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Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims

mgraczyk
103 replies
16h37m

Interestingly if you read the actual report from HRW, it sounds like most of the material they are referring too was legitimately taken down because it supported violence, according to Meta's policies.

For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down. In other cases the content praised attacks by Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.

From HRWs descriptions it sounds like the bulk of the "1049" content removals were clear violations of Meta's policies against support for violence.

Regardless of whether you agree, these don't seem surprising to me on light of Meta's own rules. There are of course a small number of exceptions listed.

rayiner
26 replies
15h56m

For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many

The phrase has its origins in Arab nationalism. It was coined in 1960 by the PLO to refer to the goal of an Arab state that occupies the entirety of what was Mandatory Palestine. If you ignore the subtext of “what happens to the Jews in that situation” I suppose you can make a case for it.

It’s like the confederate flag. In the 20th century there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism. And that’s the only connotation lots of people have of it. But it has a pretty unpleasant historical context.

At the very least it’s a dog whistle to the large fraction of the Muslim world that hates Jews: https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/adls-global-100-survey-wh.... Americans who use this phrase should really travel to the Muslim world to understand the antisemitism that’s just in the air. You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

slim
14 replies
14h47m

If you ignore the subtext of “what happens to the Jews in that situation” I suppose you can make a case for it.

the jews lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries alongside christians and muslims before colonization. If what you worry about is really "what will happen to the jews now that they committed ethnic cleansing and genocide" you should probably first worry about what is happening right now to christans and muslims in Palestine

rayiner
4 replies
13h54m

Peacefully: https://www.wsj.com/articles/many-israelis-are-refugees-from...

Name one Arab-majority country where Jews live openly as equal citizens. The suggestion that “freeing Palestine from the river to the sea” would just mean a secular multi-ethnic state where Jews life peacefully among an Arab majority is willful blindness.

graphe
3 replies
13h19m

Jews aren't treated worst than others in Muslim countries by these standards. They don't treat Hindus and Shintoism better.

cuteboy19
2 replies
10h14m

That's not true, it's much worse being jews. Christians are the most tolerated, followed by everyone else and then at last it's jews

graphe
1 replies
4h49m

Proof?

kortilla
0 replies
2h6m

The Holocaust

verbify
2 replies
14h4m

the jews lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries alongside christians and muslims before colonization

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1517_Hebron_attacks

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Ottoman...

There were periods of peace, but they were also second class citizens and occasionally the victims of massacres.

BrookeRivers
1 replies
13h34m

So because there were violent historic events (half of which were perpetuated colonizers/invading forces) in a region destabilized by colonization/imperialism, that means Israel has the right to genocide the Palestinians living there?

verbify
0 replies
1h43m

Of course not. I don't know how you got that I 'support genocide' from my post.

My point was merely not to romanticise the past.

coryrc
2 replies
14h5m

"peacefully"

House to house, Arab mobs went, bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews. Religious books and scrolls were burned or torn to shreds. The defenseless Jews were variously beheaded, castrated, their breasts and fingers sliced off, and in some cases their eyes plucked from their sockets. Infant or adult, man or woman—it mattered not.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/134601

slim
1 replies
3h39m

This is after colonization

filoleg
0 replies
19m

Are you sure? Here is a direct quote:

Islam had been at war with the Jewish people since its defining inception in 627 when Mohammad exterminated the Jews of Mecca and launched the Islamic conquest that swept north and subsumed Syria-Palestina. For centuries, Jews and Christians in Arab lands were allowed to exist as dhimmis, second-class citizens with limited religious rights. These restrictions were enforced by the Turks who, until World War I, ruled the geographically undetermined region known as Palestine, which included Jerusalem.

Seems quite pre-“colonialization”, assuming we count establishment of Israel as the startng point for that.

wokwokwok
0 replies
14h17m

Maybe instead of shouting at each other, and deliberately string up everyone, people should all calm down?

I know it hard to feel calm when things like are happening, and everyone wants to blame someone else, but there’s a whole lot of shared responsibility in what’s happening right now.

I care about what’s happening to folk in Palestine a lot, but I also care about the Jews in Israel and what happens to them.

Those are not mutually exclusive things…

mensetmanusman
0 replies
5h28m

Where are there thriving jewish communities in the middle east now?

ImJamal
0 replies
14h8m

Perhaps you should think about Jews who are in Israel who are not involved with ethnic cleansing? Do you think the Palestinians will make a distinction or would even have a way of knowing who was in support of such policies?

api
5 replies
15h30m

there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism

Never got that one. Nothing like the flag of a breakaway state founded to preserve chattel slavery as a symbol of… anti-authoritarianism?

porkbeer
2 replies
15h16m

It's known as the 'Rebel Flag' in the united states, and has indeed stood for being a rebel with none of the modern racist associations attaced to it. Many of your favorite antiracist rock stars of the 60s sported the flag. People under 40 mostly just know the culture-war version where its akin to a swastika, which itself originally had a different meaning. Symbols change, you have to view them through the lens of history and culture before recoiling to modern interpretations,

psychoslave
0 replies
12h46m

I can't tell for the rebel flag, but the swastika never stopped to be used with its original meaning in India, and at least in Europe it's rather well known that nazis "stole" it from India cultural heritage where it doesn't have the same semantic to say the least.

MavisBacon
0 replies
12h56m

Most Americans refer to this as the “Confederate Flag” these days. I’m currently living in the south, though, and you’ll hear it referred to as the rebel flag in this region by liberals and conservatives alike. Regardless I appreciate your acknowledgment of the cultural aspect, and people like the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty certainly did fly the flag back in the day

zarzavat
0 replies
14h57m

If the US had not been founded then slavery would have been abolished much sooner, so I don’t think the US flag gets a pass either.

rayiner
0 replies
15h6m

Part of that effort was to reframe the reasons why the Confederacy was “founded,” at least in part as a way of saving face (which is very important in southern culture).

Their narrative glossed over slavery, and focused on the other aspects of the conflict: the industrialized north, with its big banks and big corporations, versus the agrarian south. Do you remember the scene in Hamilton where they negotiate about where to put the capital? And the Hamilton says something along the lines of “let the south have the capital, we’ll have the bank where the real power will be.” It’s not hard to make the south look like the good guys if you ignore the Confederate elites’ actual reasons for the war.

bjourne
2 replies
11h49m

Comparing the chant "from the river to the sea" with the confederate flag is completely preposterous. The chant is a call for liberation. Anyone who has a problem with someone's freedom is themselves a racist and probably has a lot of views in common with what the confederate flag stands for. Fwiw, the phrase was coined by Jewish settlers in the 1930's (https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2018-12-16/ty-artic...) and ADL is an anti-Palestinian hate organization whose opinions no one should take seriously.

You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

Perhaps for exactly the same reason Russian passport holders aren't welcome in a lot of places?

tety
0 replies
10h7m

isn’t the original context of the confederate flag liberation from federalism?

don’t think just the fact someone believes they are liberating something makes it right, as in their eyes the russians in the current war are liberating ukraine

baobabKoodaa
0 replies
8h1m

Yes, "liberation" of the land currently occupied by jews. Just need to find a solution for them. Preferrably something final.

qwertthrowway
0 replies
2h49m

This is a very inaccurate comparison. Palestinians faced the violent expulsion of the Nakbah, and before that in the British mandate period there were attacks from violent Zionist groups. Currently, Palestine is militarily occupied and colonized. In this context, from the river to the sea must be understood as a desire for freedom and for justice.

The oppression faced under occupation by people in the West Bank and in Gaza for over 70 years now reminds us of how situations like Apartheid in South Africa formally continued until 1994.

To dismiss as simple “Jew hate” is really not the correct context; very disappointing to see these broad generalizations dismiss the fundamental needs for human life.

ahazred8ta
0 replies
15h17m

During the Civil Rights Era there were radical leftist groups that used the flag. The YPO in Chicago was allied with the Black Panthers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization (ditto Southern Student Organizing Committee)

mongol
19 replies
10h41m

I don't see why "From the river to the see" would be hateful in isolation. Certainly some people who say it may have hateful thoughts in their minds, but wishing for palestinian land where Israel is now is not hateful in itself.

krembo
18 replies
10h36m

Don't you really understand why it's an hateful speech when you wish my country stop to exists?

arnavpraneet
11 replies
10h23m

Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.

tety
8 replies
9h15m

what makes it an apartheid state? palestinians have no voting rights in all the neighboring arab states, yet a large amount of them do in israel. and if they don’t in Israel they have voting rights for the palestinian authority

cultofmetatron
7 replies
7h50m

I don't know if this is intentionally obtuse but its TRIVIALLY easy to find examples and journalistic documentaries demonstrating the apartheid going back years

just of the top of my head, there are already seperate roads that palestinians are not allowed to go on.

palestinians have to go through multiple checkpoints just to travel within their own territory.

palestinians are tried in a separate military court with a 90% conviction rate.

here's some links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCh043-gLIM

how Israel created a water crisis

https://novaramedia.com/2023/12/20/israeli-soldiers-are-snat...

Israeli soldiers are arresting and beating up palestinians simply for having photos of gaza.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6bMfikaiQ&ab_channel=CNN

here we see settler violence going on in the west bank where hamas does not opearte. its a direct contradiction to the israeli claim that there would be peac in the middle east of the arabs put their guns down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkN6PH5cG7c&ab_channel=AlJaz...

an israeli company has already put together a promo for luxury homes for israeli's to be built on the ruins of gaza. where will these people who lived there go? oh right, they are being systematically exterminated right now.

like, this took just 5 min of googling. The evidence is out there in PLAIN sight so the only way I can understand someone not knowing at this point is if they are intentionally looking the other way. its not too disimilar to germans living near the concentration camps. people looked the other way because it wasn't convenient to know what was really happening.

tety
6 replies
7h26m

This is a lot of anecdotal evidence.

And you are touching a lot of different subjects which I don't have time to refute one by one.

Examples:

1. Convinction rate in Israel is over 90% for the entire population, not just palestinians. This is because different reasons such as preference not to press charges if there is not a very high chance of conviction, plea bargains, etc.

2. Multiple checkpoints - The security situation in the west bank is a reflection of the fact this is an occupied territory which should have been solved in subsequent peace negotiations. This never happened, and the reasons for that rest on both sides, but you have to be honest with yourself if you think the Palestinians did not reject multiple fair peace offers.

"Systematically exterminated" - This is an extreme hyperbole.. there are enough historical examples of how systematic exterminations looks like to make this a not serious claim. Just compare the amount of casualties of different middle eastern conflicts to the Israeli-Palestinian one

Please try to touch something more concrete than multiple anecdotes which most do not really represent anything similar to an apartheid government.

cultofmetatron
5 replies
7h15m

This is a lot of anecdotal evidence.

you see enough annectodatal evidence and it starts to become a pattern

And you are touching a lot of different subjects which I don't have time to refute one by one.

thats how systematic oppression work. it has many facets and if you're pro israeli, you've only maintained that position by bot reading though the evidence

Convinction rate in Israel is over 90% for the entire population, not just palestinians.

fair, but why do palestinians go thougha. seperate miliary court? why are children as young as 10 serving time in military prisons? october 7th was horrible but lets not ignore that it was motivated by people in a desperate situation trying to gain bargaining chips to have their loved ones released. some of those children released from the prisons in exchange for the israeli hostages were as young as 10 at the time of incarceration.

"Systematically exterminated" - This is an extreme hyperbole..

no its not. this proves to me you have spent no time watching any of the documentaries exploring this. you wouldn't last a day living in the west bank as a palestinian. Ive seen plenty of videos of settlers shooting down palestinians in cold blood with IDF soldiers doing nothing to stop it. they only step in when palestinians fight back. as an american who studied history, I know enough about the ku klux klan to to know ethnic cleansing when I see it.

Please try to touch something more concrete than multiple anecdotes which most do not really represent anything similar to an apartheid government.

I think its obvious that there is no amount of evidence that would meet the bar for you to consider whats going on an apartheid.

tety
4 replies
7h0m

you see enough annectodatal evidence and it starts to become a pattern

Pattern for what? a national conflict is not the same as an apartheid government. We might need to go back to how you define apartheid, because I imagine separate bathrooms mandated by law, and it seems you imagine a national conflict in an occupied territory

thats how systematic oppression work. it has many facets and if you're pro israeli, you've only maintained that position by bot reading though the evidence

Sounds a bit ad-hominem

fair, but why do palestinians go thougha. seperate miliary court? why are children as young as 10 serving time in military prisons? october 7th was horrible but lets not ignore that it was motivated by people in a desperate situation trying to gain bargaining chips to have their loved ones released. some of those children released from the prisons in exchange for the israeli hostages were as young as 10 at the time of incarceration.

