Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims | Hacker News Reader

Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims

theguardian.com

648 pointscratermoon751 comments

Interestingly if you read the actual report from HRW, it sounds like most of the material they are referring too was legitimately taken down because it supported violence, according to Meta's policies.

For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down. In other cases the content praised attacks by Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.

From HRWs descriptions it sounds like the bulk of the "1049" content removals were clear violations of Meta's policies against support for violence.

Regardless of whether you agree, these don't seem surprising to me on light of Meta's own rules. There are of course a small number of exceptions listed.

"Supported violence" is a wild thing to ... // Compare; at some point, I began to receive an almost unrelenting stream of advertisements for weapons, body armor, etc. Tanks, even. Crazy things. SO much violence is advertised on "Meta"; it's only... """ a specific kind of violence """ that seems to be prohibited, by Meta, namely anti-Israeli violence.

Well no, the rule is just not what you think it is. Meta doesn't ban supporting tools that can be used for violence, Meta bans support for violent acts.

Looking at the actual report, I really disagree with your assessment. It sounds like there's a bunch of nonsense in there where Meta is _not_ living up to its own policies, and is flagging stuff disingenuously.

> Human Rights Watch also found repeated inaccurate application of the “adult nudity and sexual activity” policy for content related to Palestine. In every one of the cases, we reviewed where this policy was invoked, the content included images of dead Palestinians over ruins in Gaza that were clothed, not naked. For example, multiple users reported their Instagram stories being removed under this policy when they posted the same image of a Palestinian father in Gaza who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who was also killed.

... so no nudity, no sexual activity

> For example, a Facebook user post that said, “How can anyone justify supporting the killing of babies and innocent civilians…” was removed under Community Standards on “bullying and harassment.” Another user posted an image on Instagram of a dead child in a hospital in Gaza with the comment, “Israel bombs the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City killing over 500…” which was removed under Community Guidelines on “violence and incitement.”

... arguing _against_ violence is flagged as harassment. Image and statement about Israeli action flagged as incitement

> In one case, an Instagram user received a warning that the comment she posted “may be hurtful to others.” The comment, which Human Rights Watch reviewed, consisted of nothing more than a series of Palestinian flag emojis.[77] In other cases, Meta hid the Palestinian flag from comment sections or removed it on the basis that it “harasses, targets, or shames others.”[78]

...that's just kinda indefensible.

> Many users reported posts on Instagram being removed when they criticized the Israeli government, including the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how nuanced or careful their posts were. Meta removed these posts under its “Dangerous Organizations or Individuals” and hate speech rules, respectively.

... which is crazy since there have been plenty of reasons to criticize Netanyahu well before the Oct 7 attacks.

On the topic of "From the river to the sea", they specifically mention that posts with this phrase, as well as others

> such as “Free Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “Stop the Genocide,” were repeatedly removed by Instagram and Facebook under “spam” Community Guidelines or Standards without appearing to take into account the context of these comments.

I.e. Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

As for the "is considered hateful by many", that's true, but is also subjective, and very tangled given that prominent Israeli conservatives have used very similar phrasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Simi...

If someone actually praising the Oct 7 attacks or something gets flagged/banned/etc, then sure, Meta is just applying its policies. That does not seem to be what's happening here. It's true that the report doesn't give numbers for these specific treatments, and the authors have a limited and biased view based on who responded to their call for evidence. But the limited view doesn't seem to be of Meta even-handedly and competently applying their policies.

_However_, I don't want to attribute everything to malice where incompetence may be at least a partial explanation. If motivated 3rd parties are repeatedly flagging a photo of a clothed, dead Palestinian as "nudity", and Meta's systems are built with the assumption that such user-provided flags are presumed trustworthy, then we could easily see how someone posting that photo would get incorrectly/inappropriately flagged.

> Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

Am one of those ? I always mark these as spam as I try to keep my account politics free. I have some friends that are obsessed with the Palestinian cause and there was a time this stuff would constantly appear in my feed.

I think that's borderline abusive. A message is not spam just because you don't want to see it. A good faith expression of a viewpoint in an appropriate context is not spam. If Meta is doing a bad job picking stuff for your feed, flagging other people's comments or posts inappropriately is not the answer. In the same way, it would be abusive for me to flag your response just because I didn't enjoy it.

Is that not the actual definition of spam? Unwanted solicitation? Why would it matter what the content of the message is?

I think without actual access to the material it's pretty hard to say. For example, the report highlights that someone commented with nothing but a series of Palestinian flags to someone's post, and their comment was flagged and removed. However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse. (And these kinds of abusive comments are extremely common.)

The report also has some pretty strange language, like mentioning that a post which was flagged for nudity contained a picture of a dead woman, and a fully-clothed man holding her body. But... There are so, so many pictures of fully-clothed, male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women they abducted and/or raped before murdering. Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed? Maybe it's just a grammatical error, but they're really light on the details, and releasing the underlying data would answer a lot of questions.

Personally I am suspicious of HRW's report, since they've been caught releasing misleading reports in the past, and the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division is a BDS activist [1]. Obviously your viewpoint may be different, but without access to the underlying information it's pretty hard to make a compelling case to either side... Which to me points to the report being more worthy of suspicion, since if it was clear-cut, they'd easily convince more people of their correctness by releasing the data.

1: https://www.ngo-monitor.org/fact-sheet-on-omar-shakirs-bds-c...

This is a bit too much of reading between the lines, suspiciously so.

> Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed?

It does not. This is misrepresenting what is written in the report, to say the least. There are two such examples in the report (not sure if they refer to the same image): The first one is "image of a Palestinian father in Gaza who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who was also killed" and the other one is "an image of a fully clothed man holding a girl, both deceased". Obviously in both pictures both man and the woman are dead, debunking your "male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women" theory.

> However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse.

Again, this is just a guess and not factual information. In fact, the report has a link to the original source in footnote 78 (https://theintercept.com/2023/10/28/instagram-palestinian-fl...) and one of the comments Instagram has hidden was on a pro-Palestinian post:

> In one, a user commented on an Instagram video of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Jordan with green, white, and black heart emojis corresponding to the colors of the Palestinian flag, along with emojis of the Moroccan and Palestinian flags.

Also:

> The Intercept reviewed several hidden comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji that had no reference to Hamas or any other banned group.

Please make your substantive points without swipes such as "Again, you are making up things". This is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

When someone else's information is wrong, you're of course welcome to correct it, but please do so by providing correct information and omit swipes and other flamebait, which only degrade discussion and evoke worse from others.

I know that's not easy to do when emotions are running high, but it's something we all need to work on—and it's the same for everyone, regardless of which side they're on in any conflict.

You are misquoting the source — I'm not "making up things." I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis:

> In another, a user posted just three Palestinian flag emojis. Another screenshot seen by The Intercept showed two hidden comments consisting only of the hashtags #Gaza, #gazaunderattack, #freepalestine, and #ceasefirenow.

The Intercept does not provide the context on the posts that the flag comments were on, or the hashtags — and visibly-Jewish people across social media have been barraged since Oct. 7th by strangers brigading their completely-unrelated posts with comments like this, and are targeted for harassment just for being Jewish; I think being suspicious of the context is fairly natural. And please refrain from personal attacks.

Re: the man holding the girl — yes, I am referring to the one in which both are deceased, but only the man is referenced as being fully-clothed; members of Hamas can be deceased too. Maybe the girl is also fully-clothed, but not releasing any of the data doesn't help build confidence.

Regarding nudity, here is a tweet from Palestinian journalist MoTaz showing how photos of wounded Palestinians are incorrectly labelled as nudity: https://twitter.com/VyprCEO/status/1739180449295913096

Thanks for the source.

To be honest, anybody professionally well versed in the question of apartheid and human's right would be in favor of a BDS campaign against an apartheid state.

NGO Monitor is itself not a credible source. See http://policyworkinggroup.org.il/report_en.pdf

Okay, here's the BDS movement itself quoting Omar Shakir (the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division) speaking at a SPER meeting where he promotes BDS: https://bdsmovement.net/news/divestment-debate-continues

Seems you haven't read the actual report, HRW clearly points inconsistencies in the application of Meta's policies that amounts to censorship of any support to Palestine.

I've seen reports of hate speech in Hebrew getting a pass while Arabic users are having rules enforced in an overly broad way. Regardless of your views on the conflict, it is a bit chilling that a massive corporation is now the arbiter of speech for much of the internet now.

The irony of banning the phrase, "From the river to the sea" is that in almost every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall that show Israel extending from the river to the sea.[0]

Greater Israel, extending from the river to the sea, with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

0. This is a typical map. The only indication that there is any Palestinian territory at all is that the tiny "Area A" regions are in a different color. East Jerusalem and the vast majority of the West Bank are simply shown as belonging to Israel. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9fb3beb756529713386cc...

Furthermore, a soverign Israel "from the river to the sea" was a founding tenet of Israel's Likud party, of which Netanyahu is a member.

It is no longer an explicit goal of Likud.

Furthermore, the Israeli flag itself is the Star of David (representing Israeli land) between two blue lines which are the river and the sea. It has always been Israel’s slogan and aim, “from the river to the sea”.

It's a principle of the ruling coalition (of which Likud is the leading party), and Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that he will never allow any Palestinian state between the river and the sea.

Can you as well describe and remind us how logo of PLO looks today ?

You can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

> Greater Israel, extending from the river to the sea, with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" in a nutshell

The "stupid game" was the British Empire gifting Palestine to a group of people who didn't even live there?

> with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

Remind me, what was it that happened 56 years ago?

Israel launched what it said was a preemptive strike [0] against Egypt, destroying virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Lacking air cover, Egyptian ground forces in the Sinai peninsula retreated, but were destroyed by the Israeli air force on the roads.

Not having a clear picture of what was going on [1], the Jordanians and Syrians entered the war on Egypt's side, only to suffer a similar fate as Egypt.

