auk
I think you missed the big triangle you have to click on.
Here’s a transcript:
Election workers, the vast majority of them women, say they’re feeling vulnerable to the charged political climate surrounding the 2024 election. 38% of the women staffing the polls say they’ve experienced threats, harassment, or abuse, fueling the violence, disinformation, and conspiracy theories following the 2020 election.
Joining us now, Elizabeth Landers, lead correspondent for the Scripps News Disinformation Desk.
“And Liz, you traveled to Surrey County in North Carolina to really dig deep on this. What did you find?”
“We traveled there back in June to get a sense of how disinformation is impacting election workers, specifically the almost all-female team that heads up Surrey County’s elections. This is a small county. It’s about 70,000 people. It’s best known as the birthplace of Andy Griffith. And it’s overwhelmingly a red Republican area, went 75% for the former president in 2020. Despite that though, and despite him winning that area, this small community has been dealing with mis- and disinformation around the elections since they took place.”
“And the woman who heads up the elections there is Michelle Huff. She’s a team of just four other people helping her administer these elections. They’re working on this year-round. She described to us how things have changed since 2020. Take a listen.”
“I was actually in one store in downtown Mount Airy. I was cornered and pressed for 20 minutes. This person was getting everything that they felt 2020 election that Trump did not win because of what election officials in this country did. Even in my church, all of sudden election officials are people to not be trusted and not believe.”
“And Allie, disinformation in Surrey County for Michelle really reached a head in 2022. She said there were people that showed up at their office, confronted her about their voting systems, were asking her to see the voting machines, which the North Carolina State Board of Elections says that would have been illegal to give access to people who are not allowed to be around voting machines, that access to critical infrastructure there. They said they had evidence that the voting machines were pinging cell towers in 2020. So they were pushing conspiracies and unfounded information to her.”
“And Michelle has said that she has had to harden their office, make changes there that she never thought that she would have to consider the safety of herself, her staff, her family. But really, she has in the last four years. And she is concerned about this in the lead up to the election in November.”
“It makes a lot of sense, especially given the fact that this is a county that went so squarely for Trump. And yet the aspersions and bad faith that he has put upon the election system writ large are clearly even playing out in red counties. So then given what we saw in 2020, given what she’s experiencing in counties like this one, what’s being done to protect election workers? And I also imagine that this is impacting the number of people who want to be election workers.”
“Absolutely. The Brennan Center for Justice, who we interviewed for this piece, says that they are losing election workers at sort of an unprecedented rate right now. People just don’t want to do this kind of work because of these threats and harassment that they’re dealing with. And in addition to that, they’re losing the institutional knowledge. There’s a lot of minutiae that are involved in election administration. Every state in this country has a different way that they administer these elections. So the Brennan Center is concerned about that.”
“And I would also just add to that 80 percent of these election workers in this country are female. So part of the reason that we were focused on this story is because we’ve been tracking how disinformation is impacting women over at Scripps News. We’ve been kind of doing a series on this. And this is really impacting election workers because so many of them are women across the country, Allie.”
“Really great reporting, Liz. It’s going to have a long tail as we go into the 2024 election cycle. Thank you for tracking it and thank you for bringing it to us.”
That’s exactly the solution, yes. If you’ve never posted before, and you make a comment that gets a few downvotes, your comment is removed, and you get a polite note saying that you don’t have enough interactions to be able to post yet. A lot of subreddits do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
I still don’t have that part of the system worked out, because it’s only come up a couple of times. It hasn’t even happened enough to give a good test run to the code. I’ve been tweaking the code every time it comes up, because it’s not quite right yet, but it’s been happening so rarely that it’s not even really an issue. It would have been easier to moderate the throwaway comments by hand, to be honest.
Oh no! It hadn’t occurred to me that excluding unpopular opinions might be a problem. If only I’d thought of that, I might have looped in some other people, talked extensively about the problem and carefully watched how it was working in practice and tweaked it until it seemed like it was striking the right balance. I might have erred heavily on the side of allowing people to speak to the point that I was constantly fielding complaints from people wanting me to remove something they said shouldn’t be allowed.
And furthermore, you’re right. If this catches on then lemmy.ml might be able to silence dissenting views. That would be terrible.
I don’t see anything about preventing corporate landlords from buying it all and renting it back to us.
I agree. It’s working well at what I intended it to be, in my opinion, but the name is flat-out wrong at this point.
I made a post with my evaluation of the bot’s ability to create a space where people can disagree without being horrible about it. I think it’s succeeding at that, and these contentious topics are a good test case, since it’s not meant to create a space for only pleasant topics. The name is misleading. I don’t know why I didn’t expect this, but I didn’t.
What do you think? I’m interesting in hearing feedback on how people are receiving the content they’re seeing here. If the bot is working in my opinion, but the result from the reader isn’t good, that’s an issue.
I made !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net to test a new moderation approach which is designed to filter out a lot of the crap. I think you should try posting some articles there, and see whether you see the same hyper-critical anti-Biden content. I think I know what you’re talking about, and I think the filtering bot will probably be able to detect and ban almost all of the users you’re talking about.
That didn’t take long.
Criticizing the foreign policy of the US can be done openly in every part of Lemmy that I’m aware of. it’s the majority viewpoint. The issue here is that you’re being a combative jerk about it.
You were supposed to be banned because of the overwhelming downvotes you’re getting. There are some technical problems with the bot’s classification of new accounts, so you’re still here. Ironically, it got held up because I was having issues getting it to be strict about new accounts without excluding dissenting opinions from people who were willing to be level-headed. Your viewpoint here is far from unpopular, but there are cases where someone’s expressing an opinion about veganism, or not voting, that really is unpopular, but they’re being level-headed enough that I don’t want them to be banned. It’s taking some time to get that determination right.
You can expect a ban as soon as I figure it out, because you’re being so obviously unproductive that the downvotes are universal. I just updated the FAQ, trying to find the right words, because I don’t think this is the last time this will come up.
It’s not hard to accumulate more weighted upvotes than downvotes. In the current configuration, 97% of the users on Lemmy manage to do it. If you are one of the 3%, it’s because the community consensus is that your content is more negative than positive.
The bot is not making its own decisions about you. The community is. If you are banned, it’s because you are being downvoted overwhelmingly. The viewpoint you are expressing is probably not the issue. The Lemmy community is very tolerant of a wide variety of views. Some people may disagree with you and you may find that oppressive, but the bot will not ban you simply because some users argue with you when you say certain things. Those users are allowed to have their view, just like you have yours.
If you find you are banned and you’re willing to hear suggestions about how to present your argument without everyone downvoting you, leave a comment. Reducing your downvotes will help the bot recognize you as reasonable, but it will also probably help you get your point across more successfully. In order for the bot to ban you, you have to be received overwhelmingly negatively by the community, which probably means you’re not convincing very many people of what you’re saying.
If you’re not willing to hear those suggestions and simply want to insist that it’s everyone else that is the problem, the bot is being evil to you, your free speech is being infringed, and I am a tyrant if I don’t let you into the community to annoy everybody, I would respectfully request that you take it somewhere else.