Yeah, a lot depends on where you live. Check out these lines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wmMobN4AVw And they’re far from the worst! I just did a search on “four hour voting lines” and it happened in Chicago, New Jersey, UC Irvine, Northeast Ohio …and that’s just the first page of search results.

One reason people might be annoyed by this is because it sounds like you don’t realize how many people had to wait in four-hour long lines.

Anyhow, turnout wasn’t abysmal, it looks like be down a bit from 2020’s record numbers.

Do you think the Director of CISA – who Biden appointed (and has done a great job) and Trump will almost certainly fire – lives under a rock and wants Trump to take office? Because here’s what she said:

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/statement-cisa-director-easterly-security-2024-elections

What’s the evidence you find “literally incontrovertible”?

The comparison is apt though:

• In 2020, almost all non-partisan voting rights organizations and election experts (as well as most Republicans, despite losing) were saying that there was in fact no evidence of widespread election fraud. So conservatives claiming election fraud were seen as conspiracy theorists who were spreading disinfo (either intentionally or because they really thought there was evidence).

• In 2024, almost all non-partisan voting rights organizations and election experts (as well as most Democrats, despite losing) are saying that there was in fact no evidence of widespread election fraud. So …

Sure, if it’s somebody you know or trust who’s saying this, then it’s not disinformation; agreed about helping them contact election officials and/or other authorities, and if you think it’s useful to amplify it, then I’m not trying to talk you out of it.

If it’s not somebody you know or trust, then amplifying it is quite possibly helping out a disinformation campaign.

And in any case, amplifying individual claims is very different from the unsupported claims about “millions of missing votes”, and that’s what I am trying to talk people out of.

It’s true that downballot Dems ran ahead of Harris in most states. Why do you think it’s statistically unlikely? Polls ahead of the election showed downballot Dems were more popular than Harris. Republicans focused most of their negative campaigning on Harris. Biden’s very unpopular and she didn’t try to distance herself from him (I’m not saying that she should have, I’m just observing that she didn’t). Sexists and racists were less likely to vote for Harris.

I talked about that in the article:

Don’t get me wrong, multiple voter suppression techniques actually were used to keep people from voting – purging voters from rolls, felon disenfranchisement, 6-hour lines, texts with false information, voter intimidation, voter id laws, signature challenges, etc etc etc. But that’s not what these conspiracy allegations are focusing on.

And I also discussed it in terms of the goals of people pushing these conspiracy theories:

focusing attention on an alleged fraud that didn’t occur is a good way to divert attention from all voter suppression that really has occurred and has been steadily ramping up ever since Republicans on the Supreme Court gutted the Voing Rights Act – and got even worse this year after Republicans blocked legislation that could have provided voters and election officials with more protection.

The version on the IFTAS blog is at https://about.iftas.org/2024/10/29/5-ways-to-fight-election-disinformation-on-bluesky-and-the-fediverse/

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I can see arguments both ways. When I did the first version of this back in 2020 I got feedback from a couple of experts who emphasized the importance of getting GOOD information out to balance out the disinfo (which even with good reporting still usually doesn’t get taken down immediately) so encouraged this order … at the time we were focused on FB and Twitter but I think it’s probably still true here, since almsot all instances have part-time moderators so can’t turn things around instantly. Hard to know though …

And sorry I didn’t respond earlier, I thought I had but never hit reply.

Yep. And also, like I said in https://privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmosphere-fediverse/

For one thing, most of the people who came to Mastodon in late 2022 didn’t have good experiences … so didn’t stay in the Fediverse.6 Flash forward to 2024, and Mastodon still hasn’t addressed the reasons why.

Bluesky, by contrast, has put a lot of work into onboarding and usability – as well as giving people better tools protect themselves and others, and find and build communities … So today, BTS ARMY and millions of Brazilians, and everybody else looking for a Twitter alternative are more likely to have a good experience on Bluesky than Mastodon.

Great point. And Jay won the power struggle with Jack, which almost nobody gives her credit for.

The revised version’s at https://privacy.thenexus.today/swf-safety/

I originally posted this with a different title, but it didn’t look great as a link preview … so I changed it. There are also a few other updates since the first version.

Yeah. Well, discussions about stuff like this are good at revealing people to block and ban.

Yeah it’s a very thorough report and makes it very clear just how little excuse there is for FSF and Stallman’s other defenders to continue to enable and support his behavior. Agreed that he himself isn’t particularly relevant, but his supporters are still very influential in some areas of the open source community.

Agreed, that would have been a much better title. There’s a lot of negativity around Mastodon – the Twitter migration in 2022 is often described as a “failure”. It certainly wasn’t a success, but I see it much more as a missed opportunity.

Network effects are certainly a big deal but every social network has to deal with the issue, and some succeed. Addressing some of the reasons for bouncing not only improves retention, but makes it more likely that people recommend it to their friends. So many of the problems from July 2023’s Mastodon Is Easy and Fun Except When It Isn’t were problems back in 2017 as well … how much progress has Mastodon made? Fortunately other fediverse software’s making more progress, but it’s still frustrating.

There definitely are some great people there. Finding the right instance makes a big difference… unfortunately, almost eerybody starts off on mastodon.social, which for most people isn’t a great choice, and don’t realize they can move – and when they do try to move, they lose their posting history which is annoying.

That was a great comment. It’s frustrating because the fediverse should be good at making it easy for people to find topics their interested in … but it doesn’t work out that way in practice.

Yeah, Mastodon’s interface has a lot of complexities. It drives me crazy when people say “just like email” … here’s the most recent diagram of what posts are visible in your federated timeline.

Yeah, right now the way I think of it is that Bluesky is (conceptualy) a single big instance, connected to the rest of the ActivityPub fediverse via Bridgy Fed (which speaks both AT and ActivityPub). Bluesky’s decentralized in a different way, and the broader ATmosphere (apps that use AT protocol) is growing as well, but it deosn’t really have the same concept of instance.