Military courts are how you manage a military occupied territory, I believe this is quite common in international law. Also Palestinians can appeal to the Israeli supreme court, many do and many decisions are overruled.

About children as young as 10, I need specifics. Looking at Israeli human rights organizations which I don't think anyone would think are pro-government in any way, there weren't any younger than 14 for the very long while I scrolled (https://www.btselem.org/hebrew/statistics/minors_in_custody).

The difference between hostages is these minors were trialed for real crimes, which you probably wouldn't accept in your country as well (attempted murder for example)

no its not. this proves to me you have spent no time watching any of the documentaries exploring this. you wouldn't last a day living in the west bank as a palestinian. Ive seen plenty of videos of settlers shooting down palestinians in cold blood with IDF soldiers doing nothing to stop it. they only step in when palestinians fight back. as an american who studied history, I know enough about the ku klux klan to to know ethnic cleansing when I see it.

Systematic extermination can be quantified. Let's say one way you could measure it is by comparing birth rate to intentional death rates. I assure you the growth rate of the palestinian population is extremely positive.

Another way you can measure it is compare it to ongoing conflicts, the Syrian civil war which is currently ongoing has 600k casualties spanning a few years. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ongoing for almost a hundred years and it hasn't reached 10% of that.

It doesn't make it less tragic, but saying this is systematic extermination can minimize real cases of genocide.

I think its obvious that there is no amount of evidence that would meet the bar for you to consider whats going on an apartheid.

I'm not sure. Again, apartheid is a government system that is based on systematic racism and discrimination. Although both exist in Israel, as in many other countries, this is a far cry than South Africa, or even the United States in the early 60s.

cultofmetatron
3 replies
6h37m

ok so a large human rights group calling it apartheid isn't enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFjbnvkmQ0&ab_channel=Amnes...

or the case where a 13 year oldboy was raped in prison and the IDF labelle dthe group trying to document and report it a terrorist organization?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnH61RvX-VQ&ab_channel=Daizy...

Sounds a bit ad-hominem

I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm stating that the israeli position requires being absolutely obtuse and deflective for every shred of evidence that comes their way.

to be clear, no one is here to defend Hammas. I just don't think the IDF is any better.

case in point, they shot the three shirtless israeli hostages because they thought they were palestinians? so its perfectly fine to shoot unarmed people basicly?

tety
2 replies
6h5m

ok so a large human rights group calling it apartheid isn't enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFjbnvkmQ0&ab_channel=Amnes...

Although this is a common perception, just the fact a human rights group declares something doesn't make it so. I have to remind you that you live in a world where the UN Human Rights council chair is a country where they publicly hang gay people on cranes and rapes women in prisons.

Case in point, Lebanon is a country where you cannot become president by law if you're not born from a specific Christian sect. This is a country where ethnic discrimination is codified into laws (and of course Palestinians don't have voting rights). This is closer to what you deem apartheid, yet Amnesty did not make a fancy video about that.

or the case where a 13 year oldboy was raped in prison and the IDF labelle dthe group trying to document and report it a terrorist organization?

I'm sorry, I completely believe you it happened, however this is missing tons of context. Raped by whom? Was this case brought to a court? Do you believe the rape was state sanctioned? What were the charges which caused the IDF to declare it a terrorist organization? For example there were many situations where these organizations were money laundering fronts for Hamas.

And if the answers to all these questions is 'because Israel only does evil things and nothing is ever rational or a mistake or an individual wrong', what are you trying to prove and how does that relate to being an apartheid state

I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm stating that the israeli position requires being absolutely obtuse and deflective for every shred of evidence that comes their way.

I don't think this is the case any more than criticizing one side for not being compatible with your values while completely ignoring the different side of the coin.

case in point, they shot the three shirtless israeli hostages because they thought they were palestinians? so its perfectly fine to shoot unarmed people basicly?

It's an obvious blunder, but I think to be fair you have to know a lot more about the situation than we both know. One explanation is these soldiers were trigger happy and wanting revenge, and another explanation is that they misidentified them as armed or there was a failure of communication. There's a reason why it's called 'the fog of war'

cultofmetatron
1 replies
4h59m

Although this is a common perception, just the fact a human rights group declares something doesn't make it so.

ok so I guess amnesty international isn't a good source on if something is an apartheid by your logic?

Case in point, Lebanon is a country where you cannot become president by law if you're not born from a specific Christian sect. This is a country where ethnic discrimination is codified into laws (and of course Palestinians don't have voting rights). This is closer to what you deem apartheid, yet Amnesty did not make a fancy video about that.

fair point. on the other hand, my tax dollars aren't' funding that discrimination. wheres my tax dollars ARE paying for the palestinian genocide. and yes, 15000 dead with the majority of them being under 18 is genocide. There's enough names to put up a large monument.

I'm sorry, I completely believe you it happened, however this is missing tons of context.

the video I linked explains a good chunk of the context. it was compelling enough for the US state department to take the allegations seriously and forward the information to the israeli government. their response was to confiscate the computers and classify the the reporting party as a terrorist organization.

FOG of war? they were shirtless and loudly screaming in hebrew as confirmed by many sources. at the very least they could have been apprehended. It was considered a mistake only in that they weren't' palestinians. I haven't' even mentioned the number of journalist "accidentally killed." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V4zG_UkIdc&ab_channel=Middl...)

I mean... this is all pretty damning.

you call it circumstantial and anecdotal but there's a LOT of it. They've even gone so far as to label literal children of holocaust survivors "antisemitic" for speaking out against this genocide. (google it)

I know I probably won't be able to change your mind no matter what I show you. but there are very real reasons antizionism is growing in the world. The only solution that doesn't make israel evil will be to grant palestinians citizenship and equality under the law and let them live in israel alongside jews. abandon this whole ethnostate garbage.

tety
0 replies
4h20m

Generally I'll disengage as we're going in circles. But I'll say this, if you want to claim Israel is an 'apartheid state' or that a 'systematic extermination' is going on, you can't treat these as truisms and expect everyone to follow along.

You need to assert your claims and be ready to defend them, "Amnesty said so" is not enough to define a government system, and I heard it somewhere in youtube is not enough to declare genocide.

The conflict is extremely complex and nuanced just as the rest of the world is. People sometimes use this conflict as a way to flatly project their Good vs Evil binary attitudes, please try to embrace complexity.

lelanthran
1 replies
4h49m

Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.

Any reason other than hyperbole that you consider Israel to be an apartheid state, as compared to the rest of the Arab countries?

throw310822
0 replies
4h7m

It's absolutely pointless for us to discuss once again why Israel is considered to be practicing apartheid. It has been established by the major human rights organisations: among which Amnesty International, Human Right Watch, and in Israel, B'Tselem. That's all we need to know, if you don't agree contest those and their findings- which you can consult online.

mongol
3 replies
10h16m

No not neccessarily. There are many examples of peoples who have wished their lands to become liberated from current rulers. I am for example thinking of Finland or the Baltics. It wasn't hateful of them to wish for that, and I never heard anyone even express that idea. There are ways to express hate, but this is not one of them.

Zetobal
1 replies
7h14m

What do you mean it was not hateful? War is not hateful?

mongol
0 replies
15m

It is about as hateful as zionism is hateful. It is an expression for the desire of land in this region.

baobabKoodaa
0 replies
7h54m

The difference between Finland liberating from Russian rule vs Palestina liberating from Israel rule (geographically the whole of Israel "from the river to the sea") is that there weren't a huge amount of Russians living in Finland when Finland was liberated. But for Palestine there is. What is your solution to the "jewish problem", and is it a final solution? Please do elaborate how your genocide does not violate those content rules and guidelines.

terminous
0 replies
3h29m

On its own, "from the river to the sea" is just a description of a geographic area. It is equivalent to a bounded GIS grid. It is not a complete sentence. There is no verb.

I wish for a future where there is peace and love, with no violence, from the river to the sea. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, have full human rights under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, are enthusiastic users of GNU/Linux and the worst conflicts are debates over text editors.

If someone uses "from the river to the sea" in a sentence where they call for genocide, then what would make that sentence wrong is the verb phrase calling for genocide.

tarunupaday
0 replies
10h28m

no i do not. as an example, it’s okay for a native american to argue that usa (my country) should not exist as long as that person is not advocating physical violence to do so.

slim
12 replies
15h9m

removal of content is really like 10% of the cases. the most worrisome type of suppression of speech is what they call "shadow banning" which is really "reach limiting". to the extent people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms. I experienced this myself. We have a draft law in parliament concerning boyocott of israel. I posted a status about the law (notice it's unrelated to war or anything in the news rights now) and it got almost zero reach. it's not subtil. It's like two orders of magnitude less reach. I know it because I'm a political activist and I always comment on draft laws.

mgraczyk
6 replies
11h45m

From my first hand experience designing these algorithms at Meta and running experiments, and listening to feedback from accounts, I would guess that you are not getting reach because your followers do not interact with what you post. In almost every case people call "shadow ban", the cause was occasionally an actual bug (code doing something undesired and unexpected) or far more often people posting bad content.

The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

selcuka
2 replies
11h10m

The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

This is a very simplistic explanation. If the GP is a political activist and "always comments on draft laws", I would expect their followers to be willing to engage with political content.

uoaei
1 replies
10h46m

It would explain a lot about how Meta operates that the engineers don't factor things like this in.

mgraczyk
0 replies
2h30m

We did, they do. When I was there people did "calibration studies" for certain sensitive categories to understand and fix any model biases that would rank content higher for undesirable or unexpected reasons.

Joeri
1 replies
10h3m

I feel a deep discomfort with algorithms optimizing for “engaging” content like this. It feels to me like a form of algorithmic brainwashing, capturing people in filter bubbles. I would prefer it if there were laws against platforms making visibility decisions for the user. If people choose to be in a bubble, that’s a form of personal freedom, if an unknowable algorithm chooses for them, not so much.

mgraczyk
0 replies
2h28m

Most people on Meta's product follow too many accounts to see everything everyone posts. In an alternate reality where ranking is illegal, the game would be different and worse. Accounts would just repost the same content over and over every few minutes to stay at the top of the feed, or some other strategy to get distribution.

slim
0 replies
3h42m

Well, it does not make sense because : 1- I know the baseline of interactions I get usually 2- it's not something that happened to my account specifically, it's everybody, including community managers, for whom posting content is a monetizable skill, who resort to obfuscation when they use the word "Palestine".

two_in_one
1 replies
11h43m

people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms

It wasn't algorithm, or glitch, or bug. It was a decision made by humans, including you know who. It's a form of crowd control. That's why it's important to have several channels for 'producers'. For others it's a good idea to have several sources. You'll see much more even if each source represents a single side (which is usually the case, 'democracies' are no different).

mgraczyk
0 replies
2h32m

It's difficult for anyone who doesn't work there to know, but I would guess based on what I know of how ranking decisions are made that you are mistaken. For example I worked there prior to the 2020 election and on Instagram there was no specific ranking rule of any kind related to keywords like that, and no intentional bias to push up one side or another in any way, outside of ads and government officials.

strken
1 replies
11h17m

I wonder if the word Palestine (and potentially also Israel) trips some ML systems up. I put "Palestinian values" into a random sentiment analysis tool and it's ranked lower than most other countries. They'd both be (understandably) linked to negative content.

mgraczyk
0 replies
2h27m

Yes that's definitely possible. It's the sort of thing that Meta has teams to try to avoid, but in fast moving information landscapes it's sometimes difficult to keep up.

nox100
0 replies
11h26m

I posted 2 things recently. One was link to a game, another to an anime (neither related in any way shape or form to wars nor any news or politics what-so-ever. I got zero responses, not even likes/hearts/laughs. So I assumed FB decided not to show them to any of my friends. "Zero reach".

How do you know the reason for your reason for zero reach is any different than mine? I assumed Meta's algo decided none of my friends would be interested in what I posted, not that I was being censored.

They did respond to my next 2 posts so no idea the difference.

abeppu
11 replies
15h43m

Looking at the actual report, I really disagree with your assessment. It sounds like there's a bunch of nonsense in there where Meta is _not_ living up to its own policies, and is flagging stuff disingenuously.

Human Rights Watch also found repeated inaccurate application of the “adult nudity and sexual activity” policy for content related to Palestine. In every one of the cases, we reviewed where this policy was invoked, the content included images of dead Palestinians over ruins in Gaza that were clothed, not naked. For example, multiple users reported their Instagram stories being removed under this policy when they posted the same image of a Palestinian father in Gaza who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who was also killed.

