Facebook 'blocks accounts' of Palestinian journalists | Hacker News Reader

Facebook 'blocks accounts' of Palestinian journalists

aljazeera.com

89 pointsbjourne20 comments

That's a nice site your have there Mr Zuckerberg it would be a shame if something were to happen to it... Block a few "trouble makers" or risk being being blocked nationwide.

Random guess. Facebook got put in a position where if they didn't allow Israeli to close down accounts due to "incitement" they ran the risk of being labelled as an "incitement website" and having access blocked completely. So they chose what was better for their business. I don't agree with it but it's facebooks garden and they can choose who plays in it and who acts as the gatekeepers to it. Same happens on other sites. reddit block access to certain pages from Russia (though they only filter on a country wide basis and not remove content for everyone else). If Twitter thinks you are a problem (or becoming one) they will boot you off.

> though they only filter on a country wide basis and not remove content for everyone else)

And that is a very critical difference.

Censorship happens on many platforms, but when that censorship is being done to journalists the violations are particularly egregious.

And I completely agree. I don't agree with censoring journalists and when I find sites I use doing it I make a personal dicision if I want to keep using that site.

I would hate to be in this position. Do you comply and block accounts and those with a loud enough voice will shout loudly enough that they can get back in or run the risk of upsetting the people that hold the keys to your market?

What's the point of posting a 'random guess' and then writing out a conspiracy theory involving Israel and Facebook? Pure BS.

Fair point on the random guess because i'm not on the inside at FB. But FB and Israel are working together to remove incitement on FB. Gilad Erdan and Ayelet Shaked have pushed for legislation to force social networks such as FB to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement which caused the agreement to work together to remove such content.

The new modes of censorship and propaganda that are well developed in America, Germany, Israel, the UK, etc and that are maturing in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Morocco really scare me.

The reason is that unlike prior art in information warfare (altering versions of history textbooks, encyclopedias, newsprint, etc) where control for narrative and shading of facts was done on a very coarse level - the mode of surveilling social media and targetting individual news feeds and people with high connectivity and influence - is tailored and specific.

This combined with the new way that information is injested and the new ways that digital records have become an integral piece of regular thinking and problem solving make these elements of every country's information warfare programs uniquely dangerous.

These "accidents" keep happening and it should really give one pause. Personally, censorship is censorship regardless if it is a state actor or a company.

Important news, please don't flag it.

This could have been an honest mistake (IMHO highly unlikely), Israel-suggested (quite possibly), executed against policy by an internal employee with an agenda (IMHO possibly, but too easy a PR response), or is/was Facebook's official policy from management to support an Israeli agenda? (The scariest option) ... I guess we'll never know.

An awful lot of what comes out of Palestinian journalists is incitement. Is it any surprise that something is being done about it?

Boy, that's quite a loaded statement considering many Israeli politicians have also repeatedly called for the genocide of Palestinians (http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/netanyahu-palestinians-governm...). I'm quite surprised nothing is being done about that.

Shaked (an Israeli minister) posted (and thus endorsed) a text that calls for genocide.

While many Israeli politicians are terrible, I don't think that single endorsement substantiates your claim that "many Israeli politicans have repeatedly called ...". Even that single endorsement was deleted by Shaked.

If even politicians at the highest levels of government are doing it, let alone hate groups inside Israel, it doesn't help the case of Israeli objectivity.

I didn't say Israel is objective. But the parent post is taking a true point and hyperboling it into a total lie. Israel is bad enough without the lies trying to make it seem even worse -- discrediting its detractors.

Mondoweiss? That's an extremely biased source. It's propaganda, not journalism.

Yes. Namely the fact that "incitement" isn't a crime everywhere (and shouldn't be a crime anywhere), whereas apparently the retaliation for doing so is.

And by "Facebook blocks accounts" we mean:

>Editors from two Palestinian news publications based in the occupied West Bank say their Facebook accounts were suspended last week and that no reason was provided, alleging their pages may have been censored because of a recent agreement between the US social media giant and the Israeli government aimed at tackling "incitement".

Rubbish journalism: no actual causal connection between the Israeli government, Facebook, and the pages being taken down has been established. It's merely assumed to be there because al-Jazeera and its readership are predisposed to believe the nefarious tentacles of the Israeli government can reach anywhere.

"blocks" and "suspends" accounts are the same thing. Nothing you said or that the article said contradicts the headline.

To be absolutely fair, the italicised parts are important.

There is no proof, only accusation.

Edit: The article also does not prove that Facebook unblocked them (as no block was proved), nor reached out to Facebook on if they did indeed respond saying it was accidental.

Did you read the article?

Facebook replied on Saturday with an apology, saying the suspension had been "accidental".

That means it happened - Al Jazeera is one of the more reliable networks according to my journalist friends, and aren't usually known to publish something without fact checking or couching it in 'unconfirmed'.

Replied on Saturday to whom? The way I parsed that as "replied to the owners of the Facebook account", which is hearsay.

Facebook also has not published any PR statement apologizing for this, so either they are not real news agencies to begin with, or this never happened, or both.

Al Jazeera is reliable except when it comes to issues like this, they suffer from a bias from having this done to them in the past as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com