Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims | Hacker News Reader

Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims

theguardian.com

648 pointscratermoon751 comments

Interestingly if you read the actual report from HRW, it sounds like most of the material they are referring too was legitimately taken down because it supported violence, according to Meta's policies.

For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down. In other cases the content praised attacks by Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US government.

From HRWs descriptions it sounds like the bulk of the "1049" content removals were clear violations of Meta's policies against support for violence.

Regardless of whether you agree, these don't seem surprising to me on light of Meta's own rules. There are of course a small number of exceptions listed.

> For example, the phrase "from the river to the see" is considered hateful by many

The phrase has its origins in Arab nationalism. It was coined in 1960 by the PLO to refer to the goal of an Arab state that occupies the entirety of what was Mandatory Palestine. If you ignore the subtext of “what happens to the Jews in that situation” I suppose you can make a case for it.

It’s like the confederate flag. In the 20th century there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism. And that’s the only connotation lots of people have of it. But it has a pretty unpleasant historical context.

At the very least it’s a dog whistle to the large fraction of the Muslim world that hates Jews: https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/adls-global-100-survey-wh.... Americans who use this phrase should really travel to the Muslim world to understand the antisemitism that’s just in the air. You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

> there was an effort to rehabilitate it (as in the Dukes of Hazzard) as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism

Never got that one. Nothing like the flag of a breakaway state founded to preserve chattel slavery as a symbol of… anti-authoritarianism?

It's known as the 'Rebel Flag' in the united states, and has indeed stood for being a rebel with none of the modern racist associations attaced to it. Many of your favorite antiracist rock stars of the 60s sported the flag. People under 40 mostly just know the culture-war version where its akin to a swastika, which itself originally had a different meaning. Symbols change, you have to view them through the lens of history and culture before recoiling to modern interpretations,

Most Americans refer to this as the “Confederate Flag” these days. I’m currently living in the south, though, and you’ll hear it referred to as the rebel flag in this region by liberals and conservatives alike. Regardless I appreciate your acknowledgment of the cultural aspect, and people like the Allman Brothers and Tom Petty certainly did fly the flag back in the day

I can't tell for the rebel flag, but the swastika never stopped to be used with its original meaning in India, and at least in Europe it's rather well known that nazis "stole" it from India cultural heritage where it doesn't have the same semantic to say the least.

> has indeed stood for being a rebel with none of the modern racist associations attaced [sic] to it

I grew up partly in the South of the civil rights era and went to one de-facto segregated school. (Dad was military, stationed in various places.) I was a kid, but I paid attention to the news, and my impression was that racism was the clear, undeniable subtext to the "being a rebel" part: Many Southerners — notably, most of those who held political- and economic power — resented federal "interference" with "Southern ways," namely the violent oppression of blacks to keep them as an impoverished, powerless, underclass workforce.

(In 2020 I read a tweet thread from an anonymous Army officer, recapping the history of post-Civil War Reconstruction and the Union's de facto surrender in 1877; the quote that stuck with me was, "Sherman should've mowed the deep south like a lawn, making multiple passes")

https://twitter.com/pptsapper/status/1313470161974947843

Part of that effort was to reframe the reasons why the Confederacy was “founded,” at least in part as a way of saving face (which is very important in southern culture).

Their narrative glossed over slavery, and focused on the other aspects of the conflict: the industrialized north, with its big banks and big corporations, versus the agrarian south. Do you remember the scene in Hamilton where they negotiate about where to put the capital? And the Hamilton says something along the lines of “let the south have the capital, we’ll have the bank where the real power will be.” It’s not hard to make the south look like the good guys if you ignore the Confederate elites’ actual reasons for the war.

If the US had not been founded then slavery would have been abolished much sooner, so I don’t think the US flag gets a pass either.

During the Civil Rights Era there were radical leftist groups that used the flag. The YPO in Chicago was allied with the Black Panthers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Patriots_Organization (ditto Southern Student Organizing Committee)

Comparing the chant "from the river to the sea" with the confederate flag is completely preposterous. The chant is a call for liberation. Anyone who has a problem with someone's freedom is themselves a racist and probably has a lot of views in common with what the confederate flag stands for. Fwiw, the phrase was coined by Jewish settlers in the 1930's (https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/2018-12-16/ty-artic...) and ADL is an anti-Palestinian hate organization whose opinions no one should take seriously.

> You can’t travel to my “moderate Muslim” country with an Israeli passport. Guess why that is?

Perhaps for exactly the same reason Russian passport holders aren't welcome in a lot of places?

isn’t the original context of the confederate flag liberation from federalism?

don’t think just the fact someone believes they are liberating something makes it right, as in their eyes the russians in the current war are liberating ukraine

From what I've read about the American civil war is that all historians agree that the rebellion was about the right to hold slaves. The argument about federalisim is a narrative constructed afterwards to evoke sympathy for the rebels.

If not those who use the phase - and have been using it in exactly the same way for decades - can decide what it means, then who can? Should we apply the same argument to "pro choice" and agreee that that it is a call for premediated murder of infants because that is what the "pro life" crowd thinks?

> From what I've read about the American civil war is that all historians agree that the rebellion was about the right to hold slaves. The argument about federalisim is a narrative constructed afterwards to evoke sympathy for the rebels.

People often say this but I see no contradiction between the American Civil War being about slavery and it being about states' rights. It was about the states' rights to own slaves!

That aside, the idea that "all historians agree" is absurd.

Sure slavery and racism is a huge part of it, but don't forget it's called 'the confederacy'. You can't claim this is constructed afterwards when it's plainly in the name

Yes, "liberation" of the land currently occupied by jews. Just need to find a solution for them. Preferrably something final.

> … whose opinions no one should take seriously.

Should we take your opinion seriously instead? Unfortunately you do not share it.

You’ve repeatedly been asked “What Israel should do in your opinion in current situation and what outcome you expect once it does it?” and you repeatedly have failed to produce any answer to that question even in simplified form.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38582722

> The chant is a call for liberation.

Let’s try again : How this “liberation” would look like ? And what outcome you expect to see once it’s done ?

This is a very inaccurate comparison. Palestinians faced the violent expulsion of the Nakbah, and before that in the British mandate period there were attacks from violent Zionist groups. Currently, Palestine is militarily occupied and colonized. In this context, from the river to the sea must be understood as a desire for freedom and for justice.

The oppression faced under occupation by people in the West Bank and in Gaza for over 70 years now reminds us of how situations like Apartheid in South Africa formally continued until 1994.

To dismiss as simple “Jew hate” is really not the correct context; very disappointing to see these broad generalizations dismiss the fundamental needs for human life.

Muslims conquered that land to begin with, so that’s kind of an important bit of context for everything that follows.

And the antipathy in the rest of the Muslim world is mostly about hating Jews. In Bangladesh, where I’m from, people aren’t marching for justice for the Rohingya being genocided by Myanmar—even though Rohingya are closely related to Bangladeshis. But there are huge protests in the streets for Palestinians. What is the explanation for why people would be so much more concerned about a “human rights” issue involving a far away, distantly related people, in comparison to the amount of concern for the human rights issue happening to a closely related people next door? Because it’s not really about “human rights,” it’s about a Muslim solidarity against Jews.

The objective is an end to occupation, this is about establishing justice. it would be narrow minded and misguided to claim this is not about human rights and dignity first and foremost, which is a component of justice. People take solidarity with those being oppressed and wronged. The Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestine has been occurring for over 70 years now, and worldwide this is a galvanizing topic especially considering the major uptick in atrocities committed by the Israeli government and indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

The issue with Rohingya people is also an issue that people take solidarity with and partake in aid of.

I see your comment as dismissing the desire to establish justice in Palestine as if it is only about fighting Jews for being Jewish. Many people also protested the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which now in the US we recognize as being based on wrong premises. Apartheid was supported by many people but now it is regarded as a dark time in history.

If you wish to be on the side of ignoring the need for justice, know that you won’t be the first to do so. But it does not make it the correct thing to do.

Which occupation? Gaza (historical Filastin) and the West Bank? Or the whole of Israel? It depends on who you ask, but the most active and direct organizations working to end "occupation" take an expansive view --- hence the "river" and the "sea". When you talk about the Nakba, remember that Jewish communities in West Asia and North Africa were exiled at the same time --- the majority of the Jewish population of Israel are Mizrahi, the descendants of those exiles.

Very few things about this situation are simple.

And yet when Russia invaded Ukraine, Meta changed their policy and made it acceptable to advocate violence against Russians.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-inst...

Personally, I oppose both Russian expansionism and the genocidal antisemitic Hamas terrorist movement, so the Meta policy aligns with my views. But I am deeply uncomfortable with having a small cabal of Silicon Valley executives define the acceptable bounds of discourse for the rest of society. It would be better if they allowed all legal content no matter how objectionable and gave individual users tools to block what they don't want to see.

If social media platforms all provided the same service, there would be only one. The way it is today, each of them makes a very specific set of editorial decisions, which is why we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gab, etc. If every network put all the power in the users' hands, the dynamics of network effects would take over and we would be left with one social network.

I'm not saying this would be worse for the users, because I agree that "allow all content + powerful filtering tools" would suit me just fine. But it's worth noting that there would be a real serious monopoly problem if there were no conscious choices to differentiate. This would conflict with your main point of friction here: that a bunch of SV nerds shouldn't get to define our Overton window. If one platform provided free speech + filters, and became the only game in town, it wouldn't be long before we were back in the situation we're in today, except the group of toxic SV billionaires running the show would be even smaller.

Looking at the actual report, I really disagree with your assessment. It sounds like there's a bunch of nonsense in there where Meta is _not_ living up to its own policies, and is flagging stuff disingenuously.

> 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.

... so no nudity, no sexual activity

> 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.” 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.”

... arguing _against_ violence is flagged as harassment. Image and statement about Israeli action flagged as incitement

> In one case, an Instagram user received a warning that the comment she posted “may be hurtful to others.” The comment, which Human Rights Watch reviewed, consisted of nothing more than a series of Palestinian flag emojis.[77] In other cases, Meta hid the Palestinian flag from comment sections or removed it on the basis that it “harasses, targets, or shames others.”[78]

...that's just kinda indefensible.

> Many users reported posts on Instagram being removed when they criticized the Israeli government, including the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no matter how nuanced or careful their posts were. Meta removed these posts under its “Dangerous Organizations or Individuals” and hate speech rules, respectively.

... which is crazy since there have been plenty of reasons to criticize Netanyahu well before the Oct 7 attacks.

On the topic of "From the river to the sea", they specifically mention that posts with this phrase, as well as others

> such as “Free Palestine,” “Ceasefire Now,” and “Stop the Genocide,” were repeatedly removed by Instagram and Facebook under “spam” Community Guidelines or Standards without appearing to take into account the context of these comments.

I.e. Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

As for the "is considered hateful by many", that's true, but is also subjective, and very tangled given that prominent Israeli conservatives have used very similar phrasing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Simi...

If someone actually praising the Oct 7 attacks or something gets flagged/banned/etc, then sure, Meta is just applying its policies. That does not seem to be what's happening here. It's true that the report doesn't give numbers for these specific treatments, and the authors have a limited and biased view based on who responded to their call for evidence. But the limited view doesn't seem to be of Meta even-handedly and competently applying their policies.

_However_, I don't want to attribute everything to malice where incompetence may be at least a partial explanation. If motivated 3rd parties are repeatedly flagging a photo of a clothed, dead Palestinian as "nudity", and Meta's systems are built with the assumption that such user-provided flags are presumed trustworthy, then we could easily see how someone posting that photo would get incorrectly/inappropriately flagged.

I think without actual access to the material it's pretty hard to say. For example, the report highlights that someone commented with nothing but a series of Palestinian flags to someone's post, and their comment was flagged and removed. However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse. (And these kinds of abusive comments are extremely common.)

The report also has some pretty strange language, like mentioning that a post which was flagged for nudity contained a picture of a dead woman, and a fully-clothed man holding her body. But... There are so, so many pictures of fully-clothed, male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women they abducted and/or raped before murdering. Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed? Maybe it's just a grammatical error, but they're really light on the details, and releasing the underlying data would answer a lot of questions.

Personally I am suspicious of HRW's report, since they've been caught releasing misleading reports in the past, and the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division is a BDS activist [1]. Obviously your viewpoint may be different, but without access to the underlying information it's pretty hard to make a compelling case to either side... Which to me points to the report being more worthy of suspicion, since if it was clear-cut, they'd easily convince more people of their correctness by releasing the data.

1: https://www.ngo-monitor.org/fact-sheet-on-omar-shakirs-bds-c...

This is a bit too much of reading between the lines, suspiciously so.

> Why does the report only say that the man was fully clothed?

It does not. This is misrepresenting what is written in the report, to say the least. There are two such examples in the report (not sure if they refer to the same image): The first one is "image of a Palestinian father in Gaza who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who was also killed" and the other one is "an image of a fully clothed man holding a girl, both deceased". Obviously in both pictures both man and the woman are dead, debunking your "male members of Hamas holding nude or partially-nude dead women" theory.

> However, they don't share what the original post was; responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse.

Again, this is just a guess and not factual information. In fact, the report has a link to the original source in footnote 78 (https://theintercept.com/2023/10/28/instagram-palestinian-fl...) and one of the comments Instagram has hidden was on a pro-Palestinian post:

> In one, a user commented on an Instagram video of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in Jordan with green, white, and black heart emojis corresponding to the colors of the Palestinian flag, along with emojis of the Moroccan and Palestinian flags.

Also:

> The Intercept reviewed several hidden comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji that had no reference to Hamas or any other banned group.

Please make your substantive points without swipes such as "Again, you are making up things". This is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

When someone else's information is wrong, you're of course welcome to correct it, but please do so by providing correct information and omit swipes and other flamebait, which only degrade discussion and evoke worse from others.

I know that's not easy to do when emotions are running high, but it's something we all need to work on—and it's the same for everyone, regardless of which side they're on in any conflict.

Fair point, I think the latest edit is more civilised.

But it's not that the guy's "information is wrong", it's that he has produced some hypothetical examples of things that might be the case, but also might not.

"responding with a series of Palestinian flags to an Israeli hostage relative's post about their kidnapped sibling, for example, would be clear harassment and abuse."

This is a hypothetical. The poster is literally "making up things."

Ok, but it doesn't change the moderation point about swipes. Commenters here need to edit them out* because they move conversations flameward and evoke worse from others. As one can always make one's substantive points without resorting to them, this shouldn't be a problem.

* This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You are misquoting the source — I'm not "making up things." I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis:

> In another, a user posted just three Palestinian flag emojis. Another screenshot seen by The Intercept showed two hidden comments consisting only of the hashtags #Gaza, #gazaunderattack, #freepalestine, and #ceasefirenow.

The Intercept does not provide the context on the posts that the flag comments were on, or the hashtags — and visibly-Jewish people across social media have been barraged since Oct. 7th by strangers brigading their completely-unrelated posts with comments like this, and are targeted for harassment just for being Jewish; I think being suspicious of the context is fairly natural. And please refrain from personal attacks.

Re: the man holding the girl — yes, I am referring to the one in which both are deceased, but only the man is referenced as being fully-clothed; members of Hamas can be deceased too. Maybe the girl is also fully-clothed, but not releasing any of the data doesn't help build confidence.

> And please refrain from personal attacks.

You are right. I had already edited my post before you posted your response.

> I referenced the three Palestinian flags, not the heart emojis

> members of Hamas can be deceased too. Maybe the girl is also fully-clothed

These sound highly nitpicky and like hypotheses that are hard to justify (a Hamas terrorist raping and killing a woman, then getting killed himself and taken a picture of, while the woman is still in his arms, naked? Really?).

I think we are missing the semantics here. My points were:

- Instagram/Facebook/etc can censor comments as simple as emojis, even though they were posted as comments to pro-Palestinian stories.

- They also censor pictures for nudity, even though they are not. Note that even though the reports is ambiguous about one of such photos, it clearly says that the man and his daughter, both deceased, are fully clothed.

IDK — I just find it hard to believe that Instagram is intentionally censoring pro-Palestine posts that do not otherwise violate their policies, and the accusation is coming from an actor that is fairly biased and isn't releasing their underlying data. No doubt sometimes things get flagged incorrectly, e.g. the heart emojis — I didn't dispute those ones. But having personally seen the abuse of random Jewish accounts by people spamming Palestinian flags at strangers, I am suspicious of the cases where there isn't any context being given, especially since the source is unreliable and isn't sharing details. Same goes for photos that aren't shared.

"Human Rights Watch solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoint related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 cases documented involved examples of online censorship and suppression of content in support of Palestine, while one case contained an example of removal of content in support of Israel."

Even ignoring the self-selection sampling issues here, .01% is not exactly something to just wave off.

If HRW has lost all credibility, then giving Meta the benefit of the doubt and ignoring this report makes sense. However, if you think there’s a chance that HRW might be telling the truth, then it’s worth examining your existing assumptions on how Meta decides what content to allow on its platform.

NGO Monitor is itself not a credible source. See http://policyworkinggroup.org.il/report_en.pdf

Okay, here's the BDS movement itself quoting Omar Shakir (the director of HRW's Israel/Palestine division) speaking at a SPER meeting where he promotes BDS: https://bdsmovement.net/news/divestment-debate-continues

Thanks for the source. Shakir’s perspective makes sense. Stanford shouldn’t be supporting Israel’s strikes on Palestinian civilians.

To be honest, anybody professionally well versed in the question of apartheid and human's right would be in favor of a BDS campaign against an apartheid state.

Regarding nudity, here is a tweet from Palestinian journalist MoTaz showing how photos of wounded Palestinians are incorrectly labelled as nudity: https://twitter.com/VyprCEO/status/1739180449295913096

Thanks for the source.

> Meta's own cited policy was not that it "is considered hateful" as you say, but that this political expression was labeled as spam. That sounds pretty bogus.

Am one of those ? I always mark these as spam as I try to keep my account politics free. I have some friends that are obsessed with the Palestinian cause and there was a time this stuff would constantly appear in my feed.

