himself wrote a piece called “Making the Case,” was a source of many of the most ferocious pro-invasion pieces, including a pair written by current Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, one of a number of WMD hawks who failed up after the war case fell apart. Other prominent Democrat voices like Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait, and even quasi-skeptic Nick Kristof (who denounced war critics for calling Bush a liar) were on board, as a Full Metal Jacket character put it, “for the big win.” The Washington Post and New York Times were key editorial-page drivers of the conflict; MSNBC unhired Phil Donahue and Jesse Ventura over their war skepticism; CNN flooded the airwaves with generals and ex-Pentagon stoolies, and broadcast outlets ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS stacked the deck even worse: In a two-week period before the invasion, the networks had just one American guest out of 267 who questioned the war, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting." - Matt Taibi, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq-war-media-fail-matt-taibbi-812230/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...

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jimjimjim 6y ago

There must be repercussions for lies. There must be. It's not a free speech issue.

jandrese 6y ago
This has come up before for Fox News in the courts. They won. Because they are not a news channel and only air opinion pieces they aren't subject to the Fairness Doctrine. Also, Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine so it doesn't really matter. Basically Fox is free to lie as much as they like and it's perfectly legal because some politicians found it to be beneficial. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye https://www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-... https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-shepard-smith-opinion-commentators-entertainment-dont-really-847106 https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-shepard-smith-opinion... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-the-whole-newspaper_n_5c651a10e4b0233af971861e?guccounter=1 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-the-whole-newspa... Any time a Fox News host is pressed about their lies they fall back to the "nobody would believe these obvious lies" defense, and it works. Accountability is dead.
- treeman79 6y ago
  Ah, so glad that only one side lies. So nice of the other side to keep telling us constantly. Wonderful how we can trust big brother on everything.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    The whatabboutism sure came quick. Dude, you messed up the playbook. Deny first then deflect. Or were there too many sources posted and you thought the denial would look silly? Also, put up or shut up. Find a legal case where an NBC, ABC, PBS, Washington Post, NYT, etc... reporter uses the "I only broadcast opinions so the truth doesn't matter" defense. I'm waiting.
    - barbacoa 6y ago

spaceisballer 6y ago

I don’t think this is going to go anywhere, probably just handing out lawsuits. I do believe they may be able to win their case against Giuliani. Read a long article going into depth about it and seems like a strong case that he was very negligent. I mean there are court records of him saying they have no evidence for his claims yet he continued to spew them in public.

harry8 6y ago

And this right here is why so many people have been dead against voting machines. Even if you think you understand them, most voters can't. Most voters have no idea what to look for to see signs of fraud. Ballot papers are understood by everyone. Just about every voter knows when they're seeing something happen with ballot papers that is suspect. Just about every voter knows when there really isn't anything remotely credible about ballot papers marked and properly counted and scruitinised. It's not perfect but it is so much better than litterally anything else it's not comparable. Justice must not only be done it must be seen to be done. Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever. To hell with these election tech companies for doing anything else. Undermining the proper functioning of democracy for profit is something for which I will never, ever forgive them. The whole point is I should be convinced, everyone should be convinced that the election was run and counted fairly when I loathe and hate the result. When I can't understand how it could be true I should be utterly convinced that it is. So here we are with baseless claims of election fraud and yet there's some fertile ground to sew them where there should be NONE. Cheering these assholes for suing fox is just because I hate Murdoch is beneath me and should be beneath us all. So here's the question. Will America reform its electoral process to increase citizens confidence that the voting and counting is free of political and/or corporate interests? Including gerrymanders and such or will the disease march on ever worsening to more and louder cries from all losers of "We were robbed!" See Neera Tanden's "Russia tampered with the election to make Hilary lose" if you need examples for the whole "both sides" thing.

rspeele 6y ago
> Any and all voting machines /must/ only ever be used to mark ballot papers that are filed in the usual way and can be counted in the usual way if there is any doubt whatsoever. I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the machines used in this election do. Some counties use touchscreen ballot marking devices that print a ballot for scanning, others have the voter fill out their ballot with a pen and then feed that into the scanner. Of those two variants, I believe election security experts prefer the latter type. But as far as I know all voting machines used in the US do use a paper ballot as the permanent record. Didn't help, here, since when they recounted those paper ballots the argument shifted to "well you have to re-check the signatures on the envelopes, those could've been fake ballots", or "well there was a lot of traditional fraud with mail-in ballot harvesting and dead people voting". But the same people were still saying the machines cheated, too -- especially whenever they were talking to a receptive audience. I'm all for more openness in elections and publicly auditable data (and open-source voting machine code), but let's not pretend that it would've changed much here. People believed the election was stolen because they wanted to believe it was stolen.

exabrial 6y ago

This is best case scenario. Lets see the source code! ALL voting systems should be open source or have the source somehow publicly reviewable!!!

myrandomcomment 6y ago

The opening of suit is priceless. “The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable. Defendants have always known these facts. They knew Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 U.S. election. They knew the election was not stolen. They knew the election was not rigged or fixed. They knew these truths just as they knew the Earth is round and two plus two equals four.” https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/04/what-smartmatics-giuliani-lawsuit/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/02/04/what-smartmatics-giul...

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable. Fascinating! I look forward to someone demonstrating these facts.
- sidenote 6y ago
  Do you believe all American elections are most likely stolen unless someone presents you with facts that satisfy you? Trump, Obama, Bush, all the result of rigged elections too? What could ever satisfy you that you know, without a doubt, how millions of Americans voted?
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    > Do you believe all American elections are most likely stolen unless someone presents you with facts that satisfy you? No, not all elections. > Trump, Obama, Bush, all the result of rigged elections too? Perhaps, how would one know? Are you at all aware of the allegations about Bush 00 and 04? > What could ever satisfy you that you know, without a doubt, how millions of Americans voted? The results of a system that was designed to be verifiably resistant towards fraud would go a long way towards removing reasonable doubt.

supergirl 6y ago

instead of finding ways to improve technology or marketing to remove peoples doubts they start suing for cash.

sidenote 6y ago
Can you prove that they have stopped improving their technology? Marketing is one of the most dishonest fields out there, I would prefer that voting system companies (much like I’d prefer that pharma) not focus on marketing. Do you wish that they didn’t use the only tools available to them when someone is trying running a smear campaign against them? Would you sue someone for trying to devalue your company and it’s reputation? Why do you believe it’s inherently wrong to sue someone?