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Comment by lenerdenator | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how effective it was; I've seen plenty of content related to Gaza on Meta platforms, and I'm located in the US.

It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:

1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later

2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.

This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.

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The US was actually very low on Israel's targeting list: they came in at #18 on the list (0.7% of all TDR's submitted by Israel), lower than Israel itself (#14, 1.3%). I would speculate, given that previous reporting (the Facebook Files from Frances Haugen) has said that Facebook treats moderation in America differently from in other countries, that Israel is not focused on censoring US speech the same way because Meta would be more likely to object to their TDR's covering Americans.

The nature of the censorship is that it isn't targeted at who's seeing posts, but rather at the posts themselves. So it's not necessarily the case that the Israelis are treating different countries differently; it could simply be that Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine are all producing the largest amount of content related to the war given their proximity, involvement, and interest in the conflict.

The whole point of Facebook is that your friend network is going to be largely similar to you: that's how they can impute your interests from analyzing the interest of your friend network and then target ads for you. So what most Americans will see will be largely posts by other Americans. Immigrants from Algeria etc. will have overlapping interests and serve as node-points to move posts from one network to another, but still the majority of posts that an American will see, even on a controversial international topic like Israel/Palestine, will be from Americans, and thus largely outside of the Israeli censorship program.

Thus, my point is that your claim of personal experience as an American doesn't really have much bearing on the question of the scale of the censorship here. They are trying to bring to life censorship that is largely happening away from Americans, where Facebook historically doesn't exercise the same levels of care and respect for speech that they do with Americans (see Haugen's Facebook Files leaks).

I've also got to say that this article has apparently been flagged out twice already seems to be in line with the point of the original article. I know from experience that Facebook moderation discussions don't usually attract this level of flagging, so I'm pretty sure that this has to be related to Israel/Palestine, not Facebook.

Have you used Facebook recently? 99% of my posts are from random meme pages and groups; one's own social networks produce very little of the content you see.

>its nature as a Jewish state.

Its the same problem. Whats happening in Gaza is a direct result of the construction of an ethnostate. Whatever the resultant state is called, it should protect everyone who lives there, jewish or otherwise. Instead of a Jewish State, it should be a state where Jews are one of the people who are safe.

> less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state

Explicit ethnostates are against law and norms.

Then we've got a very, very long list of countries to act against.

alternatively, the US could just not dump billions of dollars in aid and weapons to those countries. social media companies could strengthen their content moderation systems against these kinds of state-sponsored attacks. no need to "act against" anyone.

That would, again, mean not engaging with most countries on Earth, because most of them are, or have at least some qualities of, being ethnostates, religious states, or some other combination of putting one group above another in society based on immutable characteristics or characteristics of conscience.

If you're not Han in the PRC, they're going to try to "normalize" you in the direction of acting like you're Han. If you're not ethnic Russian, same with you in Russia. The only way to keep the former Yugoslavia from continuing to be a bloodbath was by essentially setting up ethnostates. And, yes, all of them use or have used violence to enforce these conditions.

PRC, Russia, Serbia... Isn't that a list of US current opponents on the world stage? If I was Israeli I would be hoping my country did not go down this path (and of course I say hoping because I wouldn't have the ability to prevent it.)

China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.

Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.

Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.

> China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.

Tell that to the Uyghurs they were re-educating.

> Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.

They should go back to that then, but at the heart of it, you'd still have a mostly Jewish populace. Kind of like how the state that Hamas or Fatah would like to establish would be mostly Palestinian Arab.

> Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.

Most of the countries in the world are ultimately ethnostates or have political factions and geography seriously impacted by ethnic groupings. Don't believe me? Go suggest to about any European or Asian group that some other ethnic group get majority control of their land, resources, and government. They'll be reluctant at best.

No in the west we don't.

Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.

Now it may be the case that Israel would rather leave that spot and remove itself from those norms, but given its history that'd be tantamount to suicide.

> Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.

Most of the West is made up of nations that are, to at least some degree, ethnostates. If they aren't explicitly ethnostates, then they have large political blocs that grew out of ethnic groups. See: Sinn Fein, Bloc Québécois, Scottish National Party, Basque Nationalist Party, Republican Left of Catalonia, Plaid Cymru, and others.

Most of the above listed seek to exercise political power in a given region based on ethnicity. Some even have large delegations to regional or national legislative bodies. All are in countries generally identified as Western.

Even some of what you would define a country as, generally speaking, is somewhat influenced by ethnic factors like language and religion.

Nearly every country in Europe is an ethnostate.

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