I think that's borderline abusive. A message is not spam just because you don't want to see it. A good faith expression of a viewpoint in an appropriate context is not spam. If Meta is doing a bad job picking stuff for your feed, flagging other people's comments or posts inappropriately is not the answer. In the same way, it would be abusive for me to flag your response just because I didn't enjoy it.

Is that not the actual definition of spam? Unwanted solicitation? Why would it matter what the content of the message is?

Commenting on topic on social media posts is not "solicitation". If all comments are unwanted, then don't put public posts on social media.

If you post on IG about Gaza and someone comments with a different viewpoint than yours, that's not "spam". If on your Gaza post I comment about how you too can be your own boss selling vitamins, that's spam. And if I comment about Palestinian rights on you post about fashion, that's spam.

Wow I really can’t believe this is an argument you’re trying to make. Spam is something entirely distinct from “any content I disagree with or didnt ask to see”. That’s kind of a preposterous take and a grievous misunderstanding of the internet.

removal of content is really like 10% of the cases. the most worrisome type of suppression of speech is what they call "shadow banning" which is really "reach limiting". to the extent people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms. I experienced this myself. We have a draft law in parliament concerning boyocott of israel. I posted a status about the law (notice it's unrelated to war or anything in the news rights now) and it got almost zero reach. it's not subtil. It's like two orders of magnitude less reach. I know it because I'm a political activist and I always comment on draft laws.

From my first hand experience designing these algorithms at Meta and running experiments, and listening to feedback from accounts, I would guess that you are not getting reach because your followers do not interact with what you post. In almost every case people call "shadow ban", the cause was occasionally an actual bug (code doing something undesired and unexpected) or far more often people posting bad content.

The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

> The ML is good enough to know whether your followers want to engage with political content. If they don't, Facebook will show them less of it.

This is a very simplistic explanation. If the GP is a political activist and "always comments on draft laws", I would expect their followers to be willing to engage with political content.

It would explain a lot about how Meta operates that the engineers don't factor things like this in.

We did, they do. When I was there people did "calibration studies" for certain sensitive categories to understand and fix any model biases that would rank content higher for undesirable or unexpected reasons.

I feel a deep discomfort with algorithms optimizing for “engaging” content like this. It feels to me like a form of algorithmic brainwashing, capturing people in filter bubbles. I would prefer it if there were laws against platforms making visibility decisions for the user. If people choose to be in a bubble, that’s a form of personal freedom, if an unknowable algorithm chooses for them, not so much.

Most people on Meta's product follow too many accounts to see everything everyone posts. In an alternate reality where ranking is illegal, the game would be different and worse. Accounts would just repost the same content over and over every few minutes to stay at the top of the feed, or some other strategy to get distribution.

Right but users could be given prominent ways to deal with this - eg tools and buttons to (in bulk at first) unfollow people.

Well, it does not make sense because : 1- I know the baseline of interactions I get usually 2- it's not something that happened to my account specifically, it's everybody, including community managers, for whom posting content is a monetizable skill, who resort to obfuscation when they use the word "Palestine".

> people now refrain from using the word "Palestine" to avoid metas algirithms

It wasn't algorithm, or glitch, or bug. It was a decision made by humans, including you know who. It's a form of crowd control. That's why it's important to have several channels for 'producers'. For others it's a good idea to have several sources. You'll see much more even if each source represents a single side (which is usually the case, 'democracies' are no different).

It's difficult for anyone who doesn't work there to know, but I would guess based on what I know of how ranking decisions are made that you are mistaken. For example I worked there prior to the 2020 election and on Instagram there was no specific ranking rule of any kind related to keywords like that, and no intentional bias to push up one side or another in any way, outside of ads and government officials.

Your system, including subsystems, must have a filter for prohibited words, like n-word, f-word, etc. It's very easy to add another one. That could be another subsystem which very few people have access to. I suspect there are different subsystems. One strait with explanations, another shadow without. The second is something nobody talks about in public as it's difficult to explain, may be even illegal. The same way unwanted talks are being suppressed on other portals. Note, it's independent of recommendations system, which can be played with by assigning scores to words and phrases. Engineers who build those systems don't need to know how exactly they are used and what are the key words.

I can give you a first hand example. One big sh*ty bank didn't let me see my accounts if I refused to activate a debit card. After login they showed a message box, when I pressed 'cancel' they logged me out hoping I will 'click through' to get access. This way they didn't have to explain and could claim it was a bug. It lasted for months till I closed all accounts and they confirmed, but actually didn't do it. What I mean by this is don't expect big company to play nice.

Yes it would be easy, but when I worked there it didn't exist.

I posted 2 things recently. One was link to a game, another to an anime (neither related in any way shape or form to wars nor any news or politics what-so-ever. I got zero responses, not even likes/hearts/laughs. So I assumed FB decided not to show them to any of my friends. "Zero reach".

How do you know the reason for your reason for zero reach is any different than mine? I assumed Meta's algo decided none of my friends would be interested in what I posted, not that I was being censored.

They did respond to my next 2 posts so no idea the difference.

I have heard from others that link posts are somehow downranked on many social media platforms (not just Meta, but especially FB/IG). This is why many people recommend instead text posts without a link, with a callout to a second post containing a "link in comments." This seems common on YouTube community posts also.

I wonder if the word Palestine (and potentially also Israel) trips some ML systems up. I put "Palestinian values" into a random sentiment analysis tool and it's ranked lower than most other countries. They'd both be (understandably) linked to negative content.

Yes that's definitely possible. It's the sort of thing that Meta has teams to try to avoid, but in fast moving information landscapes it's sometimes difficult to keep up.

The problem is that the rules aren't applied fairly or evenly. See this example from twitter: https://twitter.com/PalestineNW/status/1738711045265392028

That's Twitter, not owned by Meta

Three of those are religions and one of those is an ethnicity as well. One of those also has seen almost constant persecution during history. It's concerning that this needs to be pointed out

That's a lame excuse as if one writes "Fuck Druze" or "Fuck Yazids" Twitter does not add a warning. Besides, Christians have certainly been persecuted in Muslim countries and Muslims are certainly persecuted in Western countries.

Please show an example of Christians being persecuted in Muslim countries. Muslims did not/do not try to convert Christians and Jews as they are considered ahlul-kitab/people of the book under Islamic law.

That's the exact opposite of what I was saying. Unlike Muslims, Christians and Druze, Jews are also a ethnic groups. Write "kill blacks", "kill Asians" or "kill Uighurs" on Twitter and you'll get similar treatment

So the phrase "from the river to the sea" is hateful to many but when it comes to disrespect Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) or Quran then it becomes freedom of speech no matter a vast majority of world population hates it. Hypocrisy to say the least!

Both are hateful to many and both are protected from laws by Congress. Facebook can remove whatever it wants on their platform.

Let's make it simpler- disrespect for Muhamad is a disrespect to a religion based on crusades and a prophet who is a declared pedophile according to their scripts (married and had sex with Aisha when she was 6yo). Calling "from the river to the sea" is a call for genocide of the Jewish people. So, can you pick a side already of which of the calls is legit and which not?

Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad? And who's going to determine which speech is good and what's bad? It's not gonna be you, it's some bureaucrat who has a completely different idea of good and bad than you do. Why do you want that?

> Wow, you are openly advocating for speech to be allowed in cases where it is politically good and disallowed in cases where it is politically bad?

Not the person you are replying to, but I think the logic is a bit different than “is it politically good or bad.” It is more like “is this speech advocating for genocide of an ethnic group or is it just critical of/disrespectful to a religion.”

I think most people agree that those two things aren’t even close to being the same. Also, I don’t think that “talking negative about islam” has been a “politically good” thing in way over a decade.

The people who advocate for censorship based on political opinions never stop at "censor genocide". They also want to censor a huge list of non-genocidal things. And my point is that these people don't seem to understand that they would not personally be able to make those case by case decisions - instead it's faceless bureaucrats who tow the party line.

Again, this should be quite simple. You can criticize a pedophile prophey. You cannot call for genocide. IDK why it's so hard for you to get that.

You need to understand that the U.S. does not own the whole world and there are other countries besides the U.S. I know it may be shocking for you to hear, but those other countries have drawn the "freedom of speech line" differently than the U.S. Calling Muhammad a pedophile (even if factually correct) is not legal in many parts of the world. Because, as I said, it is faceless bureaucrats who are drawing the line on what can be said and what can't. And that's not a good thing. Why do you place so much faith in faceless bureaucrats?

Well, if something is factually true it should not be disallowed to be said, right? But calling for the death of others should be, again, right?

I 100% agree with you! That's how the line "should be" drawn! Unfortunately, when you let faceless bureaucrats draw the line, they don't draw it where you want them to!

You do a lot of hand waving to equate "from the river to the sea" with support for genocide.

It certainly could indicate support for genocide. It also could indicate extreme disapproval for the vastly disproportionate civilian death toll among Palestinians at the hands of Isreal in the wake of Hamas' attacks.

It appears to me that Israel's goal under Netanyahu is to suppress dissent, and label all those who oppose its actions as "genocidal" to therefore justify its indiscriminate violence against the people of Gaza.

I have no problem taking down "From the river to the sea" type content so long as we also take down Greater Israel type content.

Having social media companies attempting to guess at the intention behind ambiguous phrases seems like a bad idea.

Some people are certainly implying support for genocide when they say "from the river to the sea", while others are not. Same for "Greater Israel".

The only sane place to draw the line imo is at explicit support for hatred or violence. Even that standard can be fuzzy, but if there's a reasonable doubt about intent, I don't think we want corporations or governments making those judgments.

Moderation isn’t so clean-cut that elegant rules like “no EXPLICIT support”. You’ll have people who spend all day ducking around these rules to say IMPLICITLY hateful things and it’ll cause a furor over legitimate grievances with the moderation.

I recall back during the furor over drawing Mohammad peoppe an extremist Muslim group said about Matt stone/trey Parker that they "will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh". Is allowing that sort of speech, what appears to be a death threat in response to free expression, protecting free speech? Or is it enabling a culture of self-censorship due to fears of violent reprisals? Things are complicated, you must be flexible.

In this case, I want to be reasonable. I have heard people use “from the river to the sea” in hateful ways many times. People seem legitimately upset by it and are not just putting on airs. It doesn’t advance the discourse in a productive way.

I don't remember a single instance of a mass protest on campus or in the streets, in US or in Europe or in Israel, where the protestors would demand that Israel occupies Egypt, Iraq and Syria, throw their population into the sea (or into the desert) and establish a Judaic theocracy on the freshly liberated land. I can believe that whatever is meant by "Greater Israel" among 8 billions of people would be some that support that idea, because any crazy idea can find a person crazy enough to support it. However, comparing this idea to the level of support slogans like "from the river to the sea" enjoy right now - with thousands openly proclaiming them, and on many campuses also proceeding to attack Jewish students under them - is just non-sensical. There's no "Greater Israel" movement worth talking about seriously - but there's very much movement in support of genocide of Jews, and it's very visible and prominent.

There is a "Greater Israel" movement worth taking seriously, not because they have as much popular support as "From the River to the Sea" on the streets or in the campuses, but more because of the people who believe in this notion in the halls of power.

People have called for the seizure of "Greater Israel" since Israel's founding[1]. The "Movement for Greater Israel"[2] was one of the parties that merged together to form the ruling Likud Party, and the president of Israel pulled out a map showing "The New Middle East" only having Israel and no longer having Palestine [3]. You know, the one who just invaded "Greater Israel".

My square deal, is if "From the River to the Sea" gets banned as hate speech, Netanyahu's map also gets banned as hate speech. Nobody is allowed to promote the idea that Israel takes over Palestine, or Palestine takes over Israel. It's not fair if we ban things in one direction and not the other. Allow both or neither.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel#During_British_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movement_for_Greater_Israel [3] https://i.redd.it/x68dg51jb0qb1.jpg

> It's not fair if we ban things in one direction and not the other

If Hamas would show around the maps, and Netanyahu would show around the maps - I'd say, no problem, let them both have their maps. That's not what Hamas is doing. Hamas has just murdered over 1300 people in Israel, after a long string of lesser murders over 18 years, and after shooting rockets into Israel day to day for all those years. And they plan to continue that - that's not my words, it's theirs. And the "from the river" slogan is an unequivocal support to all that. It's not about drawing of some map, there's not even nearly any comparison between drawing a map and murdering, raping and kidnapping people.

And of course, if you knew anything about policy in Israel, you'd know nobody there, and that includes first and foremost Netanyahu himself, and Likud under his (or anybody else's) leadership, wants to annex Palestinian territories. If anybody wanted it, it'd be done decades ago - as it happened in Jerusalem and Golan. But it's exactly the opposite of what everybody in Israel - very much including Likud, Netanyahu and anybody who is somebody in Israel politics - wants. Only people that know absolutely nothing about Israel politics beyond what they read in some hostile source, itself being derived from some unsourced reddit posting, could claim anything like that. Anybody who knows anything would laugh at it. Israel explicitly exited Gaza because it didn't want any responsibility for it. Israel explicitly signed with PLO because they didn't want to annex the West Banks and have all the Arab population there as citizens. I have no idea what's the story of that map and what was meant by it, and when and in what context it was shown, but if you know anything about what happened there in the last 100 years, you'd know annexing those territories is just the opposite of what Likud or Netanyahu want. So again, there's absolutely no comparison. So if you want, yeah, ban "Greater Israel" - because you'd be banning nothing but the figment of your imagination.

Right, the defense minister is handing out assault rifles to West Bank Settlers but nobody really wants to be there.

> Israel explicitly exited Gaza because it didn't want any responsibility for it.

That is not how that works. As an occupying force they are obligated to protect the population they are occupying, not commit genocide on them. No amount of kicking up sand changes that very basic fact. It doesn't matter if they actually want what they are doing, they are guilty either way. Who gives a shit what Eichmann "actually wanted" except Eichmann?

> As an occupying force they are obligated to protect the population they are occupying

Israel hasn't been "an occupying force" in Gaza for 18 years. All those years Hamas explicitly renounced responsibility of doing anything for Gazans, as a normal government should - their functionaries, like Musa Abu Marzouk, openly said they are not going to do anything for the population, that's UN's business. Their business is murdering Jews and using the population as shields, and they should be thankful for that. With this approach there's no wonder all the money went to Hamas' pockets and building the tunnels, that the schools, mosques and hospital were converted to military installations and the population is living in squalor. And the fault for that lies with Hamas - their insane fanatical hate for the Jews didn't leave any space for building any normal life in Gaza. And people on the West that keep enabling them and keep shifting the blame to Israel are part of the problem, because it's their money and their support allow Hamas to do what it does.

> not commit genocide on them

Hamas has genocide as their explicit goal, and they confirmed it many times, and they tried to do it just recently and succeeded in murdering over 1300 people in Israel. They literally murdered, raped and kidnapped everybody they encountered. The goal of Israel never was to commit any genocide (no wonder the population of Gaza tripled under Israel control) - it was to leave in peace and have the Arabs to rule themselves, peacefully. Unfortunately, with Hamas it proved to be impossible. There's only one side there that is hell-bent on committing genocide - and that's Hamas. And they are not hiding it in the least, either - but people like you keep employing astonishing amount of mental gymnastics to hide it from yourselves.

> It doesn't matter if they actually want what they are doing, they are guilty either way.

What Israel is doing is dismantling the Hamas regime. Nothing else. They allowed it to exist for 18 years, so it will take a lot of time and a lot of blood, unfortunately, because Hamas is not going to go willingly, and they are actively using the population of Gaza as human shields, while robbing them (quoting Musa Abu Marzouk again: "The aid that comes to Gaza must be distributed to the resistance fighters, and what remains is done - distribute it to the people. The attempt of some citizens to seize aid, as happened today in Rafah, will be fought with all force" - and by "force" he means murdering anyone who doesn't want to starve for his glory). But of course, the useful idiots on the West will drone about how Israel is guilty in that anyway. Nothing will change them.

Sure thing. They regularly "mow the lawn", they imposed calorie restrictions or things like spices, but they're not an occupying force.

> Despite the Israeli disengagement, the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many human-rights organizations continue to consider Gaza to be held under Israeli military occupation, due to what they consider Israel's effective military control over the territory; Israel disputes that it occupies the territory

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

They blow up up the Palestinian Supreme court and you claim "What Israel is doing is dismantling the Hamas regime. Nothing else."

https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17317722618482647...

That has as much to do with fighting Hamas as putting children into death camps had to do with fighting "Jews who control the media" or whatever.

You did not change the facts, you did not even cover them up in the slightest. What you did was stand up and get counted as someone looking the other way.

> defense minister is handing out assault rifles to West Bank Settlers but nobody really wants to be there.

The right to self defense is one of the basic human rights. "Human" here includes Jews, to the surprise of many. Israeli government committed a grave mistake of disarming the population in dangerous areas, thinking people do not need to defend themselves, since it's the job of the government. That cost hundreds of lives - lives of the people that could defend themselves, but were disarmed by their own government. Looks like finally the government realizes the gravity of their mistake. Good, at least they are capable of learning.

> The right to self defense is one of the basic human rights. "Human" here includes Jews, to the surprise of many.

Oh sure, anyone who criticizes Nazi mentality and behaviour in Israelis hates Jews.

Nope. Leibowitz was right, and your mental gymnastics just underline that.

Meanwhile: "Palestinians under attack as Israeli settler violence surges in the West Bank"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67173344

Having (Jewish) Israeli, pre-Israeli, and pre-pre-Israli heritage, I don't personally find "From the River to the Sea" offensive but I do find it non-constructive and insensitive. Globalize the intifada otoh is awful.

I follow this topic daily, on twitter, in telegram (both Israeli and Arab groups), and among the thousands of Jews I know across the world on FB (from anti-Zionist Jews to Orthodox). This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "Greater Israel" mentioned. I'll go research it now but it strikes me as a manufactured obscurity, while "From the River to the Sea" is prevasive.

> This is the first time I've ever seen the phrase "Greater Israel" mentioned.

Well, it is unquestionably the stance of the entire political party in which Netanyahu is a member of.

I've seen comments saying "yes please, show me more bombings, I love to see them die" not taken down, because "them" was palestinians.

