Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta | Hacker News Reader

Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta

dropsitenews.com

1,214 pointsjbegley960 comments

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20250411170102/https://www.drops...

I like to think we are in a better place than russia for instance with all its propaganda and jailed journalists, but then i see these kind of article come over and over....

Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media, like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to 'suck up' to the government because at the end they are business, they need to be in good term with ruling class.

you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that because no one has the time to fact check everything.

One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone can actually look for real information, but even in russia people have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.

Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream media and they enforce the government narrative, you can't speak there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe the government propaganda, your arguments won't be heard at all.

The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

>Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way.

Although not even close in number and punishment the US government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.

I think we do have a much better system because we are aware of these cases, you can speak out about the issue, and our court system can rule against the current admin.

What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.

> and our court system can rule against the current admin.

That is more and more often not happening recently, because courts are not involved. If they are and explicitly request planes to be turned around and people brought back - they're ignored without repercussions.

Exactly, it's the "they're the same anyway", "both sides" equivalency that allows the buildup of antidemocratic de-politicization and apathy. This is one of the goals of the _there_is_no_truth_ radicalization that is fundamental to Russian political control

In the US the upper class rules by soft power that gives people the illusion of choice while actually they hold all the power.

I agree it’s better that we don’t yet see individuals directly punished at scale for dissent.

But if this is all we settle for we’re like dogs fighting for scraps.

You only feel safe to speak out against the violations of law if you feel safe from them.

The united states has the world’s largest incarcerated population. It currently dwarfs the number incarcerated by the Soviet Union during the 1930s. The USA has the fifth highest incarceration rate on the planet. In the Southeast United States, the incarceration rate of the Black population is 7% (as a point of comparison 2x the incarceration rate of minoritized Uyghur population of China per the World Uyghur Congress figures)

If you are talking about Khalil, he didn't just speak against Israel, it seems like his role in an org which openly supported Hamas may have played a part but didn't matter legally. The legal issue was that he left out facts on his green card application.

I am 100% sure that support of terrorist orgs can invalidate your green card.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-claims-palest...

> According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022" and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from June to November 2023.

> "Regardless of his allegations concerning political speech, Khalil withheld membership in certain organizations and failed to disclose continuing employment by the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut when he submitted his adjustment of status application. It is black-letter law that misrepresentations in this context are not protected speech," the government said in the filing.

Most of these things are not black/white. We should wait for all the facts to come out.

> Although not even close in number and punishment the US government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.

You and I both know that isn't true and repeating that doesn't help anyone but further implant in people's minds that the other side is completely irrational and cannot be reasoned with.

No, the US government is deporting people for supporting terrorist organizations, something that's always been a disqualifying position in US immigration law. You'll get your visa denied, or even your entry denied for holding such positions, let alone maintaining an active student visa or permanent resident visa. That has always been the case and simply enforcing laws already on the books does not change that.

> What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.

Equating Russia and the US is an extreme take.

Indeed. The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often staffed with people who attended the same schools and classes as those running the country. The social circles of the two worlds are extremely closely linked.

Of course, this means that the reporting isn't very good at addressing its blind spots–i.e., most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites. And I say this as a member of that same class. Most of the political perspectives in my life are completely unrepresented in the opinion columns, which generally tend to pander upwards rather than downwards.

I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.

And here is an article on Raffi berg, BBC’s Middle East editor:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-bia...

And here is an analysis of BBC's anti-Israeli bias: https://asserson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-r...

And from the BBC itself: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d4egk17l2o "Questions still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary"

https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/skcfkb1iyx "From bias to blunders: The BBC’s anti-Israel shift since October 7"

The NYT's Executive Editor Joe Kahn is the son of a billionaire who was on the board of lobby group CAMERA, a group devoted to pressuring US media to be more pro-Israel.

Just rumors and conspiracy theories.

Where can we see evidence of what you claim?

What do you claim Kahn has done? Do you have evidence? The NY Times regulary publishes news critical of Israel.

Children and parents, siblings, etc. disagree, sometimes extremely, regularly. Children and parents disagreeing is one of the most common stories in humanity. Should Joe resign because of dad's activities?

More importantly, these newsrooms are run by people who get their money from the same places.

How much are they going to tolerate narratives that go against their financial interests?

Just endless conspiracies. Which newsroom leaders get their money from what places? Why do leaders in government and business hate journalists so much and invest so much in discrediting them?

Which politcal perspective is being ignored by the media?

> The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often staffed with people who attended the same schools and classes as those running the country. The social circles of the two worlds are extremely closely linked.

This is a conspiracy theory - they are secretly conspiring. Do you have evidence of this conspiracy actually happening on any scale?

Many attended the same universities on all sides of politics and issues. The universities are big places that have been operating for generations. Ask someone who went to a university - do they know and agree with everyone else who went there? It's absurd.

> most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites.

You need to do more than throw around stereotypes. Give us some evidence.

> I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.

Who asked permission?

>This is a conspiracy theory

Doesn't meet the criteria of what people typically call a conspiracy theory. It's easily verified or debunked by amateurs with publicly available information, it doesn't seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than those of association (certainly none of blatant felony, coup, or world domination).

You’re not arrested for posting this, so that is a pretty big difference to Russia (and other authoritarian nations like China and Turkey), no?

https://rsf.org/en/country/russia

America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent weeks—university students, mostly—for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such as international students.

- "You’re not arrested for posting this"

For what it's worth, it's widely reported that ICE is trawling social media to find targets (targeted for their speech/viewpoints). HN itself is one of their known targets.

As someone who came from a pretty authoritarian country- let me assure you that people there do routinely criticize their government, mock them all the time. Governments often do not have the bandwidth to deal with the volume of criticism, and even when they do- they wisely realize that letting people vent a little online is better than complete crackdown. I myself routinely did this in Facebook, where many in my friend list were government employees and (ex-ruling) party members.

I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from USA as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and please trust me I am not exaggerating here.

Actually now US citizens are impacted too.

Michigan-based attorney Amir Makled [a US citizen] was detained by federal immigration agents while returning home from a family vacation

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5357455/attorney-detain...

> and other authoritarian nations like China and Turkey

And Israel, where a history teacher was arrested for making a post on Facebook:

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/22/meir_baruchin

As someone said above, "America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent weeks—university students, mostly—for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such as international students."

America is changing. What was true before isn't necessarily true now, and may get worse, depending on election outcomes.

If you post it and nobody ever sees it, that is functionally the same result as not being allowed to post it.

I think UK leads here:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54123/were-over...

(many links in the responses and comments, eg: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-offensive-... - " 625 arrests were made for alleged section 127 offences in 2010 " just in london)

My wife deleted all her social media posts because she's a green card holder. Let's stop mincing words.

People who have spoken out against the genocidal apartheid regime are being black-bagged in the street by plainclothes officers all across the United States. The gap between the supposedly enlightened West and Russia grows smaller by the day.

