Facebook’s Secret Rules on Word “Zionist” Impede Criticism of Israel
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
It's the world we live in, not the one I grew up in. We could easily put the genie back in the bottle by hosting all this stuff ourselves, and encrypting it before sending it off to our friends, and using secure operating systems. However, the social inertia means that will never happen en masse.
While there are plenty of competent conservatives, there also seem to be a lot of people whose primary motive in posting on Facebook is to “trigger the libs” and that doesn’t happen without “libs” to “trigger”
In the television industry, you've seen a massive segmentation in the news and TV channels over the years. 40 years ago, there were only a few news channels that tried to target the largest demographics possible. Because of that, they largely stayed neutral. However, market competition and other forces have led to a separation between left- and right-leaning news channels. If given the choice, people avoid information that doesn't align with their worldview.
Fast forward to now. Social media companies are anything but unbiased, enforcing a mentality of "tolerance," multiculturalism, and cultural relativism. In such an environment, pushback from people who disagree makes a lot of sense, though it isn't good.
The government of Israel should be criticized but that has nothing to do with who they are, only what they do.
The average human is a simple creature and quickly create some heuristics of the kind: "if a bunch of people from certain group is evil, then the whole group is evil".
Doesn't help that it is very hard to find neutral ground too, for example Austria was supposed to be the neutral ground for negotiations between Iran and US in the Iran vs Israel nuke conflict, then they went ahead and hoisted Israeli flags. Iran now is sending their delegation home basically.
Depending on your politics, pick your villains:
- Trump
- Bush Jr
- Putin
- Kim Jong-un
- Ayatollah Khomeini
- Obama
- Hillary Clinton
None of these people, who are considered some of the world's biggest villains by huge numbers of people, are (to my knowledge) Jewish.
See, you listed some politicians, but many "common" people don't care about these people.
People DO care about their privacy when they are using applications that literally affect the whole planet, they DO care about pedophiles living nearby (for example whoever lived near Epstein or Maxwells), people DO care about a whole economy tanking because of corrupt shenanigans (what Safra did) and so on.
Even then you are not totally wrong, a lot of people think all north koreans are evil, because of their leadership, a lot of people think all iranians are evil, because of their leadership...
Well, in USA seemly both halves of the country believe the other half is evil because they voted for Trump or Hillary.
Sorry, this is bordering on "elders of zion" garbage -- "Rothschilds" "World banking conspiracy" blah blah blah, it is a kind of dog whistling going back to the 1930s and earlier, and it's repulsive. And basically, what you just performed here is classic anti-Semitism, even if you don't recognize it.
However, unlike white supremacy, Jewish supremacy has strong non-Jewish support; from evangelical Christians in the US and many right-wing parties in Europe. To the latter group, Israel's treatment of "the Muslims" is something to be imitated in their home countries.
In a way, the war over the word Zionism is like the war over Communism in reverse. Communists had to defend or downplay the Soviet Union's human rights abuses, exactly like Zionists today defend Israel's abuses. They had to argue that Communism wasn't the same thing as the Soviet System, just like Zionists have to argue that Zionism isn't the same thing as Israel's record-breaking 50-year-old long occupation. The Communists lost the war over the word and today most Communists call themselves Socialists instead (me included). We'll see if the Zionists can defend their word better. They certainly are in a much better position to do so than the Communists ever were.
As long as corporations have the right to control what people say just because it's on their servers, and as long as they don't feel threatened by the state, this problem will persist.
We have CNN and Fox, because we want news and media through the lens of similar people politically? Why wouldn’t social media be the same in the long run?
It just moderates content posted on FB.
Platforms need to have some ability to moderate themselves, the things that are sorely lacking is due process in front of an actual court on one side, and some form of international agreement on how to deal with freedom of speech on the other side.
Just take Nazi symbols: it's perfectly legal in the US to fly a Swastika flag on your home, to take a picture of that and to post it on Twitter. In Germany, all three of these acts would be illegal per §86a StGB (with the exception if one was a journalist and tweeted that photo to publicly document this). In other countries, e.g. Russia, flying the rainbow flag may be illegal - something that is perfectly legal and mainstream in Western countries.
Porn is another thing: what is legal in the US under freedom of speech / art, may be illegal in Muslim countries. Not to mention that while porn may be legal in the US, advertisers still don't really want to have their brand appear next to fetish porn.
Should Twitter now ban such accounts worldwide, restrict the availability of the content to certain jurisdictions, should it do nothing?
These are highly relevant problems, which we need to solve as societies of this world.
So, if a country says "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary ethnostates", or even "you cannot criticize anyone who promotes exclusionary Jewish ethnostates in particular", then Facebook should ban that content on behalf of the exclusionary ethnostate supporters.
Otherwise, allow criticism of exclusionary ethnostates. White supremacy and zionism are two sides of the same coin—both feed off each other, justify each other, complement each other.
Exactly these kinds of questions are what should be regulated by international agreements between countries.
> White supremacy and zionism are two sides of the same coin—both feed off each other
What?
Anything related to Zionism, Nazi or some conspiracy theories against Israel is prohibited, but using words like Islamic extremist or Muslim terrorist are fine (even though it hurts another 1B Muslim population). Same applies to what Twitter did to pro-Trump articles/tweets. Not saying Trump is good or bad, but some people had opinion pro-Biden, others pro-Trump, but Biden got unfair advantage when Twitter started censoring pro-Trump articles.
I think this double standard is going to hurt next generations, by silencing alternative ideas/opinions. All opinions should be equal, unless it promotes danger to human life.
Please note that I am aware that the suffering of Israeli citizens under rocket fire pales in comparison to the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli air strikes. I am shaken when I feel/hear rockets exploding nearby, I cannot imagine what it must feel like to have entire buildings around you blown up and reduced to rubble. Unlike Israelis, Gazan civilians are largely defenseless, and I can only imagine how terrifying that must be. So nothing in my comment is meant to belittle their suffering and I'm not trying to score victim points in some ridiculous competition. Just clarifying the misconception that Hamas rockets are toys, give them a little more credit. Their military abilities are not nearly as advanced as Israel's but they're not nothing either.
[0] If you're in Sderot, I believe you have just 15 seconds.
The Israeli right wing wants criticism of Israel to be inseparable from criticism of Jewish people. This means you can't criticize Israel without being painted as anti-Semitic, and to be fair there are a lot ppl who criticize Israel for deeply anti-Semitic reasons.