As a matter of principle, do you believe Google staff (or their outsourced contractors) can and should pre-judge the outcomes of US court cases? I ask about principles because it's very easy to focus on the specific details of these particular cases, and the fact it's your political enemy pursuing them. But that may not be true next time, and certainly won't be true every time.
I think the presence of court cases, frivolous or not, is completely orthogonal to Google's content moderation policies. An appeal to "this is pending in court" is a deeply unprincipled argument; plenty of things that a court would certainly countenance are forbidden by Google's policies.
I agree but that's not really my concern. I am most concerned about granting Google (or anyone) the power to decide what is true or false, and to prevent individuals from seeing the information used to make those judgements, or to decide for themselves.
> Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And half of America that politically was skeptical of anti-trust has the power to rethink that as well. (And they will, and Google will find out if the juice is worth the squeeze on that.)
Because of COVID-19 and the huge increase of mail in ballots, there is good reason to believe that fraud was higher than other years. Biden's margin of victory in key swing states is smaller than Trump's in 2016. These are not unreasonable things to discuss and I find unfathomable that this policy would be something Google would apply to say, Iran, or any other country where there was speech skeptical of government.
Acting as if speech discussing this on their platform is beyond the pale is ludicrous. It shows a sheltered, fragile group of people who think their views are more common than they are.
There is in fact no reason to believe fraud is higher than other years; for example, states where elections were administered by conservative Republicans found essentially no instances of it, despite huge incentives.
Another strong indication that there wasn't fraud? The ludicrous affidavits accompanying the highest-profile lawsuits against states.
What states were swung by a small margin "administered by Republicans" (political parties don't administer elections).
Most of the arguments revolve around mainly 4 metro areas: Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia (with a little Pittsburgh thrown in). These 4 metro areas alone could decide the election via electoral math. It is cliche that these areas have had voter fraud. It's been going on for a century. People have been convicted for these crimes in these areas regularly. For people to act like _this election_, that kind of talk is unreasonable, well, I have some not nice words to say to those people.
Given the extraordinary circumstances, and the narrow margins of victories, people bringing up these facts is reasonable. Youtube allows holocaust denial, and I'm supposed to believe that people claiming inner city fraud (only when it's claimed in the U.S. btw) is "a threat to democracy".
It is a cliche that conservatives, who fare poorly both in urban areas and among the minorities who disproportionately live in those areas, accuse Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia of voter fraud. Nevertheless, no real evidence of fraud is produced; in fact, the rare cases we do see of actual voter fraud tend to be committed by older Republican voters.
The reason for this is simple: voter fraud is a stupid crime. It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
This has been a conservative trope for decades. If there was any substance to it, you should have no trouble coming up with concrete examples within the last 20 years of material voter fraud being detected in Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. You can't, because there isn't any.
What the affidavits attached to these ludicrous but high-profile lawsuits instead provide is suppositions, like "suspicious" swings from certain levels of Clinton support to different levels of Biden support (it's almost like they're... different people!), or worse, batshit conspiracy theories, like the guy named "Spyder" who ran a SpiderFoot scan on Dominion Voting Systems and got dunked on by the author of SpiderFoot for not understanding the results. Or the woman who testified in Michigan, with the President's personal lawyer sitting next to her, who believes the Obamas funded the secret Wuhan lab where Coronavirus was created.
Liberals have their own problems and blind spots. But conservatives own this, and the travesty of the administration's handling of its predictable loss in the 2020 general election, completely and absolutely.
> It's hard enough to convince people that it's worth their time to add their real voice to the cacophony of voices being recorded on election day. To risk imprisonment to add a couple more voices makes no sense.
But the voter fraud being alleged now isn't one or two ballots. It's ballot harvesting here, and lost SD cards there, voting machines not properly recognizing votes, and poll watchers not being allowed near tables. In any of these cases thousands of votes could have been altered, added, or removed.
We need to take this seriously, investigate, show that the fraud (which is inevitable at some level) didn't change the election (hopefully), and tighten up the rules for next time.
Stuff that should be bipartisan. 1) Voting machines suck, even when they only count. 2) Recounts can't be on the same machines as the first count. 3) Counts must stop unless poll watchers are able to watch. 4) Poll watchers should have to make a positive assertion that they could see, and did watch, or the votes should get recounted. 5) All disputed votes, either the ID or the vote marking, should be kept separate and recounts should involve reexamining the entire vote.
> During his guilty plea hearing, Demuro admitted that while serving as an elected municipal Judge of Elections, he accepted bribes in the form of money and other things of value in exchange for adding ballots to increase the vote totals for certain candidates on the voting machines in his jurisdiction and for certifying tallies of all the ballots, including the fraudulent ballots. [1]
This was 6 months ago. That's election fraud. Investigations don't start with proof, they start with claims. These areas have in large part said that even trying to discover evidence is moot, and that no investigation has standing.
Worse, YouTube is saying that even claims for investigation are invalid. Or that claims of voter fraud past a deadline are somehow off limits, when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
> when essentially the _entire_ left wing of the Democratic party has been making claims like these for 4 years.
Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election. The democrats have been saying that it is bad to solicit aid from a foreign power to help you win an election through social media campaigns and hacking email accounts. That's wildly different than "actually I got the most votes in relevant states and really should be president".
> Clinton conceded the day after the 2016 election.
