Supporting the 2020 U.S. election

Yesterday was the safe harbor deadline for the U.S. Presidential election and enough states have certified their election results to determine a President-elect. Given that, we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential elections. For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors. We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.

Source: Supporting the 2020 U.S. election

People are crowing about how repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would put too much burden on companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They say it would be so costly to implement that it would effectively put them all out of business. But they’re happy to implement real-time screening for any and all copyrighted music posted to their platforms, even if it’s momentary or in the background. And now they’re apparently happy to police their content for things the government finds too controversial.

Who does it hurt to leave up videos about potential election fraud? The courts have soundly shut down the investigations. Any objective person would have to conclude that there is “no there, there.” And, yet, if you you’re were planning to steal an election by tampering with mail-in ballots and voting machines, the very second thing you’re going to do is plan to avoid being shown to have done so.

I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude anything either way about the election and possible fraud, but there seem to be enough curious situations to have happened that I’d love to see another documentary like The Great Hack, which showed the connections between the Trump campaign, and a successful manipulation of social media in his favor in 2016.

Our country is a captured regulatory body, only doing the bidding of the largest campaign donors, at the expense of smaller competitors. These mammoth companies get to do whatever they want. They will not allow themselves to be treated as a public service, even though they are. And they do just enough to appease people in the government so as to avoid being tasked with actually censoring their platforms for actual offensive content. So they walk this nauseating middle road of only censoring things that a small group of unpopular people are posting, and that’s the worst form of it. Either censor your platform, or don’t. If you’re removing content about election fraud, then I don’t want to see anything about 9/11 being an inside job, or how the Illuminati are running the world, either.

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