I wonder how long the comment would have been up, if it was referring to the other side instead.

edit: I see from the downvotes that my experience doesn't fit your bias. Sorry people -_-

Doesn’t Facebook have a report button? I’m pretty sure comments like that would be taken down if you reported them, it’s really a no brainer whatever “them” refers to.

The report button is rather useless unless it's a delicate issue that Facebook wants to distance themselves from. I find it hard to believe that nobody reports such comments. Probably many people do, but they get the stock reply "this comment does not violate our community standards".

I would be really really surprised if some comment so brazen wasn’t auto deleted on flagging. Saying you want someone to die is very straightforward reason to delete without much thought.

So you're just going to assume the problem doesn't exist because you'd be surprised if it did? There's skepticism, and then there's sticking your head in the sand...

You or I could run this test right now on Facebook. I suggest you just post a comment somewhere you in Facebook that you want some person or some group of people to die, it doesn’t really matter who, and measure the amount of time it takes for someone to flag it and have it deleted. This is just low hanging fruit, and completely unrelated to the immediate issue at hand.

My guess is that the original poster is leaving something out in their comment and the post wasn’t as brazen as the comment suggested.

You're literally just living in a fantasy world. "Trust me bro" has no power compared to actual studies.

I meant, you could actually execute the experiment yourself and see what happens. You don’t have to trust me, rather just do it and find out how quickly your comment is nuked. You won’t get into any trouble other than your comment being deleted…probably. The truth is easy to discern by just running the experiment if you want, but I’m guessing you have some cognitive bias that you’d rather have confirmed instead?

Anyone could say exactly the same thing about any hot-button topic and feel as self-righteous as you. Again, it's fantasy until you back it up with something empirical.

The experiments are straight forward if someone wants to run them. But your fantasy is backed up by as much evidence as mine, we are arguing about whose anecdote is better until someone does the experiment.

My argument is nothing more than that we don't know anything "until someone does the experiment". Stop putting words in my mouth, Sean.

I reported them, yes. Facebook said they didn't violate policy.

One of my local groups has been flooded with porn spam as of late, moderators have abandoned the group (the group was NOT for anything remotely related). I reported the group for spam and for sexually explicit content (I’m talking links with poster images of full on sexual activity, exposed genitalia, etc - the kind of stuff you expect on the homepage of any major porn site). The report was closed without action later that day. Anybody taking two seconds to look at the group would have immediately done _something_, but I’m doubtful that this report ever reached a real person.

Maybe the "them" was referred to hamas terrorists?

In the sense that every palestinian is a terrorist.

>I've seen comments saying "yes please, show me more bombings, I love to see them die" not taken down, because "them" was palestinians.*

Do you have any proof of this whatsoever? First that these posts actually exist (this I believe) and that the reason they weren't taken down was because they were about Palestinians (versus, say, overlooked so far)?

I don't see why "From the river to the see" would be hateful in isolation. Certainly some people who say it may have hateful thoughts in their minds, but wishing for palestinian land where Israel is now is not hateful in itself.

Don't you really understand why it's an hateful speech when you wish my country stop to exists?

no i do not. as an example, it’s okay for a native american to argue that usa (my country) should not exist as long as that person is not advocating physical violence to do so.

Side debate: the USA "ceasing to exist" from the view of a native American, in a manner analogous to Palestinians, would be the status quo that already exists today. In opposition to a racially exclusive "white supremacy" manifest dystenity.

The USA already functions as a de facto One State solution where natives have both full rights and a negotiated sub-nationality too. The manifest destiny USA's "right to exist" was settled definitively against as early as 1865.

Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.

what makes it an apartheid state? palestinians have no voting rights in all the neighboring arab states, yet a large amount of them do in israel. and if they don’t in Israel they have voting rights for the palestinian authority

I don't know if this is intentionally obtuse but its TRIVIALLY easy to find examples and journalistic documentaries demonstrating the apartheid going back years

just of the top of my head, there are already seperate roads that palestinians are not allowed to go on.

palestinians have to go through multiple checkpoints just to travel within their own territory.

palestinians are tried in a separate military court with a 90% conviction rate.

here's some links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCh043-gLIM

how Israel created a water crisis

https://novaramedia.com/2023/12/20/israeli-soldiers-are-snat...

Israeli soldiers are arresting and beating up palestinians simply for having photos of gaza.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6bMfikaiQ&ab_channel=CNN

here we see settler violence going on in the west bank where hamas does not opearte. its a direct contradiction to the israeli claim that there would be peac in the middle east of the arabs put their guns down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkN6PH5cG7c&ab_channel=AlJaz...

an israeli company has already put together a promo for luxury homes for israeli's to be built on the ruins of gaza. where will these people who lived there go? oh right, they are being systematically exterminated right now.

like, this took just 5 min of googling. The evidence is out there in PLAIN sight so the only way I can understand someone not knowing at this point is if they are intentionally looking the other way. its not too disimilar to germans living near the concentration camps. people looked the other way because it wasn't convenient to know what was really happening.

This is a lot of anecdotal evidence.

And you are touching a lot of different subjects which I don't have time to refute one by one.

Examples:

1. Convinction rate in Israel is over 90% for the entire population, not just palestinians. This is because different reasons such as preference not to press charges if there is not a very high chance of conviction, plea bargains, etc.

2. Multiple checkpoints - The security situation in the west bank is a reflection of the fact this is an occupied territory which should have been solved in subsequent peace negotiations. This never happened, and the reasons for that rest on both sides, but you have to be honest with yourself if you think the Palestinians did not reject multiple fair peace offers.

"Systematically exterminated" - This is an extreme hyperbole.. there are enough historical examples of how systematic exterminations looks like to make this a not serious claim. Just compare the amount of casualties of different middle eastern conflicts to the Israeli-Palestinian one

Please try to touch something more concrete than multiple anecdotes which most do not really represent anything similar to an apartheid government.

> This is a lot of anecdotal evidence.

you see enough annectodatal evidence and it starts to become a pattern

> And you are touching a lot of different subjects which I don't have time to refute one by one.

thats how systematic oppression work. it has many facets and if you're pro israeli, you've only maintained that position by bot reading though the evidence

> Convinction rate in Israel is over 90% for the entire population, not just palestinians.

fair, but why do palestinians go thougha. seperate miliary court? why are children as young as 10 serving time in military prisons? october 7th was horrible but lets not ignore that it was motivated by people in a desperate situation trying to gain bargaining chips to have their loved ones released. some of those children released from the prisons in exchange for the israeli hostages were as young as 10 at the time of incarceration.

"Systematically exterminated" - This is an extreme hyperbole..

no its not. this proves to me you have spent no time watching any of the documentaries exploring this. you wouldn't last a day living in the west bank as a palestinian. Ive seen plenty of videos of settlers shooting down palestinians in cold blood with IDF soldiers doing nothing to stop it. they only step in when palestinians fight back. as an american who studied history, I know enough about the ku klux klan to to know ethnic cleansing when I see it.

> Please try to touch something more concrete than multiple anecdotes which most do not really represent anything similar to an apartheid government.

I think its obvious that there is no amount of evidence that would meet the bar for you to consider whats going on an apartheid.

> you see enough annectodatal evidence and it starts to become a pattern

Pattern for what? a national conflict is not the same as an apartheid government. We might need to go back to how you define apartheid, because I imagine separate bathrooms mandated by law, and it seems you imagine a national conflict in an occupied territory

> thats how systematic oppression work. it has many facets and if you're pro israeli, you've only maintained that position by bot reading though the evidence

Sounds a bit ad-hominem

> fair, but why do palestinians go thougha. seperate miliary court? why are children as young as 10 serving time in military prisons? october 7th was horrible but lets not ignore that it was motivated by people in a desperate situation trying to gain bargaining chips to have their loved ones released. some of those children released from the prisons in exchange for the israeli hostages were as young as 10 at the time of incarceration.

Military courts are how you manage a military occupied territory, I believe this is quite common in international law. Also Palestinians can appeal to the Israeli supreme court, many do and many decisions are overruled.

About children as young as 10, I need specifics. Looking at Israeli human rights organizations which I don't think anyone would think are pro-government in any way, there weren't any younger than 14 for the very long while I scrolled (https://www.btselem.org/hebrew/statistics/minors_in_custody).

The difference between hostages is these minors were trialed for real crimes, which you probably wouldn't accept in your country as well (attempted murder for example)

> no its not. this proves to me you have spent no time watching any of the documentaries exploring this. you wouldn't last a day living in the west bank as a palestinian. Ive seen plenty of videos of settlers shooting down palestinians in cold blood with IDF soldiers doing nothing to stop it. they only step in when palestinians fight back. as an american who studied history, I know enough about the ku klux klan to to know ethnic cleansing when I see it.

Systematic extermination can be quantified. Let's say one way you could measure it is by comparing birth rate to intentional death rates. I assure you the growth rate of the palestinian population is extremely positive.

Another way you can measure it is compare it to ongoing conflicts, the Syrian civil war which is currently ongoing has 600k casualties spanning a few years. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ongoing for almost a hundred years and it hasn't reached 10% of that.

It doesn't make it less tragic, but saying this is systematic extermination can minimize real cases of genocide.

> I think its obvious that there is no amount of evidence that would meet the bar for you to consider whats going on an apartheid.

I'm not sure. Again, apartheid is a government system that is based on systematic racism and discrimination. Although both exist in Israel, as in many other countries, this is a far cry than South Africa, or even the United States in the early 60s.

ok so a large human rights group calling it apartheid isn't enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFjbnvkmQ0&ab_channel=Amnes...

or the case where a 13 year oldboy was raped in prison and the IDF labelle dthe group trying to document and report it a terrorist organization?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnH61RvX-VQ&ab_channel=Daizy...

> Sounds a bit ad-hominem

I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm stating that the israeli position requires being absolutely obtuse and deflective for every shred of evidence that comes their way.

to be clear, no one is here to defend Hammas. I just don't think the IDF is any better.

case in point, they shot the three shirtless israeli hostages because they thought they were palestinians? so its perfectly fine to shoot unarmed people basicly?

> ok so a large human rights group calling it apartheid isn't enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFjbnvkmQ0&ab_channel=Amnes...

Although this is a common perception, just the fact a human rights group declares something doesn't make it so. I have to remind you that you live in a world where the UN Human Rights council chair is a country where they publicly hang gay people on cranes and rapes women in prisons.

Case in point, Lebanon is a country where you cannot become president by law if you're not born from a specific Christian sect. This is a country where ethnic discrimination is codified into laws (and of course Palestinians don't have voting rights). This is closer to what you deem apartheid, yet Amnesty did not make a fancy video about that.

> or the case where a 13 year oldboy was raped in prison and the IDF labelle dthe group trying to document and report it a terrorist organization?

I'm sorry, I completely believe you it happened, however this is missing tons of context. Raped by whom? Was this case brought to a court? Do you believe the rape was state sanctioned? What were the charges which caused the IDF to declare it a terrorist organization? For example there were many situations where these organizations were money laundering fronts for Hamas.

And if the answers to all these questions is 'because Israel only does evil things and nothing is ever rational or a mistake or an individual wrong', what are you trying to prove and how does that relate to being an apartheid state

> I'm not talking about you specifically. I'm stating that the israeli position requires being absolutely obtuse and deflective for every shred of evidence that comes their way.

I don't think this is the case any more than criticizing one side for not being compatible with your values while completely ignoring the different side of the coin.

> case in point, they shot the three shirtless israeli hostages because they thought they were palestinians? so its perfectly fine to shoot unarmed people basicly?

It's an obvious blunder, but I think to be fair you have to know a lot more about the situation than we both know. One explanation is these soldiers were trigger happy and wanting revenge, and another explanation is that they misidentified them as armed or there was a failure of communication. There's a reason why it's called 'the fog of war'

> Although this is a common perception, just the fact a human rights group declares something doesn't make it so.

ok so I guess amnesty international isn't a good source on if something is an apartheid by your logic?

> Case in point, Lebanon is a country where you cannot become president by law if you're not born from a specific Christian sect. This is a country where ethnic discrimination is codified into laws (and of course Palestinians don't have voting rights). This is closer to what you deem apartheid, yet Amnesty did not make a fancy video about that.

fair point. on the other hand, my tax dollars aren't' funding that discrimination. wheres my tax dollars ARE paying for the palestinian genocide. and yes, 15000 dead with the majority of them being under 18 is genocide. There's enough names to put up a large monument.

> I'm sorry, I completely believe you it happened, however this is missing tons of context.

the video I linked explains a good chunk of the context. it was compelling enough for the US state department to take the allegations seriously and forward the information to the israeli government. their response was to confiscate the computers and classify the the reporting party as a terrorist organization.

FOG of war? they were shirtless and loudly screaming in hebrew as confirmed by many sources. at the very least they could have been apprehended. It was considered a mistake only in that they weren't' palestinians. I haven't' even mentioned the number of journalist "accidentally killed." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V4zG_UkIdc&ab_channel=Middl...)

I mean... this is all pretty damning.

you call it circumstantial and anecdotal but there's a LOT of it. They've even gone so far as to label literal children of holocaust survivors "antisemitic" for speaking out against this genocide. (google it)

I know I probably won't be able to change your mind no matter what I show you. but there are very real reasons antizionism is growing in the world. The only solution that doesn't make israel evil will be to grant palestinians citizenship and equality under the law and let them live in israel alongside jews. abandon this whole ethnostate garbage.

Generally I'll disengage as we're going in circles. But I'll say this, if you want to claim Israel is an 'apartheid state' or that a 'systematic extermination' is going on, you can't treat these as truisms and expect everyone to follow along.

You need to assert your claims and be ready to defend them, "Amnesty said so" is not enough to define a government system, and I heard it somewhere in youtube is not enough to declare genocide.

The conflict is extremely complex and nuanced just as the rest of the world is. People sometimes use this conflict as a way to flatly project their Good vs Evil binary attitudes, please try to embrace complexity.

I don’t think it’s fair to say he isn’t asserting his claims or defending them, it seems that you are just avoiding engaging. He literally provided documentation and links and you repeatedly dismissed them as “anecdotal “. When he provided overviews and summaries of the data (e.g HRW) you also dismissed them without engaging. What specifically does an apartheid state look to you?

He explained what an apartheid state looks like: South Africa during Apartheid and the US prior to the civil rights era.

If they need to go thru checkpoints then they are not trespassing their territory. If that's the definition for apartheid then the US border control with Mexico should be taken down for second thoughts.

> If they need to go thru checkpoints then they are not trespassing their territory.

literally 2 seconds of googling can disprove that

https://www.btselem.org/freedom_of_movement/checkpoints_and_...

> If they need to go thru checkpoints then they are not trespassing their territory.

if there was just one checkpoint between gaza and israel, yes that would be accurate but its not.

last I checked, Mexicans don't have to pass though US checkpoints when they travel from tulum to cancun or mexico city.

Regardless to that btselem is an opinionated pro-palestinian organization, at least from the first 3 examples in the source they show biased information. The cities they mention and Hebron in particular, is divided between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the 1996 agreements. From the nature of such division to get directly from one point to another might be impossible in some roads, yet there are other roads leading to same point, so no 2 points are totally disconnected.

> Unfortunately, wishing for the ceasing-of-existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by most of the world.

Any reason other than hyperbole that you consider Israel to be an apartheid state, as compared to the rest of the Arab countries?

It's absolutely pointless for us to discuss once again why Israel is considered to be practicing apartheid. It has been established by the major human rights organisations: among which Amnesty International, Human Right Watch, and in Israel, B'Tselem. That's all we need to know, if you don't agree contest those and their findings- which you can consult online.

It's indeed pointless, because it is a lie, always was a lie and continues being a lie. Naming the names of some of the far-left groups doesn't make it less of a lie. Arabs in Israel are integrated, have representation in the Knesset and full legal, electoral and all other rights. Talking about "apartheid" is nonsense, which is obvious to anybody who knows what this word means and what legal policies actually exist in Israel.

If this[1] is not apartheid, then nothing is. Separate parks with locked doors for children of different religion, the key given to Jewish moms.

1: Raw video by The Guardian, not even much commentary, see with your own eyes: https://youtu.be/ksnLom8OD9E?si=aYvcLqcLQK960fbx

This is not apartheid, and something is, but not this.

I don't know what exactly happened with those people - though by the fact that they call Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem "settlers" I can know I can't trust a word that they are saying, and the source - which is the horrendously biased against Israel Guardian - even if everything that they say were true (which I very much suspect isn't), it looks like a property dispute, very likely based on the habit of certain parts of the population (not only Arabic, but often also) to build things first and apply for permits never. This is not always prosecuted, but sometimes it is. Sometimes it leads to very nasty disputes. Never has anything to do with "apartheid", which is lack of rights based on race (or, I allow it, ethnicity). Again, Arabs in Israel enjoy exactly the same rights, so the claim of "apartheid" is pure libel. That doesn't change an iota even if you find some instance of somebody being unjustly treated by somebody else or the legal system (again, I have zero reason to believe The Guardian in this particular case, but even if it did, it would have nothing to do with supposed "apartheid").

Also I note if you watch the film carefully, the Arabs do not just demand the property. They demand the Jews to leave Jerusalem (1:26). Israel is just fine with Arabs living in Jerusalem (even if some may claim they are not fairly treated). Arabs are not fine with Jews living in Jerusalem. And we just witnessed on October 7th what they do to Jews they're not fine with, when they can. In Jerusalem, they can't. But they still would like to. I don't think when they are deprived of this capacity, it's called "apartheid" - it's not what that word was supposed to mean.

I'm sorry, I just realized there are no separate parks, typo. There are only fenced and locked parks for Jewish children. No parks for the indigenous Palestininans.

This is not a hyperbole. It's the current state of affairs

> This is not a hyperbole. It's the current state of affairs

I should have been clearer.

The GP claims that calling for the cessation of existence of an apartheid state is considered justified by the world.

He's correct. Most of the world would consider it justified.

But ... most of the world would not consider it justified to call for the cessation of existence of an entire country and, by extension, it's people.

South Africa was the first and the defining apartheid state. People called for the cessation of existence of the state. Anyone calling for the cessation of existence of the South African country would have been considered insane.

Additionally, the argument presented by GP is invalid anyway:

1. Everyone wants an apartheid state to cease existence

2. $COUNTRY is run by an apartheid state.

