Meta disables Jill Stein's Instagram account | Hacker News Reader

Meta disables Jill Stein's Instagram account

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31 pointshypeit19 comments

I'm not sure I understand the situation based off the linked post. I get the part that Meta won't let her create a duplicate, but what happened to her original account? Was her original account banned, or did she just lose her password or something?

It was banned: https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/1725911405243613591

To be fair, I was a Meta employee with inadvertent "duplicate" accounts, both I didn't use. One used an email domain I no longer had access to. The other worked for a bit but then instantly self-disabled when viewing 2FA options. It was eventually straightened out, but it took several tries to get it right.

Basically, if you speak up for ordinary Palestinians or criticise Israel you're shouted down as a supporter of terrorists, an anti-semite or both.

The tragedy is that Hamas is winning the perceptions war due to Israeli overreaction and the inability of the West to influence Bibi's fairly extreme right wing government which seems to be driven mostly by desperate self-preservation politics.

I really don't care for Stein's politics otherwise though.

Yep. Question the official line with nuance and be hellbanned without any recourse.

Ismail Haniyeh and Itamar Ben-Gvir are more or less the same strand of far-right hate but with different flavors of religious justifications on different sides.

Jill Stein pops up every POTUS election but without a track record of holding office anywhere besides once in Lexington, MA. I seriously doubt she's in favor of violent political extremism of either settlers or Hamas.

Someone at Meta should file an Oops because she seems an overall decent person.

Who is Jill Stein? Why should I care if she lost her Instagram account?

She's a presidential candidate for the Green party. One of the most well known non-Democrat/Republican politicians in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Stein

Stein received 1.5 million votes in the 2016 US Presidential election as the Green Party candidate, and she's running again for the Green Party nomination in 2024.

This is Jill Stein:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5a2d2l/title_jill_ste...

Jill Stein is a former presidential candidate and outspoken critic of Israel's ongoing war/genocide in Gaza. She is far from the only one having her account banned ostensibly for speaking out against the war. See https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/10/24/shadowbanning-... and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/26/pro-pales.... Regular, less high-profile users, report having their accounts meddled with for posting about Palestine. See https://twitter.com/qa_zafar/status/1725780416647299082, https://twitter.com/lowenxverity/status/1722966578411577565, and https://twitter.com/IShowSpeed_Live/status/17235893796782124....

Has she used the word, "genocide" to describe Israel's actions?

Is it forbidden to remind people that Israel has repeatedly massacred Arabs, because they're Arabs? Is it also forbidden to talk about Arabs have done the same to Jews? Is it forbidden if you mention one but not the other?

AJP founded by Noam Chomsky was muzzled by Columbia for daring not to celebrate the Likud narrative enthusiastically enough. It's moral cowardice when institutions and platforms fold to the demands of extremists who don't want free expression or demand blind allegiance.

PS: I recommend The Fateful Triangle (1999 edition) as prescient reading.

Genocide is different from killing, or even mass killing. It’s a political vision of the future where the other ethnicity simply cease to exists. Israel has 10% arab citizen living peacefully, serving in the army, being elected, and nobody wants to remove them from that land.

Compared to the arab world where not a single jew remains (or close to it).

> It’s a political vision of the future where the other ethnicity simply cease to exists

Hasn't Likud had/has an official policy of "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty"? If at the beginning, it was mostly Arab residents in the areas where there is now mostly Israelis, doesn't that count as trying to eliminate another ethnicity, from those particular areas?

The political policy of Likud has resulted in multiple massacres, across a long period of time. Even if you wouldn't call it genocide personally, is it valuable to persecute people who would call it a genocide?

you kind of mix everything up to try and build a very oriented picture of the conflict : political sovereignty of a nation over a land, consequences of the ongoing civil war between jews and arabs since the beginning of the 20th century, one particular political party’s view, etc.

the fact is israel doesn’t commit genocide, and it’s absurd to argue otherwise. It has military supremacy, and arabs demographic is so thriving that some even argue it could pose a threat to the jewish nature of israel.

What makes a genocide is all too political. The debate about Israel committing genocide is not yet settled and banning politicians from social media because they take a fairly common viewpoint is not in the spirit of free speech. It is not appropriate for Meta to take action against people who call Israel's invasion a genocide.

I don't use Instagram so I can't tell. But it wouldn't surprise me. Zionist lobbying has put tremendous pressure on the social media giants to censor pro-Palestinian speech they deem antisemitic. So thought crimes such as comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, calling for the decolonization of Palestine, describing the war as a genocide (as I did, because I think Israel is committing genocide) or even writing "from the river to the sea" might have the poster banned. Zionists have lost the ideological battle so their new strategy is to ban as much pro-Palestinian speech as possible by claiming it is antisemitic. Not unlike Israel, who is killing Palestinian journalist to prevent their narrative from reaching Westerners ears.

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