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>Douglass Mackey was recently put in prison for joking that people could vote by text message in 2016
Does anyone have the original tweet or wherever it was?

I think this is one of them.

Honestly, I can't help but think it's sorta reasonable to call this not ok...

Imagine if a candidate you like didn't win and it was solely because someone convinced some part of the voter base to do something that wasn't voting. Imagine if a chunk of electioneering became trying to convince less sophisticated voters to do something that wasn't voting. I don't think that's a positive future.

Now, there could be an equal protection question here -- Were there similar posts on the other side of the political spectrum that were not prosecuted? If that's the case I think there's a constitutional argument to be made due to the differential enforcement, but as for whether the act itself is sanctionable conduct, I can't help but think it probably should be.

Autistic people often have trouble with jokes and memes

People still fall for those scams though. Ask any scambaiter.

Trump ran with the meme, but when Obama was talking about Fake News, he was talking about news sites or chain emails containing things that were not true (and not "well maybe from a certain point of view" not true, but straight-up untrue things) and unsophisticated people accepting them as fact.

The other thing being, I'm not sure what the joke or meme would be -- it just looks like something played straight. It looks like a reasonably polished ad for something that would be useful but isn't real.

And I know comedy! I watched an Amy Shumer movie once!

It looks like it's played straight to me too. But also, it looks like some of the things said on fedi. And those are supposedly jokes/memes, so idk.

I see what you mean, but on the other hand I can buy a whole bunch of stuff if I have my bank card by just tapping it. No code, not even a signature, just tap and go.

I can and did get a birth certificate, a critical piece of ID by just visiting a website. Using that I could get a bunch of other critical things but the process was really easy. I also update my health card, my driver's license, my license plates online with very little verification. I can send money from my bank through text messages or email.

And then for voting, in my country you actually have to display some ID to say you are who you say you are, but apparently showing ID is racist in the US so you just say you're someone and you can vote as if you are that person. Didn't 2020 have mail in voting without any real verification? None of that was a joke, it's true somehow.

So it's tough. You get up against these questions and often freedom of speech gets bent because there is a line where even under ideal constitutional law speech isn't protected because it appears to be intended to deceive and violate someone else's rights instead of being an expression of actual opinions or facts. I think reasonable people could come down on either side based on their personal experiences.

You have to be a computer nerd to understand that it's insecure though.