Israel ended up conquering the Sinai peninsula, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

It's hotly debated whether the war really was a preemptive strike to head off an impending Arab invasion, or whether it was a war of aggression by Israel.

In any case, as a consequence of the war, millions of Palestinians came under Israeli rule. The Israelis were faced with a conundrum: they wanted to keep the land (especially the West Bank and East Jerusalem), but they didn't want millions more Arab citizens, who would shift the demographic balance, ending Israel as a Jewish state. That's why Israel has kept the Palestinians in limbo for more than half a century. They live under Israeli control, but they aren't Israeli citizens.

0. Israel initially claimed that it had been attacked first, but it soon admitted that it had attacked first.

1. Egyptian propaganda in the first hours claimed that Egypt had scored major victories.

I don't think it's very hotly debated at all. There seems to be a consensus that whether they were right to be so concerned or not, Israel's motives in preempting Egypt were about security, not territorial expansion. Before the war, Egypt administered Gaza but did not claim it (Palestinians needed something like passports to transit between Gaza and Egypt proper). Jordan was almost kicked out of the Arab League for annexing the West Bank, which it claimed as territory until 1988(!).

There's no question that since the war, Israel has abused its position with respect to the West Bank in particular (it dispossessed Gazan settlers during the disengagement, but has tacitly allowed continued settlement in the West Bank). But the history here is complicated and it's important to get it right.

> Israel launched what it said was a preemptive strike [0] against Egypt

So it was just a coincidence that Egypt had massed troops on the border, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and ejected UN security forces two weeks before that?

>The irony of banning the phrase, "From the river to the sea" …

The irony is to talk about the irony without realising the extreme nature of the phrase “From the river to the sea…” for any of the sides. Someone can as easily adapt the same phrase for calls to remove non-jewish population from the land yet the commentator felt the urge to see the irony in “banning the phrase” (as he put it) without thinking through the outcome of using such phrase in all of it’s dangerous aspects.

>every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall that show Israel extending from the river to the sea.[0]

The linked map is from post on quora [1] which does not state that.

To the question : “What borders does Israel show in maps in school textbooks?”

It states the following:

“ It really depends on the age.

TLDR - the books mostly show area international borders with markings for area A, But don’t shy away from the existence of the P.A. In higher grades, they show the evolution of the borders, and the idea that nothing is really fixed or “promised”.

Long answer:

I’ve made a small check on books available on my Child’s elementary school online website. …”

Notice “ elementary school online website.” while commentator states: “ in almost every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall”

Even this one post from only one school speaks about variety of maps presented to children but commentator simply ignores that.

Commentator takes 1 of 10 maps posted there. The one for the smallest age and claims “This is a typical map”

The real irony though is vivid if one looks at the official logo of PLO here [2] who’s chairman is Mahmoud Abbas. It shows the whole map “from the river to the sea” without any marking for Israel. Commentator criticises Israeli maps for only :“ "Area A" regions are in a different color.” and forgot to mention that PLO does not have any color for Israel in fact. The logo is currently on the official PLO web site.

> Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

The third irony is mentioning “56 years” and forgetting to mention that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 [2] pretty much to the border before 1967.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-borders-does-Israel-show-in-maps-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...

> Even this one post from only one school speaks about variety of maps presented to children but commentator simply ignores that.

Almost every map in that Quora answer shows Israel extending from the river to the sea, and shows the Palestinian territories as belonging to Israel.

> Commentator takes 1 of 10 maps posted there.

As I said, almost every map in that post shows roughly the same thing.

There was actually a dispute between the Tel Aviv school system and the national government recently, because Tel Aviv schools wanted to mark the Palestinian territories on school maps, which the national government tried to forbid. It's standard in Israel to depict everything between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea as part of Israel.

> PLO does not have any color for Israel in fact. The logo is currently on the official PLO web site.

The PLO recognizes the state of Israel, and has done so for more than 30 years. Israel does not recognize the state of Palestine, and the Israeli government says that it will never allow the creation of a Palestinian state. You're making a big deal about the PLO logo, but it's just a historic logo that hasn't been changed, and it does not reflect the PLO's position. The PLO recognizes Israel and only wants the internationally recognized Palestinian territories.

> As I said, almost every map in that post shows roughly the same thing.

I do not know how maps from 1922, 1947,1949, 1967 and 2008 with completely different borders are showing “roughly the same thing” for you. (https://www.quora.com/What-borders-does-Israel-show-in-maps-...)

If you refer only to the maps for 2nd and 3rd grades I can assure you that many things in 2nd and 3rd grade appear as “roughly the same thing” and it’s only with further education you begin to notice certain nuances. At this point I believe I should strongly recommend to use maps for more grown up children to make your point.

>You're making a big deal about the PLO logo…

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Plo_emblem.pn...) The official PLO logo clearly suggests no Israel existence.

You’ve brought map to make your point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38755727) and now you are suddenly dismissal about the map on official PLO logo and then you’ve tried to portrait me as making “a big deal” about it. Another trick to register and unfortunately such tricks and manipulative efforts are common trends in every supporter of “from the river to the sea” chant that I’ve seen. I wander what purpose they are trying to achieve by misleading others and what they are trying to hide under the “nice” words.

You were also completely dismissive about extreme and dangerous nature of the phrase “from the river to the sea” for both sides. You also completely skipped the fact of Israel withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 even after I have pointed to those two main points.

I am making a big deal of you making misleading comments and using manipulative techniques to distort the reality and hide the truth to push certain agenda without thinking through the consequences of your actions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589935) and your conscious or unconscious contribution to spreading propaganda beneficial to Hamas which leads to the loss of life on both sides. This is a moral blindness at best and intentional malevolent effort at worst.

> There was actually a dispute … It's standard in Israel …

Sources and facts are required to support such claims. After your manipulative approach with maps it’s difficult to trust the ‘stories’ you spread.

>The PLO recognizes the state of Israel.

Their logo doesn’t reflect it. Documents and factually proven persistent behaviour that is in accordance with such claim are required.

That's bad too

yes the problem is most likely that a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some uncomprehensible reasons. Like finding them justifications, or supporting them on the ongoing war. It's pretty insane if you think about.

I remember some people in the arab world took side for ben laden on 9/11 but this time it's happening in the west too.

I recall PLENTY of "The west deserved 9/11 due to imperialism" sentiments, although not people who actually supported Osama Bin Laden.

I see similar sentiments around this war all the time, "Israel deserved this terrorist attack due to imperialism" but again really not much actual support for Hamas.

It's often accompanied by cheerful comments whenever an israeli soldier dies in gaza, killed by hamas. I think it's pretty clear those people are on the terrorists side on this war.

I think the sentiment is more that Israel fucked around and found out. It’s less that Hamas is good and more that Hamas was inevitable given Israel’s conduct.

Back from that time, George W Bush literally said you are either with us or you are with the terrorists, so I feel people are pretty inoculated against allegations that they are supporting the terrorists if they don’t support the military force fighting terrorists. The “America deserved 9/11” crowd generally believes Bin Laden did 9/11 to provoke the Americans into attacking so as to create more terrorists and weaken America. This was supported by how the GWOT kept creating more terrorists after every new counter insurgency operation.

This isn’t maybe, a totally unbiased way to see things, but the point is that the sentiment generally isn’t “Hamas is great because they kill the IDF”, the sentiment is more commonly “Screw that soldier, they’re a pawn that is playing into the hands of Hamas”.

Like most arguments in controversial topics, there are good versions of the argument and bad ones. It behooves everyone not to use the bad arguments to outright dismiss the good ones.

> yes the problem is most likely that a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some incomprehensible reasons.

when the "good guys" indiscriminately kill over 15000 children in the span of two months, I dunno what you expect but its certainly not "uncomprehensible"

These are the realities of war. There are no good guys in war.

by that logic, hamas aren't the bad guys either. hamas is lambasted as a terrorist origanization because they dont' differentiate between military targets and civilians. the IDF seems to make no distinction either yet we dont' call them for what they are.

I wonder why that is

> These are the realities of war.

The proportion of civilian casualties in Israel’s invasion of Gaza is not normal for the 21st century, and indicates a below-average regard for civilian life.

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/27/gaza-civilian-deaths-israel...

> a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some uncomprehensible reasons

Jonathan Haidt explains:

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/antisemitism-on-campus

The interesting thing is that the explanation largely preceded these events, he and Greg Lukianoff documented this in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind.

removal of content is really like 10% of the cases. the most worrisome type of suppression of speech is what they call "shadow banning" which is really "reach limiting". to the extent people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms. I experienced this myself. We have a draft law in parliament concerning boyocott of israel. I posted a status about the law (notice it's unrelated to war or anything in the news rights now) and it got almost zero reach. it's not subtil. It's like two orders of magnitude less reach. I know it because I'm a political activist and I always comment on draft laws.

> people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms

It wasn't algorithm, or glitch, or bug. It was a decision made by humans, including you know who. It's a form of crowd control. That's why it's important to have several channels for 'producers'. For others it's a good idea to have several sources. You'll see much more even if each source represents a single side (which is usually the case, 'democracies' are no different).

It's difficult for anyone who doesn't work there to know, but I would guess based on what I know of how ranking decisions are made that you are mistaken. For example I worked there prior to the 2020 election and on Instagram there was no specific ranking rule of any kind related to keywords like that, and no intentional bias to push up one side or another in any way, outside of ads and government officials.

Your system, including subsystems, must have a filter for prohibited words, like n-word, f-word, etc. It's very easy to add another one. That could be another subsystem which very few people have access to. I suspect there are different subsystems. One strait with explanations, another shadow without. The second is something nobody talks about in public as it's difficult to explain, may be even illegal. The same way unwanted talks are being suppressed on other portals. Note, it's independent of recommendations system, which can be played with by assigning scores to words and phrases. Engineers who build those systems don't need to know how exactly they are used and what are the key words.