... so no nudity, no sexual activity

For example, a Facebook user post that said, “How can anyone justify supporting the killing of babies and innocent civilians…” was removed under Community Standards on “bullying and harassment.” Another user posted an image on Instagram of a dead child in a hospital in Gaza with the comment, “Israel bombs the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City killing over 500…” which was removed under Community Guidelines on “violence and incitement.”

... arguing _against_ violence is flagged as harassment. Image and statement about Israeli action flagged as incitement

In one case, an Instagram user received a warning that the comment she posted “may be hurtful to others.” The comment, which Human Rights Watch reviewed, consisted of nothing more than a series of Palestinian flag emojis.[77] In other cases, Meta hid the Palestinian flag from comment sections or removed it on the basis that it “harasses, targets, or shames others.”[78]

...that's just kinda indefensible.

Many users reported posts on Instagram being removed when they criticized the Israeli government, including the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how nuanced or careful their posts were. Meta removed these posts under its “Dangerous Organizations or Individuals” and hate speech rules, respectively.

... which is crazy since there have been plenty of reasons to criticize Netanyahu well before the Oct 7 attacks.

On the topic of "From the river to the sea", they specifically mention that posts with this phrase, as well as others

such as “Free Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “Stop the Genocide,” were repeatedly removed by Instagram and Facebook under “spam” Community Guidelines or Standards without appearing to take into account the context of these comments.

I.e. Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

As for the "is considered hateful by many", that's true, but is also subjective, and very tangled given that prominent Israeli conservatives have used very similar phrasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Simi...

If someone actually praising the Oct 7 attacks or something gets flagged/banned/etc, then sure, Meta is just applying its policies. That does not seem to be what's happening here. It's true that the report doesn't give numbers for these specific treatments, and the authors have a limited and biased view based on who responded to their call for evidence. But the limited view doesn't seem to be of Meta even-handedly and competently applying their policies.

_However_, I don't want to attribute everything to malice where incompetence may be at least a partial explanation. If motivated 3rd parties are repeatedly flagging a photo of a clothed, dead Palestinian as "nudity", and Meta's systems are built with the assumption that such user-provided flags are presumed trustworthy, then we could easily see how someone posting that photo would get incorrectly/inappropriately flagged.

reissbaker
8 replies
12h38m

I think without actual access to the material it's pretty hard to say. For example, the report highlights that someone commented with nothing but a series of Palestinian flags to someone's post, and their comment was flagged and removed. However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse. (And these kinds of abusive comments are extremely common.)

The report also has some pretty strange language, like mentioning that a post which was flagged for nudity contained a picture of a dead woman, and a fully-clothed man holding her body. But... There are so, so many pictures of fully-clothed, male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women they abducted and/or raped before murdering. Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed? Maybe it's just a grammatical error, but they're really light on the details, and releasing the underlying data would answer a lot of questions.

Personally I am suspicious of HRW's report, since they've been caught releasing misleading reports in the past, and the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division is a BDS activist [1]. Obviously your viewpoint may be different, but without access to the underlying information it's pretty hard to make a compelling case to either side... Which to me points to the report being more worthy of suspicion, since if it was clear-cut, they'd easily convince more people of their correctness by releasing the data.

1: https://www.ngo-monitor.org/fact-sheet-on-omar-shakirs-bds-c...

selcuka
5 replies
10h49m

This is a bit too much of reading between the lines, suspiciously so.

Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed?

It does not. This is misrepresenting what is written in the report, to say the least. There are two such examples in the report (not sure if they refer to the same image): The first one is "image of a Palestinian father in Gaza who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who was also killed" and the other one is "an image of a fully clothed man holding a girl, both deceased". Obviously in both pictures both man and the woman are dead, debunking your "male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women" theory.

However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse.

Again, this is just a guess and not factual information. In fact, the report has a link to the original source in footnote 78 (https://theintercept.com/2023/10/28/instagram-palestinian-fl...) and one of the comments Instagram has hidden was on a pro-Palestinian post:

In one, a user commented on an Instagram video of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Jordan with green, white, and black heart emojis corresponding to the colors of the Palestinian flag, along with emojis of the Moroccan and Palestinian flags.

Also:

The Intercept reviewed several hidden comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji that had no reference to Hamas or any other banned group.
reissbaker
2 replies
9h59m

You are misquoting the source — I'm not "making up things." I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis:

In another, a user posted just three Palestinian flag emojis. Another screenshot seen by The Intercept showed two hidden comments consisting only of the hashtags #Gaza, #gazaunderattack, #freepalestine, and #ceasefirenow.

The Intercept does not provide the context on the posts that the flag comments were on, or the hashtags — and visibly-Jewish people across social media have been barraged since Oct. 7th by strangers brigading their completely-unrelated posts with comments like this, and are targeted for harassment just for being Jewish; I think being suspicious of the context is fairly natural. And please refrain from personal attacks.

Re: the man holding the girl — yes, I am referring to the one in which both are deceased, but only the man is referenced as being fully-clothed; members of Hamas can be deceased too. Maybe the girl is also fully-clothed, but not releasing any of the data doesn't help build confidence.

selcuka
1 replies
6h1m

And please refrain from personal attacks.

You are right. I had already edited my post before you posted your response.

I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis

members of Hamas can be deceased too. Maybe the girl is also fully-clothed

These sound highly nitpicky and like hypotheses that are hard to justify (a Hamas terrorist raping and killing a woman, then getting killed himself and taken a picture of, while the woman is still in his arms, naked? Really?).

I think we are missing the semantics here. My points were:

- Instagram/Facebook/etc can censor comments as simple as emojis, even though they were posted as comments to pro-Palestinian stories.

- They also censor pictures for nudity, even though they are not. Note that even though the reports is ambiguous about one of such photos, it clearly says that the man and his daughter, both deceased, are fully clothed.

reissbaker
0 replies
5h49m

IDK — I just find it hard to believe that Instagram is intentionally censoring pro-Palestine posts that do not otherwise violate their policies, and the accusation is coming from an actor that is fairly biased and isn't releasing their underlying data. No doubt sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, e.g. the heart emojis — I didn't dispute those ones. But having personally seen the abuse of random Jewish accounts by people spamming Palestinian flags at strangers, I am suspicious of the cases where there isn't any context being given, especially since the source is unreliable and isn't sharing details. Same goes for photos that aren't shared.

dang
1 replies
10h42m

Please make your substantive points without swipes such as "Again, you are making up things". This is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

When someone else's information is wrong, you're of course welcome to correct it, but please do so by providing correct information and omit swipes and other flamebait, which only degrade discussion and evoke worse from others.

I know that's not easy to do when emotions are running high, but it's something we all need to work on—and it's the same for everyone, regardless of which side they're on in any conflict.

selcuka
0 replies
10h36m

Fair point, I think the latest edit is more civilised.

bjourne
1 replies
10h44m

NGO Monitor is itself not a credible source. See http://policyworkinggroup.org.il/report_en.pdf

reissbaker
0 replies
9h35m

Okay, here's the BDS movement itself quoting Omar Shakir (the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division) speaking at a SPER meeting where he promotes BDS: https://bdsmovement.net/news/divestment-debate-continues

bromuro
1 replies
3h18m

Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

Am one of those ? I always mark these as spam as I try to keep my account politics free. I have some friends that are obsessed with the Palestinian cause and there was a time this stuff would constantly appear in my feed.

abeppu
0 replies
2h42m

I think that's borderline abusive. A message is not spam just because you don't want to see it. A good faith expression of a viewpoint in an appropriate context is not spam. If Meta is doing a bad job picking stuff for your feed, flagging other people's comments or posts inappropriately is not the answer. In the same way, it would be abusive for me to flag your response just because I didn't enjoy it.

LtWorf
9 replies
11h23m

I've seen comments saying "yes please, show me more bombings, I love to see them die" not taken down, because "them" was palestinians.

I wonder how long the comment would have been up, if it was referring to the other side instead.

edit: I see from the downvotes that my experience doesn't fit your bias. Sorry people -_-

seanmcdirmid
6 replies
11h13m

Doesn’t Facebook have a report button? I’m pretty sure comments like that would be taken down if you reported them, it’s really a no brainer whatever “them” refers to.

selcuka
4 replies
11h6m

The report button is rather useless unless it's a delicate issue that Facebook wants to distance themselves from. I find it hard to believe that nobody reports such comments. Probably many people do, but they get the stock reply "this comment does not violate our community standards".

seanmcdirmid
3 replies
10h52m

I would be really really surprised if some comment so brazen wasn’t auto deleted on flagging. Saying you want someone to die is very straightforward reason to delete without much thought.

uoaei
2 replies
10h48m

So you're just going to assume the problem doesn't exist because you'd be surprised if it did? There's skepticism, and then there's sticking your head in the sand...

seanmcdirmid
1 replies
50m

You or I could run this test right now on Facebook. I suggest you just post a comment somewhere you in Facebook that you want some person or some group of people to die, it doesn’t really matter who, and measure the amount of time it takes for someone to flag it and have it deleted. This is just low hanging fruit, and completely unrelated to the immediate issue at hand.

My guess is that the original poster is leaving something out in their comment and the post wasn’t as brazen as the comment suggested.

uoaei
0 replies
44m

You're literally just living in a fantasy world. "Trust me bro" has no power compared to actual studies.

LtWorf
0 replies
10h50m

I reported them, yes. Facebook said they didn't violate policy.

krembo
1 replies
10h34m

Maybe the "them" was referred to hamas terrorists?

LtWorf
0 replies
10h31m

In the sense that every palestinian is a terrorist.

bsaul
6 replies
7h20m

yes the problem is most likely that a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some uncomprehensible reasons. Like finding them justifications, or supporting them on the ongoing war. It's pretty insane if you think about.

I remember some people in the arab world took side for ben laden on 9/11 but this time it's happening in the west too.

faeriechangling
5 replies
7h16m

I recall PLENTY of "The west deserved 9/11 due to imperialism" sentiments, although not people who actually supported Osama Bin Laden.

I see similar sentiments around this war all the time, "Israel deserved this terrorist attack due to imperialism" but again really not much actual support for Hamas.

bsaul
4 replies
7h9m

It's often accompanied by cheerful comments whenever an israeli soldier dies in gaza, killed by hamas. I think it's pretty clear those people are on the terrorists side on this war.

ethanbond
3 replies
5h37m

Like most arguments in controversial topics, there are good versions of the argument and bad ones. It behooves everyone not to use the bad arguments to outright dismiss the good ones.

bsaul
2 replies
4h8m

I agree with your point, however in this case i think it's important to pinpoint the hypocrisy of some people.

You can't blame israel for oct 7, ask them to stop their ongoing operations in gaza, not call for the release of hostages, not say a word about the women raped by hamas and gaza civilians, AND pretend to "just want to spare the civilians population". Those people are in practice siding for the hamas, even if they deny it.

ethanbond
1 replies
3h51m

At the dialogue level, I don’t think it’s practical to require people to give a full accounting of every related topic while speaking on a subject. There are infinite facts that are related to any one fact. Anyone can win any argument by including one more related fact and saying “well without stating your opinion on this I can discard your opinion on that.” We’ll all get nowhere.

At the actual substance level, I also don’t think it’s fair or honest to take “silence” on a topic as evidence of support for it.

In this particular case, I would bet fewer than 0.00001% of the people you’re arguing with are actually okay with (or supportive of) keeping hostages in Hamas’ custody or raping people. You’re battling a cartoon villain that you drew yourself.

bsaul
0 replies
33m

I think you grant protesters far too much common sense. What i'm saying isn't theoretical : as a recent example, here in paris a feminist movement protesting in support of palestinians women under bombing explicitly rejected from the march women that came to protest against the raping of israelis women ( and hostages ).

Another recent example in Paris as well is the number of people removing "free the hostages" posters in the streets.

And i won't even mention twitter..

This isn't something i've imagined, it's the sad reality. Those people are actively hostile to israelis even if that means supporting the most terrible atrocities commited by hamas.

sarafiq
4 replies
11h57m

So the phrase "from the river to the sea" is hateful to many but when it comes to disrespect Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) or Quran then it becomes freedom of speech no matter a vast majority of world population hates it. Hypocrisy to say the least!

krembo
2 replies
10h24m

Let's make it simpler- disrespect for Muhamad is a disrespect to a religion based on crusades and a prophet who is a declared pedophile according to their scripts (married and had sex with Aisha when she was 6yo). Calling "from the river to the sea" is a call for genocide of the Jewish people. So, can you pick a side already of which of the calls is legit and which not?

baobabKoodaa
1 replies
7h47m

Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad? And who's going to determine which speech is good and what's bad? It's not gonna be you, it's some bureaucrat who has a completely different idea of good and bad than you do. Why do you want that?

filoleg
0 replies
22m

Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad?