3. Therefore, everyone is calling for the cessation of existence of $COUNTRY.

It's simply invalid. The presence of assertions #1 and #2 above does not lead to the conclusion #3 above.

No not neccessarily. There are many examples of peoples who have wished their lands to become liberated from current rulers. I am for example thinking of Finland or the Baltics. It wasn't hateful of them to wish for that, and I never heard anyone even express that idea. There are ways to express hate, but this is not one of them.

The difference between Finland liberating from Russian rule vs Palestina liberating from Israel rule (geographically the whole of Israel "from the river to the sea") is that there weren't a huge amount of Russians living in Finland when Finland was liberated. But for Palestine there is. What is your solution to the "jewish problem", and is it a final solution? Please do elaborate how your genocide does not violate those content rules and guidelines.

A brief perusal of Finnish history will show you a series of mass deportations and concentration camps by both sides.

Hmmh, I'm actually not familiar with that part of history.

What do you mean it was not hateful? War is not hateful?

It is about as hateful as zionism is hateful. It is an expression for the desire of land in this region.

On its own, "from the river to the sea" is just a description of a geographic area. It is equivalent to a bounded GIS grid. It is not a complete sentence. There is no verb.

I wish for a future where there is peace and love, with no violence, from the river to the sea. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, have full human rights under the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I wish for a future where all people, from the river to the sea, are enthusiastic users of GNU/Linux and the worst conflicts are debates over text editors.

If someone uses "from the river to the sea" in a sentence where they call for genocide, then what would make that sentence wrong is the verb phrase calling for genocide.

No hateful intention needed if the statement is interpreted as not wanting the state of Israel to exist without implying that the people governed by that state should also not exist (it's not even a contradiction to also hold the opinion that those people have a right to exist exactly where they currently do). To my mind that is actually a reasonable opinion to have given the objectively harmful behaviour of the Israeli state (not that I am willing to get on board with it).

Governments are not people groups -- harmful governments can and have been deposed of without violence against its people.

It isnt hateful in isolation. It could be hateful, it could also just represent a statement of solidarity with Palestinians or support for a two state solution.

>I don't see why "From the river to the see" would be hateful in isolation.

It's crazy to me the a lot of the same crowd saying, "I don't see how this is hateful" are the same people who told us that the "Okay" symbol meant "white power" and was literal violence.

yes the problem is most likely that a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some uncomprehensible reasons. Like finding them justifications, or supporting them on the ongoing war. It's pretty insane if you think about.

I remember some people in the arab world took side for ben laden on 9/11 but this time it's happening in the west too.

I recall PLENTY of "The west deserved 9/11 due to imperialism" sentiments, although not people who actually supported Osama Bin Laden.

I see similar sentiments around this war all the time, "Israel deserved this terrorist attack due to imperialism" but again really not much actual support for Hamas.

It's often accompanied by cheerful comments whenever an israeli soldier dies in gaza, killed by hamas. I think it's pretty clear those people are on the terrorists side on this war.

Like most arguments in controversial topics, there are good versions of the argument and bad ones. It behooves everyone not to use the bad arguments to outright dismiss the good ones.

I agree with your point, however in this case i think it's important to pinpoint the hypocrisy of some people.

You can't blame israel for oct 7, ask them to stop their ongoing operations in gaza, not call for the release of hostages, not say a word about the women raped by hamas and gaza civilians, AND pretend to "just want to spare the civilians population". Those people are in practice siding for the hamas, even if they deny it.

At the dialogue level, I don’t think it’s practical to require people to give a full accounting of every related topic while speaking on a subject. There are infinite facts that are related to any one fact. Anyone can win any argument by including one more related fact and saying “well without stating your opinion on this I can discard your opinion on that.” We’ll all get nowhere.

At the actual substance level, I also don’t think it’s fair or honest to take “silence” on a topic as evidence of support for it.

In this particular case, I would bet fewer than 0.00001% of the people you’re arguing with are actually okay with (or supportive of) keeping hostages in Hamas’ custody or raping people. You’re battling a cartoon villain that you drew yourself.

I think you grant protesters far too much common sense. What i'm saying isn't theoretical : as a recent example, here in paris a feminist movement protesting in support of palestinians women under bombing explicitly rejected from the march women that came to protest against the raping of israelis women ( and hostages ).

Another recent example in Paris as well is the number of people removing "free the hostages" posters in the streets.

And i won't even mention twitter..

This isn't something i've imagined, it's the sad reality. Those people are actively hostile to israelis even if that means supporting the most terrible atrocities commited by hamas.

Okay let’s take the protest example. There are a few possible explanations.

1. These protestors are actually pro raping Israelis

2. These protestors want a single, specific priority for the protest they organized

And you believe not just that (1) is more likely, but that there’s so little possibility of (2) that you can just discard their entire perspective and accuse them of supporting rape of Israelis without even asking them?

What if a group of men’s rights activists showed up advocating for the men under bombardment? Would the protestors have been wrong to exclude them? Maybe! Arguably! But would their excluding those men’s rights activists have indicated that they are positively “okay with” or perhaps even supportive of the men of Gaza dying? Absolutely not.

That just seems blatantly dishonest. You don’t have the information you think you have.

To be clear: there are people who have the beliefs you’re talking about. Obviously (October 7th speaks for itself). I just think those people are far fewer than you’re perceiving, and it is absolutely necessary for people to be engaging with good criticisms on complex issues like this one with so many lives at stake.

I believe 3/ those people are caught in their own self contradictions. They hate israel so much that they're actually sorting between women that got killed for the wrong reasons and women that got killed and raped because they somehow deserved it.

Which is an absolutely horrible stance for a feminist organization. But that's where ideology leads to.

Did they say that? Or are you just assuming?

Now of course they're never going to say it out loud (hence the hypocrisy). But that's the only logical conclusion for them never organizing anything for the women that got raped and murdered on oct 7, and rejecting the ones that did.

Do you see any other explanation ?

What about their failure to organize a protest for the women of Ukraine? Or the women of Darfur? Or what about for the men in Gaza?

This is not a rhetorical question. I am curious what you make of this. What do you “know” about their opinions based on their failures to organize such demonstrations?

The fact that the israeli-arab conflict in general triggers extraordinary responses in the public opinion is another issue. i don't have any definitive answer on that.

The troubling part is that women are killed almost the same day in the same region, in the same conflict, and i'd even say only the israli ones got targeted as women on purpose and raped. And yet they chose to protest exclusively for the other side.

> i don’t have any definitive answer on that

You should consider asking a few people and actually listening to their answers instead of accusing them of being pro-rape for failing to mention your topics of choice in the same breath.

A lot of people end up with beliefs and attitudes by sheer inertia of those around them and will accordingly have bad answers. Some people don’t though, and they’re the ones who you can both teach and learn from. Thus back to my original point: look for the strong versions of the argument.

I notice you still haven't given me any plausible reason. What's the "strong version" then ?

the "definitive answer" was for the global historical interest on the israel/arab conflict. But once again, this is another issue than what we were talking about.

Strong reasons for why people are so interested in this conflict?

Here are a few reasons Americans seem to be so interested in it:

1. We’re paying for a decent chunk of it, both financially and in terms of international political support

2. It cross-cuts American society along very unique dimensions, creating ad-hoc coalitions between people who don’t normally collaborate very much (e.g. far right white supremacists and Zionists, or far left commies and jihadists). These coalitions are already impacting American domestic affairs and will likely influence our upcoming elections.

3. In general it’s reasonable to pay close attention to situations where a thousand people are killed in a terrorist attack under the purview of a western security apparatus or when an urban area is subject to an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign (given that they tend to be humanitarian disasters even in the best of circumstances)

4. This conflict has a very high potential to unravel into a regional and even global conflict given the networks backing each belligerent

How exactly is it odd that people care so much about the situation?

i'm not sure if you're doing this on purpose or not but that's not what i asked. So let me ask again more precisely : Why would a feminist movement only protest for women killed by bombing and not the ones killed and raped 2 days before , in the same region, and would on the contrary ban other feminists that wanted to also protest against those atrocities ?

You keep saying "we should ask them, there's probably a better reason for them to act like this than pure hate". So, let me ask you, what do you think that reason could be ?

> 2. These protestors want a single, specific priority for the protest they organized

From several comments up. Seems like a sufficiently plausible explanation not to jump to as cynical and self-serving an explanation as “they think Israeli women deserve to be raped.”

And I’d also not be surprised to see them kick out men’s rights activists doing the same thing. It would be excessively cynical and self-serving to jump to “they think the men of Gaza deserve to be bombed,” too.

“They’re pro rape” is an appalling accusation to level at someone. Doing so with the “evidence” you’ve supplied calls into question your willingness to question your priors and find a real solution. So this will be my last comment on the subject as I think I’ve sufficiently made my point. Have a good holiday season!

that would explain the kicking out of the protest. It doesn't explain why no proeminent feminist organization marched for those israeli women that got raped.

It's not about them being pro-rape, it's about them hating israelis more than they like women in general (which is a pretty high level of hate if you're a feminist). It's pure hate and i'm not sorry you're failing to see it for what it is. "Trying to find the best argument" for someone's position only works for people that aren't hypocritical. Otherwise it's just a failed analysis.

Perhaps the feminists in question believe that their voices are more likely to lead to a change in the stance of the US and the behavior of Israel than a change in the past behavior of Hamas. What Hamas _did_ was wrong. What Israel is _doing_ is wrong, and it’s probably only going to stop in the face of real external pressure from democracies, which have historically shown an interest in protests. I can’t speak for these feminists. But you certainly can’t either.

Hamas bad behavior didn’t stop on oct 7. It isn’t « past » behavior. It’s an ongoing conflict, with hamas having hostages and firing rockets every day. They are however the initiator of this war.

This argument is logical and I’m glad you laid it out. Stating obvious truths is a good strategy for revealing willfully ignorant posters.

More to the point, Israel can't indiscriminately kill tens of thousands of civilians (including Israeli civilians) and torture civilian hostages while claiming they care about civilian lives, and still remain plausible to the world.

Indeed, this hypocrisy is even more important to point out. Do you believe Israeli civilians bear collective guilt for Israel's ongoing war crimes, like you believe Palestinian civilians do?

I think the sentiment is more that Israel fucked around and found out. It’s less that Hamas is good and more that Hamas was inevitable given Israel’s conduct.

Back from that time, George W Bush literally said you are either with us or you are with the terrorists, so I feel people are pretty inoculated against allegations that they are supporting the terrorists if they don’t support the military force fighting terrorists. The “America deserved 9/11” crowd generally believes Bin Laden did 9/11 to provoke the Americans into attacking so as to create more terrorists and weaken America. This was supported by how the GWOT kept creating more terrorists after every new counter insurgency operation.

This isn’t maybe, a totally unbiased way to see things, but the point is that the sentiment generally isn’t “Hamas is great because they kill the IDF”, the sentiment is more commonly “Screw that soldier, they’re a pawn that is playing into the hands of Hamas”.

> a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some uncomprehensible reasons

Jonathan Haidt explains:

Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/antisemitism-on-campus

The interesting thing is that the explanation largely preceded these events, he and Greg Lukianoff documented this in their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind.

> yes the problem is most likely that a lot of people have become hamas's defenders recently for some incomprehensible reasons.

when the "good guys" indiscriminately kill over 15000 children in the span of two months, I dunno what you expect but its certainly not "uncomprehensible"

These are the realities of war. There are no good guys in war.

by that logic, hamas aren't the bad guys either. hamas is lambasted as a terrorist origanization because they dont' differentiate between military targets and civilians. the IDF seems to make no distinction either yet we dont' call them for what they are.

I wonder why that is

> These are the realities of war.

The proportion of civilian casualties in Israel’s invasion of Gaza is not normal for the 21st century, and indicates a below-average regard for civilian life.

https://www.axios.com/2023/11/27/gaza-civilian-deaths-israel...

"Supported violence" is a wild thing to ... // Compare; at some point, I began to receive an almost unrelenting stream of advertisements for weapons, body armor, etc. Tanks, even. Crazy things. SO much violence is advertised on "Meta"; it's only... """ a specific kind of violence """ that seems to be prohibited, by Meta, namely anti-Israeli violence.

Well no, the rule is just not what you think it is. Meta doesn't ban supporting tools that can be used for violence, Meta bans support for violent acts.

Seems you haven't read the actual report, HRW clearly points inconsistencies in the application of Meta's policies that amounts to censorship of any support to Palestine.

I've seen reports of hate speech in Hebrew getting a pass while Arabic users are having rules enforced in an overly broad way. Regardless of your views on the conflict, it is a bit chilling that a massive corporation is now the arbiter of speech for much of the internet now.

The irony of banning the phrase, "From the river to the sea" is that in almost every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall that show Israel extending from the river to the sea.[0]

Greater Israel, extending from the river to the sea, with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

0. This is a typical map. The only indication that there is any Palestinian territory at all is that the tiny "Area A" regions are in a different color. East Jerusalem and the vast majority of the West Bank are simply shown as belonging to Israel. https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-9fb3beb756529713386cc...

That's bad too

Furthermore, a soverign Israel "from the river to the sea" was a founding tenet of Israel's Likud party, of which Netanyahu is a member.

It is no longer an explicit goal of Likud.

It's a principle of the ruling coalition (of which Likud is the leading party), and Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that he will never allow any Palestinian state between the river and the sea.

Furthermore, the Israeli flag itself is the Star of David (representing Israeli land) between two blue lines which are the river and the sea. It has always been Israel’s slogan and aim, “from the river to the sea”.

Can you as well describe us how logo of PLO looks today ? You can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

It apparently does include the map of Palestine pre-Israel. This makes sense, in the very same way as the current Palestine protesters' slogan 'from the river to the sea', it's a reaction to the illegal settlement (which still has the same slogan based on their religion) and expresses the desire for liberation.

From the original 1977 manifesto of the current Likud party[1]:

> The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

Ever heard of Nakba[2]? History of Palestine, how everyone was living peacefully under Ottoman rule and the current state of apartheid, that is, children's parks fenced and locked, keys given to Jewish mothers[3]? The civilian body count that has now exceeded 25 thousand, in a country with a median age of 19[4]?

1: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform... , also referenced in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea

2: https://www.un.org/unispal/about-the-nakba/

3: See with your own eyes, hear directly from the mouth of children: https://youtu.be/ksnLom8OD9E?si=aYvcLqcLQK960fbx

4: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/state-of-palestin...

> It apparently does include the map of Palestine pre-Israel. This makes sense, in the very same way as the current Palestine protesters' slogan 'from the river to the sea'…

Makes sense ? Well, there is some problem with the sense of it. PLO (and supposedly it’s logo) was created in 1964 when Israel pretty much existed. But of course it makes sense if you wish the destruction of Israel and jewish population of it …same way as the current slogan 'from the river to the sea'.

>Furthermore, the Israeli flag itself is the Star of David (representing Israeli land) between two blue lines which are the river and the sea. It has always been Israel’s slogan and aim, “from the river to the sea”.

This is completely incorrect.

Wikipedia:

“The blue stripes are intended to symbolize the stripes on a tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. The Star of David is a widely acknowledged symbol of the Jewish people and of Judaism. In Judaism, the color blue symbolises God's glory, purity and gevurah (God's severity).[19][20] The White field represents Chesed (Divine Benevolence).[18]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Israel#:~:text=It%20sy....

Can you as well describe and remind us how logo of PLO looks today ?

You can find it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

The argument at hand is whether or not the phrase "from the river to the sea" is a de facto statement of support for Jewish genocide.

What is your point?

> What is your point?

To add essential information to yours when you’ve brought Likud and B.Netaniahu and forgot to mention M. Abbas leader of PLO with logo clearly showing map “from the river to the sea” without any place for Israel on it.

Perhaps you can state your point clearly now with this information because your point wasn’t clear at all.

The PLO officially recognized the state of Israel over 30 years ago, and its goal is to establish a Palestinian state only in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

This is in contrast to Israel, which has never officially recognized a Palestinian right to self-determination.

>The PLO officially recognized the state of Israel over 30 years ago.

Any document to support this claim? Certainly their logo has not changed.

I know it’s hard to change the logo but I during 30 years it should be possible if it is no longer serving their goal.

Yasser Arafat's letter to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of 9 September 1993:

> Mr. Prime Minister,

> The signing of the Declaration of Principles marks a new era in the history of the Middle East. In firm conviction thereof, I would like to confirm the following PLO commitments:

> The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

> The PLO commits itself to the Middle East peace process, and to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations.

> The PLO considers that the signing of the Declaration of Principles constitutes a historic event, inaugurating a new epoch of peaceful coexistence, free from violence and all other acts which endanger peace and stability. Accordingly, the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators.

> In view of the promise of a new era and the signing of the Declaration of Principles and based on Palestinian acceptance of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel's right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and no longer valid. Consequently, the PLO undertakes to submit to the Palestinian National Council for formal approval the necessary changes in regard to the Palestinian Covenant.

> Sincerely,

> Yasser Arafat, Chairman, The Palestine Liberation Organization

This is a very famous letter, by the way. It was sent at the beginning of the Oslo peace process, which was supposed to lead to a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories within a matter of a few years. 30 years later, Israel still occupies the Palestinian territories (and has actually massively expanded its settlements inside those territories), and still has not recognized the Palestinians' right to a sovereign state.

Couple things happened between Oslo and this year, didn't they?

> Yasser Arafat's letter…

Very good, now you can make your point about your dismissal of the real map in the real logo of the real PLO which shows no place for Israel while you have brought some school map as argument in the first place portraying it as ‘typical map’ which turned out to be map for children of 2nd and 3rd grades from one book and was 1 of 10 maps in some post in quora that clearly stating that children are exposed to variety of maps according to their age (https://www.quora.com/What-borders-does-Israel-show-in-maps-...).

to avoid duplicating it’s summarised here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831687

> with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

Remind me, what was it that happened 56 years ago?

Israel launched what it said was a preemptive strike [0] against Egypt, destroying virtually the entire Egyptian air force on the ground. Lacking air cover, Egyptian ground forces in the Sinai peninsula retreated, but were destroyed by the Israeli air force on the roads.

