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.
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?
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
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.
Jews aren't treated worst than others in Muslim countries by these standards. They don't treat Hindus and Shintoism better.
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
Proof?
The Holocaust
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.
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?
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.
"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
This is after colonization
Are you sure? Here is a direct quote:
Seems quite pre-“colonialization”, assuming we count establishment of Israel as the startng point for that.
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…
Where are there thriving jewish communities in the middle east now?
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?
Never got that one. Nothing like the flag of a breakaway state founded to preserve chattel slavery as a symbol of… anti-authoritarianism?
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps for exactly the same reason Russian passport holders aren't welcome in a lot of places?
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
Yes, "liberation" of the land currently occupied by jews. Just need to find a solution for them. Preferrably something final.
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.
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)
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.
Don't you really understand why it's an hateful speech when you wish my country stop to exists?
Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.
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
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.
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.
you see enough annectodatal evidence and it starts to become a pattern
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
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.
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.
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
Sounds a bit ad-hominem
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)
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'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.
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...
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?
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.
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 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.
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'
ok so I guess amnesty international isn't a good source on if something is an apartheid by your logic?
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.
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.
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.
Any reason other than hyperbole that you consider Israel to be an apartheid state, as compared to the rest of the Arab countries?
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.
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.
What do you mean it was not hateful? War is not hateful?
It is about as hateful as zionism is hateful. It is an expression for the desire of land in this region.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would explain a lot about how Meta operates that the engineers don't factor things like this in.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... so no nudity, no sexual activity
... arguing _against_ violence is flagged as harassment. Image and statement about Israeli action flagged as incitement
...that's just kinda indefensible.
... 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
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.
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...
This is a bit too much of reading between the lines, suspiciously so.
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.
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:
Also:
You are misquoting the source — I'm not "making up things." I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis:
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.
You are right. I had already edited my post before you posted your response.
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.
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.
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.
Fair point, I think the latest edit is more civilised.
NGO Monitor is itself not a credible source. See http://policyworkinggroup.org.il/report_en.pdf
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
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.
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.
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 -_-
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.
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".
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.
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...
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.
You're literally just living in a fantasy world. "Trust me bro" has no power compared to actual studies.
I reported them, yes. Facebook said they didn't violate policy.
Maybe the "them" was referred to hamas terrorists?
In the sense that every palestinian is a terrorist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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?
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.
Both are hateful to many and both are protected from laws by Congress. Facebook can remove whatever it wants on their platform.
The problem is that the rules aren't applied fairly or evenly. See this example from twitter: https://twitter.com/PalestineNW/status/1738711045265392028
That's Twitter, not owned by Meta
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.