Israel’s ‘Facebook law’ plans to control all Palestinian content online
ramzybaroud.net
ramzybaroud.net
https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-telecom-...
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-pledges-to-finally-perm...
This is a really grim reality of human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
Facebook has removed and suppressed content by Palestinians and their supporters about human rights abuses carried out in Israel and Palestine during the May 2021 hostilities.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/10/08/israel/palestine-faceboo...
The facebook part is redundant actually as the live-streaming of the recent ethnic-cleansing of sheikh jarrah was reason for an instagram ban already. Probably has something to do with one of the architects of Unit 8200 being on Facebook's Oversight Board for some reason.
https://act.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/Nd838QohI0Os1qxybL_EeA2
We were all told that normalization would result in democratic principles rubbing off on Middle-eastern dictatorships. Even I didn't expect dictatorship to rub off on the shining jewel of democracy. Ooops!
The article makes it like it's just a law aimed at Palestinians when it is a much broader issue and actually opposed by rightwing parties. The title is so insincere as to be sickening.
How it will be used by rightwing parties when it passes is really the only thing that matters.
Lets return to your argument when the law as proposed is struck down and the Palestinian people are not in danger of having their plight further censored and ignored by the world at large.
- The article claims that takedown requests on 20,000 Palestinian items demonstrate an attempt to control all Palestinian content.
- The number of takedown requests is irrelevant without demonstrating the illegitimacy of the requests.
- Valid evidence would be showing a takedown request for a single post that an unbiased group wouldn't interpret as inflammatory or harmful to security.
- It's suspicious that the article doesn't include a link to see the 20,000 posts. Or even one for that matter. Why wouldn't they include that extremely relevant info?
- The source for the number 20,000 is this post => https://7amleh.org/2021/12/29/the-palestinian-digital-rights...
- The post contains zero information on where that number came from.
- The article uses misleading language. It claims takedown requests "grew exponentially", from 2,421 in 2016 to 20,000+ in 2020. An additional 18,000 requests over five years is not exponential growth.
- It attributes maliciousness to the increase in takedown requests:
-- Ignoring the fact that takedown requests have been increasing globally year after year. Twitter for example had 6,000 governmental takedown requests in 2015. In 2020 that number was 81,000! https://transparency.twitter.com/en/removal-requests.html
-- Ignoring Palestinian population growth (which is indeed exponential by nature) of more than half a million. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-pale...
-- Ignoring the massive period of internet adoption during that time period. More than 1,000,000 new internet users! https://www.internetworldstats.com/me/il.htm
- Israel is not even among the top ten countries that submitted the most takedown requests in 2021. Russia, Turkey, France, and Germany are. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens...
- In 2021 Israel had 7.68 million internet users and submitted 91 content removal requests per 100,000 users. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens... https://www.statista.com/statistics/974318/israel-number-of-...
- According to my math that is a total of 6,989 for ALL takedown requests, not just Palestinian content. Hardly the 20,000+ for Palestinian content alone that the article claims.
- Depending on where you draw the lines it's hard to get a clear number of Palestinian social media users. Let's take 2.7 million as an estimate as per https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-palestine.
- Let's pretend 20,000 is indeed the number of Israeli takedown requests of Palestinian posts.
- Let's also pretend that none of those posts were incitements to violence.
- Let's assume that each takedown request targeted a post of a unique Palestinian individual (highly unlikely, people's posts tend to have a theme).
- That would mean that Israel tried to have a single post of less than 1% of Palestinian social media users taken down.
- If the average social media user posts twice a day across all their platforms that's 730 posts in 2020. So even the < 1% of users potentially affected only had .001 of their posts affected.
How on earth could anyone rational come to a conclusion that Israel plans to control all Palestinian content online?
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That's my concrete criticism.
In addition, the article is a terrible source. It seems that it wasn't shared from the author's main publication "The Palestinian Chronicle" to make it seem less biased. Here is the original https://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-israels-facebook-law-....
Note the large logo signifying the platform of a single Palestinian state solution. No state for Jews anywhere in Palestine, not along any borders '67 or '48. What happens to the vast majority of Jews in Israel who have no other country that they can go to? Is there a larger incitement to violence?
So how will this law be used properly, in your opinion, to protect the rights of the Palestinian people?
All it takes now is to claim victimhood in the form of 'suffering mental health as a result of online messages', and nobody will ever have to hear the cries of Israels' victims ever again.
Absolutely reprehensible. A truly free people do not repress the voice of their victims.
See also, the Unit 8200-founding member and other 'former' members of the IDF now sitting on Facebooks' board of directors.
To me his curriculum doesn’t look bad (sarcastic, it’s a great CV), yes he’s Palestinian but judge the content, not who wrote it:
> Ramzy Baroud is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle (1999-present), former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, former Editor-in-Chief of The Brunei Times, former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera online. Baroud taught mass communication at Australia’s Curtin University of Technology, Malaysia Campus. Baroud also served as head of Aljazeera.net English’s Research and Studies department.
Yes, Israel asked to remove content sometimes unjustly. Sure. Governments do that. But it's hard to see how this is different from general anecdotal facts and preconceived biases. You can read the facts as "Israel removed content that promotes terrorism from Facebook and got some stuff wrong". That's why reputable sources didn't publish something like that, there's no evidence.
