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Comment by bananalychee | Hacker News Reader

Your post is fair, but it's not how I read the OP, which seems less concerned with consolidation of power than with people supportive of Israel having power. And while I appreciate that criticism of Israel is not anti-semitism, believing that Israel is a legitimate state that has the right to self-defense is all it takes to be labelled as a "Zionist", and at that point it's practically a euphemism for "Jew". I'm not familiar enough with Bari Weiss's views to tell if that's what's being done here, but the use of a pejorative without clarification, combined with the fixation on "Zionists" and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda in particular makes it sound a lot like old-school anti-semitism.

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The wider context here is that the TikTok ban had significant support on the grounds of, what politicians and Zionist lobbying groups called, "anti-Israel bias" and "support for Hamas". Not just the explicitly stated "China Bad" motivations.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tiktok-ban-israel-... (Note: Article from November 2023)

The opposition to TikTok on grounds of it's Chinese ownership had been on a slow burn right up to October 2023, when it picked up steam in the wake of the early response to the Gaza War. US politicians were furious that the youth weren't buying the Bipartisan Approved Position(TM) on Israel.

Considering that major world organisations, even holocaust remembrance ones, are now calling Israel's actions genocide, that fury has aged like the finest bottle of raw milk.

Hence:

> and the implication that their intent surely must be to issue pro-Israel propaganda

That is indeed the implication made, for the reasons above, I don't think it is unwarranted.

That’s fair, I can’t say I know their inner thoughts either. Personally I’m concerned about the political unity and lack of respect for other people’s freedom of speech. We’re healthier with a robust public debate.

I sympathize with the sensitivity of the topic and what dog-whistling can look like. However, we're discussing media that people consume and the control that people have over that media. One of the most critical topics being controlled by media right now is the genocide in Gaza. And we're looking at a large section of media, including TikTok, being controlled by someone who not only denies that a genocide is happening, but is also complicit in it with their military contracts with Israel.

I think this is all relevant to the topic at hand.

I'm sympathetic to your argument, because you set explicit boundaries on the issue of concern, and you mention military contracts with concretely align Oracle with Israeli interests. It takes very selective reading between the lines to interpret the OP this charitably, when a direct interpretation reads more like "Jews who sympathize with Israel shouldn't own media platforms, because they will use them for propaganda." Which is maybe four words distanced from last-century anti-semitism.

I will add that TikTok is already being measurably manipulated, which everyone seems to be glossing over, perhaps because the bias runs in the "right" direction.

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