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Facebook To Ban Misinformation On Voting In Upcoming US Elections (reuters.com)
"Facebook will ban false information about voting requirements and fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations in the run-up to and during next month's U.S. midterm elections," reports Reuters. The latest efforts are to reduce voter manipulation across its platform. From the report: The world's largest online social network, with 1.5 billion daily users, has stopped short of banning all false or misleading posts, something that Facebook has shied away from as it would likely increase its expenses and leave it open to charges of censorship. The ban on false information about voting methods, set to be announced later on Monday, comes six weeks after Senator Ron Wyden asked Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg how Facebook would counter posts aimed at suppressing votes, such as by telling certain users they could vote by text, a hoax that has been used to reduce turnout in the past.
The information on voting methods becomes one of the few areas in which falsehoods are prohibited on Facebook, a policy enforced by what the company calls "community standards" moderators, although application of its standards has been uneven. It will not stop the vast majority of untruthful posts about candidates or other election issues.
The information on voting methods becomes one of the few areas in which falsehoods are prohibited on Facebook, a policy enforced by what the company calls "community standards" moderators, although application of its standards has been uneven. It will not stop the vast majority of untruthful posts about candidates or other election issues.
So how exactly is Facebook going to determine if reports of long lines are false? Information on line length makes it EASIER to go vote if you can choose between a few different polling locations and fine the one with the shortest lines. If that information is banned might some people go, find a long line and drop it??
Facebook may as well ban all weather reports indicating cold, snow or rain since all of those might make people less inclined to vote also. In fact I daresay Facebook is better off banning everything except cat videos on election day - though even there the danger is someone would prefer to stay in and watch cat videos rather than vote.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How about just banning ALL posts about such information, right or wrong. Allow users to point to reliable sources of such information (say the state or county's website), but just don't let anything stay that hints at what the rules are..
So... A "Remember to get registered before it is too late!" (with a pointer to the local county's elections page) is Great, but "It's too late to register after the 9th!" is not.
"You can vote starting TODAY!" is NOT OK, but "Check out when and where you can vote!" (With a link to the county's election page) is fine.
That way, Facebook doesn't need to make any fine value judgments or know all the rules for every state to keep this under control.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Good luck with that.
oh, wait, sorry, that was fake.
meanwhile, real states allow you to register to vote in person even up to election day, and to vote in person if you didn't get a ballot yet, and use paper ballots and vote by mail.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Republicans vote on November 7th. Everyone else on November 6th.
Dead democrats must get their absentee in ballots post marked by the 8th.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It seems to me that if people haven't left Facebook already, they certainly aren't going to leave it because Facebook cleans up some of the trash.
What users are going to leave en masse because Facebook doesn't show them legitimately false information? This entire argument is entirely in the ether.
I can only fathom this really comes down to them not wanting to open the "moderating" can of worms by actually trying to be responsible. Its expensive to care.
--
“People don’t care about what you say, they care about what you build.” - Mark Zuckerberg
Ban politics from Facebook. Totally.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Listening to NPR last week about voting registration, etc, one of the commentators said that she was going to tell all her Republican relatives that election day had been changed to Wednesday.
All of the other panelists agreed that this was acceptable, and a good idea.
I have several voting service/polling centers in my county, I can use any one to vote (though in reality I send in a ballot early, but even there I have several locations I can drop it off In a secure box).
Kind of seems like we have the opposite question here - what kind of ghost town do you live in that you have only a single polling center you can use? I'll bet even in Cheyenne the people there have several options.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Facebook basically already bans your political posts. I imagine you have probably noticed that you see fewer of them lately. Your political posts are being served to a few select, like minded friends, just to make you think they are not censuring you, but that's it. Basically almost no one is seeing your political posts anymore.
Well, there are web sites already claiming that "Snopes" is staffed by leftists and that no one should believe anything it says. The war over what the truth is has already begun.
The story being told is "don't trust anyone on the internet unless they agree with your gut feelings!"
The thing that confuses me about the whole debate is that I simply cannot see anything put up on Facebook impacting anyone. There's no way any post from anyone of any political bent will impact the political leanings of anyone else on Facebook.
Similarly fake news about voting is not going to impact anyone actually going to vote. Why would anyone be checking Facebook anyway for polling status? I would be looking at my county website for polling information and probably just pick the closest one. Even if I heard of some reason to not go to a particular location I'd just shift to the next closest one... the whole concern about Facebook related to voting seems terribly overblown to me. So even though I think the Facebook bans on anyone are stupid I'm certainly not against Facebook banning what it likes, it just means it will drive away all the more people every time it does so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I hope that the conflation of illegal immigrant vs legal immigrant data gets policed. That debate has seen enough falsely trying to characterize illegals, who largely are bad news almost regardless of metric, with legal ones, who are largely good along most metrics.