Just to be clear, I'm very much for a Palestinian state and a long term peace treaty. I'm far more concerned with the 80 year old Palestinian that died recently because of pure negligence by IDF soldiers. That's a real tragedy, there's evidence and it's also reported in the Israeli media.
- The article claims that takedown requests on 20,000 Palestinian items demonstrate an attempt to control all Palestinian content.
- The number of takedown requests is irrelevant without demonstrating the illegitimacy of the requests.
- Valid evidence would be showing a takedown request for a single post that an unbiased group wouldn't interpret as inflammatory or harmful to security.
- It's suspicious that the article doesn't include a link to see the 20,000 posts. Or even one for that matter. Why wouldn't they include that extremely relevant info?
- The source for the number 20,000 is this post => https://7amleh.org/2021/12/29/the-palestinian-digital-rights...
- The post contains zero information on where that number came from.
- The article uses misleading language. It claims takedown requests "grew exponentially", from 2,421 in 2016 to 20,000+ in 2020. An additional 18,000 requests over five years is not exponential growth.
- It attributes maliciousness to the increase in takedown requests:
-- Ignoring the fact that takedown requests have been increasing globally year after year. Twitter for example had 6,000 governmental takedown requests in 2015. In 2020 that number was 81,000! https://transparency.twitter.com/en/removal-requests.html
-- Ignoring Palestinian population growth (which is indeed exponential by nature) of more than half a million. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-pale...
-- Ignoring the massive period of internet adoption during that time period. More than 1,000,000 new internet users! https://www.internetworldstats.com/me/il.htm
- Israel is not even among the top ten countries that submitted the most takedown requests in 2021. Russia, Turkey, France, and Germany are. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens...
- In 2021 Israel had 7.68 million internet users and submitted 91 content removal requests per 100,000 users. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens... https://www.statista.com/statistics/974318/israel-number-of-...
- According to my math that is a total of 6,989 for ALL takedown requests, not just Palestinian content. Hardly the 20,000+ for Palestinian content alone that the article claims.
- Depending on where you draw the lines it's hard to get a clear number of Palestinian social media users. Let's take 2.7 million as an estimate as per https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-palestine.
- Let's pretend 20,000 is indeed the number of Israeli takedown requests of Palestinian posts.
- Let's also pretend that none of those posts were incitements to violence.
- Let's assume that each takedown request targeted a post of a unique Palestinian individual (highly unlikely, people's posts tend to have a theme).
- That would mean that Israel tried to have a single post of less than 1% of Palestinian social media users taken down.
- If the average social media user posts twice a day across all their platforms that's 730 posts in 2020. So even the < 1% of users potentially affected only had .001 of their posts affected.
How on earth could anyone rational come to a conclusion that Israel plans to control all Palestinian content online?
---
That's my concrete criticism.
In addition, the article is a terrible source. It seems that it wasn't shared from the author's main publication "The Palestinian Chronicle" to make it seem less biased. Here is the original https://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-israels-facebook-law-....
Note the large logo signifying the platform of a single Palestinian state solution. No state for Jews anywhere in Palestine, not along any borders '67 or '48. What happens to the vast majority of Jews in Israel who have no other country that they can go to? Is there a larger incitement to violence?
I see a map of lands inhabited by Palestinians, whether those lands be Israel or the occupied territories. It's a media outlet for/about/by Palestinians, so that seems reasonable to me.
The map of Israel/Palestine used as a logo is a well-known symbol for the rejection of any rights of Jews in any part of the current state of Israel.
It is visible on "from the river to the sea" merch and The Hamas logo (whose charter calls for the murder of all Jews wherever they may be in the world, not just the Israeli ones).
The red one, in particular, is used by Islamic Jihad, who have the stated objective of replacing Israel with a sovereign ISLAMIC Palestinian state.
The editor/president of the website(and article author) is vocal(and has even written a book) about his rejection of a two-state solution.
His claim that his support of a one-state solution does not mean the end of Jewish rights and lives in the region is hard to take seriously. The ruling power in Gaza(Hamas) has, in its charter, the stated goal of murdering jews(not just Israeli's) inside and outside of Israel and actively work to carry out that goal.
https://e7.pngegg.com/pngimages/788/380/png-clipart-gaza-isl...
Not every Palestinian is a member of or supporter of Hamas. Why not take him at his word?
Look at the real proposal - https://www.timesofisrael.com/knesset-advances-bill-censorin...
(Un)surprisingly the right wing parties are the most opposed as the proposal is a regulation against inciting content of the type usually connected to the right.
It's ridiculuous to try to gaslight everything involving Israel as having something to do with the Palestinians.
Interestingly, there is also another proposal, which may interest some HNers, which would compel Facebook et al. to write clearly the reasons for any post removal https://www.timesofisrael.com/minister-floats-hebrew-service...
What matters is whether it will pass.
And it also matters if it is subsequently used to suppress the speech of a geographically challenged human population based on their religious or political views.
> Proposed law, allowing courts to remove content that incites violence or ‘endangers mental health,’
is bad anyway, for Palestinian, Israeli and freedom.
Edit: regarding the propaganda claim. Yes Times of Israel is for me much more balanced than that website. I guess it's subjective but I could read the two and the level of discourse is very different. Ymmv