[jds375]

I think many people aren't taking into account the visibility of Trump's twitter. Trump making violence-glorifying or factually incorrect or medically dangerous tweets is far different from other twitter user's or even other blue-check-mark users because his reach is far wider than the vast majority of those users. Further, Trump has an established track record of doing this repeatedly. Those two facts establish a clear and rational basis for targeting his tweets specifically.

Completely agree with your second point though (not that there is any collusion to silence conservatives - but that this whole situation will be taken that way and used to energize that base).

[12elephant]

There is video of Twitter employees admitting there are on-going efforts to silence "shitty people" on the platform. It's quite clear who these "deplorables" or "shitty people" are.

What is the most annoying about this, though, is the tweet they chose to "Fact Check". (I use quotation marks because "fact checking" by linking to CNN and WaPo is not fact-checking at all, rather an appeal to a different authority.)

The tweet they chose to police is speculation about the future. If I say the boiling point of water is 50 degrees, you can fact-check that. Its an objective truth that water boils at 100c.

If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement. All you can do is show me someone else's statements, opinions, and predictions on the matter.

Given that Trump says so much objectively false stuff, it annoys me they didn't go after one of those tweets instead.

You catch the most flak when you're over the target...

[gknoy]

> If I say mail-in votes will cause election fraud, you cannot prove or disprove that statement

I'm not sure I believe that claim. I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.

Sure, it's possible that _some_ fraud might happen, but looking at data from Oregon, it's happened two times in twenty years (_from my reading of the conservative database that was linked somewhere yesterday -- sorry :) -- I might be off by an order of magnitude, but it's still small_). That seems like an _extremely_ low incidence rate, and seems a small price to may for the idea that maybe more people will be likely to vote, due to not having to stand in line at polling places, deal with vote suppression efforts, or even just because it's more convenient to fill it out on your own schedule ahead of time.

Now, many will say that states like CA and other large states, who haven't had a large-scale rollout of vote-by-mail with the history and planning that Oregon had, will face more fraud than Oregon did. I think that's actually a very believable point -- we are not going to have a perfect rollout. However, I'd also like to point out that we've had two decades of electronic voting machines that have been proven to be absolutely insecure, as well as numerous cases in other states of voters who have been unable to vote because their polling places were under-staffed or closed too early.

Voting by mail is a proven method that scales well to ensure that larger portions of the populace have the opportunity to vote. It's being considered in light of wanting to limit in-person gatherings. It very unlikely that it's some conspiracy to promote fraud.

[12elephant]

> I think that looking at past history of voting fraud shows pretty conclusively that _vote by mail_ fraud has always been a very low percentage.

If fraud was committed successfully, it's not going to show up in the data. You won't know at all. It's like saying "there's no evidence of a cover-up". Well of course there isn't, that's the point.

I've heard plausible methodologies for carrying out mail-in vote fraud that would be undetectable. E.g. mail containing ballots being diverted/"lost". I can neither prove nor disprove this is happening though.

I agree that electronic voting is an even worse idea than mail-in voting.