Not having a clear picture of what was going on [1], the Jordanians and Syrians entered the war on Egypt's side, only to suffer a similar fate as Egypt.

Israel ended up conquering the Sinai peninsula, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

It's hotly debated whether the war really was a preemptive strike to head off an impending Arab invasion, or whether it was a war of aggression by Israel.

In any case, as a consequence of the war, millions of Palestinians came under Israeli rule. The Israelis were faced with a conundrum: they wanted to keep the land (especially the West Bank and East Jerusalem), but they didn't want millions more Arab citizens, who would shift the demographic balance, ending Israel as a Jewish state. That's why Israel has kept the Palestinians in limbo for more than half a century. They live under Israeli control, but they aren't Israeli citizens.

0. Israel initially claimed that it had been attacked first, but it soon admitted that it had attacked first.

1. Egyptian propaganda in the first hours claimed that Egypt had scored major victories.

I don't think it's very hotly debated at all. There seems to be a consensus that whether they were right to be so concerned or not, Israel's motives in preempting Egypt were about security, not territorial expansion. Before the war, Egypt administered Gaza but did not claim it (Palestinians needed something like passports to transit between Gaza and Egypt proper). Jordan was almost kicked out of the Arab League for annexing the West Bank, which it claimed as territory until 1988(!).

There's no question that since the war, Israel has abused its position with respect to the West Bank in particular (it dispossessed Gazan settlers during the disengagement, but has tacitly allowed continued settlement in the West Bank). But the history here is complicated and it's important to get it right.

> I don't think it's very hotly debated at all. There seems to be a consensus that whether they were right to be so concerned or not, Israel's motives in preempting Egypt were about security, not territorial expansion.

The issue is actually hotly debated. To this day, former Egyptian generals say that they only placed a force in the Sinai in order to discourage the Israelis from attacking Syria, which the Egyptians thought the Israelis were doing. Additionally, the Israeli government itself does not seem to have viewed Egyptian forces in the Sinai as a serious threat. The Israelis planned and trained for their air operation against Egypt long in advance, which means they were considering a first strike for a long time.

At the very least, the simple story the Israelis like to tell ("We were attacked and defended ourselves") does not hold water.

> But the history here is complicated and it's important to get it right.

The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is not really that complicated. Fundamentally, Israel wants to keep East Jerusalem, the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza. As long as Israelis think they can hold onto those territories at an acceptable price, they will. The US, by giving Israel unconditional backing, has abetted the occupation.

In response to false Soviet intelligence reports that claimed Israel had mobilized on the Syrian border, Egypt and Syria mobilized on the Israeli border. Egypt blockaded the Strait of Tiran. They overflew the Israeli nuclear weapons facilities at Dimona. They expelled the UNEF from Sinai --- troops whose presence had been established by the UN in large part to assure Israel that Egypt wasn't going to attack. And, of course, as we now know, Egypt had an actual plan to invade, with the intent of eradicating Israel; it's disputed whether Nasser knew about it or how serious that planning was, but it's not disputed that it existed --- it created a diplomatic incident between the US and the Soviet Union.

It's very difficult to make an argument that Israel wasn't threatened, existentially, or that its actions were motivated by anything other than self-defense. The whole crisis was a shitshow of poor intelligence and bad faith (Israel's hands weren't clean either; some of the escalation, and Jordan's involvement in the conflict, probably stemmed from the Samu raid). But Israel hit Egypt because Egypt made war inevitable.

I don't think West Bank and Gaza occupation is all that complicated. We probably agree about it. Palestinians should have sovereignty and self-determination in those territories. Israeli West Bank settlements should be dismantled. But that's obviously not all people are talking about when they talk about the "occupation". We're on a thread about the "from the river to the sea". The motte is the West Bank. The bailey is Tel Aviv.

> It's very difficult to make an argument that Israel wasn't threatened, existentially, or that its actions were motivated by anything other than self-defense.

I don't think it's difficult at all. The force that Egypt moved into the Sinai peninsula was far too small to invade Israel, and in internal Israeli government discussions, they don't seem to have viewed Egypt as an imminent military threat.

> The motte is the West Bank. The bailey is Tel Aviv.

The problem is that the mainstream view in Israel is "from the river to the sea" (the Israeli version, of course), and that that's the de facto reality on the ground. Most of the people chanting "from the river to the sea" want a one-state solution with equal democratic rights for Arabs and Jews.

I'm not aware of anyone who is familiar with the situation who think that a 1 state solution is viable. If you can point to any essays or blog posts where someone lays out, how you get the Israelis to agree with it and how you keep the 1 state from devolving into a brutal civil war I'd love to read it.

The 1 state solution turns a Palestinian self determination and Israeli security issues into an existential issue for both sides. This raises the stakes considerably. I can't see it ending in anything but 100's of thousands of dead and a complete meltdown of the middle east.

Most people familiar with the situation recognize that a two-state solution is no longer viable, if it ever even was in the first place. Israeli settlement of the West Bank and East Jerusalem have made it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state, and there is very little political will in Israel to enact a two-state solution.

The one-state solution has already been implemented by the Israeli government. There is one state that rules everything between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea. It's called Israel. Israel has ruled that territory for 56 years, which is most of Israel's existence. There is no indication that Israel will give up that territory in the foreseeable future.

The only realistic question now is whether the one state that exists will become a full democracy, or whether it will continue to disenfranchise 40% of its population. Continuing to pay empty lip service to the two-state solution 20 years after the "peace process" died is just useless.

As for how to get the Israelis to agree to finally enfranchise the Palestinians, I think that will take external pressure. Israel has been able to maintain the status quo so long because it has unconditional American backing. If that backing is removed, Israel will be in a very different and much more difficult situation.

We could spin wildly off into philosophizing here, but I responded to a narrow point made upthread, and you in turn responded to that post. To sum it up:

* The untenable position the Palestinians are in today stems at least in part to the results of the Six-Day War, wherein Egypt ultimately conceded its administration of Gaza --- in which Palestinians were not full Egyptians --- to Israel, and Jordan conceded the West Bank, which it had annexed after the Arab-Israeli war. That's what Rayiner was referring to upthread --- what happened "56 years ago" was the Six-Day War.

* The Six-Day War may have had multiple causes, and perhaps nobody's hands are clean in it, but it seems beyond dispute that the "preemptive" strike against Egypt was a response to months of military provocation by Syria and, especially, Egypt, both of whom had mobilized on Israel's border, arranged the expulsion of peacekeepers, violated Israeli airspace, and blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, an act Nasser acknowledged made war inevitable.

* Had the Six-Day War (and then the Yom Kippur war, which was, like the Arab-Israeli war that preceded the Six-Day War, unquestionably a war of aggression by a coalition of Arab states against Israel) not happened, the cause of Palestine would be directed instead at/against Egypt and Jordan.

* "From the river to the sea" implies, among other things, the dispossession of Israeli Jewish people outside the West Bank and Gaza.

> months of military provocation by Syria

The Israelis were also incredibly provocative, constantly raiding neighboring Arab territory. Israel had a history of aggression against the Arab countries, such as its invasion of Egypt in 1956 and its numerous raids into Jordan and Syria.

> Had the Six-Day War (and then the Yom Kippur war, which was, like the Arab-Israeli war that preceded the Six-Day War, unquestionably a war of aggression by a coalition of Arab states against Israel) not happened, the cause of Palestine would be directed instead at/against Egypt and Jordan.

There are many false assumptions and representations here. First, the Palestinian cause was directed against Israel because Israel is the country that expelled the Palestinians from their homes, not Egypt of Jordan. Whatever complaints the Palestinians had against the Jordanians or Egyptians, those countries had not kicked them out of their villages and expropriated their homes.

Second, the First Arab-Israeli war was not a war of aggression by the Arabs. The declaration of Israeli independence was effectively a declaration of war on the Arab world. The Arabs could not accept European colonists (which the founders of Israel were in their overwhelming majority) establishing an ethnically exclusive state on Arab land. The Arab-Israeli war was preceded by massive expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homes by the militias that would later become the Israeli army. From the Arab point of view, the war was a defensive war against foreign colonists intent on conquering Arab land and on expelling the Arab population.

The Yom Kippur War was indeed launched by Egypt and Syria, but its aim was to reclaim Egyptian and Syrian territory that Israel had militarily occupied since 1967. At the time, the legitimacy of Egypt and Syrian aims in that war were widely recognized by the international community, which had already called on Israel to return the territory to its rightful owners.

> "From the river to the sea" implies, among other things, the dispossession of Israeli Jewish people outside the West Bank and Gaza.

Most people who use the phrase view it as a call to turn Greater Israel, which already exists in practice, into a fully democratic state with equal rights for all its inhabitants, including the Palestinian population of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. This does not imply any dispossession of Jewish Israelis, any more than the end of Apartheid in South Africa implied dispossession of white South Africans.

No, they were not comparably provocative. Further, you're doing the motte-and-bailey thing again: since you can't make the case that the Arab states hands are clean with respect to Gaza and the West Bank, you've switched premises, so that all of Israel is now occupied territory. To do this, you have to ignore the comparable number of Jewish people chased out of Arab states in the same time period. It's an untenable argument.

We're deep into the thread and nobody is reading us anymore. We're not going to get anywhere with this, and certainly we're not going to resolve the Israeli-Palestine conflict here.

I don't see any motte-and-bailey argument. You said that the First Arab-Israeli War was an Arab war of aggression. I responded.

> all of Israel is now occupied territory

This isn't the point I was trying to make. All of Israel was taken from the Arabs - unjustly so. However, I was simply responding to your claim about the First Arab-Israeli War, and when I speak about the "occupied territories," I'm referring to the territories that Israel conquered in 1967, not the 1948 territories.

> since you can't make the case that the Arab states hands are clean with respect to Gaza and the West Bank

Why am I supposed to make that case?

> To do this, you have to ignore the comparable number of Jewish people chased out of Arab states in the same time period.

Jewish people were chased out of Arab countries following the establishment of the state of Israel, and to a large extent, as a result of the establishment of Israel and the antisemitic reaction it caused in the Arab world. The expulsion of Jewish people from the Arab world in the 1950s onwards did not retroactively justify the expulsion of the Arab population from what became Israel in 1948.

> No, they were not comparably provocative.

Launching major raids into Jordan, invading Egypt in concert with France and Britain in 1956 - those are pretty provocative moves.

Egypt and Syria mobilized on Israel's borders in May of '67. You're citing something that happened 10 years earlier. And this appears to be the best argument you've got, since you keep making it. Let's disengage?

Egypt mobilized a defensive force that was incapable of launching an invasion. Meanwhile, Israel had been planning a first-strike, which it actually executed.

> You're citing something that happened 10 years earlier.

Israel's invasion of Egypt was 10 years prior, but dominated Egyptian security considerations. Israel's major incursion into Jordan was only 7 months prior. The Arabs had every reason to fear Israeli aggression.

Going back to the original comment about the 1967 war, OP implied that the Palestinians were somehow to blame for the fact that they live under military occupation. The story of Israel simply defending itself in 1967 is not true: Israel struck first, and its claims that it was acting in preemptive self-defense are highly questionable, at best.

Egyptians had no reason to fear Israeli aggression. Please cite the book that says otherwise. I don't think your takes here are at all historically grounded; this reads like stuff you'd get on TeachPalestine.

Israel invaded Egypt in 1956, and by 1967 was, in fact, planning a first strike on Egypt, which it subsequently executed. Of course Egypt had every reason to fear Israeli aggression.

This is the opposite of what happened.

What is "this"?

In 1967, the IDF was spoiling for a fight, and was extremely confident that it would defeat the Arab armies quickly and with low losses. It had planned and trained for a first strike on Egypt, which is what it ended up executing.

The opposite thing is true: we have documentary evidence that Egypt had a plan to preemptively invade. Again: cite a book where you're getting this stuff from. In addition to WP and AskHistorians, I'm citing Benny Morris (Righteous Victims), who is unsparing of Israel's complicity in the Six Day War and, most importantly, in its aftermath. I'm interested in where you could possibly have been getting the details you're confidently providing in this thread.

Having a plan on the shelf for how to invade is different from actually intending to invade. Israel not only had a plan to preemptively attack Egypt - it was very actively training for this plan and then carried it out. In contrast, it's fairly clear now that Egypt did not plan to invade Israel in June 1967, and was not in any position to do so. Like you, I've also read Benny Morris' Righteous Victims (which only has a relatively short section on the lead-up to the 1967 war).

The two points I've been making here are:

1. The traditional narrative that Israel fought a defensive war in 1967 is highly questionable, at best. It does not seem that the Egyptians were planning to attack, the Israelis themselves had a major hand in the escalation leading up to the war, and the Israeli military was extremely confident that it would quickly defeat the Arabs (an assessment that the Americans shared) and wanted a war.

2. This narrative that Israel gained the West Bank and Gaza through a defensive war is then used to justify Israel's more than half-century military rule over the Palestinians. Even if the Israeli narrative were 100% correct, it would not justify imposing military rule over millions of people for decades, while slowly robbing those people of their land and subjecting them to regular violence and humiliation.

Righteous Victims has 2 whole chapters on the leadup to the Six Days War, which is like the centerpiece of the book. You can't be citing Righteous Victims, because it strenuously disagrees with virtually everything you've said here. What are you citing?

to avoid duplicating this ‘style of argument’ is summarised here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831687

The only thing I wish to add is that this kind of “selectiveness” of facts by those who argue with Israel existence is by itself one of the main reasons for Israel creation in the first place.

> Israel launched what it said was a preemptive strike [0] against Egypt

So it was just a coincidence that Egypt had massed troops on the border, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and ejected UN security forces two weeks before that?

There was a build-up of tensions in the lead-up to the war, not just on the Egyptian side, but also on the Israeli side.

The Egyptians believed that the Israelis were preparing an invasion of Syria, so the Egyptians moved their own force into the Sinai peninsula, in order to deter Israel. However, the Egyptian force was nowhere near sufficient to launch an invasion of Israel.

The closing of the Straits of Tiran was politically significant, but not very economically significant. Only a tiny fraction of Israel's trade went through the straits.

The Israelis had been planning a first strike on Egypt for a long time. Whether they actually feared an imminent Egyptian invasion in June 1967 is questionable. The Israeli military was very confident of its superiority over the Arab forces, and it may have simply taken advantage of the situation to land a devastating blow against the Arabs.

The Israelis were not preparing an invasion of Syria. They were led to believe so by the Soviets; the Soviets were wrong. Egypt and Syria thus mobilized unilaterally.

>The irony of banning the phrase, "From the river to the sea" …

The irony is to talk about the irony without realising the extreme nature of the phrase “From the river to the sea…” for any of the sides. Someone can as easily adapt the same phrase for calls to remove non-jewish population from the land yet the commentator felt the urge to see the irony in “banning the phrase” (as he put it) without thinking through the outcome of using such phrase in all of it’s dangerous aspects.

>every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall that show Israel extending from the river to the sea.[0]

The linked map is from post on quora [1] which does not state that.

To the question : “What borders does Israel show in maps in school textbooks?”

It states the following:

“ It really depends on the age.

TLDR - the books mostly show area international borders with markings for area A, But don’t shy away from the existence of the P.A. In higher grades, they show the evolution of the borders, and the idea that nothing is really fixed or “promised”.

Long answer:

I’ve made a small check on books available on my Child’s elementary school online website. …”

Notice “ elementary school online website.” while commentator states: “ in almost every Israeli school, there are maps on the wall”

Even this one post from only one school speaks about variety of maps presented to children but commentator simply ignores that.

Commentator takes 1 of 10 maps posted there. The one for the smallest age and claims “This is a typical map”

The real irony though is vivid if one looks at the official logo of PLO here [2] who’s chairman is Mahmoud Abbas. It shows the whole map “from the river to the sea” without any marking for Israel. Commentator criticises Israeli maps for only :“ "Area A" regions are in a different color.” and forgot to mention that PLO does not have any color for Israel in fact. The logo is currently on the official PLO web site.

> Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

The third irony is mentioning “56 years” and forgetting to mention that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 [2] pretty much to the border before 1967.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-borders-does-Israel-show-in-maps-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaz...

> Even this one post from only one school speaks about variety of maps presented to children but commentator simply ignores that.

Almost every map in that Quora answer shows Israel extending from the river to the sea, and shows the Palestinian territories as belonging to Israel.

> Commentator takes 1 of 10 maps posted there.

As I said, almost every map in that post shows roughly the same thing.

There was actually a dispute between the Tel Aviv school system and the national government recently, because Tel Aviv schools wanted to mark the Palestinian territories on school maps, which the national government tried to forbid. It's standard in Israel to depict everything between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea as part of Israel.

> PLO does not have any color for Israel in fact. The logo is currently on the official PLO web site.

The PLO recognizes the state of Israel, and has done so for more than 30 years. Israel does not recognize the state of Palestine, and the Israeli government says that it will never allow the creation of a Palestinian state. You're making a big deal about the PLO logo, but it's just a historic logo that hasn't been changed, and it does not reflect the PLO's position. The PLO recognizes Israel and only wants the internationally recognized Palestinian territories.

> As I said, almost every map in that post shows roughly the same thing.

I do not know how maps from 1922, 1947,1949, 1967 and 2008 with completely different borders are showing “roughly the same thing” for you. (https://www.quora.com/What-borders-does-Israel-show-in-maps-...)

If you refer only to the maps for 2nd and 3rd grades I can assure you that many things in 2nd and 3rd grade appear as “roughly the same thing” and it’s only with further education you begin to notice certain nuances. At this point I believe I should strongly recommend to use maps for more grown up children to make your point.

>You're making a big deal about the PLO logo…

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fe/Plo_emblem.pn...) The official PLO logo clearly suggests no Israel existence.

You’ve brought map to make your point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38755727) and now you are suddenly dismissal about the map on official PLO logo and then you’ve tried to portrait me as making “a big deal” about it. Another trick to register and unfortunately such tricks and manipulative efforts are common trends in every supporter of “from the river to the sea” chant that I’ve seen. I wander what purpose they are trying to achieve by misleading others and what they are trying to hide under the “nice” words.

You were also completely dismissive about extreme and dangerous nature of the phrase “from the river to the sea” for both sides. You also completely skipped the fact of Israel withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 even after I have pointed to those two main points.

