Really the regulation should be about requiring social media companies to interoperate similar to regulation on the phone companies. You should be able to switch to another social media platform without losing your ability to communicate with your friends on the old platform similar to how you can still call your friends after you change phone companies.

Then is if the social media companies want to charge money people could change to another platform without losing their contacts.

Basically the only reason I still have facebook is to talk to chat with people on there that I can’t contact through other means.

That’s my fetish tho. Don’t kink shame!

Its a federal border. That barbed wire is his barbed wire.

You haven’t been following the news. The Texas Governor put the barbed wire there. The Supreme Court upheld that he was able to do so(because of course they did). Biden is trying to remove it.

Maybe try diversifying your news sources beyond TikTok.

Perfect example. Trump says he wants to deport people that were born in the US (which obviously isn’t legal). Call in the military, shoot people attempting to cross the border. Texas is putting barbed wire on the border, the the Federal government (that’s Biden) is opposing it. They want the border completely shut down and people of certain ethnicity banned.

The Dems want additional judges to process asylum applications faster. Which is good for everyone. There are some bad things in the bill, but Biden doesn’t have to enforce them and the courts will likely overturn them like they did with Trump’s Muslim ban. Getting the additional judges and staff needed to deal with the backlog of asylum claims is super important and will lessen the hardship on immigrants seeking asylum.

So explain to me how trying to get asylum claims processed faster is exactly the same thing as Trump’s Muslim ban? Or building a wall? Or shooting people?

There are more than just two candidates available in the whole United States of America that could run for president

Yeah and they either decided not to run or were eliminated in the primaries. Ideally I think a ranked choice system would be better than a primary system, but the primaries are a somewhat reasonable approximation, albeit an antiquated one.

The thing about democracy is the winner is the person that gets the most votes, not decided by solely your vote. And you can’t force people to run. Bernie Sanders ran in the 2020 primary and lost to Joe Biden. He decided not to run in this primary. You can be bitter about this, maybe come up with some conspiracy theories about the DNC somehow putting Bernie in duress to keep out of the race. Or do the same for anyone else you prefer.

But the fact is the imperfect run off system of the US electoral system determined it’s Biden vs. Trump again. You can be emotional about how you wanted something different, but it’s not going to change anything. You can be angry at other voters for not choosing different candidates. Still not going to change anything.

And Joe Biden is legit the best President of my lifetime. Not something you’ll hear from content decided by social media algorithms. He’s done a lot despite some bad actors in congress, and he could do more if there were just a few more Dem Senators and a majority in the House. Only criticism I really hear is from either republicans and kids that are ageist and/or learned about foreign policy from TikTok.

I’m Canadian, and judging from history things tend to go badly for countries that neighbour fascist countries with a powerful military. So yeah I want Old Joe to continue to be President.

But I’m not too worried about polling, they were off in 2016 because they people considered unlikely voters actually did vote, and they voted for Trump. So the statisticians compensated for this and they were much closer to the mark in 2020, but still somewhat under-counted Trump support. So they have to compensate some more. But my gut feeling is that a siginificant of the unlikely voters that turned out for Trump in the past two elections probably won’t turn out for him again. But statistics is a scientific thing, they can’t just mark Trump supporters as unlikely voters again because of a gut feeling. They have to follow the process and do the math without any gut feelings about it.

So… the polls about support for Trump aren’t reliable at all. So no point in worrying about them one way or another.

The real concern right now is how young people are pushed into some strange politics by social media. The Olds are going to vote the way they always do, and there’s less of them with each passing day. The kids are getting sucked into accelerationist doomerism so who knows what will happen there. Constant emotional manipulation on social media can send people down some dark paths. I used to think the kids are alright, but I’m not so sure anymore.

There has never been a wider gap between the Democrats and the Republicans than there is right now.

I get it you want to prove your hardcore che guevara t-shirt socialist cred. But you want to be credible at all you gotta at least sometimes look at the facts.

You were probably taught in school that democracy is a wondrous ideal thing.

When you become an adult you realize democracy isn’t about voting for who you like the most. It’s about preventing bad people from getting power. You will never get to vote for some ideal perfect person, and even if you did the general muddiness of politics would prevent that person from being able to make the change they want.

Yes, it’s “the line” now. But to be more accurate, it’s always been the line.

The top left has some design aesthetic to it. Normally I’d assume the logo with the better aesthetics wouldn’t be an open source project logo, but given Musk probably fired anyone that could make a good logo, I’ll assume the more boring one (the lower left one) is the Xitter logo.

Also Iron Man was a big movie at the time so people thought of him as the “real life Tony Stark.” That whole myth that you could have a super genius that could build a fusion reactor from a box of scraps was a thing at the time and here’s Elon Musk seemingly doing the same kind of thing.

Of course it’s silly, you have to have teams of people solving thousands of problems (big and small) to be able to get new technology.

But yeah it’s the most extreme version of the old saw “better to keep your mouth shut and have everyone assume you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” In Musk’s case, he could have kept his mouth shut and had everyone assume that he’s a genius.

I don’t know if there’s much to study about this… make a product shittier and then rebrand to remove any positive brand association with the product when it was better in the past. Yeah, that’s a bad idea.

Are you in a clear cut red state? Also is your congressional district definitely going red as well? You understand that the President isn’t a dictator, and there is a need for changes in legislation which is what congress does?

Even the GOP isn’t immune to voter margins. If the see that margin in their safe red states are starting to narrow, they may have decide whether they want to continue being fascist and face losing everything or maybe make some compromises to continue getting elected.

I minority of eligible voters wanted abortion to be illegal. They got what they wanted despite being the minority because they voted every time for decades. By not voting you’re conceding all power to those that do. Are you happy with how things are being run by the people that are put into power by this minority of eligible voters that show up and vote every time? Is so, continue to blow off voting. But you can’t complain about the results if you concede your rights to whims of people that will make the effort to vote.

Also, voting third party is clearly doing something. Staying home is doing something. Trying to help people on the Internet understand various political stances is doing something.

What positive change will come from these “actions”?

Nothing. You’re doing nothing.

Wait a second. You could have been blaming the Republican voters, because they actually voted for the guy.

In this particular forum there aren’t too many Republicans but plenty of people that think voting third party will accomplish something. It won’t because that’s not how the system works. You want to change the system, you say? You aren’t going to succeed in changing a system you don’t know anything about.

And all the while, Democrat candidates know exactly how to get more progressive votes: push progressive policies.

This is exactly what’s happening. But too many people have been sucked into TikTok rabbit holes to know that’s happening. The small amount of progressive changes that they’ve had to claw and scratch to get could be drowned in the bathtub because some people would rather be self-righteous over Joe Biden not screaming “GENOCIDE” a thousand times at Netanyahu as an opening statement before trying to hammer out a ceasefire agreement with him that will save lives.

Voting third party is doing nothing. Evil prevails when good people do nothing.