I can give you a first hand example. One big sh*ty bank didn't let me see my accounts if I refused to activate a debit card. After login they showed a message box, when I pressed 'cancel' they logged me out hoping I will 'click through' to get access. This way they didn't have to explain and could claim it was a bug. It lasted for months till I closed all accounts and they confirmed, but actually didn't do it. What I mean by this is don't expect big company to play nice.

From my first hand experience designing these algorithms at Meta and running experiments, and listening to feedback from accounts, I would guess that you are not getting reach because your followers do not interact with what you post. In almost every case people call "shadow ban", the cause was occasionally an actual bug (code doing something undesired and unexpected) or far more often people posting bad content.

The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

> The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

This is a very simplistic explanation. If the GP is a political activist and "always comments on draft laws", I would expect their followers to be willing to engage with political content.

It would explain a lot about how Meta operates that the engineers don't factor things like this in.

I feel a deep discomfort with algorithms optimizing for “engaging” content like this. It feels to me like a form of algorithmic brainwashing, capturing people in filter bubbles. I would prefer it if there were laws against platforms making visibility decisions for the user. If people choose to be in a bubble, that’s a form of personal freedom, if an unknowable algorithm chooses for them, not so much.

Most people on Meta's product follow too many accounts to see everything everyone posts. In an alternate reality where ranking is illegal, the game would be different and worse. Accounts would just repost the same content over and over every few minutes to stay at the top of the feed, or some other strategy to get distribution.

Well, it does not make sense because : 1- I know the baseline of interactions I get usually 2- it's not something that happened to my account specifically, it's everybody, including community managers, for whom posting content is a monetizable skill, who resort to obfuscation when they use the word "Palestine".

I posted 2 things recently. One was link to a game, another to an anime (neither related in any way shape or form to wars nor any news or politics what-so-ever. I got zero responses, not even likes/hearts/laughs. So I assumed FB decided not to show them to any of my friends. "Zero reach".

How do you know the reason for your reason for zero reach is any different than mine? I assumed Meta's algo decided none of my friends would be interested in what I posted, not that I was being censored.

They did respond to my next 2 posts so no idea the difference.

I have heard from others that link posts are somehow downranked on many social media platforms (not just Meta, but especially FB/IG). This is why many people recommend instead text posts without a link, with a callout to a second post containing a "link in comments." This seems common on YouTube community posts also.

I wonder if the word Palestine (and potentially also Israel) trips some ML systems up. I put "Palestinian values" into a random sentiment analysis tool and it's ranked lower than most other countries. They'd both be (understandably) linked to negative content.

Yes that's definitely possible. It's the sort of thing that Meta has teams to try to avoid, but in fast moving information landscapes it's sometimes difficult to keep up.

I've seen comments saying "yes please, show me more bombings, I love to see them die" not taken down, because "them" was palestinians.

I wonder how long the comment would have been up, if it was referring to the other side instead.

edit: I see from the downvotes that my experience doesn't fit your bias. Sorry people -_-

Maybe the "them" was referred to hamas terrorists?

In the sense that every palestinian is a terrorist.

>I've seen comments saying "yes please, show me more bombings, I love to see them die" not taken down, because "them" was palestinians.*

Do you have any proof of this whatsoever? First that these posts actually exist (this I believe) and that the reason they weren't taken down was because they were about Palestinians (versus, say, overlooked so far)?

Doesn’t Facebook have a report button? I’m pretty sure comments like that would be taken down if you reported them, it’s really a no brainer whatever “them” refers to.

The report button is rather useless unless it's a delicate issue that Facebook wants to distance themselves from. I find it hard to believe that nobody reports such comments. Probably many people do, but they get the stock reply "this comment does not violate our community standards".

One of my local groups has been flooded with porn spam as of late, moderators have abandoned the group (the group was NOT for anything remotely related). I reported the group for spam and for sexually explicit content (I’m talking links with poster images of full on sexual activity, exposed genitalia, etc - the kind of stuff you expect on the homepage of any major porn site). The report was closed without action later that day. Anybody taking two seconds to look at the group would have immediately done _something_, but I’m doubtful that this report ever reached a real person.

I reported them, yes. Facebook said they didn't violate policy.

I have no problem taking down "From the river to the sea" type content so long as we also take down Greater Israel type content.

I don't remember a single instance of a mass protest on campus or in the streets, in US or in Europe or in Israel, where the protestors would demand that Israel occupies Egypt, Iraq and Syria, throw their population into the sea (or into the desert) and establish a Judaic theocracy on the freshly liberated land. I can believe that whatever is meant by "Greater Israel" among 8 billions of people would be some that support that idea, because any crazy idea can find a person crazy enough to support it. However, comparing this idea to the level of support slogans like "from the river to the sea" enjoy right now - with thousands openly proclaiming them, and on many campuses also proceeding to attack Jewish students under them - is just non-sensical. There's no "Greater Israel" movement worth talking about seriously - but there's very much movement in support of genocide of Jews, and it's very visible and prominent.

There is a "Greater Israel" movement worth taking seriously, not because they have as much popular support as "From the River to the Sea" on the streets or in the campuses, but more because of the people who believe in this notion in the halls of power.

People have called for the seizure of "Greater Israel" since Israel's founding[1]. The "Movement for Greater Israel"[2] was one of the parties that merged together to form the ruling Likud Party, and the president of Israel pulled out a map showing "The New Middle East" only having Israel and no longer having Palestine [3]. You know, the one who just invaded "Greater Israel".

My square deal, is if "From the River to the Sea" gets banned as hate speech, Netanyahu's map also gets banned as hate speech. Nobody is allowed to promote the idea that Israel takes over Palestine, or Palestine takes over Israel. It's not fair if we ban things in one direction and not the other. Allow both or neither.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel#During_British_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Greater_Israel [3] https://i.redd.it/x68dg51jb0qb1.jpg

> It's not fair if we ban things in one direction and not the other

If Hamas would show around the maps, and Netanyahu would show around the maps - I'd say, no problem, let them both have their maps. That's not what Hamas is doing. Hamas has just murdered over 1300 people in Israel, after a long string of lesser murders over 18 years, and after shooting rockets into Israel day to day for all those years. And they plan to continue that - that's not my words, it's theirs. And the "from the river" slogan is an unequivocal support to all that. It's not about drawing of some map, there's not even nearly any comparison between drawing a map and murdering, raping and kidnapping people.

And of course, if you knew anything about policy in Israel, you'd know nobody there, and that includes first and foremost Netanyahu himself, and Likud under his (or anybody else's) leadership, wants to annex Palestinian territories. If anybody wanted it, it'd be done decades ago - as it happened in Jerusalem and Golan. But it's exactly the opposite of what everybody in Israel - very much including Likud, Netanyahu and anybody who is somebody in Israel politics - wants. Only people that know absolutely nothing about Israel politics beyond what they read in some hostile source, itself being derived from some unsourced reddit posting, could claim anything like that. Anybody who knows anything would laugh at it. Israel explicitly exited Gaza because it didn't want any responsibility for it. Israel explicitly signed with PLO because they didn't want to annex the West Banks and have all the Arab population there as citizens. I have no idea what's the story of that map and what was meant by it, and when and in what context it was shown, but if you know anything about what happened there in the last 100 years, you'd know annexing those territories is just the opposite of what Likud or Netanyahu want. So again, there's absolutely no comparison. So if you want, yeah, ban "Greater Israel" - because you'd be banning nothing but the figment of your imagination.

Having (Jewish) Israeli, pre-Israeli, and pre-pre-Israli heritage, I don't personally find "From the River to the Sea" offensive but I do find it non-constructive and insensitive. Globalize the intifada otoh is awful.

I follow this topic daily, on twitter, in telegram (both Israeli and Arab groups), and among the thousands of Jews I know across the world on FB (from anti-Zionist Jews to Orthodox). This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "Greater Israel" mentioned. I'll go research it now but it strikes me as a manufactured obscurity, while "From the River to the Sea" is prevasive.

> This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "Greater Israel" mentioned.

Well, it is unquestionably the stance of the entire political party in which Netanyahu is a member of.

Having social media companies attempting to guess at the intention behind ambiguous phrases seems like a bad idea.

Some people are certainly implying support for genocide when they say "from the river to the sea", while others are not. Same for "Greater Israel".

The only sane place to draw the line imo is at explicit support for hatred or violence. Even that standard can be fuzzy, but if there's a reasonable doubt about intent, I don't think we want corporations or governments making those judgments.

Moderation isn’t so clean-cut that elegant rules like “no EXPLICIT support”. You’ll have people who spend all day ducking around these rules to say IMPLICITLY hateful things and it’ll cause a furor over legitimate grievances with the moderation.

I recall back during the furor over drawing Mohammad peoppe an extremist Muslim group said about Matt stone/trey Parker that they "will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh". Is allowing that sort of speech, what appears to be a death threat in response to free expression, protecting free speech? Or is it enabling a culture of self-censorship due to fears of violent reprisals? Things are complicated, you must be flexible.

In this case, I want to be reasonable. I have heard people use “from the river to the sea” in hateful ways many times. People seem legitimately upset by it and are not just putting on airs. It doesn’t advance the discourse in a productive way.

> For example, the phrase "from the river to the [sea]" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down.

That’s convenient. Zionism, the ideology and its propaganda, “is considered hateful by many” too. Actually, that happy slogan of “from this body of water to that other body of water is all our precious” is shared by both parties. Israel’s flag even has it diagrammed in case you missed the slogans. The two blue lines are RIVERS. One in Egypt the other in Iraq. Believe me that many many find that “ambition” harboring “violent intent” one way or another and don’t like it.

So, Is Facebook really concerned about sensitive feelings of “many”?

Yes, it is convenient for potential victims of genocide that calling for genocide of those people is considered calling for genocide. It's also true. "From the river to the sea" is calling for the genocide of Israel population. It was known before, and Hamas proudly demonstrated it just now, there can not be any misunderstanding what they meant.