I am making a big deal of you making misleading comments and using manipulative techniques to distort the reality and hide the truth to push certain agenda without thinking through the consequences of your actions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38589935) and your conscious or unconscious contribution to spreading propaganda beneficial to Hamas which leads to the loss of life on both sides. This is a moral blindness at best and intentional malevolent effort at worst.

> There was actually a dispute … It's standard in Israel …

Sources and facts are required to support such claims. After your manipulative approach with maps it’s difficult to trust the ‘stories’ you spread.

>The PLO recognizes the state of Israel.

Their logo doesn’t reflect it. Documents and factually proven persistent behaviour that is in accordance with such claim are required.

> Greater Israel, extending from the river to the sea, with the Palestinians as stateless people with no rights, is a de facto reality, and has been for 56 years now.

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" in a nutshell

The "stupid game" was the British Empire gifting Palestine to a group of people who didn't even live there?

> For example, the phrase "from the river to the [sea]" is considered hateful by many, so it was taken down.

That’s convenient. Zionism, the ideology and its propaganda, “is considered hateful by many” too. Actually, that happy slogan of “from this body of water to that other body of water is all our precious” is shared by both parties. Israel’s flag even has it diagrammed in case you missed the slogans. The two blue lines are RIVERS. One in Egypt the other in Iraq. Believe me that many many find that “ambition” harboring “violent intent” one way or another and don’t like it.

So, Is Facebook really concerned about sensitive feelings of “many”?

> The two blue lines are RIVERS. One in Egypt the other in Iraq.

This sounded suspicious to me, and brief research shows it to be untrue.

Yes, it is convenient for potential victims of genocide that calling for genocide of those people is considered calling for genocide. It's also true. "From the river to the sea" is calling for the genocide of Israel population. It was known before, and Hamas proudly demonstrated it just now, there can not be any misunderstanding what they meant.

The lines on the flag have zero to do with rivers, it's a symbolic representation of a talith, a prayer garment, which can be seen in any synagogue. Try to get a bit of factual information before you go around spreading nonsense.

Let me see how this works:

For Palestinians to say the want to be “free from river to sea” means the “genocide of Israelis”. But, amazingly but unsurprisingly, for Israelis to say they want to be “free of Palestinians” (who happen to currently be in part in the area “from river to sea”) it does not mean “genocide of Palestinians”. This must be Schroedinger’s genocide. Now you see it now you don’t. Amazing.

A conversation somewhere in the area between river and the sea. That oh so special place on earth that is worth having a world war over. “How long o lord?” Seriously lord.

Here it goes:

- Palestinians say they want to be free from river to the sea!

- Hah, really? The nerve. Why can’t they just go to some Arab country or maybe America?

- They say they are not Arab, they are Palestinian.

- Hah. Nationalism is a sickness.

- Agreed.

- I can’t believe they want to kill us all.

- How you figure?

- Well, they ain’t gonna be “free” while we’re here. That can’t possibly work.

- Hmm.

- And they know that we know that they know.

- Aha.

- Yeah, so obviously, they want to kill us all. A genocide.

- Ingrates.

- Animals!

> For Palestinians to say the want to be “free from river to sea” means the “genocide of Israelis”.

Yes.

> But, amazingly but unsurprisingly, for Israelis to say they want to be “free of Palestinians”

Who says that? And more importantly, who does that? Arabs are 20% of Israel population. They have full citizenship rights. Nobody tries to be "free" of them in any way or form. I mean, there are probably people that dream of Israel being a mono-ethnic state and how it would make things much easier, but those are empty dreams, without any support in policy or law.

> it does not mean “genocide of Palestinians”.

It doesn't, because Israel never declared its goal to be genocide of Palestinians, and, as I mentioned, is fine with a large part of Arab population. There are more Arabs in Israel, percentage-wise, than Black Americans in the US, for example. On the contrary, there's no Jewish population in any of "Palestinian"-controlled areas and can't be - because we just witnessed what Hamas does to any Jewish (or non-Jewish but having bad luck to be around Jews) population when they have the power even for an hour. And it's not some surprise - it's written in their charter, and they have claimed, before and after October 7th, that this is exactly what they plan to do to any Israeli that they can lay their hands on. Genocide is their official goal, and their official method of achieving "free Palestine". There's no any organization that has "freeing Palestine" as their goal and does not include genocide as their method of achieving this goal. And their "freedom" never means "enjoying the same rights as Jews in Israel" - that Arab citizens of Israel already have. Their "freedom" means no Jews and no Israel at all.

On the contrary, Israel has already achieved this goal - of both Jews and Arabs living in a free democratic state - and is not advocating murdering any of the Arabic populations, whether in Israel or otherwise. Moreover, 18 years ago Israel passed all control of Gaza to Arabic self-government - and those 18 years were used exclusively to shoot rockets at Israel, send terrorists into Israel, convert hospitals, schools and mosques to military outposts and prepare for war with Israel. A war that has the genocide as the officially declared goal of it, and Hamas proudly and constantly confirms this to anybody that asks them.

> Palestinians say they want to be free from river to the sea!

No, that's not what they say. They say "Palestine will be free". Free of what? Free of Jews. Judenfrei, if you will. And only then it will be real freedom - when the filthy Jews are all destroyed. It's not about individual freedom - if you think somebody living in Gaza enjoys any personal freedoms not available in Israel you are absolutely ignorant. It's about freeing the land from the infidels.

> - They say they are not Arab, they are Palestinian.

They are not saying that, where did you see them saying that? These are not contradictory identifications, just as you can be Arab and Jordanian or Syrian. Or Jewish and American.

> Hah. Nationalism is a sickness.

Who you are reproducing here? Whose words are these? I am starting to lose here what "goes" you try to present here. Certainly nobody in Israel would say that. That sounds like some woke student from Harvard. But a woke student already hates Israel, so your whole scenario makes no sense.

> I can’t believe they want to kill us all.

Actually that's very easy to believe because they are saying it over and over and over. And are doing it when they can. For many decades now.

> Well, they ain’t gonna be “free” while we’re here. That can’t possibly work.

It's not some conjecture. Hamas is openly declaring it. And overwhelming majority of the population btw supports them.

> Yeah, so obviously, they want to kill us all. A genocide.

Yes, a genocide. That is exactly the goal. No metaphors, no exaggerations, no equivocations. That is the thing. I know you are trying to be facetious and sarcastic and somehow imply only an idiot can make such a far-fetched conclusion, but it's not far-fetched. It's openly and proudly proclaimed by Hamas. And Hamas is the government of Gaza and by the vast majority the most popular movement among the Palestinians (the only reason why it didn't capture West Banks is because Israel is much more involved there and is not letting them to gain strength, while in Gaza it was an experiment of letting it go - which failed spectacularly). I understand it is very hard to stomach such truths - that in 2023, when we are supposed to be all past those things, we still have millions-strong movements that want the same old genocide of Jews, and the people that want that genocide are the ones we're supposed to be sympathetic with because they are poor and "oppressed" - but that's the harsh reality we are living in. And ignoring this reality would only mean it will reassert itself with blood and murder - which is exactly what happened on October 7th. Israel can not ignore that reality anymore, if they want to survive - and neither can any Jews outside of Israel, if they want to survive too.

TLDR:

“‘Pre-emotive genocide’ is not genocide”.

What? Nothing in what I wrote has anything to do with that stupid claim.

At the beginning of the conflict I noticed my feed was fully leaning towards supporting Israel, even if it was only the posts of 3 people. Somehow the 30+ people demanding the stop to the bombing of civilians didn't really start appearing until late November.

They were posting the entire time, but Meta's algorithm decided not to show it to me.

"At the beginning of the conflict..."

Yes... You had plenty of people saying "this is going to be your own version of Afghanistan/Iraq if you decide to do what you want to do..."

Israel wanted revenge, not a solution. Their strategy has guaranteed that there will be another cycle of violence as the kids that grew up seeing their parents blown up in airstrikes are understandably going to be ripe for recruiting into whatever organization steps into power in place of Hamas.

It's simply their strategy, really. Turning Palestinians desperate so they turn to violence ("terrorism"), in order to justify turning their territory into even more of a shit hole, so Palestinians who can't take it anymore will emigrate, until the "problem" is gone.

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

I find such sentiment flabbergasting. Do you claim that Germany and Japan continued cycles of violence because the Allies firebombed Dresden and nuked Hiroshima? We learned after the two world wars that peace is possible if and only if there is hope, reconstruction, and a magnanimous victor. Hold Israel and the UN accountable to that. “Pacifists” preach the myth that resistance is a futile tragedy. But unfortunately violence is that can only be stopped by violence.

This worldview also shows a lack of understanding of conflicts: why the “proportional response” assumption is nonsensical. Wars are extensions of political means, and the political objective is to remove Hamas as a viable regime or fighting force. However as much violence to achieve this will be expended: possibly no more if one side surrenders today. To think the cost will be or an eye for an eye is beyond naive. To think it should be is retributive.

Unfortunately wars tear down all humanitie’s values and no side is innocent. Yet justice is a stochastic process, such that each person thinks at the back of their head and judges should the decision must fall, whose cause they would get behind.

You compare Gaza, half of the population being children, with Nazi Germany and talk about learning from history? While the IDF is blowing up courts and universities and people talk on Israeli TV about making Gaza "unlivable"?

The Nazis talked about the people they murdered exactly the same way. Himmler and his stuff about the great sacrifice the SS made for the benefit of humanity, all that... they excused murdering children with "international bankers", the same way people excuse genocide in Gaza with Hamas. "No side is innocent, it's all so very complex". Nothing changed.

Kind of a click-bait headline.

To quote the actual report: "This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship."

They asked people to self-report instances. There is probably selection bias (maybe they advertised only to the pro-palestian crowd. Maybe the israeli crowd thinks HRW is biased and didn't want to engage. Maybe something else). There is probably also base rate falacy involved which isn't accounted for.

This just isnt the right type of study to determine if meta has a bias in censorship.

The paragraph in question:

> Human Rights Watch solicited cases of any type of online censorship and of any type of viewpoint related to Israel and Palestine. Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 cases documented involved examples of online censorship and suppression of content in support of Palestine, while one case contained an example of removal of content in support of Israel.[2] This distribution of cases does not necessarily reflect the overall distribution of censorship.

So HRW may as well not have looked at the other side of the issue. They also complained that Meta's policies are informed by the United States' designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

> I get the sense these sorts of reports are designed to turn into headlines.

Bingo.

HRW has a reputation for being biased against Israel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Wa... . Regardless of whether that's true, it could explain why pro-Israel folks wouldn't want to engage with them.

I think this report actually demonstrates the anti-Israel bias HRW has been accused of. HRW points to the 9,500 content takedown requests that Israel has made as one of "four underlying, systemic factors that contributed to the [pro-Palestine] censorship." But knowing that a single Reddit post can receive more than 9,500 comments within a day[1], and that some percentage of the takedown requests likely relate to posts that threaten operational secrecy or the right to privacy of victimized Israelis, leads me to the exact opposite conclusion: that Israel's takedown requests are neither intended to censor pro-Palestine voices nor, if that were the intent, large enough in number to have an impact. Since the report provides no context for the numbers it reports makes me think the authors are more interested in pushing the idea that Israel controls the online narrative than they are in understanding what is actually happening on these platforms.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/news/top/?sort=top&t=year

Are you saying that changes on Israel's part could cause Hamas to stop their aggression? That seems very unlikely - Hamas doesn't even pretend to be open to peaceful coexistence with Israel. Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

Or that it could lead to Gazans overthrowing Hamas? It's possible, but it would take a violent rebellion since Hamas doesn't hold elections, and realistically it would probably take generations for sentiment to change. It would be hard for Israelis to just accept that they will be attacked for generations, with increasing sophistication (mainly thanks to Iran's support), with no response.

This is greatly complicated by the fact that Israel materially supported Hamas and saw it as useful.

Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

On the other hand, Israel is not facing good geopolitical headwinds. As Yemen demonstrated, they are extremely vulnerable to a blockade. One day, in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli. That of course doesn't justify Hamas's inhuman war crimes, but acting as if war is unprovoked is not consistent with reality - Israel has never, by the definitions in international law, stopped actively waging war against Gaza.

I agree Israel ought to be able to prevent similar ground invasions, but what about rockets?

The Iron Dome has been relatively effective so far, but the technological gap won't last forever. Hamas has already acquired rockets like the Fajr-5, despite the blockade. Once they start using guidance systems, the destruction will be much greater, and 90% interception rate won't be good enough.

Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

How would guidance systems increase the destruction? If anything, history has shown that precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties - there isn't much of a point building a single precision guided missile, instead of 100 imprecise dumb rockets, when your goal is terror bombing (the calculus is slightly different for bombs, however).

> Even if Israel could limit the damage in the long term, it doesn't seem politically viable to just tolerate repeated attacks with no response. So I think it's inevitable that Israel will have to remove Hamas from power, no matter the geopolitical cost.

This is an odd gripe. Israel is perpetrating repeated attacks in the West Bank, every single day, and the Palestinian Authority as well as the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now. In fact, it is perfectly possible to tolerate repeated attacks with limited response, and there are many examples of countries tolerating low-impact attacks for a very long time with little response.

Preventing Hamas or a Hamas-like group from existing is not possible as a matter of reality, not as a matter of geopolitical cost. Israel already tried the whole occupation thing, and it only meant more attacks. The only way to remove Hamas from power, without them being replaced by not-Hamas-in-name-only, is to convince Gazans, for a second time, that peaceful coexistence is possible, and to actually give it a shot this time.

> the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank have been tolerating repeated attacks for decades now

I’m fairly certain it’s more an inability to respond in any effective way.

Hamas doesn't have an ability to respond in an effective way either, yet here we are. If anything, it's far easier to get supplies and engage in terrorism in the West Bank than it is in Gaza.

> precision weapons tend to reduce civilian casualties

Yes, but normally the user is targeting military assets and trying to minimize collateral damage. I think it's clear that Hamas has the opposite goal, since they typically lob unguided rockets in the general direction of population centers.

If all you have are unguided rockets, you're going to point them wherever they're most likely to hit something. If/when you have guidance systems, you can afford to be selective and concentrate on high value targets. That's how it goes in asymmetric warfare.

Given Hamas' explicit genocidal goals, I think we can expect some portion of their strikes will simply aim to maximize Jewish deaths, even as others may target specific military assets.

See for example Russia's recent Hroza strike (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hroza_missile_attack), which killed 59 at a memorial service. Hamas can't really do strikes like that today; they would just miss with overwhelming probability. I think that will change soon if they remain in power.

The Iskander missile has a 1500lb warhead. Compare the number of deaths it causes to the number of deaths a single unguided Israeli bomb causes in Gaza when it hits a populated building, and you will soon realize that the guidance is not the determining factor here, it's just the mass of explosives.

24000 bombs dropped and hamas says 20000 dead. That's less than 1 bomb per death.

Because people left. Of course, if you bomb an empty building few will die. We're not looking at averages here, we're looking at single incidents that caused many deaths.

>high value targets

Such as places with a lot of civilians yes

No. In asymmetric warfare civilians are targeted partly for animus but mostly because of accessibility. Poorer security places extra pressure on the enemy government which makes it easier to destabilize over time, in theory. In the case of unguided missiles it's natural to point them at wherever the infrastructure is dense.

If you have the resources to be selective, it's much more attractive to hit specific targets like military facilities or political figures/institutions. Terrorist attacks are more often perpetrated against civilians nowadays because political/military targets are so hardened that assassinations are difficult.

That makes no sense. If all you had were unguided rockets, where else could you possibly aim them? There is no other target where they would have any effect at all, because all high value targets are too small to be hit a +/- 500m weapon.

If your goal was just to hit a population center, I fail to understand the point of guided rockets. Seems much more effective to just make more dumb rockets. Even compared to targets like hospitals, you'd still do more damage with more dumb rockets, especially due to saturation.

I disagree that dumb rockets are more effective. Hamas, PIJ, etc. have only managed to kill 28 after launching something like 20k dumb rockets. There are many examples of modern precision weapons causing more deaths with a single strike.

That is mostly because the rockets are small and largely intercepted. The examples you have of modern weapons causing mass casualty events are of weapons with warheads 50+ times the size of those in a Hamas rocket, and there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities.

Also, you need compare the deaths with the number of rockets that aren't intercepted to get a baseline of effect.

ChatGPT estimates around the total warhead sizes of rockets from Gaza to Israel at around 200,000 kg. Maybe that's off but let's say 100,000 kg, and say 10,000 kg of that wasn't intercepted. Still seems like significantly more than the 500~700 kg warhead which killed 59 in Hroza, for example.

Looking at this another way, if Hamas could target things like nightclubs, wouldn't those have something like 50x the population density of the general area?

> there's plenty of examples of comparable unguided weapons causing similar casualties numbers when fired at cities

Even when fired from distances on the order of 70km (the distance from Gaza to Tel Aviv)? Aircraft using dumb bombs tend to get a lot closer to their targets.

> Ultimately Israelis don't have to suffer serious attacks from Hamas. Hamas doesn't have that power, militarily - only gross incompetence from the IDF allows that kind of attack.

While there were gigantic failures that no one denies, possibly to the level of gross incompetence, Israel is also fighting against a real enemy, not some cartoon. Hamas is also smart, is increasingly well-armed, and can wait many years until the next attack. It's not clear that Israel can defend against every conceivable attack that Hamas can mount, and staying completely vigilant all the time is very costly economically, too. (I'll note that Hamas puts a lot of money and labor into these attacks, but they are pretty freely stealing from their people; the Israeli government can't do the same.)

It's true that, on its own, Hamas can't actually conquer Israel. But it can clearly carry out massive attacks that kill thousands and completely upend all life in Israel, and it's possible that they can keep doing this every couple of years.

> So Israel desperately needs to make amends with its Arab neighbors, and it can stop any real attack from Hamas. That makes the situation pretty different and assymetrical.

Actually, Israel is on relatively good terms with all its Arab neighbors (relative to the past), and was on the verge of formalizing those good relations with Saudi Arabia. That's one of the reasons for this Hamas attack - to try and stop the Israeli-Arab peace process, because they feel (very likely correctly) that it leaves the Palestinians in a worse situation.

