Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 903 posts

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

#471

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

londons_explore wrote: post #168

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…

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.

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

#472

Post by sudosysgen »

dlubarov wrote: post #428
sudosysgen wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> 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.

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.

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

#473

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

hx8 wrote: post #319
krisoft wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

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

#474

Post by reissbaker »

abeppu wrote: post #387
mgraczyk wrote: post #336

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 go…

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 i…

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...

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

#475

Post by ajmurmann »

bjourne wrote: post #466
mgraczyk wrote: post #336

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 go…

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

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

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

#476

Post by sam0x17 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #317

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 i…

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.

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

#477

Post by sgjohnson »

arp242 wrote: post #261
sgjohnson wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/07/1095322 https://www.humanium.org/en/south-sudan/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-57446154 https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/01/1083102 https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/06/1137237 https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/more-half-ukraines-chi... etc. etc. etc. etc. 15 seconds of internet for the first things that entered my mind. It's really not that hard. The whole business w…

> 15 seconds of internet for the first things that entered my mind. It's really not that hard.

You know full and well what I’m talking about. Virtually nobody that’s far away from those conflicts posts pro-whatever side content on their social media. Mainstream media basically doesn’t talk about any of those.

My claim was that “nobody cares”, not that “there are no articles whatsoever being written about children dying in other conflicts”.

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

#478

Post by cultofmetatron »

cthaeh wrote: post #66

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

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.

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

#479

Post by sarafiq »

mgraczyk wrote: post #336

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 go…

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!

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

#480

Post by Tostino »

sgregnt wrote: post #331
perfectritone wrote: post #38

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.

"At the beginning of the conflict..."

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.

Post reply on HN