The lines on the flag have zero to do with rivers, it's a symbolic representation of a talith, a prayer garment, which can be seen in any synagogue. Try to get a bit of factual information before you go around spreading nonsense.

Let me see how this works:

For Palestinians to say the want to be “free from river to sea” means the “genocide of Israelis”. But, amazingly but unsurprisingly, for Israelis to say they want to be “free of Palestinians” (who happen to currently be in part in the area “from river to sea”) it does not mean “genocide of Palestinians”. This must be Schroedinger’s genocide. Now you see it now you don’t. Amazing.

A conversation somewhere in the area between river and the sea. That oh so special place on earth that is worth having a world war over. “How long o lord?” Seriously lord.

Here it goes:

- Palestinians say they want to be free from river to the sea!

- Hah, really? The nerve. Why can’t they just go to some Arab country or maybe America?

- They say they are not Arab, they are Palestinian.

- Hah. Nationalism is a sickness.

- Agreed.

- I can’t believe they want to kill us all.

- How you figure?

- Well, they ain’t gonna be “free” while we’re here. That can’t possibly work.

- Hmm.

- And they know that we know that they know.

- Aha.

- Yeah, so obviously, they want to kill us all. A genocide.

- Ingrates.

- Animals!

> For Palestinians to say the want to be “free from river to sea” means the “genocide of Israelis”.

Yes.

> But, amazingly but unsurprisingly, for Israelis to say they want to be “free of Palestinians”

Who says that? And more importantly, who does that? Arabs are 20% of Israel population. They have full citizenship rights. Nobody tries to be "free" of them in any way or form. I mean, there are probably people that dream of Israel being a mono-ethnic state and how it would make things much easier, but those are empty dreams, without any support in policy or law.

> it does not mean “genocide of Palestinians”.

It doesn't, because Israel never declared its goal to be genocide of Palestinians, and, as I mentioned, is fine with a large part of Arab population. There are more Arabs in Israel, percentage-wise, than Black Americans in the US, for example. On the contrary, there's no Jewish population in any of "Palestinian"-controlled areas and can't be - because we just witnessed what Hamas does to any Jewish (or non-Jewish but having bad luck to be around Jews) population when they have the power even for an hour. And it's not some surprise - it's written in their charter, and they have claimed, before and after October 7th, that this is exactly what they plan to do to any Israeli that they can lay their hands on. Genocide is their official goal, and their official method of achieving "free Palestine". There's no any organization that has "freeing Palestine" as their goal and does not include genocide as their method of achieving this goal. And their "freedom" never means "enjoying the same rights as Jews in Israel" - that Arab citizens of Israel already have. Their "freedom" means no Jews and no Israel at all.

On the contrary, Israel has already achieved this goal - of both Jews and Arabs living in a free democratic state - and is not advocating murdering any of the Arabic populations, whether in Israel or otherwise. Moreover, 18 years ago Israel passed all control of Gaza to Arabic self-government - and those 18 years were used exclusively to shoot rockets at Israel, send terrorists into Israel, convert hospitals, schools and mosques to military outposts and prepare for war with Israel. A war that has the genocide as the officially declared goal of it, and Hamas proudly and constantly confirms this to anybody that asks them.

> Palestinians say they want to be free from river to the sea!

No, that's not what they say. They say "Palestine will be free". Free of what? Free of Jews. Judenfrei, if you will. And only then it will be real freedom - when the filthy Jews are all destroyed. It's not about individual freedom - if you think somebody living in Gaza enjoys any personal freedoms not available in Israel you are absolutely ignorant. It's about freeing the land from the infidels.

> - They say they are not Arab, they are Palestinian.

They are not saying that, where did you see them saying that? These are not contradictory identifications, just as you can be Arab and Jordanian or Syrian. Or Jewish and American.

> Hah. Nationalism is a sickness.

Who you are reproducing here? Whose words are these? I am starting to lose here what "goes" you try to present here. Certainly nobody in Israel would say that. That sounds like some woke student from Harvard. But a woke student already hates Israel, so your whole scenario makes no sense.

> I can’t believe they want to kill us all.

Actually that's very easy to believe because they are saying it over and over and over. And are doing it when they can. For many decades now.

> Well, they ain’t gonna be “free” while we’re here. That can’t possibly work.

It's not some conjecture. Hamas is openly declaring it. And overwhelming majority of the population btw supports them.

> Yeah, so obviously, they want to kill us all. A genocide.

Yes, a genocide. That is exactly the goal. No metaphors, no exaggerations, no equivocations. That is the thing. I know you are trying to be facetious and sarcastic and somehow imply only an idiot can make such a far-fetched conclusion, but it's not far-fetched. It's openly and proudly proclaimed by Hamas. And Hamas is the government of Gaza and by the vast majority the most popular movement among the Palestinians (the only reason why it didn't capture West Banks is because Israel is much more involved there and is not letting them to gain strength, while in Gaza it was an experiment of letting it go - which failed spectacularly). I understand it is very hard to stomach such truths - that in 2023, when we are supposed to be all past those things, we still have millions-strong movements that want the same old genocide of Jews, and the people that want that genocide are the ones we're supposed to be sympathetic with because they are poor and "oppressed" - but that's the harsh reality we are living in. And ignoring this reality would only mean it will reassert itself with blood and murder - which is exactly what happened on October 7th. Israel can not ignore that reality anymore, if they want to survive - and neither can any Jews outside of Israel, if they want to survive too.

> The two blue lines are RIVERS. One in Egypt the other in Iraq.

This sounded suspicious to me, and brief research shows it to be untrue.

I don't see why "From the river to the see" would be hateful in isolation. Certainly some people who say it may have hateful thoughts in their minds, but wishing for palestinian land where Israel is now is not hateful in itself.

Don't you really understand why it's an hateful speech when you wish my country stop to exists?

No not neccessarily. There are many examples of peoples who have wished their lands to become liberated from current rulers. I am for example thinking of Finland or the Baltics. It wasn't hateful of them to wish for that, and I never heard anyone even express that idea. There are ways to express hate, but this is not one of them.

Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.

no i do not. as an example, it’s okay for a native american to argue that usa (my country) should not exist as long as that person is not advocating physical violence to do so.

No hateful intention needed if the statement is interpreted as not wanting the state of Israel to exist without implying that the people governed by that state should also not exist (it's not even a contradiction to also hold the opinion that those people have a right to exist exactly where they currently do). To my mind that is actually a reasonable opinion to have given the objectively harmful behaviour of the Israeli state (not that I am willing to get on board with it).

Governments are not people groups -- harmful governments can and have been deposed of without violence against its people.

On its own, "from the river to the sea" is just a description of a geographic area. It is equivalent to a bounded GIS grid. It is not a complete sentence. There is no verb.

I wish for a future where there is peace and love, with no violence, from the river to the sea. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, have full human rights under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, are enthusiastic users of GNU/Linux and the worst conflicts are debates over text editors.

If someone uses "from the river to the sea" in a sentence where they call for genocide, then what would make that sentence wrong is the verb phrase calling for genocide.

>I don't see why "From the river to the see" would be hateful in isolation.

It's crazy to me the a lot of the same crowd saying, "I don't see how this is hateful" are the same people who told us that the "Okay" symbol meant "white power" and was literal violence.

It isnt hateful in isolation. It could be hateful, it could also just represent a statement of solidarity with Palestinians or support for a two state solution.

The problem is that the rules aren't applied fairly or evenly. See this example from twitter: https://twitter.com/PalestineNW/status/1738711045265392028

That's Twitter, not owned by Meta

Three of those are religions and one of those is an ethnicity as well. One of those also has seen almost constant persecution during history. It's concerning that this needs to be pointed out

That's a lame excuse as if one writes "Fuck Druze" or "Fuck Yazids" Twitter does not add a warning. Besides, Christians have certainly been persecuted in Muslim countries and Muslims are certainly persecuted in Western countries.

That's the exact opposite of what I was saying. Unlike Muslims, Christians and Druze, Jews are also a ethnic groups. Write "kill blacks", "kill Asians" or "kill Uighurs" on Twitter and you'll get similar treatment

Please show an example of Christians being persecuted in Muslim countries. Muslims did not/do not try to convert Christians and Jews as they are considered ahlul-kitab/people of the book under Islamic law.

And yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, Meta changed their policy and made it acceptable to advocate violence against Russians.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

Personally, I oppose both Russian expansionism and the genocidal antisemitic Hamas terrorist movement, so the Meta policy aligns with my views. But I am deeply uncomfortable with having a small cabal of Silicon Valley executives define the acceptable bounds of discourse for the rest of society. It would be better if they allowed all legal content no matter how objectionable and gave individual users tools to block what they don't want to see.

If social media platforms all provided the same service, there would be only one. The way it is today, each of them makes a very specific set of editorial decisions, which is why we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gab, etc. If every network put all the power in the users' hands, the dynamics of network effects would take over and we would be left with one social network.

I'm not saying this would be worse for the users, because I agree that "allow all content + powerful filtering tools" would suit me just fine. But it's worth noting that there would be a real serious monopoly problem if there were no conscious choices to differentiate. This would conflict with your main point of friction here: that a bunch of SV nerds shouldn't get to define our Overton window. If one platform provided free speech + filters, and became the only game in town, it wouldn't be long before we were back in the situation we're in today, except the group of toxic SV billionaires running the show would be even smaller.

So the phrase "from the river to the sea" is hateful to many but when it comes to disrespect Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) or Quran then it becomes freedom of speech no matter a vast majority of world population hates it. Hypocrisy to say the least!

Both are hateful to many and both are protected from laws by Congress. Facebook can remove whatever it wants on their platform.

Let's make it simpler- disrespect for Muhamad is a disrespect to a religion based on crusades and a prophet who is a declared pedophile according to their scripts (married and had sex with Aisha when she was 6yo). Calling "from the river to the sea" is a call for genocide of the Jewish people. So, can you pick a side already of which of the calls is legit and which not?

Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad? And who's going to determine which speech is good and what's bad? It's not gonna be you, it's some bureaucrat who has a completely different idea of good and bad than you do. Why do you want that?

> Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad?

Not the person you are replying to, but I think the logic is a bit different than “is it politically good or bad.” It is more like “is this speech advocating for genocide of an ethnic group or is it just critical of/disrespectful to a religion.”

I think most people agree that those two things aren’t even close to being the same. Also, I don’t think that “talking negative about islam” has been a “politically good” thing in way over a decade.

Again, this should be quite simple. You can criticize a pedophile prophey. You cannot call for genocide. IDK why it's so hard for you to get that.

You do a lot of hand waving to equate "from the river to the sea" with support for genocide.

It certainly could indicate support for genocide. It also could indicate extreme disapproval for the vastly disproportionate civilian death toll among Palestinians at the hands of Isreal in the wake of Hamas' attacks.

It appears to me that Israel's goal under Netanyahu is to suppress dissent, and label all those who oppose its actions as "genocidal" to therefore justify its indiscriminate violence against the people of Gaza.

> For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many

The phrase has its origins in Arab nationalism. It was coined in 1960 by the PLO to refer to the goal of an Arab state that occupies the entirety of what was Mandatory Palestine. If you ignore the subtext of “what happens to the Jews in that situation” I suppose you can make a case for it.

It’s like the confederate flag. In the 20th century there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism. And that’s the only connotation lots of people have of it. But it has a pretty unpleasant historical context.

At the very least it’s a dog whistle to the large fraction of the Muslim world that hates Jews: https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/adls-global-100-survey-wh.... Americans who use this phrase should really travel to the Muslim world to understand the antisemitism that’s just in the air. You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

Comparing the chant "from the river to the sea" with the confederate flag is completely preposterous. The chant is a call for liberation. Anyone who has a problem with someone's freedom is themselves a racist and probably has a lot of views in common with what the confederate flag stands for. Fwiw, the phrase was coined by Jewish settlers in the 1930's (https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2018-12-16/ty-artic...) and ADL is an anti-Palestinian hate organization whose opinions no one should take seriously.

> You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

Perhaps for exactly the same reason Russian passport holders aren't welcome in a lot of places?

isn’t the original context of the confederate flag liberation from federalism?

don’t think just the fact someone believes they are liberating something makes it right, as in their eyes the russians in the current war are liberating ukraine

> … whose opinions no one should take seriously.

Should we take your opinion seriously instead? Unfortunately you do not share it.

You’ve repeatedly been asked “What Israel should do in your opinion in current situation and what outcome you expect once it does it?” and you repeatedly have failed to produce any answer to that question even in simplified form.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38582722

> The chant is a call for liberation.

Let’s try again : How this “liberation” would look like ? And what outcome you expect to see once it’s done ?

Yes, "liberation" of the land currently occupied by jews. Just need to find a solution for them. Preferrably something final.

During the Civil Rights Era there were radical leftist groups that used the flag. The YPO in Chicago was allied with the Black Panthers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization (ditto Southern Student Organizing Committee)

This is a very inaccurate comparison. Palestinians faced the violent expulsion of the Nakbah, and before that in the British mandate period there were attacks from violent Zionist groups. Currently, Palestine is militarily occupied and colonized. In this context, from the river to the sea must be understood as a desire for freedom and for justice.

The oppression faced under occupation by people in the West Bank and in Gaza for over 70 years now reminds us of how situations like Apartheid in South Africa formally continued until 1994.

To dismiss as simple “Jew hate” is really not the correct context; very disappointing to see these broad generalizations dismiss the fundamental needs for human life.

Muslims conquered that land to begin with, so that’s kind of an important bit of context for everything that follows.

And the antipathy in the rest of the Muslim world is mostly about hating Jews. In Bangladesh, where I’m from, people aren’t marching for justice for the Rohingya being genocided by Myanmar—even though Rohingya are closely related to Bangladeshis. But there are huge protests in the streets for Palestinians. What is the explanation for why people would be so much more concerned about a “human rights” issue involving a far away, distantly related people, in comparison to the amount of concern for the human rights issue happening to a closely related people next door? Because it’s not really about “human rights,” it’s about a Muslim solidarity against Jews.

The objective is an end to occupation, this is about establishing justice. it would be narrow minded and misguided to claim this is not about human rights and dignity first and foremost, which is a component of justice. People take solidarity with those being oppressed and wronged. The Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestine has been occurring for over 70 years now, and worldwide this is a galvanizing topic especially considering the major uptick in atrocities committed by the Israeli government and indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

The issue with Rohingya people is also an issue that people take solidarity with and partake in aid of.

I see your comment as dismissing the desire to establish justice in Palestine as if it is only about fighting Jews for being Jewish. Many people also protested the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which now in the US we recognize as being based on wrong premises. Apartheid was supported by many people but now it is regarded as a dark time in history.

If you wish to be on the side of ignoring the need for justice, know that you won’t be the first to do so. But it does not make it the correct thing to do.

> there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism

Never got that one. Nothing like the flag of a breakaway state founded to preserve chattel slavery as a symbol of… anti-authoritarianism?

Part of that effort was to reframe the reasons why the Confederacy was “founded,” at least in part as a way of saving face (which is very important in southern culture).

Their narrative glossed over slavery, and focused on the other aspects of the conflict: the industrialized north, with its big banks and big corporations, versus the agrarian south. Do you remember the scene in Hamilton where they negotiate about where to put the capital? And the Hamilton says something along the lines of “let the south have the capital, we’ll have the bank where the real power will be.” It’s not hard to make the south look like the good guys if you ignore the Confederate elites’ actual reasons for the war.

It's known as the 'Rebel Flag' in the united states, and has indeed stood for being a rebel with none of the modern racist associations attaced to it. Many of your favorite antiracist rock stars of the 60s sported the flag. People under 40 mostly just know the culture-war version where its akin to a swastika, which itself originally had a different meaning. Symbols change, you have to view them through the lens of history and culture before recoiling to modern interpretations,

If the US had not been founded then slavery would have been abolished much sooner, so I don’t think the US flag gets a pass either.

At the beginning of the conflict I noticed my feed was fully leaning towards supporting Israel, even if it was only the posts of 3 people. Somehow the 30+ people demanding the stop to the bombing of civilians didn't really start appearing until late November.

They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.

"At the beginning of the conflict..."

Yes... You had plenty of people saying "this is going to be your own version of Afghanistan/Iraq if you decide to do what you want to do..."

Israel wanted revenge, not a solution. Their strategy has guaranteed that there will be another cycle of violence as the kids that grew up seeing their parents blown up in airstrikes are understandably going to be ripe for recruiting into whatever organization steps into power in place of Hamas.

It's simply their strategy, really. Turning Palestinians desperate so they turn to violence ("terrorism"), in order to justify turning their territory into even more of a shit hole, so Palestinians who can't take it anymore will emigrate, until the "problem" is gone.

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

I find such sentiment flabbergasting. Do you claim that Germany and Japan continued cycles of violence because the Allies firebombed Dresden and nuked Hiroshima? We learned after the two world wars that peace is possible if and only if there is hope, reconstruction, and a magnanimous victor. Hold Israel and the UN accountable to that. “Pacifists” preach the myth that resistance is a futile tragedy. But unfortunately violence is that can only be stopped by violence.

This worldview also shows a lack of understanding of conflicts: why the “proportional response” assumption is nonsensical. Wars are extensions of political means, and the political objective is to remove Hamas as a viable regime or fighting force. However as much violence to achieve this will be expended: possibly no more if one side surrenders today. To think the cost will be or an eye for an eye is beyond naive. To think it should be is retributive.

Unfortunately wars tear down all humanitie’s values and no side is innocent. Yet justice is a stochastic process, such that each person thinks at the back of their head and judges should the decision must fall, whose cause they would get behind.

You compare Gaza, half of the population being children, with Nazi Germany and talk about learning from history? While the IDF is blowing up courts and universities and people talk on Israeli TV about making Gaza "unlivable"?

The Nazis talked about the people they murdered exactly the same way. Himmler and his stuff about the great sacrifice the SS made for the benefit of humanity, all that... they excused murdering children with "international bankers", the same way people excuse genocide in Gaza with Hamas. "No side is innocent, it's all so very complex". Nothing changed.

Kind of a click-bait headline.

To quote the actual report: "This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship."

They asked people to self-report instances. There is probably selection bias (maybe they advertised only to the pro-palestian crowd. Maybe the israeli crowd thinks HRW is biased and didn't want to engage. Maybe something else). There is probably also base rate falacy involved which isn't accounted for.

This just isnt the right type of study to determine if meta has a bias in censorship.

The paragraph in question:

> Human Rights Watch solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoint related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 cases documented involved examples of online censorship and suppression of content in support of Palestine, while one case contained an example of removal of content in support of Israel.[2] This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship.

So HRW may as well not have looked at the other side of the issue. They also complained that Meta's policies are informed by the United States' designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

> I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

Bingo.

HRW has a reputation for being biased against Israel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Wa... . Regardless of whether that's true, it could explain why pro-Israel folks wouldn't want to engage with them.

I think this report actually demonstrates the anti-Israel bias HRW has been accused of. HRW points to the 9,500 content takedown requests that Israel has made as one of "four underlying, systemic factors that contributed to the [pro-Palestine] censorship." But knowing that a single Reddit post can receive more than 9,500 comments within a day[1], and that some percentage of the takedown requests likely relate to posts that threaten operational secrecy or the right to privacy of victimized Israelis, leads me to the exact opposite conclusion: that Israel's takedown requests are neither intended to censor pro-Palestine voices nor, if that were the intent, large enough in number to have an impact. Since the report provides no context for the numbers it reports makes me think the authors are more interested in pushing the idea that Israel controls the online narrative than they are in understanding what is actually happening on these platforms.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/top/?sort=top&t=year

Are you saying that changes on Israel's part could cause Hamas to stop their aggression? That seems very unlikely - Hamas doesn't even pretend to be open to peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically it would probably take generations for sentiment to change. It would be hard for Israelis to just accept that they will be attacked for generations, with increasing sophistication (mainly thanks to Iran's support), with no response.