> It also bears note that, if you judge Gaza as a country, it would not be able to cause any act of agression, as the Israeli blockade alone constitutes an act of war and a casus belli.

Well, they did elect Hamas and fairly quickly start to shoot rockets at Israel. And by that token they are also at war with Egypt.

Gaza isn't a fully independent country, obviously, but it's also not under full military occupation like it was before. People insisting on one or the other usually have a point that it helps them prove, but reality is more complicated.

I do believe that it is directionally true that Gazans could've made far more of their situation once Israel withdrew, and Hamas has basically squandered that opportunity by turning to violence.

>in the not so distant future, the US won't be able to intercept all the missiles of Israel's enemies on its behalf, and Israel will have to contend with the threat of a total blockade.

The US + Israel + allies can/will absolutely level these countries if necessary. Both history and current events demonstrate that. Do you really think they are at the mercy of what Yemen does?

Life is not a video game. The US and Saudi Arabia already spent 7 years trying to level Yemen to stop them from firing cruise missiles everywhere in the region, and failed. The US didn't managed to stop Iraq from launching ballistic missiles until over a year after the decision to invade was made, and now look at Iraq right now, various militias are still firing missiles at US military bases and getting away with it.

Yemen is just a proxy of Iran, ultimately, and the US has already lost multiple proxy wars against Iran. Invading Iran itself is not a workable proposition, either.

> would probably take generations for sentiment to change

It will likely take forever unless steps are taken to initiate a peace process.

Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

And honestly where tf is the UN in all of this?

> Honestly I'm not sure how we can start a peace process after the terrorist atrocities that were committed?

Israel somehow managed to convince other arab states and the US to make peace after the Lavon Affair and USS Liberty incidents, I'm sure they can manage to find some equivalent forgiveness in their hearts this time around :)

> At this point I think the best is to just evacuate all Palestinians to the rest of the Arab countries as refugees and then just leave the contested territory as unoccupied and "dmz" like for both sides.

Logistically far more israelis have dual citizenship elsewhere than Palestnians, so perhaps they should leave instead?

I think anyone who's read about the lavon affair and the uss liberty will laugh at the comparison to oct. 7th

> Their best offer was a 10-year ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders.

That was 2004. By 2017, their asks, for all intents and purposes, were the same as the PA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...

Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met. They offered only a ceasefire in exchange for 1967 borders, not a permanent peace deal.

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

Anyway, they've shown their true colors at this point; very different statements recently:

> Since the shocking Hamas attack on Oct. 7, in which Israel says about 1,400 people were killed — most of them civilians — and more than 240 others dragged back to Gaza as captives, the group’s leaders have praised the operation, with some hoping it will set off a sustained conflict that ends any pretense of coexistence among Israel, Gaza and the countries around them. “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us,” Taher El-Nounou, a Hamas media adviser, told The Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/middleeast/hamas-is...

> Even their updated 2017 demands did not include peace with Israel if met.

India doesn't have peace with Pakistan. Doesn't mean the 2 nuclear powers (similarly partitioned up by the British) are at perpetual war.

Hamas like PA accepts 2SS. It is expantionists in Israel that reject it. In fact, PA concedes to have a state on merely 19% of historic Palestine.

I feel like you missed the part where the official Hamas spokesman called for permanent war.

You miss the part where Hamas was ready to step aside, as recently as 2021, if it meant a political agreement could be reached over the establishment of the Palestinian state: https://www.972mag.com/hamas-fatah-elections-israel-arroganc...

Anyhow, after Hamas is gone like we are promised, let's see what new excuses crop up (like, 'all Pal civilians are Nazis' is already gathering some steam) to continue the subjugation of the Palestinians.

My statement is from 2023 and is the current state of affairs. Your source from 2021 does not include:

1. An actual statement

2. That was ever enacted

FYI, what you are referring to is actually a proposal from Fatah to hold elections in 2021, and a promise from Hamas not to run. Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run, despite briefly claiming they wouldn't, and according to Marwan Barghouti and Mohammad Dahlan [1], and even Hamas themselves [2], Abbas then canceled the elections out of fear his party would lose. Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced; and regardless, long before the time of the cancellation, Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Palestinian_legislative_e...

2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210430012358/https://www.times...

> My statement is from 2023...

GP started off with something from 2004! Glad we are making progress with timelines here, if nothing else.

Speaking of 2023 statements, the ruling party in Israel democratically elected for 2 decades now, have made it abundantly clear that they'll continue to thwart any attempts at 2SS (https://archive.is/34Sg0) because 'security of the only democracy in the Middle East is at stake'. Apartheid? Yes, for security. Siege? Aiwa, security. Bombing Syria and Iran? Also, security. I'd like to smoke what they are in Knesset to be this drunk on conflict and war. And for the majority to continue to vote them in, because 'security', is telling. The result is, Kahanists are now elected ministers; but God forbid Pals elect 'terrorists'...

> Hamas backed out of the agreement and ended up submitting candidates to run

I don't see a single mention of Hamas in the 2021 roster: https://www.elections.ps/tabid/1163/language/ar-PS/Default.a... The Wikipedia page you linked to merely points out a former Hamas leader was running under a new party.

> Your article's claim that it was due to "heavy pressure" from the United States and Israel is unsourced

Abu Mazen is a puppet. No reason to believe he cancelled the elections despite ALL other factions (some 25+) wanting one. He most certainly can't do so without the support of whoever funds his little fiefdom. It is a forgone conclusion, as people say.

> Hamas was running and any pretense that they would step aside was gone.

I mean, you state that there hasn't been an actual statement (see below) but also claim it is all a ruse all in the space of 3 paragraphs...

  The full minutes of the talks were published in an official Emirati document. In essence, the message of the Hamas leadership was clear: "If you in Fatah are convinced that you can get a state from Israel along the 1967 lines through negotiations, go for it. We will not interfere."

That is not a statement from Hamas, it is the author editorializing minutes from a meeting. The Wikipedia article that I linked shows the actual list of candidates and parties, which include Hamas, as well as sources for them and opinion polls showing Hamas was likely going to win the election. These are just the facts. Feel free to look at the official candidate lists and opinion polls if you disagree. Hamas was running and the opinion piece you posted is incorrect — they were not going to sit out the election.

Here is the direct quote from Wikipedia, since you're claiming it doesn't say Hamas was running:

The March 31 midnight deadline for submissions of electoral lists saw 36 lists officially presented,[69] including:

Fatah, led by Mahmoud Aloul[70]

Freedom, headed by Nasser al-Qudwa and Fadwa Barghouti, the wife of Marwan Barghouti[71]

Hamas (running as "Jerusalem is Our Promise"), led by Khalil al-Hayya[70]

...

I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections, when every source points out that he did, and Hamas themselves say he did and called it a coup by Fatah.

Posting random quotes from Netanyahu that do not reference the 2021 election does not back up your claim that Hamas was willing to sit out the election. I don't like Netanyahu either, but that doesn't mean that somehow Hamas wasn't trying to stay in power.

  Hamas (running as "Jerusalem is Our Promise"), led by Khalil al-Hayya[70]

Hamas was in the running in 2021 via proxy (may be because the Western governments labelled it a terrorist group?), driven by their political aspirations as opposed to their military ones: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210324-hamas-is-building...

> I am not sure why you keep arguing unsourced claims — to the point of claiming that Abbas did not cancel elections

I never claim anything of the sort. Abu Mazen did cancel the elections.

> opinion polls showing Hamas was likely going to win the election

As before, actual Kahanists winning elections is a-okay... but Hamas or its proxies winning democratically scare the hell because... 'security'? The 972mag article specifically calls out that the cancellation of the elections by Abu Mazen as the catalyst for al-Qassam, Hamas' armed wing, to (perhaps foolishly) take matter into their own hands.

> That is not a quote from Hamas, it

What about the direct quotes by Likudniks calling for ethnic cleansing (https://twitter.com/MairavZ/status/1739364199367618871) or more repression? Why do direct quotes from Hamas matter when an official Emirati document points out Hamas were okay with PA leading a political solution towards 2SS (and it is PA that has nothing to show for it 5 years since then).

Just so it is clear, I think Hamas are better relegated to the dustbins of history. They hinder more than they help.

Literally nowhere does it say that Hamas was only running "via proxy" in the article you linked. Hamas was running in the election as "Jerusalem is our Promise," as noted by Wikipedia and every single major news outlet that covered the election at the time. Just as in the 2006 election (which they won), where they ran using the name "Change and Reform." [1] The name of the list is just how they market their campaign slogan to voters, it doesn't mean they're not running or that it's a "proxy" that is different than them — and it certainly does not mean they're sitting out the election which was your claim. And that is why every major news outlet reported Hamas running in 2021, just as they did in 2006, and why you are continually unable to find sources saying they didn't run and are posting random articles that don't back up your claims.

And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute the undeniable fact that Hamas did actually submit to run in the 2021 election, just as they did in 2006.

Why does an official Emirati document...

You have not linked to an official Emirati document. You have linked to an opinion piece editorializing unsourced Emirati minutes supposedly from a meeting between Fatah and Hamas, that supposedly show a proposal for Hamas not to run in elections — a proposal that in reality was never enacted and an election that Hamas did run in. There are a zillion sources that show Hamas did run in the election and you have been unable to show anything saying that they didn't, and keep posting random right-wing Israeli statements as if that somehow proves Hamas didn't run.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative...

> and it certainly does not mean they're sitting out the election which was your claim.

That was 972mag's claim as a precondition for Hamas to enter PLO post elections (which didn't happen).

1. In 2014, per UAE, Hamas stepped aside to let PA reach a political solution on 1967 borders. PA had nothing to show for that.

2. In 2021, 35 parties alongside Hamas (via proxy or not) favoured elections in WB, E Jerusalem, and Gaza. PA called it off.

In both those cases, doubt it was all Abu Mazen on his own, without the backing of the Knesset.

> And again, bringing up random Likudniks does not refute...

Two things:

1. You seem to place emphasis on direct quotes from Hamas but dismiss direct quotes from Likudniks (that prove they're no supporters of 2SS, which is why they may have pushed Abu Mazen to prevent elections).

2. Random? That's the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister.

Anywho, it seems we both agree on what happened (sabotage of the peace process) just not what led to it (right-wing Israeli rulers).

(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746496, but I detached it from there, i.e. moved it to the top level, because this subthread is better than the surrounding flamewar it was in.)

Sometimes i feel that reporters should be needed to add a basic statistical analysis before they are allowed to claim something like censorship.

How much content is posted every day on meta? How many content removal decisions are taken every day by meta?

Hint: Over 1 billion Stories are posted every day.

So even if 1049 content removals would happen on a single day - but this "evidence" is collected over a much longer time period.

You have to read about HRW and its campaign against Israel to maybe understand why HRW continue to post this type of propaganda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Human_Rights_Watc...

The guardian did a very bad job at picking up this biased content.

Well, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Israel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_United_States_for... etc.

Does the existence of these Wikipedia articles now mean that I can call any information put out by Israel or the United States "biased content" and just disregard it?

No. The comment you're replying to explicitly calls out the poor methodology this report is based on and the lack of subject matter expertise shown by the authors. The Wikipedia article is supplementary information that situates this critique within a wider context. They are not saying you should dismiss the report simply because of the Wikipedia article.

Their methodology seems really flawed. They cherry picked a thousand instances of wrongly removed content, but how many posts do you think there are about the conflict on Facebook and Instagram? Tens of millions? They have no way of knowing how representative that sample is.

Exactly. Whatever your opinions on Israel and Gaza, putting out a report so cherry-picked on such a small, unrepresentative sample only serves to show HRW's biases.

> Human Rights Watch published a call for evidence of online censorship…from the main Human Rights Watch accounts on Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and TikTok.

I don’t see how HRW can post this in good conscience without acknowledging the huge potential for voluntary response bias in this survey. Pro-Israel voices have been skeptical of HRW’s perceived Anti-Israel bias[1] for over a decade. They are not going to be following or engaging with HRW accounts, and their voices are most likely fewer in number overall[2]. The fact that 1,049 of the 1,050 comments submitted for HRW’s review were Pro-Palestine should be a red flag, not the core piece of evidence.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204619004574318...

[2] https://wpde.com/amp/news/nation-world/support-for-palestine...

No matter what your views, we should all be very concerned that a technology company that specializes in social connections is controlling what people can say to one another.

This combined with the close government coordination that was recently exposed is deeply concerning.

‘Disinformation’ seems to be more and more just ‘opinions we don’t like or support’ and this episode should serve as a warning to use all to limit their power before it’s too late.

And I don’t care if you like Triden or Brump: this shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

Hamas is a terrorist organization, apparently backed by Iran, and are constantly spreading misinformation online, this is why it's censored?

I sometimes open "The Guardian" and the amount of times they quote "The Gaza Health Ministry", which would be no more trust worthy than the North Korean or Chinese health ministry, is fucking ridiculous.

If people thought about thing more critically then we wouldn't have to sensor everything but people don't they eat it up, and get all conspiratorial.

On the other hand, I think Meta have built a shit product that requires an insane level of censoring to keep even remotely civil. Unfortunately this flawed product has dire impacts on democratic societies.

> Hamas is a terrorist organization

You seem to be making the mistake that many do and conflating Hamas with the Palestinian people. The article is not about posts in support of Hamas.

Good luck just "untangling" Hamas and the palestinians though.

May it be that Meta is just doing it job by weeding out fakes? Most of the pro-Hamas/pro-Palestinian propaganda that I saw contradicts the facts to say the least (or in the best case is only single-sourced with the source being either Hamas itself or a cozy affiliate of a Hamas like those Gaza offices of UN agencies).

Btw, Meta is outlawed (declared "extremist", it is somewhat like "material supporter of terrorism" status in US) in Russia for refusing to bend to Russian authorities and to carry only official Russian, completely false, propaganda.

It might be that outside of your circles, people do have different opinions, without them being bots.

Last elections fb was spamming me with trump propaganda. I don't know anyone who voted for trump, for the simple reason that I don't live in USA. And yet I still got the propaganda… I understand the russians might not want USA propaganda and might want their own instead.

I'm not talking about opinions. I'm taking about propaganda and facts which that propaganda contradicts. For illustration, I've just posted an example of such propaganda and the facts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38751882

Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian with 1 being pro-israeli. Then some of the propalestinian post will be calling for genocide or celebrating the massacre of oct 7.

IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

Twitter has surprisingly become much better since Elon purchased it. The community tags are great and non-partisan, they fairly report on all inaccuracy.

Even advertisers aren’t immune, I’ve seen community tags on paid ads calling them out for being drop shippers.

Notably, Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) was released in Jan 2021. Elon just flipped the feature flag.

Worth noting Birdwatch launched alongside the ability to report tweets for misinformation, a feature Elon disabled. For that reason it’s difficult to conceive of Community Notes today as a simple continuation of the Birdwatch effort.

I think he was right to disable the ability for Community Notes to actually report and remove tweets. First, it's a vector for abuse. Second, misinformation is a loaded term and having the context along side the content is more important for an informed public.

Of course anything illegal or against ToS should be removed and only be the purview of Twitter's moderation team (or what's left of it).

I have had the opposite experience with X, I find it hard to escape any cheap rage bait on my feed regardless of how I would tag or hide pages. It’s interesting you have this experience, though.

In a 2 day span I saw George Soros and Tucker Carlson get hit by Community Notes.

Gave me some hope that Elon is serious.

Musk has criticised Community Notes a few times for calling him out.

More often he has expressed how well it works and how great it is.

He praised it many times, but just a few weeks ago was complaining when he posted BS and community notes essentially called him out. In any case, I think it's a good feature and hope it doesn't go away.

> get hit by Community Notes

How does that work? can anyone post a "community note", or by what process is that decided?

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/community-notes

Thanks! But I didn't find a clear description there of how this works. What elevates an ordinary comment to a "community note" and what determines whether a "community note" stays up as a sort of verdict on the original post? This seems like a hard thing to get right at scale. If you rely on voting (i.e. likes or whatever), you'll just end up with a parallel comment system, no more authoritative than the original one. So there must be some other process deciding which proposed notes get this special status.

(Perhaps I should add: yes, I'm being lazy; no, I'm not being critical - I just want someone to explain this to me so I don't have to work to find out.)

Be a verified (by phone number, no need to pay) twitter user. Apply to be a Community notes contributor. Wait. If accepted, you start with 0 points. Twitter will start to show you proposed (as opposed to published) community notes. You can vote yes / no. If a note you voted yes (or no) will get enough other yes (no) votes to get published (rejected), you will get 1 point. If you voted "wrong", you will lose a point. After you have a certain number of points (I think 5), you can also write proposed notes yourself, not just vote. If your note gets rejected, you lose 5 points.

But twitter is not only counting the yes / no votes. They need people who have voted differently on some previous notes, to agree in their votes on this note, before their algorithm makes the decision to publish or reject the note.

A lot of proposed notes will never get enough votes to be decidedly published or rejected, so they will linger in the "proposed" stage forever.

Thank you! That's clear and interesting.

Some related HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25906672

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25908439

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33478845

Thanks - it sounds from https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introduci... (via your first link) that they have a rating system whereby community members get to vote on which notes they think are true (a.k.a. which ones they like), and some sort of reputation system to compensate for the weaknesses of relying solely on votes. Did they publish the details of these systems?

Edit: this, from https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti... (via your third link) is interesting:

Community Notes doesn't work by majority rules. To identify notes that are helpful to a wide range of people, notes require agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings. This helps prevent one-sided ratings.

Then they link to https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/contributing/div..., which expands on that. It seems they're basically trying to control for ideological perspective, i.e. to identify signal that doesn't just boil down to "I like / agree with this". I've often wondered if something like that could work.

>Did they publish the details of these systems?

I didn't look into the details myself, but there is a 24-page paper linked from this page:

>Details of our methodology and past findings can be found in our paper.

https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/g...

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes/blob/main/birdwatc...

Pointing out yet again that Community Notes long precedes Musk's purchase of Twitter. It got going in early 2021; I was one of the first batch to sign up for it, although I think it had been in developments for a year or so before that. January 6 rattled a lot of people at Twitter so I suspect that influenced the timing of the rollout.