Right. We don't have to arrest. We can just disappear anything you say critical of our masters, I mean, our overlords, I mean, our government, I mean, a foreign government, I mean, a foreign government that hacks American companies and sells the hacks to Middle Eastern dictators who breed an ideology that trained people to attack our own country, I mean...

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/02/us/israel-protesters-us-s...

They don't need to arrest him because the narrative is already controlled, as shown by the article, and by going to any traditional news site.

Yea but there's also not much point in critiquing the government here. What we ever been able to do about it except riot? We can endlessly discuss the failures of government and as it stands I don't think we will never see these failures distinguish candidates in the voting booth. Which is confusing, because you'd think the democrats would have wanted to win this time.

He could have his visa revoked though.

Why arrest if you can silence?

Well, Israelis are not abruptly incompetent and culturally allergic to progress, with a predictable habit of grovelling to whichever tyrant comes next — but they certainly do share some methods.

Any difference is going to disappear in only a few years. What matters is the direction the US taking. This happened to Russia about 14 years ago, and it’s happening to the US now.

You do realize that this is where things are going, right? Have you not heard of the arrests and recent deportations of student protestors?

I don’t understand why we keep forgetting that authoritarianism is a slippery slope.

Yea people are actually https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo

The western endorsement of the genocide in Gaza has been some of the best PR Putin could ever have hoped for.

It simultaneously underlined the viciousness, the lack of moral credibility and extreme hypocrisy of western leaders in the eyes of the nonaligned world (e.g. the global south), none of whom sanctioned him.

If you are not constantly posting fake and not recieve money from foreign entities you are not being arested at all in Russia. You may get a fine, and that's not always the case.

Not really, I'm Russian currently located in Russia and I can openly say that I hate our government. Though it would obviously be much worse if I actually had a big audience, in which case yeah there may be repercussions

> You’re not arrested for posting this

Your funds might be cut off though: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/07/trump-...

Or your president might declare a wartime law to deport all the immigrants: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp34ylep987o

Or you, a honors student (but not a citizen) might find yourself in an unmarked van if you dared to question the powers that be. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrn57340xlo

Sure it happens to immigrants only for now, brings memory to this poem:

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.

Russia doesn’t just put people in jail for speaking against the government. They weaponise the generational fear of being disappeared by the government. This is not close to what happens in America where you can post anything anywhere and if Facebook deletes it you can always make your own website about it. If you did this in Russia you go to jail. Even if you say things like “it is sad Ukrainian children die in children’s day in Russia” you go to jail. I don’t think you can compare modern USA with modern Russia in this way. USA does plenty of other things that are bad like jailing so many people for petty crimes without pushing much on speech. USA has its own problems and all these comparisons only hide them.

They are now denying visas, and deporting lawful residents, sending them to offshore torture prisons, for social media posts.

For non citizens, regardless of length of time or legality, this is the case right now. For birthright citizens and full citizens it will be the case very soon

They are sending people to a concentration camp without any due process.

Technically, they are the same. As in: people with power want to control the narrative.

This was so, is so and will always be so, everywhere.

But but but… details matter. A lot.

The west has traditions how and when to apply power, which is distinctly different from Russia.

I hand-pick two illustrations of Russia:

1. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/moscow-police-accu...

> Officers “beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in his anus,” according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.

2. Bald man claim to power was accompanies with mysterious explosions of apartment buildings after which Chechens were declared enemies and war started.

Some interesting bits from wikipedia:

> Three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police.[6] The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the incident in Ryazan had been an anti-terror drill and the device found there contained only sugar, and freed the FSB agents involved.[7]

And

> 13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov makes an announcement about the bombing of an apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk that only takes place three days later

> 16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 17 are killed, 69 injured

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombi...

>hand-picked

cherry-picked, actually

1. Almost exactly the same incident happened in the USA, NYPD sodomized Michael Mineo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_alleged_police...

None of the NYPD officers didn't have any sentence for this

2. That's an old conspiracy theory, even the Russian opposition (at least the reasonable part of it) doesn't support this theory. There are plenty of publications about it in Russian, and if you will do some effort you will find why

> Russian opposition

Do you mean the guy who died relatively recently in Russian prison? Or his colleague who was part of prisoner exchange

Most of Russian opposition does support this theory. Many people do, in general. It's hard to call it a conspiracy theory when they literally caught a couple of FSB guys loading bags of explosives into an apartment building. The official version is that this was a "security training", but c'mon.

It's still humans being humans, we just have a covert culture while they are more overt. I personally like being tricked/manipulated more than forced. I'd rather get Tom Sawyered into painting a fence than being held at gunpoint.

The college deportations are the government, but I would guess that the Meta compliance has more to do with the fact that Cheryl Sandberg is a politically-connected turbo-Zionist.

I wish we were neutral on this issue. As an American, it is not my business. I am in no position to justly arbitrate between them. But our politicians are whores, our Zionists have deep pockets, and they're not afraid to empty them out for the cause, so it looks like America's taxpayers are all on Team Zionist, whether we like it or not.

Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods of power grabs are also fairly universal.

The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed respond.

Well, there is a difference with Russia, actually. One of Palestinian professors, who studied freedom of speech, shaped it this way: The difference is that people from Russia, Arab countries etc DO know that their media is lying - but also they know the Western media is lying, because they read all that nonsense the westerners write about their countries.

Good for you that you started to realize how corrupt the Western media is.

> Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way.

This is more subtle. I have a lot to say about Israel, and I do post occasionally on Facebook, but I tone it down a lot because I have a few high profile people in the industry and academia among my Facebook friends (not actual friends). If I were to post what I really think, this would have serious career repercussions for me. People would brand me as an antisemite (they don't know that my grandfather is Jewish and he practically raised me).

Can you compare this to Russia? Well, I am Russian and I live in the West, so my choice of living here gives an answer to this question. I'd be in jail in Russia if they read my Facebook posts about the war in Ukraine. Yet, I'm now disillusioned about the Western liberalism, all thanks to Gaza war.

The US isn't just trying to save the Jews... it's trying to leverage them to crush the Muslims for Christian domination.

It is not so bad in Russia. Not so many sites are blocked. You can easily read foreign news if you want to. Hacker news is not blocked for example :).

Another often overlooked difference is that non US/UK citizens are typically bilingual, so by definition can access more news sources

> The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

You might consider trying not to view the world entirely in black and white then.

This sort of sentiment is not particularly productive especially in times like this..

There is no difference between US and Russia in terms of free speech. Russia doesn't have promote a narrative of free speech while banning it. US suppresses it, punishes it and effectively deports anyone who criticizes Israel.

Holy cows are holy everywhere, its just that different cows are holy everywhere.

The difference is not in the ability to be heard. The difference is in the consequences: jail or even death vs. merely not being heard.

The difference with Russia is that they are much worse at hiding their corruption and censorship.

Russia doesn't bang the drum of "free speech" ad nauseam the way US social media magnates do.

Strictly speaking, Russia has quite explicit free speech protections in its constitution. So much so that it separately covers freedom of speech and freedom of press, and in regard to the latter straight up says "censorship is prohibited".

