3 ms·

As long as 1% or more of voters in Pennsylvania keep voting based on whomever talked to them last; and as long as Super PACs can continue to receive unlimited a

As long as 1% or more of voters in Pennsylvania keep voting based on whomever talked to them last; and as long as Super PACs can continue to receive unlimited anonymous money; no media channel will be legally restricted from spamming people. Phone spam is too effective politically.

Spivak 3y ago
I don't see any reason we can't ban everything but political speech given its status as extra-super-protected.
tptacek 3y ago
I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that robocalls produce material swings in elections at all, let alone 1%, a number commonly attributed to all campaign GOTV efforts put together.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Not honest ones anyways... Robocalls every election season go out to targeted communities telling them the wrong polling location. I will leave as an exercise to the reader what political slant those communities almost always have. The impact of those must be very hard to measure.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    I don't think there's much evidence that these fraudulent robocalls have much of an impact, if any, either. You can tell a plausible story that they have the opposite effect (they tend to target the Black vote, and the Black vote is relatively well organized compared to other US voting blocs, and is sensitive to suppression). The people running these campaigns tend to be complete chucklefucks, so it doesn't follow from the fact that people are taking the time to do them that they actually work.
    - doctorpangloss 3y ago
      Mark Zuckerburg, Nov 11, 2016: > Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience. Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 27, 2017 > The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was... Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found... After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election." Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 13, 2018 > When it comes to implementing a solution [to influence campaigns opposed by both parties], certainly some investors disagree with my approach to invest so much in security. [Read the 3,300 word description of concrete actions here https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/] Do you know who the real "chucklefucks" are? The people telling Mark Zuckerburg "plausible" stories with first principle inductive reasoning about what is or is not important on Facebook. It was a huge mistake to listen to them between November 4th and November 11th, 2016, just when he issued his first erroneous comment. He controls all the data on Facebook and has the means to analyze it, so he had absolutely no reason to listen to those people at all. He should have just waited and found out what the real answer was. You're making a good faith comment. But you don't really know what evidence there is. In fact you don't know anything about it at all. You have no reason to speculate, because campaigns and phone companies have all of the data needed to answer the question, and agitating them to answer it is the right thing to do. Mistakes happen from people conflating fast answers with correct ones. Even Mark Zuckerburg does. So your answer is good because it is fast and inductive and first principles, but it is also really, really bad because it requires no reading, no analysis and no real knowledge, just fuzzy-wuzzy podcast-and-pop-sci takeaways. Sucking the air out of the room with a fast and cheap answer undermines the people trying to investigate influence campaigns. So you can be sincere and co-opted at the same time.
      - 3y ago
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimental-political-science/article/abs/largescale-evidence-for-the-effectiveness-of-partisan-gotv-robo-calls/8179C59E6D4042DC804787A5F1F4BC8B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimen... 3-7 votes per 1k calls
  - tptacek 3y ago
    That's turnout GOTV, though, not the vote fraud stuff.
    - whimsicalism 3y ago
      presumably the fraud is at least as effective or it wouldn’t be done. also i don’t think GP was talking about fraud
      - tptacek 3y ago
        That assumes a number of facts not anywhere in evidence, including that the people launching these idiotic fraud call operations are rational actors (the ones we've learned about so far manifestly are not), and that fraudulent calls would work algebraically against actual GOTV calls.

Spivak 3y ago

I don't see any reason we can't ban everything but political speech given its status as extra-super-protected.

tptacek 3y ago

I don't think there's much evidence to suggest that robocalls produce material swings in elections at all, let alone 1%, a number commonly attributed to all campaign GOTV efforts put together.

RajT88 3y ago
Not honest ones anyways... Robocalls every election season go out to targeted communities telling them the wrong polling location. I will leave as an exercise to the reader what political slant those communities almost always have. The impact of those must be very hard to measure.
- tptacek 3y ago
  I don't think there's much evidence that these fraudulent robocalls have much of an impact, if any, either. You can tell a plausible story that they have the opposite effect (they tend to target the Black vote, and the Black vote is relatively well organized compared to other US voting blocs, and is sensitive to suppression). The people running these campaigns tend to be complete chucklefucks, so it doesn't follow from the fact that people are taking the time to do them that they actually work.
  - doctorpangloss 3y ago
    Mark Zuckerburg, Nov 11, 2016: > Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea. Voters make decisions based on their lived experience. Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 27, 2017 > The facts suggest the greatest role Facebook played in the 2016 election was... Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found... After the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it. This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election." Mark Zuckerburg, Sep 13, 2018 > When it comes to implementing a solution [to influence campaigns opposed by both parties], certainly some investors disagree with my approach to invest so much in security. [Read the 3,300 word description of concrete actions here https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/737729700291613/] Do you know who the real "chucklefucks" are? The people telling Mark Zuckerburg "plausible" stories with first principle inductive reasoning about what is or is not important on Facebook. It was a huge mistake to listen to them between November 4th and November 11th, 2016, just when he issued his first erroneous comment. He controls all the data on Facebook and has the means to analyze it, so he had absolutely no reason to listen to those people at all. He should have just waited and found out what the real answer was. You're making a good faith comment. But you don't really know what evidence there is. In fact you don't know anything about it at all. You have no reason to speculate, because campaigns and phone companies have all of the data needed to answer the question, and agitating them to answer it is the right thing to do. Mistakes happen from people conflating fast answers with correct ones. Even Mark Zuckerburg does. So your answer is good because it is fast and inductive and first principles, but it is also really, really bad because it requires no reading, no analysis and no real knowledge, just fuzzy-wuzzy podcast-and-pop-sci takeaways. Sucking the air out of the room with a fast and cheap answer undermines the people trying to investigate influence campaigns. So you can be sincere and co-opted at the same time.
    - 3y ago
whimsicalism 3y ago
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimental-political-science/article/abs/largescale-evidence-for-the-effectiveness-of-partisan-gotv-robo-calls/8179C59E6D4042DC804787A5F1F4BC8B https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-experimen... 3-7 votes per 1k calls
- tptacek 3y ago
  That's turnout GOTV, though, not the vote fraud stuff.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    presumably the fraud is at least as effective or it wouldn’t be done. also i don’t think GP was talking about fraud
    - tptacek 3y ago
      That assumes a number of facts not anywhere in evidence, including that the people launching these idiotic fraud call operations are rational actors (the ones we've learned about so far manifestly are not), and that fraudulent calls would work algebraically against actual GOTV calls.