Not the person you are replying to, but I think the logic is a bit different than “is it politically good or bad.” It is more like “is this speech advocating for genocide of an ethnic group or is it just critical of/disrespectful to a religion.”

I think most people agree that those two things aren’t even close to being the same. Also, I don’t think that “talking negative about islam” has been a “politically good” thing in way over a decade.

peyton
0 replies
11h50m

Both are hateful to many and both are protected from laws by Congress. Facebook can remove whatever it wants on their platform.

bjourne
2 replies
12h48m

The problem is that the rules aren't applied fairly or evenly. See this example from twitter: https://twitter.com/PalestineNW/status/1738711045265392028

mgraczyk
0 replies
12h44m

That's Twitter, not owned by Meta

ajmurmann
0 replies
12h22m

Three of those are religions and one of those is an ethnicity as well. One of those also has seen almost constant persecution during history. It's concerning that this needs to be pointed out

rshaban
1 replies
6h14m

"Supported violence" is a wild thing to ... // Compare; at some point, I began to receive an almost unrelenting stream of advertisements for weapons, body armor, etc. Tanks, even. Crazy things. SO much violence is advertised on "Meta"; it's only... """ a specific kind of violence """ that seems to be prohibited, by Meta, namely anti-Israeli violence.

mgraczyk
0 replies
2h35m

Well no, the rule is just not what you think it is. Meta doesn't ban supporting tools that can be used for violence, Meta bans support for violent acts.

nradov
1 replies
15h52m

And yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, Meta changed their policy and made it acceptable to advocate violence against Russians.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

Personally, I oppose both Russian expansionism and the genocidal antisemitic Hamas terrorist movement, so the Meta policy aligns with my views. But I am deeply uncomfortable with having a small cabal of Silicon Valley executives define the acceptable bounds of discourse for the rest of society. It would be better if they allowed all legal content no matter how objectionable and gave individual users tools to block what they don't want to see.

singleshot_
0 replies
12h55m

If social media platforms all provided the same service, there would be only one. The way it is today, each of them makes a very specific set of editorial decisions, which is why we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gab, etc. If every network put all the power in the users' hands, the dynamics of network effects would take over and we would be left with one social network.

I'm not saying this would be worse for the users, because I agree that "allow all content + powerful filtering tools" would suit me just fine. But it's worth noting that there would be a real serious monopoly problem if there were no conscious choices to differentiate. This would conflict with your main point of friction here: that a bunch of SV nerds shouldn't get to define our Overton window. If one platform provided free speech + filters, and became the only game in town, it wouldn't be long before we were back in the situation we're in today, except the group of toxic SV billionaires running the show would be even smaller.

faeriechangling
1 replies
11h29m

I have no problem taking down "From the river to the sea" type content so long as we also take down Greater Israel type content.

danenania
0 replies
4h40m

Having social media companies attempting to guess at the intention behind ambiguous phrases seems like a bad idea.

Some people are certainly implying support for genocide when they say "from the river to the sea", while others are not. Same for "Greater Israel".

The only sane place to draw the line imo is at explicit support for hatred or violence. Even that standard can be fuzzy, but if there's a reasonable doubt about intent, I don't think we want corporations or governments making those judgments.

UrineSqueegee
50 replies
1d1h

Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian with 1 being pro-israeli. Then some of the propalestinian post will be calling for genocide or celebrating the massacre of oct 7.

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

dehrmann
26 replies
19h0m

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.

This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.

Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

calamari4065
13 replies
17h25m

People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve.

Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see".

Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always.

If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them.

It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not.

We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.

mgraczyk
10 replies
16h45m

I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.

kahnclusions
5 replies
16h20m

I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.

mgraczyk
4 replies
16h13m

That's a different argument, and not one I really care about. It's no more "addictive" than tv and way less harmful

fshr
1 replies
15h45m

To push back, it does seem like you care. You've created rationalizations and offer them up unprompted. I think most people would argue for allowing both settings and having the app default to the one the internal research found more preferable and more profitable. Not offering the setting is telling.

mgraczyk
0 replies
14h38m

I meant I don't care to argue. I've had this conversation too many times, and it does have the setting. You can Google it to figure out how to change it.

J_Shelby_J
1 replies
14h39m

I think the point is: were the experiments testing whether people said they liked X better and immediately engaged or were you testing whether or not the user felt good about the experience and wanted to come back long term.

My experience is meta prioritizes instant gratification, which yeah people and their immediate actions says they want. But also I’ve completely stopped using Facebook and instagram because it became clear it’s of limited value to me. Yeah, i might mouse over a piece of salacious content because it’s salacious. But i know it’s low value to me. And most of my peers are in the same boat.

mgraczyk
0 replies
14h36m

We ran experiments that lasted up to 5 years. People who have ranked feeds self report a better experience after using the product for years, although you have to be careful with these sorts of things because the chronological users are more likely to churn, which biases the results

ekianjo
1 replies
16h36m

20% is far from small...

mgraczyk
0 replies
14h33m

Typically less, depends on the surface.

calamari4065
1 replies
15h36m

Were you measuring what users like, or what they "engage" with?

If I see a post on mastodon, it's from someone I follow or a post that someone I follow thought was worth sharing. That's a genuine interaction between humans. I get to decide what's in my feed based on who I follow and the filters I set up. The system is designed only to connect me with people I choose to follow.

Meanwhile, an algorithmic feed with no options is designed for one thing: manipulating users to optimize "engagement". That by definition requires ignoring what users prefer. I really shouldn't have to explain that this is a bad thing.

mgraczyk
0 replies
14h33m

We ran lots of experiments, including asking people survey questions, monitoring usage, asking people offline to try both, etc

You're wrong about the design of algorithmic feeds. I worked on them, that's not how we designed them.

naravara
0 replies
15h35m

Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed.

When those were reverse chronological feeds everyone and their mother wasn’t on these sites. They were smaller groups of people who were mostly younger and the overall traffic was lower. For people who didn’t follow a bajillion people, including people they didn’t know you would feasibly reach the end of the feed. But that’s not how people use the sites anymore.

But even then, if you wanted people to actually see and respond to your posts you’d have to time out when you posted it to hit around lunchtime. No 2AM musings if you expected to have anyone see it. And good luck with having your engagement or childbirth announcements getting to people in a different time zone if your family is international.

crakhamster01
0 replies
14h55m

I don't use FB anymore, but Instagram has reverse chronological feed as an option if you want to use it. Majority of users prefer algorithmic, so that's the default, but I do tap the chronological feed every once.

mcny
4 replies
18h44m

but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice.

Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

tylerchurch
3 replies
17h24m

I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?

noitpmeder
0 replies
16h6m

... nothing?

jacoblambda
0 replies
14h29m

I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more".

Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.

j-bos
0 replies
17h3m

Not the one you're replying to but I unfollow all, but a couple people.

HashThis
1 replies
18h22m

What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.

dehrmann
0 replies
18h3m

What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other

I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.

whstl
0 replies
16h43m

"People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."

That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?

If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.

wernercd
0 replies
17h27m

"this doesn't scale" Yet it did fine for years before removing sane options.

octacat
0 replies
17h21m

Does not scale, sure, if 2 posts are from random people I am not interested in, 2 posts are ads. Repeat. That is the current feed on instagram.

jancsika
0 replies
15h44m

People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.

ignoramous
0 replies
18h12m

This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude.

You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?

rottencupcakes
17 replies
1d1h

Twitter has surprisingly become much better since Elon purchased it. The community tags are great and non-partisan, they fairly report on all inaccuracy.

Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.

brightball
10 replies
18h37m

In a 2 day span I saw George Soros and Tucker Carlson get hit by Community Notes.

Gave me some hope that Elon is serious.

dang
7 replies
17h23m

get hit by Community Notes

How does that work? can anyone post a "community note", or by what process is that decided?

sampo
3 replies
17h12m
dang
2 replies
11h11m

Thanks! But I didn't find a clear description there of how this works. What elevates an ordinary comment to a "community note" and what determines whether a "community note" stays up as a sort of verdict on the original post? This seems like a hard thing to get right at scale. If you rely on voting (i.e. likes or whatever), you'll just end up with a parallel comment system, no more authoritative than the original one. So there must be some other process deciding which proposed notes get this special status.

(Perhaps I should add: yes, I'm being lazy; no, I'm not being critical - I just want someone to explain this to me so I don't have to work to find out.)

sampo
1 replies
8h5m

Be a verified (by phone number, no need to pay) twitter user. Apply to be a Community notes contributor. Wait. If accepted, you start with 0 points. Twitter will start to show you proposed (as opposed to published) community notes. You can vote yes / no. If a note you voted yes (or no) will get enough other yes (no) votes to get published (rejected), you will get 1 point. If you voted "wrong", you will lose a point. After you have a certain number of points (I think 5), you can also write proposed notes yourself, not just vote. If your note gets rejected, you lose 5 points.

But twitter is not only counting the yes / no votes. They need people who have voted differently on some previous notes, to agree in their votes on this note, before their algorithm makes the decision to publish or reject the note.

A lot of proposed notes will never get enough votes to be decidedly published or rejected, so they will linger in the "proposed" stage forever.

dang
0 replies
20m

Thank you! That's clear and interesting.

dang
1 replies
11h7m

Thanks - it sounds from https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... (via your first link) that they have a rating system whereby community members get to vote on which notes they think are true (a.k.a. which ones they like), and some sort of reputation system to compensate for the weaknesses of relying solely on votes. Did they publish the details of these systems?

Edit: this, from https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti... (via your third link) is interesting:

Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.

Then they link to https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/div..., which expands on that. It seems they're basically trying to control for ideological perspective, i.e. to identify signal that doesn't just boil down to "I like / agree with this". I've often wondered if something like that could work.

r721
0 replies
10h39m

Did they publish the details of these systems?

I didn't look into the details myself, but there is a 24-page paper linked from this page:

Details of our methodology and past findings can be found in our paper.

https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/g...

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...

luuurker
1 replies
17h30m

Musk has criticised Community Notes a few times for calling him out.

aik
0 replies
4h0m

More often he has expressed how well it works and how great it is.

GaryNumanVevo
2 replies
19h5m

Notably, Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) was released in Jan 2021. Elon just flipped the feature flag.

peyton
1 replies
18h48m

Worth noting Birdwatch launched alongside the ability to report tweets for misinformation, a feature Elon disabled. For that reason it’s difficult to conceive of Community Notes today as a simple continuation of the Birdwatch effort.

GaryNumanVevo
0 replies
8h42m

I think he was right to disable the ability for Community Notes to actually report and remove tweets. First, it's a vector for abuse. Second, misinformation is a loaded term and having the context along side the content is more important for an informed public.

Of course anything illegal or against ToS should be removed and only be the purview of Twitter's moderation team (or what's left of it).

d3w4s9
0 replies
5h49m

I guess you haven't read any news for a while.

Advertisers are fleeing Twitter and nobody knows how much longer Twitter will exist, because, well, they don't want their ads to be displayed next to Nazi content, in any circumstances.

If you find Twitter better, good for you for swimming in that kind of content.

cmur
0 replies
18h59m

I have had the opposite experience with X, I find it hard to escape any cheap rage bait on my feed regardless of how I would tag or hide pages. It’s interesting you have this experience, though.

anigbrowl
0 replies
13h46m

Pointing out yet again that Community Notes long precedes Musk's purchase of Twitter. It got going in early 2021; I was one of the first batch to sign up for it, although I think it had been in developments for a year or so before that. January 6 rattled a lot of people at Twitter so I suspect that influenced the timing of the rollout.

Perhaps the confusion is that CN was originally called 'Birdwatch' and people don't realize they're the same thing.

wvenable
0 replies
13h39m

IMO you shouldn't censor anything.

What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.

If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.

pityJuke
0 replies
6h17m

Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian

Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.

As for Threads, both are common.

octacat
0 replies
17h23m

Even tricker that if there is not enough moderation, Apple could remove your app or some government would ban it.

lostlogin
0 replies
16h59m

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.

Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/facebook-new...

arp242
0 replies
18h31m

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.

And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?

dlubarov
21 replies
23h32m

Are you saying that changes on Israel's part could cause Hamas to stop their aggression? That seems very unlikely - Hamas doesn't even pretend to be open to peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically it would probably take generations for sentiment to change. It would be hard for Israelis to just accept that they will be attacked for generations, with increasing sophistication (mainly thanks to Iran's support), with no response.

sudosysgen
14 replies
19h3m

This is greatly complicated by the fact that Israel materially supported Hamas and saw it as useful.

Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

On the other hand, Israel is not facing good geopolitical headwinds. As Yemen demonstrated, they are extremely vulnerable to a blockade. One day, in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli. That of course doesn't justify Hamas's inhuman war crimes, but acting as if war is unprovoked is not consistent with reality - Israel has never, by the definitions in international law, stopped actively waging war against Gaza.

dlubarov
13 replies
17h49m

I agree Israel ought to be able to prevent similar ground invasions, but what about rockets?

The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.

Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

sudosysgen
12 replies
17h16m

How would guidance systems increase the destruction? If anything, history has shown that precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties - there isn't much of a point building a single precision guided missile, instead of 100 imprecise dumb rockets, when your goal is terror bombing (the calculus is slightly different for bombs, however).

Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.

Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.

dlubarov
9 replies
14h27m

precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties

Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.

anigbrowl
4 replies
13h52m

If all you have are unguided rockets, you're going to point them wherever they're most likely to hit something. If/when you have guidance systems, you can afford to be selective and concentrate on high value targets. That's how it goes in asymmetric warfare.

dlubarov
2 replies
11h45m

Given Hamas' explicit genocidal goals, I think we can expect some portion of their strikes will simply aim to maximize Jewish deaths, even as others may target specific military assets.

See for example Russia's recent Hroza strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hroza_missile_attack), which killed 59 at a memorial service. Hamas can't really do strikes like that today; they would just miss with overwhelming probability. I think that will change soon if they remain in power.

sudosysgen
1 replies
8h42m

The Iskander missile has a 1500lb warhead. Compare the number of deaths it causes to the number of deaths a single unguided Israeli bomb causes in Gaza when it hits a populated building, and you will soon realize that the guidance is not the determining factor here, it's just the mass of explosives.

mikrotikker
0 replies
5h22m

24000 bombs dropped and hamas says 20000 dead. That's less than 1 bomb per death.

cuteboy19
0 replies
10h12m

high value targets

Such as places with a lot of civilians yes

sudosysgen
3 replies
12h43m

That makes no sense. If all you had were unguided rockets, where else could you possibly aim them? There is no other target where they would have any effect at all, because all high value targets are too small to be hit a +/- 500m weapon.

If your goal was just to hit a population center, I fail to understand the point of guided rockets. Seems much more effective to just make more dumb rockets. Even compared to targets like hospitals, you'd still do more damage with more dumb rockets, especially due to saturation.

dlubarov
2 replies
11h24m

I disagree that dumb rockets are more effective. Hamas, PIJ, etc. have only managed to kill 28 after launching something like 20k dumb rockets. There are many examples of modern precision weapons causing more deaths with a single strike.

sudosysgen
1 replies
8h46m

That is mostly because the rockets are small and largely intercepted. The examples you have of modern weapons causing mass casualty events are of weapons with warheads 50+ times the size of those in a Hamas rocket, and there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities.

Also, you need compare the deaths with the number of rockets that aren't intercepted to get a baseline of effect.

dlubarov
0 replies
2h0m

ChatGPT estimates around the total warhead sizes of rockets from Gaza to Israel at around 200,000 kg. Maybe that's off but let's say 100,000 kg, and say 10,000 kg of that wasn't intercepted. Still seems like significantly more than the 500~700 kg warhead which killed 59 in Hroza, for example.

Looking at this another way, if Hamas could target things like nightclubs, wouldn't those have something like 50x the population density of the general area?

there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities

Even when fired from distances on the order of 70km (the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv)? Aircraft using dumb bombs tend to get a lot closer to their targets.

Aeolun
1 replies
16h27m

the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now

I’m fairly certain it’s more an inability to respond in any effective way.

sudosysgen
0 replies
15h7m

Hamas doesn't have an ability to respond in an effective way either, yet here we are. If anything, it's far easier to get supplies and engage in terrorism in the West Bank than it is in Gaza.

geysersam
2 replies
17h42m

would probably take generations for sentiment to change

It will likely take forever unless steps are taken to initiate a peace process.

zo1
1 replies
5h2m

Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

And honestly where tf is the UN in all of this?

zen_1
0 replies
3h51m

Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

Israel somehow managed to convince other arab states and the US to make peace after the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty incidents, I'm sure they can manage to find some equivalent forgiveness in their hearts this time around :)

At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

Logistically far more israelis have dual citizenship elsewhere than Palestnians, so perhaps they should leave instead?

ignoramous
1 replies
16h50m

Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

That was 2004. By 2017, their asks, for all intents and purposes, were the same as the PA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...

reissbaker
0 replies
8h22m

Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met. They offered only a ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders, not a permanent peace deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas

Anyway, they've shown their true colors at this point; very different statements recently:

Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-is...

dang
0 replies
10h34m

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746496, but I detached it from there, i.e. moved it to the top level, because this subthread is better than the surrounding flamewar it was in.)

londons_explore
18 replies
19h20m

One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.

At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.

For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.

krisoft
4 replies
19h4m

At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.

hx8
2 replies
17h3m

In such a situation, I foresee something more like the splitting of the Roman Empire. There's no reason to stop serving global customers just because the users are separated from HQ. Especially if the servers are already on both sides of the geo-political border.

RcouF1uZ4gsC
1 replies
12h42m

The Roman Empire split was relatively friendly. Theodosius split it between his two sons.

ithkuil
0 replies
10h27m

The Roman empire had a tradition of splitting the control of the areas between multiple people at several points starting from Diocletian's tetrarchy onward.

The last east/west split was different on that it was that last one.

In a way, you could look at the period of absolute control by a single person as an exception in Roman history.

londons_explore
0 replies
3h26m

Did many businesses stop operating in russia? Or did many of those shops/restaurants/etc physically located in Russia simply rename and continue operations independent from the parent company?

For example, Mcdonalds is now operated as Vkusno i tochka [1], and has awfully similar menu and branding to Mcdonalds.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkusno_i_tochka

NikolaNovak
4 replies
18h35m

I love, in honestly both somewhat sarcastic but mostly very real sense, that hacker news discussion of global thermonuclear war...is how to prepare your database unique ID scheme for unforeseen sharding :->

dekhn
2 replies
17h40m

"The great EU/US Spanner schism of 2032"

anigbrowl
1 replies
13h43m

METRIC WILL WIN

ithkuil
0 replies
10h35m

Little endians already won!

But beware the big endian insurgency

morkalork
0 replies
18h16m

We may be living in a radiological hellscape but at least we won't have ID collisions!

preommr
0 replies
18h13m

For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do

"Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."

owlstuffing
0 replies
18h39m

“halves”

mensetmanusman
0 replies
18h21m

Just do what everyone does to fragile egos. You show Russia and China what they believe, and you show the rest of the world something else.

fngjdflmdflg
0 replies
13h26m

Any distributed database worth its salt is already using UUIDs of some sort.

charcircuit
0 replies
17h8m

This already exists with China. You have to run a Chinese version of your infra that is separate from the global version.

anigbrowl
0 replies
13h43m

In such dire straits as you describe, companies and individuals will likely be forbidden to provide any sort of commercial services to the opposing side.

RcouF1uZ4gsC
0 replies
12h43m

I think most companies will naturally align a certain way and there won’t be a big deal compared to the actual war.

The Western companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon will all align with the US

The European companies will align with the US as well

The Chinese companies Huwaei, ByteDance, Alibaba will align with China.

8note
0 replies
17h34m

These types of things are already arriving via data sovereignty laws.

Any global business will arrive in such a war already having split businesses

ThinkBeat
18 replies
17h6m

This is something people have to relearn over and over again.

A lot of the people who are not upset with Meta limiting opinions and content related to the war in Gaza¹. Were gloating and happy when Meta limited opinions and content from right wing politicians² not so long ago.

Once you invite censorship for content you dont like, how can you expect it wont bite you in the ass later on.

This is why freedom of speech is an important principle. That overshadows how someone "feels" about speech.

Everyone is in favor of freedom of speech. ""Dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, were in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." -Noam Chomsky

Slightly related though originating from a different context.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me. —Martin Niemöller

Which in this context I use it to highlight that the protection of freedom of speech is not something you can ignore because you dont care about a topic. One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited. If we dont, then it becomes a bit more limited, and a little bit more, and eventually it will strike upon something you do care about, and it is far too late to speak up.

¹,² For this post I am assuming this is accurate. But i cannot prove either.

Aeolun
7 replies
16h34m

I think the problem with the right wing politicians was that they were presenting their warped view of reality as fact?

canadiantim
3 replies
15h59m

That's what everyone says when they want to censor someone they don't like

Aeolun
2 replies
15h39m

I’m fairly certain this was found to be true by various sources.

Of course if you are already disinclined to accept that because it doesn’t align with your view of reality, there’s not much I can say to change it.

canadiantim
1 replies
14h59m

If you provided the sources it would help to atleast have a productive discussion of the merits of that point of view. Without the sources it just sounds like you don't like right-wing politicians.

Aeolun
0 replies
11h12m

While that is true, I have found that quoting sources doesn’t particularly help unless people are already inclined to believe me, so it just wastes my time to find them every time.

Might be cynical, but ultimately I don’t really believe I can change any minds just with a comment. If you ask why I make the comment in the first place then, that’s a good question.

fourseventy
2 replies
16h29m

As if the left wing politicians dont also present warped facts.

kahnclusions
0 replies
16h2m

Not to the same degree or extent… the departure from reality and rejection of any facts they don’t like, rejection of scientific thinking, is waaaaay way more of a right wing problem.

Aeolun
0 replies
15h36m

Left wing politicians have the tendency to overstate things, but (in my experience) they don’t often make up things altogether.

Something about the idealism required to be a left wing politician in this political climate?

sam0x17
2 replies
12h15m

I used to believe this, but the sad reality of modern society is that the current "meta" is suppressing viewpoints that damage society from your point of view, and if you decide not to play the meta by, say, opting for carte blanche free speech, others who have damaging views that actively harm your position will embrace this "meta" instead and YOUR views will eventually be suppressed (see Karens flooding local school boards to get basic LGBT literature banned, who have no problem being hypocritical about the fact that they just want to censor things they disagree with but will leave literal Nazi literature alone). It's an arms race of who can control the dialogue and get their views in front of the most eyeballs, unfortunately, and if you fail to see it that way, you will lose.

In the face of fascism, restraint in the name of principles make you weaker than the fascist.

ThinkBeat
1 replies
4h50m

The sad reality of modern society is that the current "meta" is suppressing viewpoints that damage society from your point of view,

My viewpoint is freedom of speech regardless of my opinion of it, or yours.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell

If you decide not to play the meta by, say, opting for carte blanche free speech, others who have damaging views that actively harm your position will embrace this "meta"

My viewpoint is freedom of speech regardless of my opinion of it, or yours. If people express viewpoints I do not agree with I will fight for their right to say it. That is what freedom of speech means.

Which is why ACLU defended a Nazi group´s right to protest.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” ― S.G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

I dont care who is doing the burning, nor why they are doing it. People burning or banning books is the antithesis of freedom of speech. Something I clearly reject.

. It's an arms race of who can control the dialogue and get their views in front of the most eyeballs, unfortunately, and if you fail to see it that way, you will lose. In the face of fascism, restraint in the name of principles make you weaker than the fascist.

You appear to advocate that your opinion of the world must be the true opinion, and thus, needs to be enforced and dissent silenced lest our nation becomes "facist"¹

This means that you become the arbiter of what is truth and what is not. What is harmfull or not. Or yu delegate this ot the state, or to private corporations or all of the above. That is the definition of an autocracy in my opinion.

You would probably be more comfortable in Saudi Arabia where dissent is dealt with in a proactive manner.

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.” -- Oscar Wilde

¹ https://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

dotandgtfo
0 replies
3h16m

The position you have about this topic serves the status quo of corporations and advertisers deciding on what speech is acceptable. That is the status quo today with the major tech platforms. Personally I find it detestable. And you'd find your viewpoints a bit extreme in countries around the world. Nazi speech in Germany is banned for a good reason and is popular with the populace.

And sharing quotes by long dead authors is hardly relevant to the systems we've built today which reward inflammatory speech for the sake of monetizing eyeballs. Personally I find that more dystopian than setting some rules for engagement about how you discuss sensitive topics, like we have here on HN. But that's expensive to do so these platforms just deplatform such content no matter how inflammatory or neutrally it is presented.

chiefalchemist
2 replies
16h9m

Freedom of speech is drastically compromised when there's a lower and lower ceiling of freedom of thought. Meta or any platform limiting speech is a 2x "win" because it also limits further proliferation of such ideas.

