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Wait, how the hell can you say that the FBI's interventions in social media changed the 2020 election outcome? That's a wild assertion, you're essentially arguing that enough people were persuaded to not vote Trump by virtue of not seeing this story.
What's wild about it? It was a close election, smaller things could have changed it's results. When you ask Sam Harris and other adults in the room about censoring the laptop story, they will literally explicitly say it was warranted, because otherwise Trump likely would have won.
And no, not seeing the story didn't even have to persuade people to not vote Trump, it just had to not persuade people to not vote Biden.
Can you show me where Sam Harris or these "other adults" said this after the election was done?
But how would it have done that? We're talking about there being a group of voters who, in October 2020, held the unstated belief that Joe Biden was not worth being president, no matter what Trump was/did, if he had acted corruptly with regards to a foreign company. This group of voters also had to be geographically distributed enough that their exertion was a deciding factor in how the electoral college voted.
I do not believe there is such a group of voters that fits such the necessary qualities to make the argument that the NYPost could have swung the election had its reporting not been suppressed by Facebook and Twitter for some period of time. I don't even think the story was suppressed for that long.
I can't believe you haven't heard it, it was the talk of the day. There was one more high-profile Voxesque progressive saying the same thing. I want to say Noah Smith, but it hasn't made quite the same splash, and isn't seared into my memory as much.
No, we're talking about a group of voters who held the stated belief that Joe Biden was not as bad as Trump, but who might have gone, "bah, a pox on both your houses!" upon hearing the news, and refused to vote, or went third party.
That's fair. You're still asserting the existing of a group of people for whom this would have been the tipping point into not voting Biden and arguing that they were geographically distributed enough to theoretically swing the election. I would like to see evidence of this group existing.
Wasn't there some poll saying something to that effect?
If you're asking for something less biased, more precise, focused on the swing states, etc. before you change your mind - fair enough. But keep in mind "the FBIs intervention in Twitter almost certainly swung the election" was me being bombastic, and my actual point was "anyone can reasonably frame their preferred incident as more important".
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