Whenever this topic comes up, the government just nods at the document, as if it had any relation to the real world.

True. I was born in Russia and to be honest I wish Russia would at least "bang the drum of free speech" as well. If you pretend to have some values you actually make people start to believe in them a bit

Sure, the 'free speech' propaganda is a conscious part of the (better/more effective) public opinion manipulation playbook.

Is Meta really considered “mainstream media”? I always took that phrase to refer to NBC, CBS, NY Post, etc - the big legacy news organizations (print and TV).

The big legacy news organisations would be legacy media.

Social media is not even 20 years old but it’s a tall order to deny it mainstream status since the younger generations get their news from scrolling TikTok and not cracking open the daily broadsheet.

Legacy media has been sourcing from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit for years. They’re as mainstream as AP and Reuters but without the reputation or the credentials.

How does "mainstream" America increasingly get its news?

It's mainstream, it's media, people read their news on it, so yes. But I'd rather trust NPR, BBC, the Guardian or some other legacy news outlet, because these unscrupulous tech bros will skew the narrarive by silencing some sources while brainwashing people with whatever suits them best.

you might enjoy reading, "Manufacturing Consent"

I don't think this is necessarily an issue of censorship so much as it is highlighting that Facebook is clearly a fucking news publisher and should be treated as such under the law.

It's time to revoke section 230 for any social media network that amplifies or buries content with a non-transparent process.

In this case it isn't even merely an algorithm designed by humans. They have LITERAL human editors choosing which stories to put on the front page, just like the NYT, and they should be held liable for the content on their platforms just like legacy media is.

Are you saying you think human editors handpick what goes on billions of people’s Facebook feeds?

Wait but if you perform an extremely complex method of algorithmic curation, at some point isn’t the human designing the algorithm becoming an editor?

[flagged]

Anna Politkovskaya – Investigative journalist and critic of the Chechen war, shot in Moscow (2006). Alexander Litvinenko – Ex-FSB officer poisoned with polonium in London (2006).

Stanislav Markelov & Anastasia Baburova – Human rights lawyer and journalist, shot in Moscow (2009).

Boris Nemtsov – Opposition leader, shot near the Kremlin (2015).

Denis Voronenkov – Former Russian MP, shot in Kyiv (2017).

Nikolai Andrushchenko – Journalist, beaten to death in St. Petersburg (2017).

Alexei Navalny – Opposition leader, died in prison after previous poisoning (2024).

---

The difference is that they murder their political opponents for show to make their people be afraid of dissent.

You comparing it with some (disgusting, vile) social media company (which would improve the world immensely if it disappeared) is completely inappropriate.

"We're not as bad as them" is a poor argument. Particularly while America quickly slides in that direction. Just take a look at the deportation of Venezuelans especially the case of the wrongly deported man that the government conveniently "can't find". That's a story comparable to the stories Americans tell about Russia and China.

I think OP is more using this incident along with many others. Things similar to in February when the President signed executive orders that imposed sanctions on American law firms and lawyers which included suspension of security clearances, termination of government contracts, and restrictions preventing firm employees from accessing federal buildings. (https://www.justsecurity.org/110109/president-cannot-issue-a...)

I have no idea how to talk equality to speak of whether they are comparable or not, but I do think people are seeing a different atmosphere.

If you gonna mix in politicians and opposition the USA has a extensive list themselves.

Trump is barely, like, 90? days into his presidency and his gestapo is already kidnapping people and shipping them to torture camps contrary to the court orders.

Putler is an established dicktator with a long list of killing his own citizens with impunity.

Give trump a couple of years. He can't do it overnight, he needs to cook the Americans slowly. Hitler didn't turn the Germans into Nazis overnight either.

Is this an example of whataboutism?

Sadly, that situation is also contorted to legitimize the spread verifiably false information by certain current political cults, led by a Turnip, that claim it is another party controlling media because they believe that they have the secret access to the “truth” that is being “blocked” on all other sources of media, and point to other suppressed stories (even if completely unrelated or blocked due to being outright lies) as proof. Look at attempts to curtail the spread of completely false vaccine information that is now being used as proof of something nefarious (even while more nefarious activity is being perpetrated). Some people took notes from other Dictators’ control of media long ago and have been working toward it for many years via press-related misinformation to cause a loss of confidence. You would think the press would fight back harder against being de-legitimized, using stronger wording and calling lying what it is, but when your purse strings are being controlled by the same businesses that see opportunities to advantage themselves, it’s not surprising.

This post is oddly nonsensical ...

> mainstream media, like facebook

Facebook is in the 'mainstream media'? That's a first in my experience. 'Mainstream media' usually describes established journalism organizations such as CNN, Fox, the NY Times, the WSJ. Facebook is universally grouped with 'social media' in my experience.

> Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media

In fact, most people go on social media. The 'mainstream media' is losing audience rapidly.

> you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends

I'm a bit confused here. Facebook complying with ... which government? The Israeli government has very little power over Facebook - Israel is a tiny market.

Meanwhile, Trump has been calling the 'mainstream media', the 'enemy of the people' - because they constantly report what he doesn't like.

Since the November election, many have shockingly capitulated but many remain. The NYT, for example, publishes negative news and criticisms of Trump and Israel daily.

> The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

You haven't established much of anything. Much of the comment doesn't make sense. Where is the Russian NYT? Which American journalists are in jail?

It’s not a better or worse government (although it may be), it’s just different.

So when the government pointed to the disproportionate support for Palestine on TikTok vs Instagram, it was actually because Instagram was suppressing it. It is ironic.

https://x.com/hawleymo/status/1717505662601609401

Another reason why TikTok has to come under US ownership. How else are we going to censor things when they are under China’s (lack of) control?

Exactly. China demands Apple Maps be ran on Chinese servers by Chinese workers. I would expect current U.S. administration to be frustrated with these imbalances as surveillance state measures increase. These imbalances were less important when there was less interest in information and truth suppression.

And conversely, another reason why Trump's tariffs on China are a bone-headed move. They are not going to sell TikTok while the tariffs last, and the popular demand for it makes banning it a non-starter.

While this may be part of the story, it's certainly not the full picture. We know that the CCP is actively manipulating the algorithm on Tiktok to further their agenda on multiple other geopolitical issues—something we have ample evidence for. I don't know if there is a smoking gun on this one topic in particular, but the CCP's goal has always been to divide the American audience; and we know that older Americans skew pro-Israel whilst younger Americans are more oriented towards being pro-Palestinian. If someone looked in the right places, they would more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation to favor a Palestinian bend.

> something we have ample evidence for

Can you share some of that evidence? My impression from the SCOTUS case is that the government only alleged it could happen, not that it was happening. So I’m a bit surprised to see someone so confidently assert it is happening.

> more likely than not find evidence of algorithm manipulation

I think a lot of people have been looking. For years. Yet you admit there is no smoking gun. Perhaps if we look in the right place we will find Russell’s teapot orbiting Jupiter as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot

So, we have proof of a strong algorithm manipulation by Israel on the entire family of main US social media (those used by the older segment of the population); and yet you still manage to point your finger to a hypothetical, unproved manipulation of the algorithm on the competitors' social media to explain the difference in attitude between generations? But you have the answer here, there has been manipulation of the social media consumed by the older segment!

