Growing number of apps help automate pro-Israel activism online | Hacker News Reader

Growing number of apps help automate pro-Israel activism online

washingtonpost.com

26 pointsaspenmayer40 comments

They've been doing this for decades.

What was that app they had in the 2000s? You used to install it into your computer and had some sort of megaphone icon in the app tray and would alert you whenever anyone was talking about Israel online.

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Found it. It was called megaphone.

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

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675

Israeli group claims it’s using back channels to censor “inflammatory” content - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38941719

Why does a country that is apparently doing nothing wrong have the most advanced PR and propaganda machine in the world?

I think that is probably an exaggeration. I don't see a lot of reason to believe they have the most advanced machine and I don't buy that their PR machine exists to ameliorate ethical lapses. PR/Propaganda is power and all regimes want power.

I've seen incredible amounts of (justfied) anti-Israeli action press, so I don't particularly believe they have a wildly successful PR machine either.

China, the US, and Russia are all clearly advanced. Facebook alone got significant press for weighing in substantially on elections across the world. Twitter, before Elon, was used to coordinate against despotic regimes all over the world. Hollywood alone has incredible soft and hard power.

NSO group's Pegasus, and their selling software to despotic regimes so that they can find and torture/murder/scare journalists is much more telling of Israel's ethical core, as is their bombing of associated press offices.

Seeking power is not mens rea, directly harming those who would report your misdeeds is.

> Hollywood has.. hard power

Um, what??

Because most of the Muslim world shares false propaganda against them, and they are billions of people against ~10 million?

Why does tech used have any effect on what is true? If you don't fear the truth, you should be happy that the minority has the tools to get more data out.

Israelis on TikTok and Israeli leadership make the best case against Zionism. They’re openly racist and genocidal. As someone who’s not religious it’s clear the Palestinians have the moral high ground by a long shot.

Palestinians have higher moral ground by raping innocent teenagers and then shooting them in the head?

Yeah, some moral high ground. Your comment tells more about you than about this conflict.

Palestinians have the moral high ground because it was their land that was invaded in 1948 and they been oppressed by Israel ever since. The “rapes” have been discredited over and over. One of the many things Israel does that is very obvious to outside observers is to lie constantly in the most obvious of fashions.

Well, that's because the premise of actions or policies being "right" or "wrong" is very simplistic. Both sides are active in the PR front, you think those "free palestine" rallies organize themselves?

dang, is there any way to pre-emptively/proactively block the apps mentioned in this article and ones like it from parsing content on HN? I have no reason to believe that they’re being used here, but it would be nice to know that content posted here is not being targeted by coordinated inauthentic behavior.

I think these apps just post links to the content they target for mass flagging. Individual users still use their personal accounts to access the content. I don't think there would be anything distinctive about the traffic other than a lot of it originating in Israel.

Perhaps you’re correct. If the apps allow you to input/select content for parsing, then the admins/mods can do some tests/dryruns to see what is happening on the backend and block it, and nothing of value would be lost as far as HN and its guidelines are concerned. HN doesn’t allow bots or novelty accounts, and this kind of posting behavior as mentioned in OP is actively moderated against for breaking the guidelines of HN, so it doesn’t hurt to ask. The sites mentioned in OP may also have a way to request to not be used on domains that you own, as well.

Ah, I was wondering why the comments on r/worldnews read like propaganda.

I think it's more that /r/worldnews has removed any critical voices long ago.

I don't even remember when I was myself banned. It's a very 'shaped' subreddit, and not just on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Do you think the moderator account u/Maxwellhill on r/worldnews belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell? (The one that hasn’t posted since her arrest in 2019)

https://www.the-sun.com/news/4460492/ghislaine-maxwell-reddi...

It's absolutely possible.

But the power moderators and their anonymity are certainly a huge legitimacy problem. There are subreddits that are more important in shaping opinions than the New York Times or Washington Post, and the people controlling discussion in them are anonymous.

It's hard to underestimate how enormous a problem this is.

I don't think the problem is the anonymity, but the complete lack of accountability. They don't need to be "unmasked" they need to be replaced when their moderation, which has long since turned into editorializtion, isn't serving the needs of readers.

I like the idea of changing out moderation to a subscription system where you can 'subscribe' to specific moderators and moderators you dont like you can ignore. Ignored mod changes do not get propogated to your view. Default moderators can remain a popularity contest but at least this provides a release valve for all the completely unchecked corruption that happens in these mod teams and lets people fix the problem on an individual and eventually group basis.

This would allow people to control who controls what they see rather than have moderators just materialize in these positions and be all-powerful for all time as they rot from corruption.

That's an idea close to my ideal solution, and had that been solution from the beginning there might have been no need for unmasking of the moderators, but you cannot have the present situation where anonymous people have the power they currently have, or where they remain unexposed.

There isn't anywhere else where anonymous entities control discussion with this kind of influence, and it's leading, as we see with /r/worldnews, with /r/politics, etc., to large-scale political manipulation and manipulation of national sentiments.

The effect they've achieved is probably greater than what has been achieved with LLMs etcetera.

Early reddit ramped up quickly for many reasons, not the least for a number of early "super" moderators pushing links to a breadth of media publications.

Leaving Epstein aside:

    Born in France and raised in Oxford, Maxwell is the daughter of British media proprietor Robert Maxwell and French-born researcher of the Holocaust, Elisabeth Maxwell.

I suspect u/Maxellhill had password control by Ghislaine and a degree of personal use, but the bulk of the links and constant presence was maintained by PA's.

Other global media empires have their footprint across reddit in early super accounts.

That subreddit has been a forum for nation-state trolls for a long time.

This is a terrible article. There are grassroots advocacy apps, and software for a wide variety of issues. Singling out Israel turns this into a hit piece and it doesn't belong on hacker news

We're just lucky it's still attached to a human being. When online political discourse is dominated by millions of AI bots that appear indistinguishable from a human, that could be horrific.

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