That's immaterial. YouTube's censorship restrictions have nothing to do with a formal concession, merely claims of fraud impacting the election. And identical claims of election tampering resulting in a "fraudulent electioin" have been ongoing by Democrats on MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, CNN etc. for 4 years.
So we're now in a boat where Google/YouTube is essentially arguing they're qualified to make judgements on defending election integrity in the U.S.
It has nothing to do with policy consistency, and everything to do with who the people are who work there.
>Certainly Google has the power to decide what they think is true or false on their YouTube service.
And people have to right to find this despicable. Although Google may not actually have that power (I don't know how much Youtube is considered a monopoly)
You seem to be arguing that because cases 1-9 were without merit, case 10 and beyond are too. That may turn out to be true, but it is also quite literally pre-judging.
Your argument also accepts that the courts judged these cases to have no merit, while implicitly denying that such judging was necessary.
How should a Google staffer differentiate between case number 9 (dismissed) and case number 10 (still on the docket)? And what hope can they have of coming to a better understanding of the details and merits of a case than the exact body (a court) which is set up to do precisely this?
The whole legal system is premised on every case being judged on its own merits, and rightly so.
Cases 10 and beyond are, too. One way you can see that is the subsequent cases have been relying on the same batshit evidence as the dead cases.
If Google was a courtroom, you might have a point --- the courts are in many circumstances obligated to hear and dispassionately resolve batshit frivolous cases. Google is not.
My concern is that you as an individual have used your personal judgement to come to the conclusion that these cases are batshit (as have I incidentally), and in this specific case you are most likely correct. But had Google prevented you from seeing this information, you would not have been able to form any view at all. And that is the direction all these platforms are moving in.
I also have absolutely zero trust in Random Googlers being capable of determining truth and falsity in the general case (which is where this is heading), or in managing this power in such a way that is a net benefit to society. If they didn't have monopolies on information consumption I would be a little less concerned.
A different example: Google could have stopped people seeing "false" information about COVID earlier this year. Twitter and other platforms labelled this "misinformation", and Google could have censored it from YouTube, searches, etc. The tech companies anointed the WHO as the arbiter of truth, yet the WHO was wrong for quite a while about several important things. I would prefer to live in a world where individuals are allowed to see all the contested facts and arguments, and decide for themselves.
One last example: Ignaz Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and many others.
I suppose the real solution is to break up the information monopolies, then let them do all the censoring they want.
We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News. I don't find any of this persuasive. Google is also preventing me from forming my own opinions about content featuring firearms, hate speech, violent criminal organizations, sales of regulated goods, nudity, and sexual content. I'm waiting for an argument from you that would be persuasive to someone who thinks it's just fine for Google to ban porn from Youtube.
I'm not trying to persuade you that your specific personal preferences for a "Safe Mode Internet" are wrong. I'm saying that just because you are personally comfortable with Google's current set of moderation choices, this does not mean that it is right or optimal for Google to start enforcing these preferences for society as a whole, particularly when it requires them to become the arbiter of truth and basic facts, while also avoiding the normal regulatory obligations associated with this. That is the slope we are on.
There is also a difference in kind between porn and this sort of speech. Different laws apply, different social norms apply, different technical options (and trade-offs) apply, and so on. I have also heard that there are many other porn hosting websites, and Google does not enjoy any sort of monopoly.
Perhaps we're talking past each other here but to put my general point a different way, and it's only relevant because Google is effectively a monopoly: If you were told you could be born into a world with a free internet, or a curated internet, but you had no influence over who would do the curation, which world would you choose?
> We're talking about Youtube, not Google search results for Fox News.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, next to Google itself. I would say it's not beyond the realms of possibility for YouTube to eventually eclipse Google.
How, even in principle, would google prevent a person from seeing legal documents? Most (all?) jurisdictions publish them on the web themselves? https://www.courtlistener.com/ is great.
1. Well, I just told you about them. It's old fashioned, but talking to people works wonders. You're not the first person I've encouraged to go directly to legal documents.
2. Probably the median person uses several -- google, facebook, and the like.
Nobody has accused Google of burying search results about these court cases, so you can't reasonably pretend that's the debate we're having. Please keep the goalposts static, so we can discuss productively.
The election occurred over a month ago. The counting of votes was complete enough 4 days later that any violations subsequent to then could not have changed the outcome. The relief sought--to prevent the results from being certified--would have been impossible to grant two weeks ago.
At this point, any case being filed now over the results of the election is doomed to fail either by the doctrine of laches (you should have filed it sooner) or inability to grant relief, and that's even without considering any other possible failings it may have (including merit!).
While the courts will operate under the assumption that a case is meritorious until proven otherwise, there is no reason for the court of public opinion to operate under the same assumption, especially when there is clear precedent and established case history demonstrating why the case must be dismissed that the filing makes no attempt to address.
I don't think "the court of public opinion" is a high enough standard for a prospective world-wide monopolistic censor of information. Such an authority needs to be completely rigorous, completely fair, completely objective, completely informed, and so on. Google cannot meet that bar.
By your standard, Semmelweis would have been censored as "misinformation". Ditto Galileo and the rest.
And was that borne out in the public square or in scientific journals and conferences? There are reasonable arenas for this material. In this case, that arena is the courts.
Of course we can, because it's a law of nature. Whereas man-made laws are subject to human action and interpretation, so outcomes are far less predictable.
The "specific details" are a plethora of court rulings, election certifications, and statements from Trump's own lawyers that they are not bringing fraud cases.