Republicans will be wishing they were dead on November 10th, but they're just prison bound. Get your ass ready for PRISON, Trump traitors!
Mueller better work fast or the bad news will be Donnie getting re-elected in 2020.. On the other hand, the good news is Mueller will have another 4 years to keep looking...
Given Mueller's team is abandoning ship in droves of late, I'm guessing we are closer to the end than the beginning here, which tells me he didn't find anything on Donnie or any of the principles involved beyond what we've seen charged so far, which is a huge disappointment given that the sole reason for this whole thing getting started, Popodouplous, only got 13 days for lying to the FBI and nobody is getting charged with anything to do with Russians and the election.
I got to applaud your sticking to that pet theory of yours in the face of zero evidence, even after all this time.. You sure know how to beat that dead horse, keep it up, you still may get it to run..
such as by telling certain users they could vote by text, a hoax that has been used to reduce turnout in the past.
Someone who would fall for that is someone I probably wouldn't want voting in the first place. Voting via text is so insecure on so many levels it boggles the mind.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings. No more lies, no more 'shadow banning' no more pretense. Facebook is showing their true colors. Now that people have seen the kind of values that Facebook demonstrates, they can make their own choices to continue to associate on the Facebook platform, or not.
But not all misinformation, only that which steers people away from their own political views.
... where fewer = 0
But it won't be banned, because they'll still be able to see their own post.
"Talking about politics? That's a banning.
Lookin' to share political content? That's a banning.
Staring at funny political meams? That's a banning.
Linking to past political facts? Oh, you better believe that's a banning.
No freedom of speech on social media.
No account after speech on social media.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If an account based in Minsk reports a long line in a community 25 miles outside of Topeka,
Why is that impossible? I can get traffic conditions in Minsk from my home in the U.S., why is it impossible to fathom that accounts even in other countries could be providing real time monitoring of polling traffic?
Would you say the same thing about an account in NYC giving polling line times anywhere in the country? That is just as plausible to work and no-one would bat an eye if the New York times were providing that information, yet it's not spatially close either.
How are people who read a tech site like Slashdot not able to figure this out?
Indeed, how IS it that someone on Slashdot cannot understand how information can be accessed globally now?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This joke is over 2 years old, but remains funny:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So, FB are trying to be the Ministry of (Current) Truth. I would fully support the ban on lying — if only a way to reliably distinguish truth from lies (outside Mathematics) could be devised even in theory.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Given Mueller's team is abandoning ship in droves of late, I'm guessing we are closer to the end than the beginning here,"
Wait, that sounds a lot like Trump's team.
I bet she runs in the primaries. But the Ds should give her zero votes.
She's too narcissistic not to try.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Would be to ban ALL negative advertising on candidates period.
It is bad enough the ads for âoe How amazing I am and I approve this message âoe , but the negative attack ads probably outnumber them three to one.
Hell, one is playing as I type this and hitting the mute button the moment one starts has become second nature now.
It is amazing our system of voting includes this level of bullshit. After a few decades of this and nothing ever changing ( in the grand scheme of things ) is it any wonder why folks become disillusioned with it all.
Listen here:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/3...
Oct 12, Another View.
AV Round Table: VOTE! - skip ahead to 14:30.
If someone is going to believe they can vote by sending a text message to some random phone number because they saw a post on Facebook saying so... ... Do we really want that person voting?
You are wrong in your comparison to newspapers, twice over.
First, newspapers have very limited space. They can only publish a few letters or op-eds, so the editors must choose which few of those they receive to publish.
In comparison, Facebook publishes *everything* automatically, with no human intervention, by default. They have no restrictions on space, materials, or staffing to typeset, or anything like that.
Which leads directly to the second way you are wrong: Newspapers choose not to publish. Facebook allows the publication of certain things, then goes back and removes them later. A positive action to prevent people from seeing previously published information - quite different from the negative action of not publishing the information in the first place.
Finally, on a different note, you do realize that the television censors (that was their job title) were in charge of deciding which bits of TV were not to be published, right?
The question is not "if", the question is "why". As in, why would someone in Minsk have this interest in reporting the length of time people are waiting to vote in Baton Rouge?
Well for one thing someone who wanted to pay for such a thing could easily be wanting to have staff writing and manning that in a much cheaper place than the U.S.. It could easily be a U.S. company but all of the technical work would come out of Russia or India or China.
