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0 pointsbusymom06y ago0 comments

It's 1,285 convictions now. And that's just the ones which were caught.

> 1,000 instances is significant

Now that's just silly. You are conflating "1285 convictions" with "number of votes" which is wrong. 1 person can manipulate thousands of votes - and they have. Read the convictions. Entire elections have been overturned. It takes 270 to win.

I also stated the "there hadn’t been any prosecutions for double voting or any non-citizen voting in years" is simply 100% false but you didn't reply.

You can see all the way till 2019, there's been several convictions of double voting:

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud/search?combine=&state=Al...

The article is literally saying one thing while the data says exact opposite and yet you are trusting the article instead of the raw data. I don't know what else to tell you.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

shadowgovt6y ago· 2 in thread

I don't know why we should focus on the error in statement made by "Republican commission member and election lawyer J. Christian Adams." I didn't comment because I agree with you; his statement appears erroneous.

We'll agree to disagree on what the data says in the report; you claim it's significant, I (and statisticians and voting law scholars and some Congresspeople) claim it's not.

All of this is an irrelevant distraction to the top-level question of whether it's acceptable that the President of the United States---a country that clearly enshrines freedom of speech, and of the press, for the purpose of disputing the facts as accepted by civil servants---should respond to a private corporation exercising those rights by threatening to shut it down. Every recursion we add to this thread is further evidence of why those rights are baked into the Constitution and why they're necessary, and casts a dark cloud on any civil servant who would attempt to thwart them.

Hypothetical: imagine instead of Twitter, the President had chosen Hacker News as his primary avenue for broadcasting short messages to the public. And instead of the two of us dithering on this topic, it were https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dang using his editorial voice as site moderator to drop a top-level fact-check subthread under the President's threads.

In response, the President threatens to shut down HN. Acceptable or no?

busymom0OP6y ago

Saying "President threatens to shut down HN" is silly. It should be "President threatens to shut down HN unless they either stop censoring libertarian and conservative voices OR they declare themselves as publishers which allows average Joe to sue them if needed". Right now they are acting as a publisher while enjoying the immunities offered by claiming to be a platform.

60 years ago, LGBT voices would have been censored on tech platforms. Few years before that, blacks were censored.

I am a brown immigrant myself (I try not to bring it up as I think it shouldn't matter but it does in this context) and I get called nazi and white supremacist and all sorts of names on Reddit just because I have certain right leaning views. I am libertarian myself. I am banned from pretty much every politics and news subs. I find it impossible to even put my voice on Reddit on political topics and the same is true here for HN too. People say "build your own site" but when we do, we get attacked and dropped by providers. I think people have a hard time empathizing because they aren't in the same shoes.

Also the "private corporation" excuse is never used when for example the Baker who couldn't bake the cake for the gay couple for religious reasons got taken to court 3 times. I don't agree with the Baker and I would bake the cake myself but I would allow him to practice his own religious views. I don't like the double standard.

Also it is well studied that the brains in left leaning people is different than right leaning. For example the "amygdalas" is more active in right leaning people. It's an area of the brain that's associated with expressing and processing fear and threats. It's a biological difference. Falls in a similar category of race, sex etc.

When 50% of the population is being throttled, I think it's time to fix things.

Do you think it's fair for a site like Reddit to provide all sorts of porn to a 12 year old kid but ban right leaning views? How can democracy exist when half the population can't voice their opinion.

Also I am not just talking about censorship of right wingers. I am talking about people like Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang too. Nor am I talking just about US. Canada and others like HK and Taiwan too.

1 more thing. From the proposals made by Josh Hawley:

> Preserves existing immunity for small and medium-sized companies. The bill applies only to companies with more than 30 million active monthly users in the U.S., more than 300 million active monthly users worldwide, or who have more than $500 million in global annual revenue

So HN won't be covered anyway.

shadowgovt6y ago

Size is irrelevant. 5 people or 50 million, freedom of the press is freedom of the press.

And Twitter enjoys no immunity here. If the President wants to sue them for defamation or libel for fact-checking them, he's welcome to. They own the fact-check copy. I'd have no issue with him suing them as a private citizen. Good luck with it, I say to him. Truth is an affirmative defense.

As for the rest... I don't know what to tell you. Freedom of the press does not imply requirement others listen, or obligation to provide presses to people. Demanding those things implies the ideas cannot stand on their own in the common marketplace.

(Baker is a different issue; sexual orientation is a protected class in law. Political views or "being President" is not, for self-evident reasons).

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