This is greatly complicated by the fact that Israel materially supported Hamas and saw it as useful.

Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

On the other hand, Israel is not facing good geopolitical headwinds. As Yemen demonstrated, they are extremely vulnerable to a blockade. One day, in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli. That of course doesn't justify Hamas's inhuman war crimes, but acting as if war is unprovoked is not consistent with reality - Israel has never, by the definitions in international law, stopped actively waging war against Gaza.

I agree Israel ought to be able to prevent similar ground invasions, but what about rockets?

The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.

Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

How would guidance systems increase the destruction? If anything, history has shown that precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties - there isn't much of a point building a single precision guided missile, instead of 100 imprecise dumb rockets, when your goal is terror bombing (the calculus is slightly different for bombs, however).

> Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.

Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.

> precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties

Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.

> the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now

I’m fairly certain it’s more an inability to respond in any effective way.

> Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

While there were gigantic failures that no one denies, possibly to the level of gross incompetence, Israel is also fighting against a real enemy, not some cartoon. Hamas is also smart, is increasingly well-armed, and can wait many years until the next attack. It's not clear that Israel can defend against every conceivable attack that Hamas can mount, and staying completely vigilant all the time is very costly economically, too. (I'll note that Hamas puts a lot of money and labor into these attacks, but they are pretty freely stealing from their people; the Israeli government can't do the same.)

It's true that, on its own, Hamas can't actually conquer Israel. But it can clearly carry out massive attacks that kill thousands and completely upend all life in Israel, and it's possible that they can keep doing this every couple of years.

> So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

Actually, Israel is on relatively good terms with all its Arab neighbors (relative to the past), and was on the verge of formalizing those good relations with Saudi Arabia. That's one of the reasons for this Hamas attack - to try and stop the Israeli-Arab peace process, because they feel (very likely correctly) that it leaves the Palestinians in a worse situation.

> It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli.

Well, they did elect Hamas and fairly quickly start to shoot rockets at Israel. And by that token they are also at war with Egypt.

Gaza isn't a fully independent country, obviously, but it's also not under full military occupation like it was before. People insisting on one or the other usually have a point that it helps them prove, but reality is more complicated.

I do believe that it is directionally true that Gazans could've made far more of their situation once Israel withdrew, and Hamas has basically squandered that opportunity by turning to violence.

>in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

The US + Israel + allies can/will absolutely level these countries if necessary. Both history and current events demonstrate that. Do you really think they are at the mercy of what Yemen does?

Life is not a video game. The US and Saudi Arabia already spent 7 years trying to level Yemen to stop them from firing cruise missiles everywhere in the region, and failed. The US didn't managed to stop Iraq from launching ballistic missiles until over a year after the decision to invade was made, and now look at Iraq right now, various militias are still firing missiles at US military bases and getting away with it.

Yemen is just a proxy of Iran, ultimately, and the US has already lost multiple proxy wars against Iran. Invading Iran itself is not a workable proposition, either.

> Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

That was 2004. By 2017, their asks, for all intents and purposes, were the same as the PA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...

Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met. They offered only a ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders, not a permanent peace deal.

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

Anyway, they've shown their true colors at this point; very different statements recently:

> Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-is...

> Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met.

India doesn't have peace with Pakistan. Doesn't mean the 2 nuclear powers (similarly partitioned up by the British) are at perpetual war.

Hamas like PA accepts 2SS. It is expantionists in Israel that reject it. In fact, PA concedes to have a state on merely 19% of historic Palestine.

> would probably take generations for sentiment to change

It will likely take forever unless steps are taken to initiate a peace process.

Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

And honestly where tf is the UN in all of this?

> Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

Israel somehow managed to convince other arab states and the US to make peace after the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty incidents, I'm sure they can manage to find some equivalent forgiveness in their hearts this time around :)

> At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

Logistically far more israelis have dual citizenship elsewhere than Palestnians, so perhaps they should leave instead?

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746496, but I detached it from there, i.e. moved it to the top level, because this subthread is better than the surrounding flamewar it was in.)

Sometimes i feel that reporters should be needed to add a basic statistical analysis before they are allowed to claim something like censorship.

How much content is posted every day on meta? How many content removal decisions are taken every day by meta?

Hint: Over 1 billion Stories are posted every day.

So even if 1049 content removals would happen on a single day - but this "evidence" is collected over a much longer time period.

You have to read about HRW and its campaign against Israel to maybe understand why HRW continue to post this type of propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc...

The guardian did a very bad job at picking up this biased content.

Well, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Israel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_United_States_for... etc.

Does the existence of these Wikipedia articles now mean that I can call any information put out by Israel or the United States "biased content" and just disregard it?

No. The comment you're replying to explicitly calls out the poor methodology this report is based on and the lack of subject matter expertise shown by the authors. The Wikipedia article is supplementary information that situates this critique within a wider context. They are not saying you should dismiss the report simply because of the Wikipedia article.

Their methodology seems really flawed. They cherry picked a thousand instances of wrongly removed content, but how many posts do you think there are about the conflict on Facebook and Instagram? Tens of millions? They have no way of knowing how representative that sample is.

> Human Rights Watch published a call for evidence of online censorship…from the main Human Rights Watch accounts on Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and TikTok.

I don’t see how HRW can post this in good conscience without acknowledging the huge potential for voluntary response bias in this survey. Pro-Israel voices have been skeptical of HRW’s perceived Anti-Israel bias[1] for over a decade. They are not going to be following or engaging with HRW accounts, and their voices are most likely fewer in number overall[2]. The fact that 1,049 of the 1,050 comments submitted for HRW’s review were Pro-Palestine should be a red flag, not the core piece of evidence.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204619004574318...

[2] https://wpde.com/amp/news/nation-world/support-for-palestine...

Exactly. Whatever your opinions on Israel and Gaza, putting out a report so cherry-picked on such a small, unrepresentative sample only serves to show HRW's biases.

No matter what your views, we should all be very concerned that a technology company that specializes in social connections is controlling what people can say to one another.

This combined with the close government coordination that was recently exposed is deeply concerning.

‘Disinformation’ seems to be more and more just ‘opinions we don’t like or support’ and this episode should serve as a warning to use all to limit their power before it’s too late.

And I don’t care if you like Triden or Brump: this shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, apparently backed by Iran, and are constantly spreading misinformation online, this is why it's censored?

I sometimes open "The Guardian" and the amount of times they quote "The Gaza Health Ministry", which would be no more trust worthy than the North Korean or Chinese health ministry, is fucking ridiculous.

If people thought about thing more critically then we wouldn't have to sensor everything but people don't they eat it up, and get all conspiratorial.

On the other hand, I think Meta have built a shit product that requires an insane level of censoring to keep even remotely civil. Unfortunately this flawed product has dire impacts on democratic societies.

> Hamas is a terrorist organization

You seem to be making the mistake that many do and conflating Hamas with the Palestinian people. The article is not about posts in support of Hamas.

Good luck just "untangling" Hamas and the palestinians though.

May it be that Meta is just doing it job by weeding out fakes? Most of the pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian propaganda that I saw contradicts the facts to say the least (or in the best case is only single-sourced with the source being either Hamas itself or a cozy affiliate of a Hamas like those Gaza offices of UN agencies).

Btw, Meta is outlawed (declared "extremist", it is somewhat like "material supporter of terrorism" status in US) in Russia for refusing to bend to Russian authorities and to carry only official Russian, completely false, propaganda.

It might be that outside of your circles, people do have different opinions, without them being bots.

Last elections fb was spamming me with trump propaganda. I don't know anyone who voted for trump, for the simple reason that I don't live in USA. And yet I still got the propaganda… I understand the russians might not want USA propaganda and might want their own instead.

I'm not talking about opinions. I'm taking about propaganda and facts which that propaganda contradicts. For illustration, I've just posted an example of such propaganda and the facts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882

Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian with 1 being pro-israeli. Then some of the propalestinian post will be calling for genocide or celebrating the massacre of oct 7.

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.

This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.

Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.

Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/facebook-new...

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.

And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything.

What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.

If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.

> Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian

Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.

As for Threads, both are common.

Even tricker that if there is not enough moderation, Apple could remove your app or some government would ban it.

Twitter has surprisingly become much better since Elon purchased it. The community tags are great and non-partisan, they fairly report on all inaccuracy.

Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.

I have a suspicion that this article is vaguely a response to the previous report that TikTok overwhelmingly censors content in accordance with China's official position.

That entire report was very weird as they compared some uploaded videos with specific hashtags on TikTok vs Instagram. I just don’t understand how that methodology can fly when TikTok is banned in some places, while IG is banned in different ones. So obviously you’ll get stuff anout Hong Kong protests on IG, but not on TikTok since it’s not available in Hong Kong.

There’s also no reliable way of finding where the data is being uploaded from, so huge bot-farms in India wouldn’t push much in TikTok either, cause again, it’s banned there. As much as I hate TT/IG, we shouldn’t try to prove our point with extremely unreliable studies.

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.

That is "the beauty" of this conflict (if something this heinous could ever have a beautiful side): It poses many interesting technical challenges. But, quite understandably, people everywhere (including HN) are fast to move the "warring" right onto our screens (hence the flagging).

So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].

I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].

Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673300

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_occupations

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/which-countries-receive-...

