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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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