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.