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From Twitter's statement:

> Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

This not "wondering about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud," it's an outright lie.



>In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

How could you possibly know this, and how could twitter possibly know this? Surely that is the intent, but what do you make of stories like this one: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/11/05/goldstein-investi...

"Only registered voters will receive ballots", you cannot state a future event as a fact, since it hasn't actually happened yet. Stories like the one linked show that in the past, California has had problems with this.

Should twitter now fact check their fact checking? Perhaps the idea of future-telling is flawed to begin with and twitteer should not attempt to be a source of truth!


What a bad-faith take. Technically, no, twitter's statement is not a fact about the future, but merely a fact about California's policies. In the utmost of pedantry, it should read "According to California's election policies, ballots are only to be sent to registered voters at the addresses listed on their registration."

But if we're really drilling into semantics, you posted a link about dead people on the registry. That does not, in fact, preclude twitter's statement. Hundreds of dead people have active voter registrations! Twitter's statement is not invalidated by this.

But neither does it support Trump's claim about "significant" voter fraud. Hundreds of votes in the state of California is neither significant, nor guaranteed that the dead people's ballots will be used.

But Trump's claim is that ballots will be sent to everybody in the state. That's a far greater lie than your overwrought interpretation of their statement.


A multinational company just decided to put their finger on the scale of a US election. I think that decision and the way it was made invites scrutiny.


So do you think that journalists should not fact check politicians either?


Well, that's certainly Trump's characterization of the situation. Fox News has also been fact-checking him lately and he's similarly outraged. Bottom line, the Founders' remedy to false speech by government officials is the freedom to discuss those lies in an open forum.


He's the president of the United States operating on a private platform owned by a private company! No one should be above reproach on such a platform and that includes the president.

If he doesn't like it, he can direct Lockheed Martin and tell them to spend a couple billion dollars on making Litter. At least then it'll go to something slightly more productive than whatever contracts they're currently siphoning money off of.




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