For another, we already have a similar situation today where a lot of international press is covering tons of U.S, news. Why? Hell if I know but it's not much of a leap from the existing coverage of U.S. politics abroad to some insanely detailed coverage of hot U.S. races, including the line levels at polling places to gauge turnout for each district... How long before someone somewhere sets up cameras outside every polling place and scans the video to determine accurate polling visit figures? You could probably even make pretty good guesses by having cameras watching nearby parking areas and looking at the cars they drove up in, who they would be voting for (based on bumper stickers or clothing say).
That's because we know who the New York Times is
In that section I am talking more about the pure technical challenge of limiting posts on attendance based merely on spatial location. You start making exceptions and suddenly the task of correctly filtering is a nightmare and you will make mistakes.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In Maricopa County, as in all of Arizona, you are assigned a polling place. You can't just show up at whichever one you want on election day.
Yes you can, you just end up casting a provisional ballot if you do not go to your assigned polling place. You can still vote at any polling place in your county...
You would know this if you were a voter in the US.
Unlike you I won't stoop to claiming you do not live in the U.S., instead I will give you a pass for not understanding arcade details of a process we all only go through once a year or so. They do REALLY want you to vote in your assigned polling place so I understand why you might think it was not possible to do otherwise. It's not even as difficult as flying without proper ID (which I had to do once, shudder).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Provisional ballots are generally not counted.
And the ballot you cast provisionally must be the ballot for the precinct you are from. They don't keep ballots for all precincts at all polling places. So unless you are in the rare state that will send you the ballot by mail ahead of election day, the only way you're going to get the correct ballot is by going to your assigned precinct's polling place. If they could get their assigned ballot from their assigned polling place, then they wouldn't need a provisional ballot, would they?
Yes, you could cast a provisional ballot, but it would not be counted unless it was the ballot from the precinct you were assigned. That's law. Also, there are several states that do not allow provisional ballots at all.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If the state requires you to use a government-issued ID to confirm your identity for voting, you can generally vote at any one of multiple polling stations. Your ID is used to confirm you only voted once.
If the state prohibits identity verification by ID, you have to go to your one designated polling station. You tell the poll workers your name and address. They have a big printed list of everyone who's supposed to vote at that polling station, and look you up to confirm that you're on it, cross off your name, and give you your ballot. The fact that your name has been crossed off the list is used to confirm that you only voted once.
Provisional ballots are generally not counted.
They are if they matter so what is the difference?
The whole point of voting is that off chance the election is on the margin and your vote may make a difference. I am a registered independent and voted in a primary this year, never again after looking at the results. My vote made zero difference as BOTH parties have the primaries quite wrapped up by chosen candidates. I still continue to vote in the main elections though few votes seem to matter there either.
And the ballot you cast provisionally must be the ballot for the precinct you are from.
Yes, and? I already said that, every time (well I said county, but that's usually pretty much the same thing, the exact term and region may vary state to state but each region you can legally vote in will mostly have multiple polling centers if it's of any size at all).
Also, there are several states that do not allow provisional ballots at all.
Well that's kind of misleading wouldn't you say? There you see the end result is the same in North Dakota for example which does not have provisional ballots because you don't need to register to vote..., you can vote anywhere. So while you are technically right there it does not invalidate what I am pointing out, that most people have multiple places the can go to vote if they desire.
Read through the various states provisioning ballot laws and see if YOU can find any state where there is not some mechanism to vote in different polling locations, I could not find any (the section "States That Are Exempt from Provisional Ballot Laws" includes North Dakota for example which as I noted, does not need provisional ballots).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's just set aside the fact that this was an obvious joke for now. They didn't say anything about Republicans. They said "racist relatives".
You guys need to stop with the "persecuted victim" act... it's wearing pretty thin.
Happy holidays,
SK
There are also real-world consequences for making threats. You do realise that logs can be subpoenaed, turning you from "AC" to "AC posting from 83.239.45.231 on 2018-10-16@05:46:15" pretty quickly, don't you?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Actually RT is not all bad. Naturally it's slanted in favour of Putin/Kremlin line, but it is still interesting at times, and you can always cross-check stories that seem dubious against other sources. Which is what the discerning reader should be doing in any event, regardless of the outlet.
Nor should we be afraid of a little criticism. For example: Is Ryan correct in her assertion that Trump does in fact represent the "real" America? Why or why not?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And replace the site with instructions to get to the closest voting booth.
While I can't condone that, this is where we are at now. Both sides trying to sabotage the vote and a political system that apparently can't do anything about it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That's not a new or particularly unheard of strategy. Some right wing groups in recent elections have sent out mailers with the wrong election date and/or voting information on them to unfavorable demographics to suppress the vote. One of the less subtle forms of voter suppression, which is a class of activity that should be treated much more harshly by the law and subsequently law enforcement, but the US has done somethings to earn its dips into the flawed democracy status such as in the Economists' index.