That is, people can't think what they aren't aware of. People can't change their minds when the alternatives are limited.

paulmd
1 replies
14h41m

Even here there are some thoughts you are not allowed to voice. And I’m not just talking about violence/etc but calling out ideas too vigorously etc will get you censored here too. “Flamewar style” is the trope used to justify it.

and in general this site also has a massive trend of people who are losing a debate leaning in to rules-lawyering as a means of suppressing disagreement etc.

“sorry sir you’re not allowed to mention that they didn’t read the literally-one-line parent comment and are replying to the exact opposite of the argument it’s making! Flagged my good sir, this is a forum for civil debate!

A truly open and free debate includes the freedom to point out that the moon is not made of cheese and in fact I do think less of you for arguing that it is. But that’s back to the “flamewar style”. In reality not everyone is engaging in good faith or isn’t just part of some shitty bandwagon/etc and banning the ability to call that out just lowers the debate, because now it becomes a deliberate strategy that is formed by the rules themselves. Gameplaying rules-lawyering maximalists will ruin anything.

at some level, anti-censorship and curation are fundamentally opposed goals. You can’t have a high level of discourse and also be covering 101-level or incoherent arguments. And attempting to do so produces a false equivalence which results in worse outcomes for truth-seeking. The moon is not made of green cheese and it’s a waste of everyone’s time to rebut that in every single thread, against someone who doesn’t want to admit that it’s an incoherent position.

torton
0 replies
11h48m

and in general this site also has a massive trend of people who are losing a debate leaning in to rules-lawyering as a means of suppressing disagreement etc.

Is this specific to or more prevalent on this site though? Seems like common human/business behaviour. If you can’t win on merit, win on technicality, etc.

nradov
1 replies
16h2m

I agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that Congress should consider extending common carrier rules to large social media platforms and force them to carry all legal content. This would in a sense be a form of "compelled speech" in that those companies would have to expend resources to distribute communicates that their management finds objectionable, but at scale the marginal costs would be virtually zero. And they would still be able to give individual users the tools to filter out or block content that they don't want to see.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

eviks
0 replies
10h57m

At scale the marginal cost would be the platform losing users to smaller platforms with less compelled garbage

And at another scale another cost would be that you're compelled to say something you find objectionable

echelon
0 replies
16h33m

"Freedom of speech for me, not for thee."

Those at both sides of the political horseshoe [1] want it this way, and do not believe the pendulum will swing out of their favor.

The best way to enshrine this in society is with new legislation to protect our means of communication (won't happen) or robust P2P social protocols (also probably won't happen).

Remember that the ACLU used to defend everyone. Even distasteful groups such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, Nation of Islam, NAMBLA, Westboro Baptist Church. And that's what it takes to defend free speech. Defending even the speech and the people you don't like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

abeppu
0 replies
16h19m

While I agree that one's views on censorship should not be based on whether one agrees or disagrees with the views presently impacted, I don't think your comparisons are reasonable for multiple reasons:

- Stalin and Hitler were _state_ censorship, where the state itself (and its heavy-handed use of force) were used to silence dissent. Meta is not a state, and Meta is not itself using force.

- When Niemöller says "they came for ...", he doesn't mean shadow-banning social media accounts. Silencing accounts on social media isn't _nothing_ but it's also definitely not equivalent to being sent to a prison camp.

- I think there is a legitimate broader question about what "censorship" should mean when talking about companies whose products involve communication. A requirement that user-provided messages should have equal reach irrespective of what they're saying seems to is in tension with the firm having its own freedom to not put certain things on their screens, on pages with their branding.

One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited.

- I also think there's a legitimate question of whether people have a right to spread false information, including deliberate misinformation, irrespective of the platform. Claims that a chemical is medically effective in treating a specific disease need to be backed by clinical evidence. Intentionally lying to harm someone's reputation is defamation. "Censorship" in the form of "you can't criticize The Party" or "you can't publish that novel with its dangerous ideas" seems pretty different from "you can't say that your horse drug treats covid". Perhaps all viewpoints should have the same freedoms of expression, but we don't get to have our own facts. One can have principled reasons for believing that not all speech should be equally free.

cthaeh
17 replies
1d

Can someone explain how every single post about Palestine/Israel is flagged and removed the instant it hits front page?

I have seen this with around 4-5 threads personally and who knows how many I missed

dang
13 replies
19h25m

Users are flagging them. I don't think it's hard to understand why: it's a divisive and flameprone topic.

Two positions that people urge us to take (different people, obviously) are (1) treat it as off topic and flag everything; or (2) have no limits, which means letting it dominate the front page. Neither of these positions are viable for HN. For reasons why I say that, see past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... - these are general explanations, not specifically about Gaza, but they apply to that also.

HN has had at least two major related threads so far:

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1309 comments)

Here are some explanations I posted the last time this question of flags came up, in case helpful at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527

Obviously we want commenters to have thoughtful, respectful, open conversation with each other rather than just fighting a war on HN. Equally obviously, it's pretty hard to avoid the latter. These things can only be 'graded on a curve', i.e. moderation has to shift somewhat, relative to the topic - not to do that would be expecting people not to be human, which is a losing proposition. But that does not mean the rules somehow switch off. Accounts that break the HN guidelines egregiously (such as by getting aggressive or posting in the flamewar style) are going to get warned and/or banned, regardless of who they're battling for or against. More than that, I'm not sure what we can do.

user982
8 replies
18h37m

Have you noticed any patterns or organization in the flagging and voting of this subject, or does it all look organic?

dang
6 replies
17h31m

I haven't looked closely, but based on what I have looked at, plus prior experience, I believe that flags of this kind are a coalition between two subgroups of user: those who dislike the content of an article for political or ideological reasons, and those who are more concerned about the content being bad for HN (e.g. because they're worried about flamewars).

arp242
5 replies
16h59m

because they're worried about flamewars

Huh? I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

I wish HN was more granular about measures for users, e.g. by marking these highly contested topics and just giving people topic-bans. Some people just completely lose their shit, and then other people lose their shit in response, and these people post a million messages by the time the rest of us managed to actually read the article and perhaps some relevant background info. It just craps up everything.

That's what Wikipedia does. Works reasonably well.

Of course it'd have to be programmed.

oefrha
4 replies
15h59m

I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

What? Do you have showdead on?

I flagged this one, because “discussions” on this topic are mostly hot garbage, they are dominated by extremely motivated people shitting canned flamebait all over the place, especially early on. Indeed by the time I saw and flagged this there were already like four or five people doing exactly that, and by keeping it up, more of this type of users are invited. They are largely flagged by now, leaving an entire page of flagged stuff and more interwoven in the somewhat visible page; must be one of, if not the lowest signal-to-flag stories on HN. I can only see like 20% of 352 comments so far without showdead.

arp242
3 replies
8h43m

What? Do you have showdead on?

I was joking – "woosh" as I believe the kids say.

And this is why I'd be in favour of a "topic ban".

rightbyte
2 replies
8h28m

The problem with topics bans is that you can sabotage topics you don't like to silence them. E.g. Rust evangelicals could have been silenced quite easely by flame baiting their posts.

arp242
1 replies
8h14m

Some people really don't need a whole lot of baiting; for example there's a top-level comment that reads (entire comment): "'peaceful support of Palestine'", without condemning Hamas is still pro-Hamas action in this case."

Never mind the stuff that's just outright beyond the pale.

So we can start with that.

rightbyte
0 replies
3h39m

Just some blend war mongerer trying make us choose side between Netanyahu and Hamas, pretending those are the options. Or what is your analysis?

morkalork
0 replies
18h15m

What if it was organic? It would suck wouldn't it eh?

verse
1 replies
15h32m

posting in the flamewar style

What is the flamewar style?

dotnet00
0 replies
13h56m

Presumably aggrssively calling people names, spamming the replies with insults and trying to provoke others into an argument without actually expressing any ideas.

cratermoon
0 replies
18h1m

Thank you dang for allowing this discussion. Our profession needs to wrestle with issues like this openly, and do so in a respectful way in the spirit of John Milton and John Stewart Mill.

anigbrowl
0 replies
13h22m

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

I posted that one, and while it went somewhat well by the standards of such a controversial topic, it was still contentious and had a lot of bad feeling. I submitted it because there was a nexus to both the dynamics of influence operations and individual movers and shakes in the SV community.

In general I think submitting on a topic like this requires some sort of hacker-specific angle - involving people in the industry, or the impact of technological change, or a new dynamic emerging from some unexpected source (eg cheap consumer-tech drones in the Ukraine conflict).

It's not that other topics shouldn't be discussed on HN, anything sufficiently unusual to be news cn be worth a look. But we should also be mindful that if the community can't provide more than baseline insight/expertise on a trending news topic, the resulting discussion will probably be shallow and have little value.

quitit
0 replies
4h11m

Possibly due to the topic attracting emotional, inflammatory responses rather than an objective, on-topic discussion.

Some people can't resist and have to turn every thread into a battlefield as if this achieves something on the ground. (Often citing the exact same disinformation that has been propagating across social media.)

cultofmetatron
0 replies
12h2m

I've also had my por palestinian posts flagged. the really insane thing is I never call for violence and every assertion I make about human rights violations I make gets backed up with a link to a documentary or news story. I even tryto avoid using aljezeera as a my lone source. Over the last to months I've spent a lot of time researching teh history of the conflict and it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.

asylteltine
0 replies
16h15m

Because it doesn’t belong here and it’s inflammatory. Also most articles are heavily biased but claim not to be. For example, they trust numbers given by an internationally recognized terrorist organization. But tell me again how it’s not biased.

whats_a_quasar
11 replies
1d

This post was flagged, but I don't think it should have been and I hope it stays up. I have been grateful that HN hasn't had the same level of animosity about the conflict in Gaza as other places on the internet. But this news article is about a core issue in tech, and should be discussed on HN. The whole world now uses social media to communicate, which means that when there's a war, partisans of both sides will be motivated to fight out the propaganda war on the platforms that tech built.

I wonder if there will ever be a way for a global-sized platform which uses algorithmic content feeds to convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this. The HRW report has 1,000 examples of peaceful pro-Palestinian content that was removed by Meta. But only Meta themselves has the information to know whether there is systematic bias. So we get a situation where people sympathetic to both sides both come away feeling that the platform is biased. I think the U.S. culture war has similar dynamics.

My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions. Maybe statistics on deleted posts, more legible moderation rules, publicly posted justifications for moderation decisions. Another part of my brain thinks that maybe this is just an unsolvable problem for social reasons in a community that's global-scale. I'm not sure. I do feel like this is still Meta's job, part of their cost of doing business, and if they put something like 5% of their revenue into moderation the situation would be a lot better.

In the meantime I find myself personally trying to cut out as many algorithmic feeds as I can from my life. I prefer the curation of a news website or podcast, small group discussions, or 1:1 communication with people I trust. Algorithmic feeds are easy but so far have never done a good job covering issues where there is real conflict between two groups.

bitwize
6 replies
19h0m

My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Visibility into moderation decisions makes them more gameable/exploitable/circumventable. The whole purpose of moderation is to remove unwanted speech; justifying the fairness of such removal is only secondary, and can be elided if it interferes with the primary goal.

Hence "You have been banned because your posts violate our Terms of Service" messages with no further explanation, and things like shadowbanning. It sucks to be on the receiving end of these things but they make online communities much more pleasant.

infotainment
2 replies
17h12m

Exactly; consider the "censorship" that everyone generally agrees with, spam filtering. If the precise nature of the spam filter is known (keyword lists, etc), then it becomes much easier to design emails that avoid being filtered.

fulafel
1 replies
9h31m

Spam filtering is the opposite problem of people trying to communicate their views on mass killings of civilians in an important respect: In the case of spam, you don't want the spammers to reformulate their message to get past the filters. In the case of mass killings, you do want to allow the social media users to tone down their writing.

infotainment
0 replies
5h41m

Sounds good in theory, but in practice I think you’d ultimately just incentive the kind of behaviors you already see on TikTok: users would just add asterisks to filtered words, instead of changing anything of substance.

anigbrowl
2 replies
13h31m

This is basically an argument for getting rid of laws and ruling by fiat, with a judicial process that amounts to repeating 'you know what you did' whether or not that is honest.

moqmar
0 replies
9h35m

Communities are moderated based on how good you feel there, if it's the most ad-friendly, how good everyone stays on-topic, or other mostly social & subjective criteria. Judicial systems aren't about any of those things.

