I think it's been a long time since anyone believed that's what Facebook wanted. They want money, same as every other company. They navigate political and social waters to maximize profit. Lip service is paid to each side to stave off undesirable regulation and user exodus.

I've attended 5 different colleges and universities in one off courses and degree programs. I've never once felt that a narrative was being pushed. Perhaps it's that students are exposed to people and ideas from different parts of the country and world and just naturally become less conservative? Modern day social conservatives have a distinct aura of fear of the "unknown other" about them. Getting to know people from different backgrounds is a good way to open our minds to the value of diversity.

It is utterly ridiculous to believe that a Vice President has the slightest authority to manipulate the results of the election. Why? Because the VP is not prohibited from BEING ON THE BALLOT! You would never, NEVER, want someone who could be running for office to have veto power over which votes counted. That makes no sense at all. If it were the case that the VP actually had any ability to discard votes which were "disputed" we would have had a President Gore and not Bush. This was just one more lie spun up to allow Trump and his supporters to delay accepting the inevitable.

Personally, I don't think the violence at the Capitol was the "attack on democracy" that worries me. Rather it was the months long campaign by a sitting President and his political party to undermine faith in the election process itself. They pre-emptively discredited the whole process of democracy: casting and counting votes. They concocted the stolen election narrative and insurrection was the result. It was not the result of one speech on the day but months of cultivating hate and fear.

You have no idea what Trump was thinking. You think you do; you want to believe no one could be that brash and it not be coming from his heart. But I think he knew exactly what he was doing. The man may be loathsome, but he loves adoration and knew how to get it from his base. He told them what he knew they wanted to hear and they lapped it up. And when it was all going to be over, he decided to have one last great show of devotion from his cult and whipped them up on purpose. Just because he's a rude, loud asshole doesn't mean he was saying what he was thinking. Pretty sure what he was thinking most of the time is "look at all those idiots hanging on my every word."

Most bugs are the result of poor specifications because people rarely know what they want or need to the level of detail needed for software development. Also, for any kind of system like this, there was probably bidding set up and the project went to the lowest bidder. That would have resulted in underpaid, overworked and probably mostly less experienced developers and few QA resources. As they're getting contract rates, the software company would not have wanted to hear about the extra time it would take to design a system that would be flexible and configurable into the future. They want to get a shiny maintenance contract for more cash.

Health care is different from ordinary markets in the same way that a police force is. When you're in need you simply must have the service or suffer extremely bad outcomes. When buying a widget, you can shop around, wait for a sale etc and let market forces and competition do their magic. When you're ill or injured you must have care, and generally from a nearby provider. Allowing the market to decide that rural or poor areas aren't worth serving would be a terrible outcome. Pure profit motive won't get you a lot of burst capacity either - we need more hospital beds available than will generally be occupied to support major incidents or outbreaks.

You'd have doctors turn away patients who had a bad outlook. We don't want doctors to select patients based on their profitability at all, IMHO.

Very well thought out and written. You should publish it on Medium or somewhere that would get more eyes than a 4 levels deep post on Slashdot. I've long marveled at the Republican party's ability to get poor white folks to vote against their own self interest so long as it's even more against the interests of people they don't like.

Social media companies are not common carriers of data. They use advanced algorithms to calculate which posts to promote for maximizing page views and thus ad impressions. So long as they are not agnostic to the content moving on their wires they should not be protected from liability for it.

Sadly, the reason to care is that millions of your fellow countrymen are being misled by the content and then voting. Twitter wouldn't be an issue if its users had the necessary critical thinking skills to dismiss the garbage. Of course, Twitter would probably cease to exist in that case.

News outlets aren't obligated to allow everyone to come in and stand in front of the camera and broadcast to the world. That is a closer analogy than providing housing. Freedom of speech is not about freedom to say the thing anywhere you please. I can throw you out of my house for saying things I don't want, the local grocery store can throw you out for saying things they don't want, and social media platforms can too.

"Social media" is a collection of companies that have figured out how to monetize people's desire to share pictures of cats and conspiracy theories. The First Amendment is about the government NOT being able to throw you in jail for criticizing them. It offers no protection against having a company that makes money by selling your eyeballs to the highest bidder dump you from their platform. These advertising vehicles are not obligated to put their eyeball business at risk by providing a platform to anyone. There is no constitutional right to have an account on a social media site; just as there's no constitutional right to go into a news studio and stand in front of the camera. "Freedom of speech" is not at all the same as guaranteed access to the platform of your choice for that speech. Free speech existed long before social media.

The Snowden leaks are now pretty dated. It's possible infiltration tactics have changed or were never that pervasive. Generally though, what I see in all of this is the malignant narcissist at the top setting this all up. He knew he was in real danger of losing the election so he started months ago in sowing doubt of the legitimacy of the vote. All prepped to believe that the only way Trump could lose the election is if it were stolen, these folks actually thought they were preventing the coup, not participating in it. Obviously they should be charged, but something deeper has to change if we're going to prevent more of the same. We must return to valuing critical thinking skills over rote facts in schools. We need to figure out how to incorporate the massive power of social media into society without having it be a hotbed of radicalization.

I believe that Trump wanted the riot to happen so that he could revel in the knowledge that these people love him so much they'll overthrow their own democracy for him. In that light, he purposely encouraged lax security. Just contrast photos from January 6 with those from the BLM protests. You can see the vast difference in numbers and attitudes of the deployed police/national guard.

Trump did not ban travel from China. He banned travel by non-Americans from China, but did nothing to test or quarantine Americans who'd been there. Also, there's evidence that the virus was already in America before then and spreading in communities. So, he closed the proverbial barn door half way after the horses were gone. And then wanted credit for it. And then failed to do anything to encourage mask-wearing, testing or staying at home when possible. So yeah, focusing on China under the circumstances was racist. And clearly ineffective.