> something we have ample evidence for.

Please show this "ample evidence" because it seems you (or "we" - whoever that is) have something the rest of the world doesn't.

We find in mainstream media a pro Israel bend. We also find the same in US companies. Manipulation? Yes

So what if they do this though? Big so what? Americans are allowed to read any journal and any news, even those explicitly owned and edited by foreign adversaries that they want. This is a tried and true first amendment right. And I get that forcing China to divest TikTok isn't legally an act against the 1st Amendment, but functionally it is. Why can't Americans see a CCP-biased view of Palestine if they want to? If I want to watch CCP propaganda all day, or Press TV, or Russia Today, that's my right as an American. Part of the reason there's interest to see that at all and 0 interest in watching a CCP revisionist history of the Korean War is because Israel can only bomb so many WCK aid workers, Red Cross aid workers, ambulances with the sirens on, in full video, etc. before people become curious about why this isn't a big deal for our govt.

it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it were being manipulated, but we know for absolute certain facebooks sites and twitter are manipulated.

we should be looking to stop all manipulation, whether from a state or billionaires. this kind of manipulation is awful no matter what the source is.

i have a hard time understanding why so many are terrified of tiktok yet turn around and seem eager to suck from twitter or facebook’s firehose.

Yes. This was clearly the reason for the ban in the first place.

Most americans support Israel in this conflict. Maybe the samples are just biased?

Not true at all. Talk to the average American, not an extremist of either side, and they want Israel to defend themselves and stop demanding billions from us then talking down to us and telling themselves we are easy to trick into giving them full support and money whenever they want

Current polls say 53% of Americans disapprove of Israel’s actions, and 38% say it is genocide.

Regarding your specific claim, here’s the most recent poll I could find. In june, 61% of Americans opposed sending military support: https://theintercept.com/2024/09/10/polls-arms-embargo-israe...

The missing part of this article: are the requests valid? Are they actually incitements to terrorism and violence or is it just a clamp down on criticism? The headline of the article implies the latter but the body does not provide any evidence for that.

Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that. I would expect there to be quite a lot of incitement to violence related to that. I would expect the israeli government to be mostly concerned with incitements of violence against its citizens. In the context of this conflict i would expect such incitements to be mostly be made by the demographics cited in the article due to the nature of the conflict. The article seems like it could be entirely consistent with take downs being used appropriately. It needs more then this to prove its headline.

Heck, from this post we dont even know relative numbers. How does this compare against take down requests from other groups?

If you have valid rules but in practice only enforce them against a single group, then in some sense you are asking the wrong question.

In other words, for people who assume rule enforcement is supposed to be fair, they see unfair enforcement as hypocrisy. However, if you just see enforcement as another tool to wield against enemies, hypocrisy is irrelevant. What matters is power. It’s my basketball, I make the rules.

> If you have valid rules but in practice only enforce them against a single group

I'd agree. Is there any evidence that that is happening here? The article reports on israeli take down requests but does not report on take down requests from other groups. Meta could very well be using the same rules against pro-israel groups, we just dont know because the leak didn't include that information.

The article does mention it, but I agree that the story is incomplete without a clearer idea (including examples) of what is being censored.

> "A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta’s moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel."

However that study is using a different data set afaik. There is no indication that the things being requested taken down by Israel are the same as those being studied by HRW.

Its also really difficult to draw any conclusions from the HRW study due to selection bias issues. The sample was sent in by users instead of being chosen randomly from censored posts. Even assuming you agree with HRW's assesment that the posts were peaceful, there is no way to tell from the study if this represents the 0.00001% most "peaceful" of all censored posts or if its the average censored post, and i think that makes a big difference when evaluating this situation. The experimental design of the HRW study is just rather poor, and i think you could use such a design to come to basically any conclusion you want.

> The missing part of this article: are the requests valid?

They are enforced with neither human nor AI review, so the reality is that we don't know. They are enforced by virtue of who submits them, with no question on whether they are valid or not.

Having heard from friends the kind of censorship they face on the topic on Facebook and Instagram when discussing the topics at hand, I know of plenty of situations where people were censored without breaking any rules. They're a small sample of course.

Ask anyone who works at Meta if they are valid, and they themselves will tell you, they don't really know. That should let you know how easy it would be for Israel to wield this tool in their favor. If they actually are doing it unfairly or not, we can never know since these posts are automatically taken down without human review.

From the lost of countries and knowing how rampant antisemitism is in these countries I suspect majority of the request are valid and express support and urge for terrorism.

Depends what you consider "incitement". The IL government seems to go by "whoever is not for us is against us" logic:

> A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta’s moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine, while just one post was content in support of Israel.

> Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that.

Sorry, but this is already part if the narrative. (Or rather the implication is that this would justify everything because wars seemingly have different rules. But if course only for one side) It's a "war" were one side inflicts 100 times as many casualties on one side than the other and still has no intention of stopping.

What would you define as “valid”

I would think that anyone advocating for or cheering the death of civilians would be valid reason for removal. Criticizing Israeli policy, being supportive of Palestinians in general, or contradicting Netanyahu's talking points: not a valid reason for removal.

I guess as "violating facebook terms of use". At some point i don't think what the standard is matters that much as long as its equally enforced against everyone.

Generally though i do think its legit for facebook to take down posts advocating for violence and terrorism. Devil is in the details.

Defending yourself from genocide is not terrorism

right, if you, for example, wear uniform, and if you, for example, have not started the war and didnt cause the genocide by not wearing uniform, by using civilians as human shields, and by stealing the humanitarian aid and reselling it to poor displaced civilians, that you then cynically enlist to die for your cause, because there is no other source of cash to feed your families.

you should also consider the sequence of events before using such grave accusations.

When do you think the supposed genocide started?

Not a surprise. I remember last year seeing that posts to https://www.birdsofgaza.com/ were being blocked, and it's hard to think of a more innocuous way of speaking out.

It’s not only about suppression; it’s about cultivating fear around expressing your opinions. There are groups actively working to have individuals fired for voicing support for Palestine.

For instance, a woman wrote “Freedom for Palestine” in Gaelic on LinkedIn, prompting a group of Israelis in a WhatsApp chat to actively coordinate efforts to get her fired.

The General Manager of Wix, Batsheva (Levine) Moshe, responded in a WhatsApp chat saying:

“Hi yes we know. Being taken care of since it was published. I believe there will be an announcement soon regarding our reaction.”

Wix were orderd to pay €35K for unfair dismissal.

ref(s):

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...

Similarly, pro-Palestine content on HN is highly suppressed.

do you feel like it is “Israel’s war on Gaza”? Does that represent reality fully? Is that what children should be taught, that there is a demonic people that kills children? You don’t see any problem with omitting the massacre of israeli civilians, the captured hostages and many thousands of rocket launches towards densely populated civilian communities? is that how we achieve peace in your view?