If it makes you feel better, the historical methods for cheating in US elections tended to be a lot more blatant, including some of the stuff that we were chiding other countries for no so long ago.
Facebook is an abomination ... yet it's difficult to avoid it.
E.g. a local institution had a disaster happen to their building, days ago. Their Facebook page had immediate photos, videos, information. Their web page, as of last night, no change.
It's unbelievable how many businesses and orgs consider their Facebook their "real" presence, and their website (if they even bother with one) as their redheaded stepchild.
So I would suggest "avoid it completely" but sometimes you can't ...
Well, there are web sites already claiming that "Snopes" is staffed by leftists and that no one should believe anything it says. The war over what the truth is has already begun.
The story being told is "don't trust anyone on the internet unless they agree with your gut feelings!"
Snopes is staffed by leftists ... which doesn't make it completely useless, but it does mean that when it comes to gray areas, benefit of the doubt, and so forth, they are slanted a certain way.
As with anything run by human beings (or by automated processes created/trained by human beings).
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if she's the Democratic nominee! Surely it's her turn this time.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
So it sounds like they're telling us to expect violence during the elections.
Listen here: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/3... Oct 12, Another View. AV Round Table: VOTE! - skip ahead to 14:30.
But ... but ... that's OK, because they only want to "suppress" meanie "fascist" wascally wepubwicans.
You certainly are a fine advertisement for American educatiion, sir.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I once read a review of a book about a visit to Florida. The part that caught my attention, and that I remember, was:
"Reading this book will do more to deter the reader from visiting Florida than anything except an actual visit to Florida".
Facebook is getting just like that.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
We'll just ban misinformation and misunderstandings! Peace and harmony will follow!
Why didn't I think of that??
Leftist, rightist, or not, it is utterly irrelevant. It is amazingly partisan to claim someone has a bias against the truth merely because of political beliefs. And yet, that's one of the biggest claims against many media organizations, that they can't be trusted bcause their reporting staff has a different political stance than is required. If Snopes can cite the facts and backs them up, then I would not doubt it just because I haven't done my own research. Especially in things that would be absurd to fake because it could be discounted so quickly. But instead the report is that Snopes is staffed by leftists and therefore some articles say it cannot be trusted - even though those articles never once pointed out errors or did their own research.
In other words the point of those articles bashing Snopes was that its readers should NOT think for themselves and instead believe what the proper political authorities tell them to believe. The last thing this country needs is the rise of a political thought police, and yet that's what we seem to be growing on both the right and the left. In my view, if any political leader tells you something you must automatically doubt it and get more info before trusting it, especially if such leaders are highly partisan and are trying to demonize one side or the other.
So another slashdotter takes the bait and replies without changing the title, so that the rest of us see this piece of shit modded at +2. This time it's to inform a practiced shareblue-type shill that its ip could be traced. That must be extra amusing.
First, newspapers have very limited space.
Our local newspaper editor is continually begging for letters, except during election season, so "limited space" is not an issue. Also, there is an online version of our local newspaper (and I believe many other "local newspapers" are also online) which has unlimited space. "Limited space" is not an excuse for "censorship", and even were it true, is it not censorship in any meaningful use of the term.
Which leads directly to the second way you are wrong: Newspapers choose not to publish.
I'm sorry, what? They choose not to publish, which is, in the meaningless sense of the word, censorship. It is a block to someone's voice being heard. Choosing not to publish is no different than publishing by default and then removing. And I'll tell you a secret: newspapers ALSO go back and remove things that they've published. Our fine local newspaper editor published a letter from a local nut who said, in no uncertain terms, that all Trump supporters were child rapists. That letter could not be withdrawn from the print edition, but it has completely disappeared from the online one.
Further, our fine local newspaper editor just recently decided that the public comment section of the online version of the paper could no longer exist. Not only could people not post comments in reply to articles, all previously posted comments were removed. They also had a "report abuse" option for every comment, and many comments would appear online as "removed". Ergo, they removed things that had already been published. A LOT of things that had already been published. And in exactly the same way that Facebook does.
Finally, on a different note, you do realize that the television censors (that was their job title) were in charge of deciding which bits of TV were not to be published, right?
Yes, based on legal considerations and in an official capacity. They still exist. But they were also not called "censors" except by people who saw every act of self-control or control over media they owned as censorship. Their official title was "Standards and Practices." But those damn censors would keep the "cutting edge" comedians and comediennes from saying certain things -- to stay within FCC regulations.
First place to start is kick the politicians off.