PS: For many (myself included), Christmas is about loving your family and not “the birth of Jesus Christ”, even if their mothers see it that way

> My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Visibility into moderation decisions makes them more gameable/exploitable/circumventable. The whole purpose of moderation is to remove unwanted speech; justifying the fairness of such removal is only secondary, and can be elided if it interferes with the primary goal.

Hence "You have been banned because your posts violate our Terms of Service" messages with no further explanation, and things like shadowbanning. It sucks to be on the receiving end of these things but they make online communities much more pleasant.

This is basically an argument for getting rid of laws and ruling by fiat, with a judicial process that amounts to repeating 'you know what you did' whether or not that is honest.

Communities are moderated based on how good you feel there, if it's the most ad-friendly, how good everyone stays on-topic, or other mostly social & subjective criteria. Judicial systems aren't about any of those things.

If I have a boot on my throat, it better be privately owned.

Exactly; consider the "censorship" that everyone generally agrees with, spam filtering. If the precise nature of the spam filter is known (keyword lists, etc), then it becomes much easier to design emails that avoid being filtered.

Spam filtering is the opposite problem of people trying to communicate their views on mass killings of civilians in an important respect: In the case of spam, you don't want the spammers to reformulate their message to get past the filters. In the case of mass killings, you do want to allow the social media users to tone down their writing.

> this news article is about a core issue in tech

I agree. Let's assume that a Social-Media Business (SMBiz) gains sufficient value from hosting topical discussion to want to continue. But there is cost, reputational risk, and lawyers are expensive. How can SMBiz effectively moderate a conversation/debate/flamewar about a controversial event or subject, especially when the SMbiz wants to maximise user engagement while respecting laws and government requests?

Like it or not, that's the business reality. People who want a truly neutral discussion platform that operates with transnational freedom and total personal freedom will find that their ideals alone are not enough to sustain the business.

Prior Art: People often say that HN's Dang and Slashdot's moderation system are the best examples of "effective moderation" that we know. If the moderation is effective, it means SMBiz is attentive to topics and comments and discussion is insightful and interesting; it isn't overwhelmed by frivolity, falsehoods, defamation, and death threats (FFDDs). If the job is done well, SMBiz may even receive accolades. See Reddit's recent experience with its moderators for a negative example.

Here are some of the rules that will need to be applied, in stochastic FIFO order. Items are lettered for reference.

a= At all times, keep a clear eye on the business equation. Effective moderation will have a significant cost. At any scale!

b= Seed the discussion with verified accounts/users. Reputation must be earned and maintained. See Prior Art.

c= Rate limiting, especially for controversial topics. No short, stupid Reddit posts. People must weigh their words. Sometimes, the microphone must be disabled.

d= No flamewars, no propaganda, no falsehoods. See Prior Art. Lock any discussion that achieves high FFDDs. Throw away accounts, ban offenders. Make it sting.

e= No anonymity unless a verified account/user has sufficient reputation to post in anonymous mode. But it costs in ReputationCoin.

f= No bots, no bridages. See Prior Art to estimate workload and infrastructure.

g= Enable and reward trusted moderators. See Prior Art.

= = = Final Notes

> My engineer brain wants to solve this

I get that you are very interested in the Moderation Problem, but I think this wording wins no support. Backers will say that you are way out of your social depth, and people in the debate will dismiss your intent as naivety or bike-shedding (frivolous or misplaced optimisation) or a combination of the two.

One important reason why HN succeeds because Dan G (who is indeed attentive, and principled) rejects the most ungovernable type of conversation: flamewars.

> convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this

There is no neutrality, of course. SMBiz can state its bias and interests clearly. But it will be hard to make a profit from achieving neutrality because strident factions in polarised debate do not want neutrality.

> My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Politics are not an engineer’s job, nor is content moderation.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181105214850/https://www.alter...

Meta and YouTube seem to have started to shadowban pro-Palestine sentiment materials.

It boils down to the algorithmic feed, where Zuckerberg decides what the users see and not the users. Old Facebook didn't have that problem, where there more or less was a chronological order of friends' post. That systems also did not have any problem with "troll farms" (do those even exist, anyway?) since those could not reach you in the first place.

On places like Reddit, I get this feeling that some bot network control most subs. It seems to be major manipulation of down votes and upvotes. The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

> The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

I think it’s identical here on HN. Upvoting, downvoting, and using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion. I think it’s just the topic du jour on HN is less escalated (usually opinions of tech choices) so it doesn’t seem as extreme.

> using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion

I've had showdead turned on for years and have rarely seen contrary opinions flagged, if ever.

The main things I see flagged are personal attacks, open bigotry, flaming, etc. Occasionally I used to see anti-CCP comments flagged, but I haven't seen that in a while. I'd be interested to see some examples where you think something was unjustly flagged.

By that same token, the vast majority of downvoted comments I see are just...irritating. They're not usually overly bigoted, they're not more contrary than other, less irritating comments that aren't downvoted, they're just really annoying to read and engage with.

It is not as bad on HN. I mean, we disagree right now, right?

It is not about technical topics but about the persons. HN got better discussion climate about the Israel-Hamas war too, then say Reddit.

On some half-obvious corporate shill post I've gotten some 'unfair' (according to me) grey out down votes for being critical, where it was obvious that none but shills would care enough to downvote. So the problem do exist, but it ain't too bad.

Reddit is a whole other league of bad.

Be sure to turn on showdead, it absolutely should be enabled with the amount of suppression and brigading and rules-lawyering that takes place

I’ve had my spicy posts get downvoted within 10 seconds of me making the post. Impossible for that to always be organic. Glad others observe this here. Dang will of course deny this happens, but it is happening for sure.

Most spicy comments get rapid downvotes, and it's organic.

I know mine do.

Long time HN readers frequently load https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments to see where the interesting conversations are happening right now .. and they pretty much all reflexively downvote comments that appear to be rude or attacking other users directly rather than discussing their positions.

In the incoming world of AI generated garbage content, Meta decided to kill feeds from your friends and pages you follow. That is "great" strategic planning.

Trying to keep everyone happy is keeping no one happy.

Hashtags like #GazaStarving got banned on Instagram for no reason. Yea there is bad censorship.

are the pictures of the hostages being removed for no reason?

Can someone explain how every single post about Palestine/Israel is flagged and removed the instant it hits front page?

I have seen this with around 4-5 threads personally and who knows how many I missed

Users are flagging them. I don't think it's hard to understand why: it's a divisive and flameprone topic.

Two positions that people urge us to take (different people, obviously) are (1) treat it as off topic and flag everything; or (2) have no limits, which means letting it dominate the front page. Neither of these positions are viable for HN. For reasons why I say that, see past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... - these are general explanations, not specifically about Gaza, but they apply to that also.

HN has had at least two major related threads so far:

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1309 comments)

Here are some explanations I posted the last time this question of flags came up, in case helpful at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527

Obviously we want commenters to have thoughtful, respectful, open conversation with each other rather than just fighting a war on HN. Equally obviously, it's pretty hard to avoid the latter. These things can only be 'graded on a curve', i.e. moderation has to shift somewhat, relative to the topic - not to do that would be expecting people not to be human, which is a losing proposition. But that does not mean the rules somehow switch off. Accounts that break the HN guidelines egregiously (such as by getting aggressive or posting in the flamewar style) are going to get warned and/or banned, regardless of who they're battling for or against. More than that, I'm not sure what we can do.

Have you noticed any patterns or organization in the flagging and voting of this subject, or does it all look organic?

Thank you dang for allowing this discussion. Our profession needs to wrestle with issues like this openly, and do so in a respectful way in the spirit of John Milton and John Stewart Mill.

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

I posted that one, and while it went somewhat well by the standards of such a controversial topic, it was still contentious and had a lot of bad feeling. I submitted it because there was a nexus to both the dynamics of influence operations and individual movers and shakes in the SV community.

In general I think submitting on a topic like this requires some sort of hacker-specific angle - involving people in the industry, or the impact of technological change, or a new dynamic emerging from some unexpected source (eg cheap consumer-tech drones in the Ukraine conflict).

It's not that other topics shouldn't be discussed on HN, anything sufficiently unusual to be news cn be worth a look. But we should also be mindful that if the community can't provide more than baseline insight/expertise on a trending news topic, the resulting discussion will probably be shallow and have little value.

> posting in the flamewar style

What is the flamewar style?

I've also had my por palestinian posts flagged. the really insane thing is I never call for violence and every assertion I make about human rights violations I make gets backed up with a link to a documentary or news story. I even tryto avoid using aljezeera as a my lone source. Over the last to months I've spent a lot of time researching teh history of the conflict and it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.

> it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.

this is flamebait

Possibly due to the topic attracting emotional, inflammatory responses rather than an objective, on-topic discussion.

Some people can't resist and have to turn every thread into a battlefield as if this achieves something on the ground. (Often citing the exact same disinformation that has been propagating across social media.)

Because it doesn’t belong here and it’s inflammatory. Also most articles are heavily biased but claim not to be. For example, they trust numbers given by an internationally recognized terrorist organization. But tell me again how it’s not biased.

Not only Meta, but Reddit, Google as well

extremely disturbing

One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.

At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.

For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.

I love, in honestly both somewhat sarcastic but mostly very real sense, that hacker news discussion of global thermonuclear war...is how to prepare your database unique ID scheme for unforeseen sharding :->

> At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.

> For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do

"Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."

I think most companies will naturally align a certain way and there won’t be a big deal compared to the actual war.

The Western companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon will all align with the US

The European companies will align with the US as well

The Chinese companies Huwaei, ByteDance, Alibaba will align with China.

In such dire straits as you describe, companies and individuals will likely be forbidden to provide any sort of commercial services to the opposing side.

These types of things are already arriving via data sovereignty laws.

Any global business will arrive in such a war already having split businesses

Just do what everyone does to fragile egos. You show Russia and China what they believe, and you show the rest of the world something else.

This already exists with China. You have to run a Chinese version of your infra that is separate from the global version.