> Do you feel like it is “Israel’s war on Gaza”? Does that represent reality fully?

No, I didn't write the text on that website. I'd describe it as Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Do you think ignoring Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is ignoring reality? Do you think that immigrants taken in during WWII should have ethnically cleansed the natives? Do you think that settlers in Westbank terrorising Palestinians every day is any different from the settlers in 1940s? Do you think that a militarized society like Israel with compulsory military service can be treated as civilians or like the US defined enemy combatants? Do you think that rocket launches are just testing the effectiveness of missile shields? Do you think 20k Pound bombs are less lethal than tiny rockets? Do you think that holding 10k palestinians in prisons , most without charges and degrading their humanity at every checkpost was happening since 20 years or did it start just now?

Do you think that playing victim works every time?

I'd like to see examples of actual posts that were taken down, rather than talk of the quantity, or who filed the reports.

I am part of a neighborhood group where I grew up in Bangladesh and lived until 5th grade in the 90s.

The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself just to be extra careful himself.

Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.

Makes you wonder what kind of posts about Jews a local Bangladeshi group is posting... Or why.

…and yet, they still use and support these censorship platforms.

They’ll do anything but leave.

> Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis, which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for Ire*

Not sure why you're downvoted. This is all true.

Every pro Palestinian protestor has experienced some form of awareness suppression and content removal. They have known this was a thing long before anyone else did.

Same thing happened during 9/11. Muslims saw suppression, bullying by the police and no one covered it. Then the tables turned on maga republicans after j6.

I’m too stupid to navigate this topic in anything other than a crude and adolescent way, however I think it could be tricky for pro-palestinians because they can fall easily into the trap of using party slogans used by proscribed organisations.

My understanding of Hamas is that they are not considered a legitimate army, but if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable number of war crimes (not unlike the IDF as many would say). Showing support for such things is beyond reasonable accepted discourse in my home country.

It sounds like you're using the fact that the posts aren't available for you to view to evaluate as a weakness of the reporting on this suppression campaign, but of course they're not available because of the suppression campaign.

Surely the burden should be on the censors to establish clearly that something is in fact incitement to violence, rather than on external reporters to magically show that content which has been taken down is not incitement?

Generally i hold the burden to prove wrong-doing is on the party allegging wrong-doing. Otherwise we get in a situation where it can be effectively impossible for the accused to prove their innocence, as it is much more difficult to prove a negative than a positive.

As a recent example, the instagram of guardian journalist Owen jones (well known Israel critic) was suddenly suspended without any explanation today.

It has been since restored, after a predictable twitter storm.

Wasn’t that caused by pro-palestinian people reporting him out of hatred for attending a “butt-mitzvah” Jewish gay party?

Since nobody here has actually read the article, it states that the reason the posts were taken down was "prohibits incitement to terrorism praise for acts of terrorism and identification or support of terror organizations." This type of speech (incitement) is illegal in the United States and support is very borderline depending on the type and meaning of "support". Now, if the reason doesnt match the actual content removed that should definitely be addressed which is your point, but I think that the reason is valid.

You can see some examples here (linked in the OP): https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

On the one hand there are comments from users that want to “turn Gaza into a parking lot” or worse and were not removed because they don’t violate the community guidelines.

On the other hand there are people posting educational explainers about Palestinian human rights censored under hate speech or dangerous individuals rules.

The HRW report[1] goes into details, at least on the 1050 takedowns they documented

[1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

> 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.

> While “hate speech,” “bullying and harassment,” and “violence and incitement” policies[74] were less commonly invoked in the cases Human Rights Watch documented, the handful of cases where they were applied stood out as erroneous. 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.”[75] 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.”[76]

This is exactly why I want to see the posts, because I don't really trust 3rd parties to accurately classify "peaceful content in support of Palestine". It's possible Facebook is wrong. It's also possible that it's filled with content that is peaceful in only the most shallow, ignorant reading possible. e.g. (paraphrasing from my facebook feed last year, on a post which was not taken down): "I'm planning a celebration on October 7th in support of my Palestinian friends, who wants to join me :)"

HRW is a "complicated" organization. It took money from Saudis in return for not advocating for LGBT rights in the middle east [1]. It agreed to take money from the Qatari government, a government that also supports Hamas [2][3] and is involved in corruption cases and buying of politicians all over the world.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/human-rights-watch-took-...

[2] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/1700763578-human-...

[3] https://www.memri.org/reports/raven-project-leaks-alleged-qa...

The article links to a much longer article from Human Rights Watch with a good number of examples: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

The article mentions requests to remove posts quoting Ghassan Kanafani. The article introduces Kanafani as a literary figure, but then discusses his involvement in the PFLP. I don't know if they want the reader to form a particular judgement about this, or if they're just reporting the facts.

Imagine actively censoring a revolutionary your government assassinated 50 years ago. Is the dude haunting this person or something?

One off test, but for this guy, with large BSky and Twitter accounts, made the same pro-UA post on both, the post on Twitter was suppressed for about 12 hours, until it was spammed by hate bots, and then was made widely visible. The BSky post had lots of responses, starting from the moment of posting, almost wholly pro-UA.

https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...

On the face of it, Twitter itself is suppressing in line with Donald/Elon's agenda, and running hate/love bots.

Also saw another BSky poster showing a horrific anti-immigration post on Twitter getting spammed by love-bots.

I just re-read the article, and there’s no evidence of wrong doing. There’s a bunch of circumstantial stuff that people are choosing to feed into their narrative.

Facebook has some rules and community guidelines, the Israeli government recognized some posts that violate those and asked for them to be taken down, and Facebook complied in accordance to their own rules.

Having a system of rules does not mean that the system is inherently well-designed or well-intentioned.

Nothing illeagal. Just dirty.

The article doesn't even prove that anything is dirty. It's just carefully insinuating that these takedown requests are wrong, without actually showing any proof of this.

Just want to call out that the head of the trust and safety/integrity division, Guy Rosen, is an Israeli citizen with a strong pro-Israel bias. He’s also a person of questionable morals. From Wikipedia:

“ Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger founded Onavo in 2010. In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. Since the acquisition, Onavo was frequently classified as being spyware, as the VPN was used to monetize application usage data collected within an allegedly privacy-focused environment.”

That Meta considered his questionable ethics a feature not a bug, and repeatedly promoted him, is very problematic.

I was there during the onavo scandal. It was straight up spyware. They would regularly show graphs of snapchat usage vs messenger vs whatsapp and the snapchat data was explicitly attributed to onovo logs.

It's a conspiracy theory. Plenty of Israeli citizens support Palestinian rights and are opposed to what their government is doing. The guilt by association leads to things like antisemitism and anti-Palestinian hate and all the rest.

In what way is this a conspiracy theory or guilt by association? I don't think it is. (Except maybe the statement that he's an Israel citizen, though I think in this context it's a legit statement to make.)

The parent post explicitly makes two separate statements - 1. that he's an Israeli citizen, and 2. that he has questionable morals. I don't necessarily agree with the second statement, but it's explicitly not saying he's immoral because he's Israeli (guilt by association).

