Facebook is removing opinions about Israel as being against Community Standards | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is removing opinions about Israel as being against Community Standards

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A lot of friends reported that facebook started removing their old posts in which they express opinions about (Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc). The reason given by facebook is that those posts go against the Community Standards. Here is an example : https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10219643591617501&id=1147855750&anchor_composer=false (the post and comments are in arabic, you may translate them).

I’m posting this to HN to raise the issue and get your opinions on the matter, in a time social media giants took over blogs, and became nearly the main gate to share what you think with a large audience.

Please keep the discussion civil.

View on HN

As long as we have the NAT obstacle for P2P communication, and the lack of cost-carrying identity requirements to combat spam and such, we'll be stuck with for-profit web janitors and their questionable/self-interested choices about what constitutes trash.

Tough problem! Pretty sure our friends on the west coast will find new reasons (if they haven't already) to re-intermediate IPv6, and things like IPFS don't have a strong, cost-carrying, identity feature, so there's always the worry of randos dropping immutable child porn on your server.

The internet is no longer for our own quaint musings. Back to newsletters and graffiti, peasants!

To go a bit more off-topic here, It isn't obligatory that decentralized p2p platforms manage network obstacles badly nor that you even connect to random strangers at all.

When RetroShare was still in the Debian repositories, I managed to establish fast and direct connections with my peers, and only my peers, especially after forwarding a port.

Meanwhile the (outdated) version of Syncthing in Debian only connects through a relay which limits its speed and is a problem for privacy. For chat, there is Jami (outdated, too) and Tox.

It looks like most of these problems are because of a lack of people working on them, and possibly misaligned incentives. The technical issues are secondary.

It can be done, but NAT traversal is hard, and somewhat flaky since not every firewall implements NAT exactly the same. I think Skype did NAT traversal in the early days, and eventually gave up and switched to media proxying for these reasons.

Throw in dynamic IP addresses, and it doesn't make things any easier.

Nerds can just set up DDNS and a port forward. Grandma probably can't.

Have you tried https://samy.pl/pwnat/ ?

I've implemented the same paper. It's fun, but not Grandma-ready.

Changing IPs can be dealt with network-wide DHT or a known-peer approach.

The NAT traversal shenanigans only have to be successful on one side. When the geek manages to be reachable, they can talk to their grandparent, given they use software that tries to connect them, like RetroShare.

This doesn't cover all cases, but enough to be useful and valuable.

I'd posit that the reason everything gets jammmed through HTTP/HTTPS/SMTP/POP/IMAP/DNS now is that those are the only things we can reliably get through every firewall.

Home firewalls are easy. Most already have UPNP or NAT-PMP enabled, so the app can easily poke holes--even in TCP! Corporate ones (people procrastinating at work is a fat chunk of internet traffic) will have all kinds of ad-hoc rules that struck the network guy's fancy at the time.

For a truly P2P net (grandma-to-grandma), one side isn't enough.

I can't read the post that was removed because it's in Arabic, but is it possible that it just violates the community standards? E.g. you mention Hezbollah posts as being removed; according to some (the US govt being one) Hezbollah is a terrorist orgainization and per Facebook: "We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in [terrorist] activities"

In any case, it seems like it's hard to form an opinion on it when we can't have a good idea how widespread it is, or what these messages are (other than the one you posted which I'm sure someone could translate). I would recommend getting a consensus (about what's going on) on another forum like Reddit, and then bring it to here for opinions.

I translated a couple of them:

1. Hassan Nasrallah: "Saudi Arabia asked Israel to hit Lebanon in return for paying tens of billions of dollars. This is information, not analysis."

2. Imad Akl, Ayyash, Salah Shehadeh, Rantissi, teacher Ahmed Yassin, Said Siam, Nizar Rayan, Jaabari and many others were assassinated. Has the resistance set back? I swear that did only increase the determination of its sons, they are fighting for the sake of God and for the liberation of the land and save their honor, and it doesn’t harm them martyrdom of their leaders, rather tightens their resolve and makes them stronger and stronger .. This is a great project and resistance institutions no longer stand on people no matter how painful is their loss .. Congratulations to them what they wished and that they only had to die that way.

#2 looks like it violates the content rule I posted above.

#1 would be really intersting to see good sources on. Barring that, I imagine it was removed for being "False news", another community guideline violation.

The example you give is a complaint about a removal, not the offending post itself.

The “offending” posts are in the screenshots attached to that post and some of the comments.

The problem is that most HN'ers, I would dare to guess, can't read Arabic. And since the posts in question are attached as screenshots, it's quite difficult for non-arabic speakers to translate them.

I translated a couple of them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302888

Any reason this was flagged and suddenly removed from the front page? I think the topic being related to the impact of the social media moderation, has been brought a lot of times in HN and results in many interesting and thoughtful discussions.

It's hearsay ("a lot of friends reported") and if they are removing posts/comments en masse, it appears to be explainable by anti-terrorism-guidelines, because the groups praised (in what you translated) are considered terrorist groups or affiliate with terrorists in the US/West.

There might be something there that is worth looking into, but in the current form, it's not really obvious. HN isn't really meant for outrage, "raising awareness" etc, especially when it's mostly unsubstantiated rumors; use Twitter or Reddit for that.

Analyze it thoroughly, write an article, take other explanations into consideration and explain why & how you ruled them out, and post that as a SHOW HN.

The same people--in spite of the 1st amendment--are trying (with some success!) to make it illegal for Americans to boycott or say anything critical of Israel.

If the Chinese or the Russians tried this, everyone would see it for what it is--foreign powers pulling our strings.

Since Israel is an ethno-religious state, their PR apparatus (with some success!) spins every single criticism as covert antisemitism.

see: hasbara

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