ImHereToVote
0 replies
10h57m

If I have a boot on my throat, it better be privately owned.

throwaway55479
1 replies
23h29m

That is "the beauty" of this conflict (if something this heinous could ever have a beautiful side): It poses many interesting technical challenges. But, quite understandably, people everywhere (including HN) are fast to move the "warring" right onto our screens (hence the flagging).

So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].

I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].

Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673300

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_occupations

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/which-countries-receive-...

nomdep
0 replies
18h9m

PS: For many (myself included), Christmas is about loving your family and not “the birth of Jesus Christ”, even if their mothers see it that way

heresie-dabord
0 replies
4h58m

this news article is about a core issue in tech

I agree. Let's assume that a Social-Media Business (SMBiz) gains sufficient value from hosting topical discussion to want to continue. But there is cost, reputational risk, and lawyers are expensive. How can SMBiz effectively moderate a conversation/debate/flamewar about a controversial event or subject, especially when the SMbiz wants to maximise user engagement while respecting laws and government requests?

Like it or not, that's the business reality. People who want a truly neutral discussion platform that operates with transnational freedom and total personal freedom will find that their ideals alone are not enough to sustain the business.

Prior Art: People often say that HN's Dang and Slashdot's moderation system are the best examples of "effective moderation" that we know. If the moderation is effective, it means SMBiz is attentive to topics and comments and discussion is insightful and interesting; it isn't overwhelmed by frivolity, falsehoods, defamation, and death threats (FFDDs). If the job is done well, SMBiz may even receive accolades. See Reddit's recent experience with its moderators for a negative example.

Here are some of the rules that will need to be applied, in stochastic FIFO order. Items are lettered for reference.

a= At all times, keep a clear eye on the business equation. Effective moderation will have a significant cost. At any scale!

b= Seed the discussion with verified accounts/users. Reputation must be earned and maintained. See Prior Art.

c= Rate limiting, especially for controversial topics. No short, stupid Reddit posts. People must weigh their words. Sometimes, the microphone must be disabled.

d= No flamewars, no propaganda, no falsehoods. See Prior Art. Lock any discussion that achieves high FFDDs. Throw away accounts, ban offenders. Make it sting.

e= No anonymity unless a verified account/user has sufficient reputation to post in anonymous mode. But it costs in ReputationCoin.

f= No bots, no bridages. See Prior Art to estimate workload and infrastructure.

g= Enable and reward trusted moderators. See Prior Art.

= = = Final Notes

My engineer brain wants to solve this

I get that you are very interested in the Moderation Problem, but I think this wording wins no support. Backers will say that you are way out of your social depth, and people in the debate will dismiss your intent as naivety or bike-shedding (frivolous or misplaced optimisation) or a combination of the two.

One important reason why HN succeeds because Dan G (who is indeed attentive, and principled) rejects the most ungovernable type of conversation: flamewars.

convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this

There is no neutrality, of course. SMBiz can state its bias and interests clearly. But it will be hard to make a profit from achieving neutrality because strident factions in polarised debate do not want neutrality.

gumballindie
0 replies
17h22m

My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Politics are not an engineer’s job, nor is content moderation.

orenlindsey
11 replies
18h50m

Censorship has been done to both people with right-wing views and left-wing views. It's not a question of if it's been done.

We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.

boston_clone
9 replies
18h39m

I'm not sure it's correct to classify this particular instance as either left- or right-wing; additionally, misinformation should be censored.

From the article: >Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam

This issue seems almost parallel to the paradox of tolerance in that algorithms which promote content at a global scale - largely without human oversight - should not be unregulated.

It is factual to say that human rights violations are occurring in Palestine. It is also factual to say that people have a right to defend themselves, and to recognize that atrocities are atrocious. But to silence the already-oppressed furthers oppression, and Meta is to blame here, again.

We should also consider the potential implications that Meta, with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, has in regard to US foreign policy vis-a-vis support of Israel.

orenlindsey
4 replies
16h37m

Supporting Palestine is generally a left-wing view (proof: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/07/11/american-views...).

So Meta is censoring a mostly left-wing viewpoint.

boston_clone
3 replies
14h47m

What you've cited is US-centric; it's both reductive and fallacious to categorize this as left- or right-wing, when again, the article states that this phenomenon was observed in more than 60 countries.

Perhaps where you're located it is a predominately left-wing viewpoint, but the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.

The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid being a US right-wing viewpoint is somewhat unsurprising, though.

SgtBastard
1 replies
7h4m

"the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.

The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid..."

The "rest of the world" in general supports a ceasefire in the Gaza strip as evidenced by recent UN votes.

I'm not aware of any Anglosphere, European or Asian nation describing Israel's actions as either war-crimes or perpetuating apartheid.

While I'm happy to be corrected with sources - conflating the two seems like both a extreme reach and needlessly political.

boston_clone
0 replies
2h23m

The majority of the UN has consistently recognized and attempted to resolve what Israel is doing, as evidenced by their voting history in the years (decades?) prior to the events of the last few months.

For your situational awareness, sarge - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes

Don’t just downvote; lmk what you think!

baobabKoodaa
0 replies
6h41m

It's not accurate to say that the non U.S. world largely supports Palestine in this conflict. At least the EU seems to lean more towards Israel support.

rightbyte
2 replies
6h50m

misinformation should be censored.

This is such a fallacy. When the ones in power don't allign with your view, your view will be "missinformation".

The Vietnam war, Iraq war all got started on made up missinformation. Guess what kind of "missinformation" any laws about it would target?

boston_clone
1 replies
2h32m

How is it a fallacy? I mean misinformation by definition; you’re correct that power structures may distort truth to achieve an objective, and that’s not good - that’s the prima facie misinformation I’m talking about here.

I agree it would have been better if news outlets like the NYT didn’t regurgitate things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as factual, but that will happen when the intelligence community is embedded at said news organizations.

rightbyte
0 replies
1h26m

The fallacy is that there will be no objective classification of what is considered misinformation. Rather, it will be arbitrary. So you can't censor misinformation. You will censor information.

logicchains
0 replies
10h18m

misinformation should be censored.

Misinformation is just information that people in power don't want people knowing.

RangerScience
0 replies
18h48m

There’s a good piece from someone (formerly?) at Reddit about how to do moderation without consideration if content; I’m not expressing a take either way behind it being worth a look.

mc32
11 replies
1d1h

What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

The fact is people are unprincipled and will either complain about free speech or will clamor for it, or complain about censorship or clamor for it depending on point of view.

I wish people were principled and stood on principle and not what dog they have in a fight.

djohnston
2 replies
1d1h

Yep, everyone is full of shit and self interested. Accepting that makes it easy to tune out weak rhetoric from all sides.

g8oz
1 replies
1d1h

You could try paying attention to human rights reports instead of assuming a false equivalence.

djohnston
0 replies
1d

You submit to weak rhetoric from one side.

CM30
2 replies
1d1h

Sadly I agree with this. It seems like the best summary of how most people treat free speech is basically:

"If my side is the underdog, talk about how important it is and complain that we're being censored, and if my side is winning, talk about how it's not necessary and those people can go elsewhere"

It was extremely obvious when Twitter was bought by Musk and the rules changed to favour far right wing content and rhetoric. Suddenly all the folks talking about that XKDC comic and no free speech on a private platform had a very different tune once their side was the one getting banned or censored there...

If you disagree with how a platform is run, go somewhere else.

zen928
1 replies
19h26m

I agree that it's sad you agree with this.

ipaddr
0 replies
17h56m

No matter what people say it's a private company and they can censor or use your data anyway they wish. If you don't like it go elsewhere.

I hate that idea but I accept it. If I didn't accept this then I am in favor of random political entities dictating what is accept content.

JoshTriplett
1 replies
17h15m

What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

Yes, and it's absolutely still their platform and their rules. And people also have every right to criticize that platform and its rules, as they're doing. What Meta is doing is wrong, but it should emphatically not be illegal.

cscurmudgeon
0 replies
15h1m

What Meta is doing is wrong

The very first example in the report is "river to the sea" which is arguably a dog whistle for genocide. Parts of liberal Europe have banned this slogan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Lega...

whats_a_quasar
0 replies
1d

The platforms are large enough now that there is a public interest in the moderation decisions that they make. Like a utility or a mail carrier or an internet service provider, if you reach a certain size in an industry that tends towards a natural monopoly, then the public has an interest in regulating your behavior towards neutrality.

Tadpole9181
0 replies
1d1h

The vast majority of people are principled on outcomes, not the details of how to get there.

So when aiding in an attempted coup or a coordinated effort to manipulate votes to subvert democratic institutions, their principles are focused on stopping that from happening. But we simultaneously admire the founding fathers - who committed a coup and massaged democracy to embed their own power and ideals. And it's regularly asked (though less commonly with time) why Germans didn't just "kill Hitler", by people who would call the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appalling. Because it aligns with their principles for the outcome of "a better world for people", which is what they actually care about.

Being dogmatic on the implementation details is important as a preventative measure for abuse by bad actors later, mostly. But forgetting that the end goal is a more just world is just as deadly, because it can let institutions be warped and abused, even if they technically don't break "principles". Plus, I think the last 100 years have made it fairly clear that the real threats and tyrant don't care, they'll just break your principled rules and just... Do it?

Anyway, I find it curious that you call "being against an active genocide of a race of people, the murder of innocent women and children in their open-air prison" a simple "dog in the fight". As if stopping thousands of deaths isn't worth breaking a principle or two? Now I don't know enough about the situation to say that's what's happening or not, but that's what these people are the very least feel. Try to use that perspective when engaging the discussion.

Chris2048
0 replies
19h25m

Their platform, their rules?

This works at a national level too: "our country, our rules (laws)"

And FB and the like have been found to break a number of laws in the past: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/12-billion-euro-fine-f...

Perhaps alternative planforms would have a better chance if FB played fair?

rightbyte
7 replies
17h41m

It boils down to the algorithmic feed, where Zuckerberg decides what the users see and not the users. Old Facebook didn't have that problem, where there more or less was a chronological order of friends' post. That systems also did not have any problem with "troll farms" (do those even exist, anyway?) since those could not reach you in the first place.

On places like Reddit, I get this feeling that some bot network control most subs. It seems to be major manipulation of down votes and upvotes. The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

hipadev23
5 replies
16h35m

The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

I think it’s identical here on HN. Upvoting, downvoting, and using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion. I think it’s just the topic du jour on HN is less escalated (usually opinions of tech choices) so it doesn’t seem as extreme.

Der_Einzige
1 replies
7h27m

I’ve had my spicy posts get downvoted within 10 seconds of me making the post. Impossible for that to always be organic. Glad others observe this here. Dang will of course deny this happens, but it is happening for sure.

defrost
0 replies
7h17m

Most spicy comments get rapid downvotes, and it's organic.

I know mine do.

Long time HN readers frequently load https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments to see where the interesting conversations are happening right now .. and they pretty much all reflexively downvote comments that appear to be rude or attacking other users directly rather than discussing their positions.

smt88
0 replies
10h59m

using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion

I've had showdead turned on for years and have rarely seen contrary opinions flagged, if ever.

The main things I see flagged are personal attacks, open bigotry, flaming, etc. Occasionally I used to see anti-CCP comments flagged, but I haven't seen that in a while. I'd be interested to see some examples where you think something was unjustly flagged.

rightbyte
0 replies
9h35m

It is not as bad on HN. I mean, we disagree right now, right?

It is not about technical topics but about the persons. HN got better discussion climate about the Israel-Hamas war too, then say Reddit.

On some half-obvious corporate shill post I've gotten some 'unfair' (according to me) grey out down votes for being critical, where it was obvious that none but shills would care enough to downvote. So the problem do exist, but it ain't too bad.

Reddit is a whole other league of bad.

paulmd
0 replies
14h45m

Be sure to turn on showdead, it absolutely should be enabled with the amount of suppression and brigading and rules-lawyering that takes place

octacat
0 replies
17h16m

In the incoming world of AI generated garbage content, Meta decided to kill feeds from your friends and pages you follow. That is "great" strategic planning.

jules-jules
7 replies
22h6m

Absolute joke that posts like these are flagged to death on here. I thought this place was trying to be a little different.

CommanderData
3 replies
18h26m

There was a post upvoted highly at the beginning of this current war, by scholar opinions about the situation in Palestine but it was removed completely, not just flagged or deleted. But full removal which I've not observed before on HN.

It was something like this https://opiniojuris.org/2023/10/18/public-statement-scholars...