This sort of thing has happened before in the US:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b...

This is the same reason they want to buy TikTok and banned it had nothing to do with Chinese influence it was that the censoring of pro Palestinian content was not being done like in western platforms and Israel and Israel bought US politicians did not like it.

The role of the media (including social media) is to move in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy. This has been known for some time [1]. It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X". It's about a series of filters that decides who is in the media and who has their thumb on the algorithmic scales, as per the famous Noam Chomsky Andrew Marr interview [2] ("What I'm saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting").

Noam Chomsky is a national treasure.

When a former Netanyahu adviser and Israeli embassy staffer seemingly has the power to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on Meta platforms [3], nobody should be surprised.

If you're a US citizen who is a journalist critical of a key US ally, that ally is allowed to assassinate you without any objection of repercussions [4].

This is also why Tiktok originally got banned in a bipartisan fashion: the Apartheid Defense League director Jonathon Goldblatt said (in leaked audio) "we have a Tiktok problem" [5] and weeks later it was banned. Tiktok simply suppresses pro-Palestinian speech less than other platforms.

[1]: https://chomsky.info/consent01/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0

[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...

[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/16/israeli-forces-kil...

[5]: https://x.com/Roots_Action/status/1767941861866348615

> It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X".

The government got so comfy it really got to be that easy:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... (Aug 27, 2024)

> White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”

> The officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company didn’t agree, he said in the letter.

Hey this Chomsky guy seems pretty smart! Would be great to get him on mainstream media sometime.. hah

"Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel...Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs submitted by the Israeli government in an average of 30 seconds...All of the Israeli government’s TDRs post-October 7th contain the exact same complaint text, according to the leaked information, regardless of the substance of the underlying content being challenged. Sources said that not a single Israeli TDR describes the exact nature of the content being reported"

Realistically, how can we uncover this type of foreign interference? As in, is there any hack someone in our community can perform to expose Israeli propaganda? Israel locked journalists out of Ghaza, and has pretty much dominion over social media in the US. How can someone remain informed or expose misinformation campaigns (ideally without repercussions, which is a dangerous control they have over our gov)?

One defense against it might just be to actively crawl Facebook and externally record the contents of posts as soon as they're posted. Then you have a record of everything that got deleted.

I don't know how you scale that up to make it easy for everyone to find "disappeared" content on any platform. Maybe some kind of peer-to-peer system where everyone's browser cache basically acts as a searchable archive, with a browser plugin that inserts a button into web pages to show disappeared content.

(It's also worth noting that probably a lot of content that was removed by moderators was removed for a legitimate reason. So, ideally you'd have some sort of crowd moderation to get rid of the stuff that really is spam or hate speech or whatever.)

Meta could start by being transparent when they are asked to take down a post and could be transparent when they comply.

They have released this data for at least ten years at this point. That's one of the sources the Human Rights group used.

“According to internal communications reviewed by Drop Site, as recently as March, Cutler actively instructed employees of the company to search for and review content mentioning Ghassan Kanafani, an Arab novelist considered to be a pioneer of Palestinian literature.”

So this person is actively thinking about a Palestinian revolutionary that was assassinated by Mossad over half a century ago, and is using their position to push for internal censorship of him accordingly.

Imagine if a Palestinian employee at Meta suggested censoring mentions of past members of Haganah.

Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people is seen as pro-Hamas, even if I shout at the top of my voice that I don't care for the armed factions and political jockeying of either side.

I will expect to be downvoted to hell for this.

> Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people is seen as pro-Hamas,

What makes you say that? Plenty of people express support for the Palestinian people, including plenty of governments and heads of state, etc.

I personally think that being pro-Palestine means you should be anti-Hamas, since they are a brutal dictatorship that's plundered its people's resources to engage in a war with Israel that has destroyed their lives.

The main worrying thing is when someone is not pro-Palestinian, they're either pro-Hamas or anti-Israel.

I agree with the last two paras, with the following addendum. I'm also pro-Israeli people, but I find their leadership (and the settlers) the same as Hamas. No different.

As for the first para, I have very close friends who have been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a university student in the US today and said exactly what I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-sympathizer. I have been downvoted to hell on reddit and elsewhere for putting it as mildly as I did here.

That's because the Palestine protests are full of people who actually are pro-Hamas, and not only that but often rabidly antisemite on top of that. Your side linked the two together for whatever reason.

Wut?

If Apartheid South Africa could last just a little bit longer, they would still be an apartheid state like Israel is today.

Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-censoring which is reprehensible.

The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.

Palestinian violence predates the 1967 and 1948. Also Gaza wasn't occupied since Israel left it in 2005.

Here's is one example from 1954 when Israel did not control Gaza or the West Bank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%27ale_Akrabim_massacre

"The Ma'ale Akrabim massacre, known in English as the Scorpions Pass Massacre, was an attack on an Israeli passenger bus, carried out on 17 March 1954, in the middle of the day. Eleven passengers were shot dead by the attackers who ambushed and boarded the bus. One passenger died 32 years later of his injuries, in a state of paralysis and partial consciousness. Four passengers survived, two of whom had been injured by the gunmen."

Palestinians are largely in the reality they're in due to the violence.

Can you remind us whether this bus attack in which 11 people died came before or after the 1948-1949 Plan Dalet during which over 500 Arab villages were destroyed or depopulated by military forces under the direction of later first prime minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion?

  The plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return. Zionist military units possessed detailed lists of neighborhoods and villages to be destroyed and their Arab inhabitants expelled.

  This strategy is subject to controversy, with some historians characterizing it as defensive, while others assert that it was an integral part of a planned strategy for the expulsion, sometimes called an ethnic cleansing, of the area's native inhabitants.

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

Israelis and Palestinians are largely in the reality they're in due to the violence.

Funny how easy it is to forget that guerilla terrorist actions were introduced to the region by Zionists in the 1940s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing

Just to name a notable event amongst many.

Many of the masterminds of the early Zionist insurgency later became top Israeli government officials.

Sad to think that Jews and Arabs lived ok side by side. Right wing radicals realized their destiny could only be completed with Palestinian displacement.

... so while we were all worried about TikTok, being owned by a Chinese company, would be a vector for that government to push a skewed/propagandized stream of content on the world, Meta has already been doing it for a foreign government despite not having foreign ownership.

It's all skewed, obviously. It's all about alignment.

This is John Spencer the chair or urban warfare studies at West Point Academy. The most prestigious military academy in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25xaPTsmGGE

People who have been posting against the Israeli genocide have been familiar with this for a long time now. The censorship is extremely evident; thankfully the truth is coming out. Food for thought: if you are on the side of truth, you do not need to censor.

The problem is the pro-Palestine movement irrecoverably linked themselves to Hamas, a terrorist organization, it's made supporting Palestine a toxic position to hold for anyone of any significance.

Actually it's the other way around. Fascists in Israel and the US worked very hard to make it so that anyone seen to be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is seen as pro Hamas, or pro terrorist.

