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

theguardian.com

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

#551

Post by moqmar »

anigbrowl wrote: post #454
bitwize wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 viola…

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.

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.

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

#552

Post by reissbaker »

bjourne wrote: post #519
reissbaker wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

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

#553

Post by rightbyte »

hipadev23 wrote: post #340
rightbyte wrote: post #273

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 c…

> 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.

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.

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

#554

Post by fulafel »

infotainment wrote: post #312
bitwize wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 viola…

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.

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.

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

#555

Post by trhway »

LtWorf wrote: post #550
trhway wrote: post #327

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" s…

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.

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

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

#556

Post by tety »

arnavpraneet wrote: post #538
krembo wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#557

Post by CommanderData »

dang wrote: post #535
CommanderData wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

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 whi…

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.

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

#559

Post by sudosysgen »

dlubarov wrote: post #493
sudosysgen wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 target…

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.

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.

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

#560

Post by arp242 »

oefrha wrote: post #376
arp242 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 art…

> 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…

> 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".

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