HN claims they are different but they sensor more than Reddit, where at least have to be astroturfed with a majority.

dang
2 replies
10h24m

Barring some rare bug, I can say for sure that didn't happen. Posts on HN are never removed completely, except in cases when the person who posted it asks us to, and even then usually only if there weren't replies. Other than that, the most that happens is that a post gets killed, a.k.a. [dead] status, and any user who reads HN with the 'showdead' setting turned on in their profile can see those.

I'd like to know which HN post you're talking about, so I can say exactly what happened. Whatever post it was, it wasn't from the site opiniojuris.org. The most recent HN submission from that site was 10 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=opiniojuris.org

CommanderData
1 replies
9h7m

I respect that you've commented. It was something I upvoted. I checked through my upvoted submissions at the time and could no longer find it which was a first for me as either would expect it to have been flagged or deleted but shown.

I remember being a little shocked when it was on the front page and shortly after was not. I've checked again from <4 months. Wonder if anyone else can recall the URL - I just remember it was a collective scholarly opinion with condemnation on the situation, it may not have been from opinionjuris but the article was very similar.

dang
0 replies
19m

I wonder if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38036236? You'd need to turn showdead on in your profile to see that one.

I'm pretty sure that the code that decides whether or not to display a [dead] post doesn't consider whether the user had upvoted the post before it became [dead]. Maybe it would be better if it did.

hutzlibu
2 replies
21h8m

Maybe because the discussion is not of very high quality? Look how many downvotes there are already, it is an emotional topic and yes, even here people are having problems with maintaining a civil debate about a controversial topic. And others don't want all that flame war here, so they flag it, simple as that.

Chris2048
1 replies
15h35m

The mechanism of downvoting is supposed to remove low quality posts. If someone if uncivil, downvote or flag them. Soon enough they'll get the hint or be warned.

others don't want all that flame war here

That doesn't make sense. If you don't want to participate, then ignore the post. actively preventing others participating is something else - I think "censor" is more appropriate in that case.

hutzlibu
0 replies
8h0m

Well, the space on the front page is limited. And there are lots of other controversial topics - potentially taking all the space.

And some want only technical topics or mainly technical. So "curating" is more appropriate I think.

(But personally I did participate ... so much that I am rate limited again)

bawolff
4 replies
15h49m

Kind of a click-bait headline.

To quote the actual report: "This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship."

They asked people to self-report instances. There is probably selection bias (maybe they advertised only to the pro-palestian crowd. Maybe the israeli crowd thinks HRW is biased and didn't want to engage. Maybe something else). There is probably also base rate falacy involved which isn't accounted for.

This just isnt the right type of study to determine if meta has a bias in censorship.

nosefurhairdo
1 replies
15h32m

The paragraph in question:

Human Rights Watch solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoint related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 cases documented involved examples of online censorship and suppression of content in support of Palestine, while one case contained an example of removal of content in support of Israel.[2] This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship.

So HRW may as well not have looked at the other side of the issue. They also complained that Meta's policies are informed by the United States' designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

zer0zzz
0 replies
14h0m

I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

Bingo.

kar5pt
1 replies
14h8m

HRW has a reputation for being biased against Israel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Wa... . Regardless of whether that's true, it could explain why pro-Israel folks wouldn't want to engage with them.

havelhovel
0 replies
1h38m

I think this report actually demonstrates the anti-Israel bias HRW has been accused of. HRW points to the 9,500 content takedown requests that Israel has made as one of "four underlying, systemic factors that contributed to the [pro-Palestine] censorship." But knowing that a single Reddit post can receive more than 9,500 comments within a day[1], and that some percentage of the takedown requests likely relate to posts that threaten operational secrecy or the right to privacy of victimized Israelis, leads me to the exact opposite conclusion: that Israel's takedown requests are neither intended to censor pro-Palestine voices nor, if that were the intent, large enough in number to have an impact. Since the report provides no context for the numbers it reports makes me think the authors are more interested in pushing the idea that Israel controls the online narrative than they are in understanding what is actually happening on these platforms.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/top/?sort=top&t=year

perfectritone
3 replies
1d1h

At the beginning of the conflict I noticed my feed was fully leaning towards supporting Israel, even if it was only the posts of 3 people. Somehow the 30+ people demanding the stop to the bombing of civilians didn't really start appearing until late November.

They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.

sgregnt
2 replies
16h51m

"At the beginning of the conflict..."

Tostino
1 replies
11h55m

Yes... You had plenty of people saying "this is going to be your own version of Afghanistan/Iraq if you decide to do what you want to do..."

Israel wanted revenge, not a solution. Their strategy has guaranteed that there will be another cycle of violence as the kids that grew up seeing their parents blown up in airstrikes are understandably going to be ripe for recruiting into whatever organization steps into power in place of Hamas.

mrpopo
0 replies
10h44m

It's simply their strategy, really. Turning Palestinians desperate so they turn to violence ("terrorism"), in order to justify turning their territory into even more of a shit hole, so Palestinians who can't take it anymore will emigrate, until the "problem" is gone.

cf1241290841
3 replies
16h20m

I believe its relevant to mention that this doesnt have to be ill intent on part of Meta. Israeli intelligence is spending a lot of resources on influencing narratives. Its not surprising that this would include exploiting and influencing moderation. And its not like social media sites figured out perfect moderation yet, they are an easy target for such determined influences.

underdeserver
2 replies
11h7m

Israeli intelligence is likely spending virtually no resources at all on influencing narratives. And if they are, they are failing spectacularly.

More likely, the ministry of the exterior, the IDF spokesperson office, and civilian operations are trying to influence narratives.

From what I can tell these other efforts are not doing so well either.

cf1241290841
1 replies
8h27m

I think you are wrong on both parts.

Cognitive / Narrative warfare has become part of standard doctrine for most major militaries.

Earlier discussion about "corporate" spin offs from the intelligence sector. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803779

Looking how many countries backed the current Israeli government for how long despite targeting the civilian population, as well as stuff like OP on most major platforms they seem to be horrifically effective.

underdeserver
0 replies
3h53m

Hyperlocal public opinion bot campaigns in third world countries are different from swaying public opinion in the west.

I would not say any governments other than the US government "back" the Israeli government. The most the Israelis get is a cold neutrality, and an occasional abstention instead of yea vote in the many UN general assembly votes against Israel.

trhway
2 replies
16h55m

May it be that Meta is just doing it job by weeding out fakes? Most of the pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian propaganda that I saw contradicts the facts to say the least (or in the best case is only single-sourced with the source being either Hamas itself or a cozy affiliate of a Hamas like those Gaza offices of UN agencies).

Btw, Meta is outlawed (declared "extremist", it is somewhat like "material supporter of terrorism" status in US) in Russia for refusing to bend to Russian authorities and to carry only official Russian, completely false, propaganda.

LtWorf
1 replies
9h36m

It might be that outside of your circles, people do have different opinions, without them being bots.

Last elections fb was spamming me with trump propaganda. I don't know anyone who voted for trump, for the simple reason that I don't live in USA. And yet I still got the propaganda… I understand the russians might not want USA propaganda and might want their own instead.

trhway
0 replies
9h29m

I'm not talking about opinions. I'm taking about propaganda and facts which that propaganda contradicts. For illustration, I've just posted an example of such propaganda and the facts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882

kar5pt
2 replies
14h3m

Their methodology seems really flawed. They cherry picked a thousand instances of wrongly removed content, but how many posts do you think there are about the conflict on Facebook and Instagram? Tens of millions? They have no way of knowing how representative that sample is.

underdeserver
0 replies
11h10m

Exactly. Whatever your opinions on Israel and Gaza, putting out a report so cherry-picked on such a small, unrepresentative sample only serves to show HRW's biases.

havelhovel
0 replies
2h58m

Human Rights Watch published a call for evidence of online censorship…from the main Human Rights Watch accounts on Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and TikTok.

I don’t see how HRW can post this in good conscience without acknowledging the huge potential for voluntary response bias in this survey. Pro-Israel voices have been skeptical of HRW’s perceived Anti-Israel bias[1] for over a decade. They are not going to be following or engaging with HRW accounts, and their voices are most likely fewer in number overall[2]. The fact that 1,049 of the 1,050 comments submitted for HRW’s review were Pro-Palestine should be a red flag, not the core piece of evidence.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204619004574318...

[2] https://wpde.com/amp/news/nation-world/support-for-palestine...

23B1
2 replies
17h8m

People still use Facebook?

ignoramous
0 replies
16h44m

Instagram, yes. Some billion of them, I'd hazard a guess.

b0ner_t0ner
0 replies
16h37m

(Depending on your country) Whatsapp has Channels, some of those news channels' views are completely one-sided.

zawaideh
1 replies
17h25m

Hashtags like #GazaStarving got banned on Instagram for no reason. Yea there is bad censorship.

taskforcegemini
0 replies
4h20m

are the pictures of the hostages being removed for no reason?

wslh
1 replies
17h35m

On another news, the UN, which is a political international organization, and not a company or an "app", have a large blind spot for many attrocities around the world.

It is important to criticize those apps but most important to look at the reality you really face, like "Denmark and Germany arrest terror suspects planning attacks in Europe" [1].

Also, you can follow by the HRW 2023 report [2]. I think they forgot to put an executive summary that gives you a quick glance around the world. [3] helps.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2023/12/14/denmark-...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023

[3] https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2023/01/World%...

karim79
0 replies
16h0m

Whataboutism[0] at its finest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

mathgradthrow
1 replies
13h6m

I have a suspicion that this article is vaguely a response to the previous report that TikTok overwhelmingly censors content in accordance with China's official position.

kredd
0 replies
11h8m

That entire report was very weird as they compared some uploaded videos with specific hashtags on TikTok vs Instagram. I just don’t understand how that methodology can fly when TikTok is banned in some places, while IG is banned in different ones. So obviously you’ll get stuff anout Hong Kong protests on IG, but not on TikTok since it’s not available in Hong Kong.

There’s also no reliable way of finding where the data is being uploaded from, so huge bot-farms in India wouldn’t push much in TikTok either, cause again, it’s banned there. As much as I hate TT/IG, we shouldn’t try to prove our point with extremely unreliable studies.

yolkedgeek
0 replies
11h1m

Meta is as rigged and rotten as it gets. I live in Iran and whenever I have posted something political (not just rants, something serious) or any serious about the gov, it always got taken down. During the Woman,Life,Freedom movement everybody reported how instagram would take down important rebel news and posts and journalisms. you would think meta would work against something like the Islamic republic but it seems like it love all corrupt dictator governments. Let it be Islamic republic or Israel.

Thank god I have left all meta platforms for about 3 years now. But anyone who claims Meta is not pure evil is either evil themself or really really stupid.

xenospn
0 replies
16h3m

Odd. When I open instagram reels all I see are pro-Palestinian posts, including the now intolerable “threads” box. I doubt that report is accurate.

welzel
0 replies
3h13m

Sometimes i feel that reporters should be needed to add a basic statistical analysis before they are allowed to claim something like censorship.

How much content is posted every day on meta? How many content removal decisions are taken every day by meta?

Hint: Over 1 billion Stories are posted every day.

So even if 1049 content removals would happen on a single day - but this "evidence" is collected over a much longer time period.

You have to read about HRW and its campaign against Israel to maybe understand why HRW continue to post this type of propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc...

The guardian did a very bad job at picking up this biased content.

psyman
0 replies
17h53m

Not only Meta, but Reddit, Google as well

oglop
0 replies
11h25m

This comment section is a blast.

Btw, just saying “this phrase is considered hateful by many” is inane. Many people find many things hateful but they don’t get the same weird instant “you bigot!” label as some of what I see directed towards Palestinian supporters. It’s nuts.

I have no dog in the fight. Just giving some useless anecdotes for people to get angry over.

But also, 1000 is not that many in the grand scheme of things like Meta said.

gumballindie
0 replies
17h24m

I have nearly no followers on Threads and follow only 2-3 people yet somehow I am bombarded with pro palestine content on the odd occasion i open it. I somehow doubt the guardian is right on this one. This “newspaper” is known to gave all sorts of dubious agendas.

dventimi
0 replies
17h24m
ChatGTP
0 replies
6h53m

Hamas is a terrorist organization, apparently backed by Iran, and are constantly spreading misinformation online, this is why it's censored?

I sometimes open "The Guardian" and the amount of times they quote "The Gaza Health Ministry", which would be no more trust worthy than the North Korean or Chinese health ministry, is fucking ridiculous.

If people thought about thing more critically then we wouldn't have to sensor everything but people don't they eat it up, and get all conspiratorial.

On the other hand, I think Meta have built a shit product that requires an insane level of censoring to keep even remotely civil. Unfortunately this flawed product has dire impacts on democratic societies.