Apparently there are some that even say the Palestinian flag itself is a "terrorist flag" and anyone flying it is also a terrorist.

Actually the Israeli government (Netenyahu) funded Hamas as a way to destabilise the Palestinian authority and conflate palestinianism with terrorism (EU Policy chief Joesep Borrell has stated this on record https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-claims-e...)

Just because a bunch of war criminals keep saying it, it doesn't make it true.

Why shouldn't _any_ radical propaganda (unfortunately this is the case with most of pro-palestine content, even if for understandable or good reasons) be removed?

Globalize the enchilada !

And then Zuckerberg says he's all about free speech, even mocking Europe as not being free-speech enough

He's not wrong though, that Europe isn't free-speech enough. I don't care about the hypocrisy, because free speech is so good and so beneficial that I don't care if the proponent is iffy.

Just like IBM on "IBM and the Holocaust" (a must read). A genocide being supported by the US companies / media just in front of our noses.

If this appals or surprises you but then you call others conspiracy theorists when they're disseminating things that don't align with your mainstream political views, you need to learn from it and stop playing the game.

Or there truly are conspiracies against our natural destinies, we are merely ignorant and incompetent in identifying what they might be.

Covering own asses is natural enough. War crimes and crimes against humanity are serious concerns with serious considerations, yet what if we cannot ourselves be trusted by the very nature of our self lies?

>> The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.

Nice to see Zuckerberg taking free speech as seriously as he claims.

I m not sure he ever claimed that

I recall he made changes at the beginning of the year specifically because "it's time to get back to our roots around free expression."

Full transcript of his remarks can be found here: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-anno...

Facebook's boss has repeatedly shown that he's an amoral hypocrite , most blatantly after Trumps election. I m not particularly sympathetic to palestinians but what's going on here. Its not just Israel, facebook has succumbed to authoritarian governments like Turkey in the past. The ubiquity of facebook and its monopolies are directly contradicting the spirit of democratic Constitutions worldwide. What's the point of guaranteeing freedom of expression when a single entity/person controls the attention of billions and billions of people.

I think we need a rethink of freedom of press laws in the age of international monopolies.

Judges have now ruled that suspected "expected beliefs" that are "otherwise lawful" is grounds for deportation, if those suspected thoughts are "antisemitic" (read- supportive of peace in Palestine).

They are literally arresting and deporting people for suspected thoughts.

Student visas are being denied based on social media posts.

This is fascism.

Just for context, that judge is an immigration judge, ie a Department of State employee. Immigration judges are not part of the judicial branch (despite the job title) and can't make precedent or interpret law. They are basically a rubber stamp for whatever policy the Secretary of State is pushing.

> Judges have now ruled that suspected "expected beliefs" that are "otherwise lawful" is grounds for deportation, if those suspected thoughts are "antisemitic"

Do you have a link to what you are referring to?

Quote from Marco Rubio (confirmed 99-0 in the Senate)

"Rubio said that while Khalil's “past, current or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful," the provision allows the secretary of state alone to “personally determine” whether he should remain in the country." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mahmoud-khalil-deported...

The article is a day old, the judges just affirmed that Rubio is allowed to do this today

> grounds for deportation,

Sadly but nobody is entitled to student visas. They never were. It's mostly at the whim of the state department and they may revoke it for a variety of reasons. Minor misdemeanors or getting caught with DUI would also lead to losing a visa. It's really a "walk on eggshells" kind of situation. Yeah, in some cases appealing and finding a lawyer may help but it's huge uphill battle.

Calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people is not being supportive of peace in Palestine. These students are not innocent.

Once again, the USA is #2 to their Israeli masters.

Honestly who cares? They just fit into the region, which is one murderous, genocidal cesspool. The fact that it happens to the usual genocidal majority in the region (sunni-muslim) is the only thing that drives this artificial outrage and the muslim brotherhood oilstates who push it. They have wiped all minorities from nearly all middle-east countries over the course of the last 70 years, so if a thoroughly murdered minority wants to run a defensively structured ethno-state- be they copt, greek christians, armenians, belotschis, druse, kurds, jesidi, zhorthastrian, hindu or whatever - just go for it.

The western delusional denial about the realities of the ground when it comes to multicultural societies (think Beirut) shouldn't pave the way for more murder and atrocities as it already did.

>Meta’s Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, Jordana Cutler, has also intervened to investigate pro-Palestine content. Cutler is a former senior Israeli government official and advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Concerning...as another billionaire would say

Was anyone else confused reading the title? At first pass I was asking myself "metadata from what?" then figured out oh not metadata, data from Meta.

Why is the word Israeli removed from the title? and Meta added? Seems like quite a politically-important modification

Edit: ok you guys, all your responses have convinced me that I misread the room, and I'm going to reverse the title edit now.

-- original reply: --

I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation practice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.

The entire endeavor was orchestrated by Israel - that’s kinda the point here. Meta didn’t act on its own, as the edited title would imply.

I think in this instance the perpetrator is central to the story/article

I totally understand the contention around this topic but you're altering the keypoint of what the article is about. Why remove one country name and keep the other? The article is not about Meta, but how their platform is being manipulated by one country against the other. Your edit shows a strong evidence you're not taking a partisan position and have a preference. I am not sure you should be editing contenious posts when you don't hold a partisan position. Your edit is in the same realm as what the post is talking about. I understand moderation is tricky, but this goes way beyond moderation.

At this point, is it feasible to implement user-submitted or generated tags for submissions that can subsequently be concealed?

Our focus is shifting towards the news aspect rather than the hacking aspect, which is the primary reason for my presence here.

FWIW I support this. It's more relevant to HN to talk about Meta, the big tech company, doing something wrong than a nation, regardless of where you stand on this issue.

The current title (11:36 AM PST) is:

"Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram"

@dang IDK if this matters, nor when the title was changed (from submission, to now). Just an FYI.

Btw there's a lot more information about the moderation on this post here, if you or anyone want to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657264.

The problematic point here is that Facebook is more than willing to obliterate certain topics and political views when requested, not which ones or by whom orders in particular.

[flagged]

No, what it proves is that users will flag unsubstantive flamewar posts on Hacker News, regardless of the topic or the commenter's position on the topic.

This is a good thing. Posts like your comment here break the site guidelines badly*, and the users who flagged it were quite correct to do so, regardless of your (or their) political opinion.

* for example, this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.", and this one: "Don't be snarky.". Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing those things? We'd appreciate it.

Mark needs to go

I think he has a majority of the voting shares, so nobody can get rid of him unfortunately. Meta is too big to fail and Zuck is set to be dictator for life if he wants to be.

Edit: I'm deleting most of my post, to avoid politics part and only preserving my "point"

Basically I'm saying: Nobody has a right to free wide distribution of their thoughts on social media anyway, and also, those who provide these free ad-supported platforms have many reasonable motivations to remove content -- including the belief that the speaker is wrong/spreading lies and propaganda. That doesn't 'silence' them any more than not letting them into my house silences them.