Any distributed database worth its salt is already using UUIDs of some sort.

“halves”

This is something people have to relearn over and over again.

A lot of the people who are not upset with Meta limiting opinions and content related to the war in Gaza¹. Were gloating and happy when Meta limited opinions and content from right wing politicians² not so long ago.

Once you invite censorship for content you dont like, how can you expect it wont bite you in the ass later on.

This is why freedom of speech is an important principle. That overshadows how someone "feels" about speech.

Everyone is in favor of freedom of speech. ""Dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, were in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." -Noam Chomsky

Slightly related though originating from a different context.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me. —Martin Niemöller

Which in this context I use it to highlight that the protection of freedom of speech is not something you can ignore because you dont care about a topic. One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited. If we dont, then it becomes a bit more limited, and a little bit more, and eventually it will strike upon something you do care about, and it is far too late to speak up.

¹,² For this post I am assuming this is accurate. But i cannot prove either.

While I agree that one's views on censorship should not be based on whether one agrees or disagrees with the views presently impacted, I don't think your comparisons are reasonable for multiple reasons:

- Stalin and Hitler were _state_ censorship, where the state itself (and its heavy-handed use of force) were used to silence dissent. Meta is not a state, and Meta is not itself using force.

- When Niemöller says "they came for ...", he doesn't mean shadow-banning social media accounts. Silencing accounts on social media isn't _nothing_ but it's also definitely not equivalent to being sent to a prison camp.

- I think there is a legitimate broader question about what "censorship" should mean when talking about companies whose products involve communication. A requirement that user-provided messages should have equal reach irrespective of what they're saying seems to is in tension with the firm having its own freedom to not put certain things on their screens, on pages with their branding.

> One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited.

- I also think there's a legitimate question of whether people have a right to spread false information, including deliberate misinformation, irrespective of the platform. Claims that a chemical is medically effective in treating a specific disease need to be backed by clinical evidence. Intentionally lying to harm someone's reputation is defamation. "Censorship" in the form of "you can't criticize The Party" or "you can't publish that novel with its dangerous ideas" seems pretty different from "you can't say that your horse drug treats covid". Perhaps all viewpoints should have the same freedoms of expression, but we don't get to have our own facts. One can have principled reasons for believing that not all speech should be equally free.

I used to believe this, but the sad reality of modern society is that the current "meta" is suppressing viewpoints that damage society from your point of view, and if you decide not to play the meta by, say, opting for carte blanche free speech, others who have damaging views that actively harm your position will embrace this "meta" instead and YOUR views will eventually be suppressed (see Karens flooding local school boards to get basic LGBT literature banned, who have no problem being hypocritical about the fact that they just want to censor things they disagree with but will leave literal Nazi literature alone). It's an arms race of who can control the dialogue and get their views in front of the most eyeballs, unfortunately, and if you fail to see it that way, you will lose.

In the face of fascism, restraint in the name of principles make you weaker than the fascist.

Freedom of speech is drastically compromised when there's a lower and lower ceiling of freedom of thought. Meta or any platform limiting speech is a 2x "win" because it also limits further proliferation of such ideas.

That is, people can't think what they aren't aware of. People can't change their minds when the alternatives are limited.

I agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that Congress should consider extending common carrier rules to large social media platforms and force them to carry all legal content. This would in a sense be a form of "compelled speech" in that those companies would have to expend resources to distribute communicates that their management finds objectionable, but at scale the marginal costs would be virtually zero. And they would still be able to give individual users the tools to filter out or block content that they don't want to see.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

"Freedom of speech for me, not for thee."

Those at both sides of the political horseshoe [1] want it this way, and do not believe the pendulum will swing out of their favor.

The best way to enshrine this in society is with new legislation to protect our means of communication (won't happen) or robust P2P social protocols (also probably won't happen).

Remember that the ACLU used to defend everyone. Even distasteful groups such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, Nation of Islam, NAMBLA, Westboro Baptist Church. And that's what it takes to defend free speech. Defending even the speech and the people you don't like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

I think the problem with the right wing politicians was that they were presenting their warped view of reality as fact?

I believe its relevant to mention that this doesnt have to be ill intent on part of Meta. Israeli intelligence is spending a lot of resources on influencing narratives. Its not surprising that this would include exploiting and influencing moderation. And its not like social media sites figured out perfect moderation yet, they are an easy target for such determined influences.

Israeli intelligence is likely spending virtually no resources at all on influencing narratives. And if they are, they are failing spectacularly.

More likely, the ministry of the exterior, the IDF spokesperson office, and civilian operations are trying to influence narratives.

From what I can tell these other efforts are not doing so well either.

On another news, the UN, which is a political international organization, and not a company or an "app", have a large blind spot for many attrocities around the world.

It is important to criticize those apps but most important to look at the reality you really face, like "Denmark and Germany arrest terror suspects planning attacks in Europe" [1].

Also, you can follow by the HRW 2023 report [2]. I think they forgot to put an executive summary that gives you a quick glance around the world. [3] helps.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2023/12/14/denmark-...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023

[3] https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2023/01/World%...

Whataboutism[0] at its finest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Censorship has been done to both people with right-wing views and left-wing views. It's not a question of if it's been done.

We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.

I'm not sure it's correct to classify this particular instance as either left- or right-wing; additionally, misinformation should be censored.

From the article: >Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam

This issue seems almost parallel to the paradox of tolerance in that algorithms which promote content at a global scale - largely without human oversight - should not be unregulated.

It is factual to say that human rights violations are occurring in Palestine. It is also factual to say that people have a right to defend themselves, and to recognize that atrocities are atrocious. But to silence the already-oppressed furthers oppression, and Meta is to blame here, again.

We should also consider the potential implications that Meta, with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, has in regard to US foreign policy vis-a-vis support of Israel.

There’s a good piece from someone (formerly?) at Reddit about how to do moderation without consideration if content; I’m not expressing a take either way behind it being worth a look.

What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

The fact is people are unprincipled and will either complain about free speech or will clamor for it, or complain about censorship or clamor for it depending on point of view.

I wish people were principled and stood on principle and not what dog they have in a fight.

Sadly I agree with this. It seems like the best summary of how most people treat free speech is basically:

"If my side is the underdog, talk about how important it is and complain that we're being censored, and if my side is winning, talk about how it's not necessary and those people can go elsewhere"

It was extremely obvious when Twitter was bought by Musk and the rules changed to favour far right wing content and rhetoric. Suddenly all the folks talking about that XKDC comic and no free speech on a private platform had a very different tune once their side was the one getting banned or censored there...

If you disagree with how a platform is run, go somewhere else.

> What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

Yes, and it's absolutely still their platform and their rules. And people also have every right to criticize that platform and its rules, as they're doing. What Meta is doing is wrong, but it should emphatically not be illegal.

Yep, everyone is full of shit and self interested. Accepting that makes it easy to tune out weak rhetoric from all sides.

The platforms are large enough now that there is a public interest in the moderation decisions that they make. Like a utility or a mail carrier or an internet service provider, if you reach a certain size in an industry that tends towards a natural monopoly, then the public has an interest in regulating your behavior towards neutrality.

The vast majority of people are principled on outcomes, not the details of how to get there.

So when aiding in an attempted coup or a coordinated effort to manipulate votes to subvert democratic institutions, their principles are focused on stopping that from happening. But we simultaneously admire the founding fathers - who committed a coup and massaged democracy to embed their own power and ideals. And it's regularly asked (though less commonly with time) why Germans didn't just "kill Hitler", by people who would call the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appalling. Because it aligns with their principles for the outcome of "a better world for people", which is what they actually care about.

Being dogmatic on the implementation details is important as a preventative measure for abuse by bad actors later, mostly. But forgetting that the end goal is a more just world is just as deadly, because it can let institutions be warped and abused, even if they technically don't break "principles". Plus, I think the last 100 years have made it fairly clear that the real threats and tyrant don't care, they'll just break your principled rules and just... Do it?

Anyway, I find it curious that you call "being against an active genocide of a race of people, the murder of innocent women and children in their open-air prison" a simple "dog in the fight". As if stopping thousands of deaths isn't worth breaking a principle or two? Now I don't know enough about the situation to say that's what's happening or not, but that's what these people are the very least feel. Try to use that perspective when engaging the discussion.

> Their platform, their rules?

This works at a national level too: "our country, our rules (laws)"

And FB and the like have been found to break a number of laws in the past: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/12-billion-euro-fine-f...

Perhaps alternative planforms would have a better chance if FB played fair?

This comment section is a blast.

Btw, just saying “this phrase is considered hateful by many” is inane. Many people find many things hateful but they don’t get the same weird instant “you bigot!” label as some of what I see directed towards Palestinian supporters. It’s nuts.

I have no dog in the fight. Just giving some useless anecdotes for people to get angry over.

But also, 1000 is not that many in the grand scheme of things like Meta said.

Meta is as rigged and rotten as it gets. I live in Iran and whenever I have posted something political (not just rants, something serious) or any serious about the gov, it always got taken down. During the Woman,Life,Freedom movement everybody reported how instagram would take down important rebel news and posts and journalisms. you would think meta would work against something like the Islamic republic but it seems like it love all corrupt dictator governments. Let it be Islamic republic or Israel.

Thank god I have left all meta platforms for about 3 years now. But anyone who claims Meta is not pure evil is either evil themself or really really stupid.

People still use Facebook?

(Depending on your country) Whatsapp has Channels, some of those news channels' views are completely one-sided.

Instagram, yes. Some billion of them, I'd hazard a guess.

Odd. When I open instagram reels all I see are pro-Palestinian posts, including the now intolerable “threads” box. I doubt that report is accurate.

I have nearly no followers on Threads and follow only 2-3 people yet somehow I am bombarded with pro palestine content on the odd occasion i open it. I somehow doubt the guardian is right on this one. This “newspaper” is known to gave all sorts of dubious agendas.

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