Fair enough, but the social media companies should be honest about it. Instead they brag hypocritically about free speech.

I disagree with you though. These global social media platforms have an incredible amount of sway over our society. As long as they have that reach, they should not be allowed to distort and silence.

It would be interesting to see a random sample of these posts. I know any sample they released would be groomed to make them look good, but it would be interesting if it were possible.

People still use Facebook?

Personal anecdote: whever I log in to the feed, 1/3 of posts are ads, 1/3 are algorithmic recommendations, and 1/3 are pro-Palestine posts by a former partner.

Almost none of my other connections post anything, though there are occasional exceptions.

Groups and Marketplace

They ate still very popular

Yesterday, my high school son was sitting on the couch. Asked him what he was doing… “social studies on the partitioning of Palestine in 1948”. More spicy a topic that I was expecting. Intrigued, I asked ChatGPT a few questions about the religious populations of modern Israel throughout the centuries. Got some interesting results and asked it for some clarification on the political sensitivity of this topic. It agreed it would be challenged by many. Anyway, decided to share it with my son, and texted it to him on his iPhone from my iPhone. Normally that would be sent via iMessage, fully end to end encrypted, and yet this time, when I was sending potentially politically charged views on israel, it was sent as SMS!! Now, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but… that got me questioning why, on any of the thousands of messages I’ve sent my son, this specific one wasn’t sent encrypted. Hmm

You may be interested in seeing what Tal Broda, an executive at OpenAI, posted at the start of the war: https://x.com/StopZionistHate/status/1735471349278052584

Isn't another wild thing here that Apple chooses whether to send it encrypted or not? Sorry, haven't used an iPhone with iMessage, not sure how it works.

Try Signal instead perhaps?

SMS messages get sent when you're outside of data network.

Or when the phone detects questionable content and decides to? I was sitting on my couch, next to my son when I sent the message. We were both connected to the WiFi. Sure, I’ve had messages sent via SMS before, typically when I’m on a plane and just lose 5G connectivity - but never on my couch before. Just seemed like a strange coincidence which made me realize that could be a viable attack pattern against a population.

Izr revieves almost 50% of the worlds startup funding for cyber security in any given year. Think about what they do with this.

"Israeli Campaign" is it really that weird for someone to ask to take down posts calling for their annihilation?

The posts are not calling for Israel's annihilation. They call for stopping the genocide. The posts merely document what Israel is doing in Gaza, since Israel doesn't allow independent journalists to verify and show the world the carnage it's causing to the people of Gaza.

Is it just me or is this post very low on the hacker news order even though it has much more upvotes in a short time than much of the posts above it.

This is in the FAQ: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#whyrank ("Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"). But here's a longer answer.

In the case of a story like this, which has significant new information (SNI) [1] on a major ongoing topic (MOT) [2], and at least some hope of a substantive discussion, moderators sometimes turn off the user flags on the story [3] so that it can spend time on HN's front page.

In such cases, we usually adjust the degree to which we turn off the flags so that the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags isn't affected too dramatically. Usually the best way to support a substantive discussion is for the story to remain on HN's front page, but not in the highest few slots, where it would burn much hotter.

Since upvotes and submission time are public data but flags aren't, it can appear like a story is being downweighted when in fact the opposite is the case, as with this thread. That's not a rule, though—we do also downweight stories sometimes. That's why the FAQ explains that you can't derive rank from votes and time alone.

The reason moderation works this way, btw, is that HN is a curated site [4] (and always has been—here's me explaining this when I took over HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621).

Moderators' job is to jiggle the system out of the failure modes [5] it would otherwise end up in if the software were running unattended. Turning off flags on certain stories, and adding downweight to other stories, are two examples. The goal is the same: to support substantive discussion on interesting stories, and (as a necessary condition for that) prevent the site from burning too hot if we can.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This is a really hard problem. Just consider that there are ~150 Muslims for every Jew worldwide. In the USA it's the reverse - 2:1 in favor of Jews, concentrated in particular geographic areas.

Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system, you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can represent Jewish history. It's clear to me why this happens, but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely difficult.

I think there's an erroneous implicit assumption in your reasoning, namely that to be Zionist is equivalent to be Jewish, and to be anti-zionist is to be Muslim (otherwise, why would you be talking about Jew:Muslim ratios). The fact of the matter is that not every Zionist* is Jewish (in fact, the vast majority of Zionists are christian), and vice versa not every Jewish person is a Zionist (Jewish voice for peace, the ultra orthodox, etc).

But even beyond that, I think engaging in censorship to hide an ethnic cleansing is an affront to humanity.

* Here, I'm taking Zionism to mean to be in support of the way Israel has formed and continued to form in the past 77 or so years. I am aware that there are many different interpretations of Zionism (to illustrate the breadth; Noam Chomsky considered himself a Zionist), but this particular interpretation is the one that is relevant to this conversation.

I think my country (USA) would be healthier if a common sense viewpoint was selected and held.

Conflicts are always terrible, and the Eurasia / Africa region countries are particularly brutal.

Every citizen of every country has a human right (in a civilized civilization / society) to live a life that does not involve violence. A life where they are not worried about RPGs, bombings, (etc,) or military invasions.

Some sources of conflict involve places which various (different) religions hold as sacred / holy. Those sites should become UN world heritage locations and be managed by the UN in ways that only allow non-military peaceful access for any who want to visit.

With respect to Gaza my personal opinion remains unchanged. Both an innocent civilian people who suffer, and a terrorist government, remain in that region. The civilians should be evacuated. The terrorists who remain after (or whom are caught and found guilty in a trial) should be purged. The country should then be cleaned up, rebuilt, and returned to the innocent people along with a training-wheels UN supported government that brings stability, peace, and prevents a resurgence of hate and terrorism. In a few generations the country can grow more stable and graduate from the guided government structure.

That would be not just a two state solution, but a two states and global peace sites solution.

A two state solution is never possible when one state keeps expanding with impunity, and every time the second state resists it is called a terrorist state. My country resisted colonization in the mid 20th century and the resistance efforts were called terrorism by everyone, nobody calls them terrorists now.

"The civilians should be evacuated." They don't want to leave and Israel uses these "evacuations" to make sure Palestinians never return, as they did in 1948, 1967, etc[1][2]. This is whitewashing genocide and is an extremely violent view, packaged in reasonable sounding words. Israel has a long documented history of using terrorism to build its state. If you truly oppose terrorism I recommend starting with the books I've sourced.

[1] The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé

[2] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Kahlidi

And I assume after this evacuation, purging, and installment of a new government Israel will magically change its ways? You need to address both sides to find a solution.

this is grossly misunderstanding the situation in Gaza, a two state solution was never acceptable to Israel, Hamas as it exists today is a result of Netanyahu policy. Israel created the monster to justify their genocide.

I just don't see a way that a two-state solution works. A three-state solution might be feasible (Gaza and West Bank governed separately), but then you have to deal with internal Israeli politics, and I really don't know enough about them to make even an educated guess about how hard it would be to get that through (I would imagine very, but like I said, I know very little about their politics).

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