Perhaps the confusion is that CN was originally called 'Birdwatch' and people don't realize they're the same thing.

I guess you haven't read any news for a while.

Advertisers are fleeing Twitter and nobody knows how much longer Twitter will exist, because, well, they don't want their ads to be displayed next to Nazi content, in any circumstances.

If you find Twitter better, good for you for swimming in that kind of content.

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

Full disclosure: I work for Meta, but not on ranking, and my opinions are my own. Edit: this isn't specific to Meta; it's common to all content platforms.

This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude. There are leaked state secrets the public should know. There's hate speech (laws vary by country). Sexual material (laws vary). Nudity (laws and customs vary). Then there's libel (which is hard and slow to prove). That's just on the legal side. That's what you're calling for, but that's hard enough. I have no idea how Kiwi Farms and 4chan do it.

Then there's ranking. Maybe the posts are there if you know where to look, but realistically, you'll never see them. People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

> but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

Just having the option to not see anything I am not explicitly following and always seeing posts in reverse chronological order would be nice.

Right now I barely ever go to Facebook because my timeline is a mess. I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

> I've manually unfollowed all my friends and yet the spam comes through.

If you've unfollowed everyone what do you expect to see?

Not the one you're replying to but I unfollow all, but a couple people.

... nothing?

I expect if you unfollowed everyone for it to show absolutely nothing, leaving a "consider following these people" prompt. And otherwise when I reach the end of new content, show me a "you reached the end of your unread content, consider following these people to add more".

Having a clear "you are caught up" point probably isn't positive for engagement metrics so I understand why they don't do it but I'd rather the app be oriented towards UX than to be oriented towards engagement metrics.

What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other. They will pick one political side to lose. They will sort/rank to be effectively censored (not scene in common usage). Pretend that can't be escaped". It can be escaped. Having the power to censor one political side is just too addicting for meta to use the self-control to not abuse that power. That is what is happening.

> What you are effectively saying is "people in Meta will decide to be on one political side or the other

I'm not saying anything about Meta, but content forums as a whole. I'm also not saying people will even make decisions. Sometimes those running the platform might, sometimes users might, sometimes users might implicitly decide as recommender systems learn their preferences.

> This is really hard. There's universally objectionable material like CSAM. That's (politically) easy to exclude.

You're right. Instagram feeds can get quite 4chan esque: https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-instagram-video-algorithm-chil... Even so, TFA claims that Meta has figured out a way to suppress pro-Pal content... so clearly, something's up?

"this doesn't scale" Yet it did fine for years before removing sane options.

>People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

I fail to see how this is a problem. Much less one that necessitates spending billions of dollars developing sorting and recommendation algorithms to solve.

Unless your priority is not "show the user what they have explicitly requested to see".

Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed. Now that they aren't, we have federated social media with no algorithm, just reverse chronological. People are perfectly happy with it now, same as always.

If you follow too many people to keep up with, the problem is that you follow too many people. Users will self regulate. If you give them filtering and sorting tools, they'll use them.

It's crazy that we keep reinventing the same solutions and wonder why heaping additional complexity on top of the original idea does nothing but make it worse. You'd figure that someone somewhere would be at least aware of what came before, but apparently not.

We're just gonna keep inventing wheels, and keep touting how many more edges this new wheel has compared to the last one until we get back to round and wonder where it all went wrong.

I did work on ranking at Meta. The vast majority of people really do not prefer the chronological feed. We validated this by extraordinarily high powered randomized trials, including with surveys. No more than 20% of people preferred a chronological feed in any experiment I saw.

20% is far from small...

Typically less, depends on the surface.

I mean, yeah, but you could also do a lot of high powered randomized trials about kinds of cookies and learn that 80% of people always prefer eating the cookies with cocaine in them.

That's a different argument, and not one I really care about. It's no more "addictive" than tv and way less harmful

To push back, it does seem like you care. You've created rationalizations and offer them up unprompted. I think most people would argue for allowing both settings and having the app default to the one the internal research found more preferable and more profitable. Not offering the setting is telling.

I meant I don't care to argue. I've had this conversation too many times, and it does have the setting. You can Google it to figure out how to change it.

I think the point is: were the experiments testing whether people said they liked X better and immediately engaged or were you testing whether or not the user felt good about the experience and wanted to come back long term.

My experience is meta prioritizes instant gratification, which yeah people and their immediate actions says they want. But also I’ve completely stopped using Facebook and instagram because it became clear it’s of limited value to me. Yeah, i might mouse over a piece of salacious content because it’s salacious. But i know it’s low value to me. And most of my peers are in the same boat.

We ran experiments that lasted up to 5 years. People who have ranked feeds self report a better experience after using the product for years, although you have to be careful with these sorts of things because the chronological users are more likely to churn, which biases the results

Interesting. I just logged into facebook and my feed is spam, and my notifications are basically a chronological feed of my closest connections.

If you don't use Facebook regularly, the feed will be bad. They use almost no data older than 90 days

Were you measuring what users like, or what they "engage" with?

If I see a post on mastodon, it's from someone I follow or a post that someone I follow thought was worth sharing. That's a genuine interaction between humans. I get to decide what's in my feed based on who I follow and the filters I set up. The system is designed only to connect me with people I choose to follow.

Meanwhile, an algorithmic feed with no options is designed for one thing: manipulating users to optimize "engagement". That by definition requires ignoring what users prefer. I really shouldn't have to explain that this is a bad thing.

We ran lots of experiments, including asking people survey questions, monitoring usage, asking people offline to try both, etc

You're wrong about the design of algorithmic feeds. I worked on them, that's not how we designed them.

How about giving the people the option and letting them decide for themselves.

Also, 20% of people is hundreds of millions of people.

People have the option, you can choose to use a chronological feed on Facebook and Meta

Facebook engr is famous for popularizing the phrase “one in a million happens every millisecond” so this 20% hand wringing is funny to me

> Users were perfectly happy when twitter, Facebook, tumblr, MySpace, and literally every other site was a reverse chronological feed.

When those were reverse chronological feeds everyone and their mother wasn’t on these sites. They were smaller groups of people who were mostly younger and the overall traffic was lower. For people who didn’t follow a bajillion people, including people they didn’t know you would feasibly reach the end of the feed. But that’s not how people use the sites anymore.

But even then, if you wanted people to actually see and respond to your posts you’d have to time out when you posted it to hit around lunchtime. No 2AM musings if you expected to have anyone see it. And good luck with having your engagement or childbirth announcements getting to people in a different time zone if your family is international.

I don't use FB anymore, but Instagram has reverse chronological feed as an option if you want to use it. Majority of users prefer algorithmic, so that's the default, but I do tap the chronological feed every once.

Does not scale, sure, if 2 posts are from random people I am not interested in, 2 posts are ads. Repeat. That is the current feed on instagram.

"People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."

That's just rationalizing a business decision. Nobody is saying there should be no algorithmic timeline. If it "doesn't scale" for my own timeline, that's 100% on me. Why take away the decision or "nudge" into the other direction?

If the algorithmic timeline really were THAT better, there would be zero need to remove the chronological option or "forget" when the user sets it as an option. People would just use it.

> People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people.

People say they want kind, honest car salesmen, but that doesn't scale for the kind of overleveraged floor plans and impulsive, short-term thinking that characterize most dealerships.

This isn't a universal problem though: only Instagram and Facebook have these accusations

> "People say "just show the posts in chronological order," but this doesn't scale for humans reading it, especially as you follow more people."

I'm not sure I agree with you. I'm in 40+ IRC channels and multiple networks. I have an IRC Bouncer with playback enabled and my window stops when I log off at the place where I left off. I can easily scroll back to the bottom an see what's current. Same thing goes for Discord and Slack.

I have never in my life thought, "wow I wish I could get a summary of all the dumb shit said in ##chat and ##politics in the same place when I come back." Maybe, just maybe, I don't need to know the highlights of everything that's happened since I last logged on?

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution. When something is propaganda or false just quickly tag it as such with why it is false like Xitter does.

It seems to me this just moves the problem, because then we'd be having discussions about how this stuff is wrongly tagged, no? Also who does the tagging? Random users? See how well that will work.

And I'm fairly certain Twitter still removes stuff? If I post "gas the Jews" or "gas the Arabs" I wouldn't expect that to stay up?

Even tricker that if there is not enough moderation, Apple could remove your app or some government would ban it.

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything. That's the only solution.

The two things that immediately come to my mind are the organisation of the genocide of Rohingya [1] and the live streaming of the Christchurch mosque massacre [2]. Both of these were promoted by Facebook too I believe.

Free speech absolutists see no issue with allowing that content to exist. I believe in free speech, but believe it has limits. It’s good to see the FB employee, dehrmann, with sane (personal) comments.

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/29/facebook-new...

> IMO you shouldn't censor anything.

What is the platform for? Checking out pictures of your grandchildren and keeping up on with the knitting group or is it for an international propaganda war? If you censor nothing then it's no longer a platform, it's a war zone. You can argue that the censorship is unfair, politically skewed, etc but you can't argue that it shouldn't be done at all or there won't be one inch of the Internet not dedicated to this and every other conflict everywhere.

If HN itself went completely uncensored it would become useless to us almost immediately. Who ever posts most, wins.

> Eh this is really tricky, for exampe if I open instagram, Threads or tiktok 9/10 posts will be pro-palestinian

Yeah. I don't think I've seen any pro-Israeli content on Instagram, just overwhelming comment spam on random posts asking said content creator to acknowledge Palestine.

As for Threads, both are common.

I have a suspicion that this article is vaguely a response to the previous report that TikTok overwhelmingly censors content in accordance with China's official position.

That entire report was very weird as they compared some uploaded videos with specific hashtags on TikTok vs Instagram. I just don’t understand how that methodology can fly when TikTok is banned in some places, while IG is banned in different ones. So obviously you’ll get stuff anout Hong Kong protests on IG, but not on TikTok since it’s not available in Hong Kong.

There’s also no reliable way of finding where the data is being uploaded from, so huge bot-farms in India wouldn’t push much in TikTok either, cause again, it’s banned there. As much as I hate TT/IG, we shouldn’t try to prove our point with extremely unreliable studies.

This post was flagged, but I don't think it should have been and I hope it stays up. I have been grateful that HN hasn't had the same level of animosity about the conflict in Gaza as other places on the internet. But this news article is about a core issue in tech, and should be discussed on HN. The whole world now uses social media to communicate, which means that when there's a war, partisans of both sides will be motivated to fight out the propaganda war on the platforms that tech built.

I wonder if there will ever be a way for a global-sized platform which uses algorithmic content feeds to convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this. The HRW report has 1,000 examples of peaceful pro-Palestinian content that was removed by Meta. But only Meta themselves has the information to know whether there is systematic bias. So we get a situation where people sympathetic to both sides both come away feeling that the platform is biased. I think the U.S. culture war has similar dynamics.

My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions. Maybe statistics on deleted posts, more legible moderation rules, publicly posted justifications for moderation decisions. Another part of my brain thinks that maybe this is just an unsolvable problem for social reasons in a community that's global-scale. I'm not sure. I do feel like this is still Meta's job, part of their cost of doing business, and if they put something like 5% of their revenue into moderation the situation would be a lot better.

In the meantime I find myself personally trying to cut out as many algorithmic feeds as I can from my life. I prefer the curation of a news website or podcast, small group discussions, or 1:1 communication with people I trust. Algorithmic feeds are easy but so far have never done a good job covering issues where there is real conflict between two groups.

That is "the beauty" of this conflict (if something this heinous could ever have a beautiful side): It poses many interesting technical challenges. But, quite understandably, people everywhere (including HN) are fast to move the "warring" right onto our screens (hence the flagging).

So, as you mentioned, algorithmic feeds is one of them. There are many others like how to create temporary infrastructure for such a besieged, war-torn city [0].

I suppose many would say, "This goes for all wars, what is special about this one?" Well, I would argue this is a "special conflict". It is one of (if not THE) longest-running military occupation in the world [1], where, coincidentally, the US spends its largest tax-payers-funded foreign aid [2].

Edit: And because many are now commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, it is worth recalling that it is also special for being that birth's place (spiritually, if not literally).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38673300

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_occupations

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/which-countries-receive-...

PS: For many (myself included), Christmas is about loving your family and not “the birth of Jesus Christ”, even if their mothers see it that way

> My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Visibility into moderation decisions makes them more gameable/exploitable/circumventable. The whole purpose of moderation is to remove unwanted speech; justifying the fairness of such removal is only secondary, and can be elided if it interferes with the primary goal.

Hence "You have been banned because your posts violate our Terms of Service" messages with no further explanation, and things like shadowbanning. It sucks to be on the receiving end of these things but they make online communities much more pleasant.

Exactly; consider the "censorship" that everyone generally agrees with, spam filtering. If the precise nature of the spam filter is known (keyword lists, etc), then it becomes much easier to design emails that avoid being filtered.

Spam filtering is the opposite problem of people trying to communicate their views on mass killings of civilians in an important respect: In the case of spam, you don't want the spammers to reformulate their message to get past the filters. In the case of mass killings, you do want to allow the social media users to tone down their writing.

Sounds good in theory, but in practice I think you’d ultimately just incentive the kind of behaviors you already see on TikTok: users would just add asterisks to filtered words, instead of changing anything of substance.

This is basically an argument for getting rid of laws and ruling by fiat, with a judicial process that amounts to repeating 'you know what you did' whether or not that is honest.

If I have a boot on my throat, it better be privately owned.

Communities are moderated based on how good you feel there, if it's the most ad-friendly, how good everyone stays on-topic, or other mostly social & subjective criteria. Judicial systems aren't about any of those things.

> My engineer brain wants to solve this by giving users more visibility into moderation decisions.

Politics are not an engineer’s job, nor is content moderation.

> this news article is about a core issue in tech

I agree. Let's assume that a Social-Media Business (SMBiz) gains sufficient value from hosting topical discussion to want to continue. But there is cost, reputational risk, and lawyers are expensive. How can SMBiz effectively moderate a conversation/debate/flamewar about a controversial event or subject, especially when the SMbiz wants to maximise user engagement while respecting laws and government requests?

Like it or not, that's the business reality. People who want a truly neutral discussion platform that operates with transnational freedom and total personal freedom will find that their ideals alone are not enough to sustain the business.

Prior Art: People often say that HN's Dang and Slashdot's moderation system are the best examples of "effective moderation" that we know. If the moderation is effective, it means SMBiz is attentive to topics and comments and discussion is insightful and interesting; it isn't overwhelmed by frivolity, falsehoods, defamation, and death threats (FFDDs). If the job is done well, SMBiz may even receive accolades. See Reddit's recent experience with its moderators for a negative example.

Here are some of the rules that will need to be applied, in stochastic FIFO order. Items are lettered for reference.

a= At all times, keep a clear eye on the business equation. Effective moderation will have a significant cost. At any scale!

b= Seed the discussion with verified accounts/users. Reputation must be earned and maintained. See Prior Art.

c= Rate limiting, especially for controversial topics. No short, stupid Reddit posts. People must weigh their words. Sometimes, the microphone must be disabled.

d= No flamewars, no propaganda, no falsehoods. See Prior Art. Lock any discussion that achieves high FFDDs. Throw away accounts, ban offenders. Make it sting.

e= No anonymity unless a verified account/user has sufficient reputation to post in anonymous mode. But it costs in ReputationCoin.

f= No bots, no bridages. See Prior Art to estimate workload and infrastructure.

g= Enable and reward trusted moderators. See Prior Art.

= = = Final Notes

> My engineer brain wants to solve this

I get that you are very interested in the Moderation Problem, but I think this wording wins no support. Backers will say that you are way out of your social depth, and people in the debate will dismiss your intent as naivety or bike-shedding (frivolous or misplaced optimisation) or a combination of the two.

One important reason why HN succeeds because Dan G (who is indeed attentive, and principled) rejects the most ungovernable type of conversation: flamewars.

> convincingly show moderation neutrality on a topic like this

There is no neutrality, of course. SMBiz can state its bias and interests clearly. But it will be hard to make a profit from achieving neutrality because strident factions in polarised debate do not want neutrality.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181105214850/https://www.alter...

Meta and YouTube seem to have started to shadowban pro-Palestine sentiment materials.

It boils down to the algorithmic feed, where Zuckerberg decides what the users see and not the users. Old Facebook didn't have that problem, where there more or less was a chronological order of friends' post. That systems also did not have any problem with "troll farms" (do those even exist, anyway?) since those could not reach you in the first place.

On places like Reddit, I get this feeling that some bot network control most subs. It seems to be major manipulation of down votes and upvotes. The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

In the incoming world of AI generated garbage content, Meta decided to kill feeds from your friends and pages you follow. That is "great" strategic planning.

> The atmosphere is way to aligned to be real.

I think it’s identical here on HN. Upvoting, downvoting, and using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion. I think it’s just the topic du jour on HN is less escalated (usually opinions of tech choices) so it doesn’t seem as extreme.

Be sure to turn on showdead, it absolutely should be enabled with the amount of suppression and brigading and rules-lawyering that takes place

> using flagging to suppress contrary opinions is rampant and has a huge negative impact toward discussion

I've had showdead turned on for years and have rarely seen contrary opinions flagged, if ever.

The main things I see flagged are personal attacks, open bigotry, flaming, etc. Occasionally I used to see anti-CCP comments flagged, but I haven't seen that in a while. I'd be interested to see some examples where you think something was unjustly flagged.

By that same token, the vast majority of downvoted comments I see are just...irritating. They're not usually overly bigoted, they're not more contrary than other, less irritating comments that aren't downvoted, they're just really annoying to read and engage with.

It is not as bad on HN. I mean, we disagree right now, right?

It is not about technical topics but about the persons. HN got better discussion climate about the Israel-Hamas war too, then say Reddit.

On some half-obvious corporate shill post I've gotten some 'unfair' (according to me) grey out down votes for being critical, where it was obvious that none but shills would care enough to downvote. So the problem do exist, but it ain't too bad.

Reddit is a whole other league of bad.

I’ve had my spicy posts get downvoted within 10 seconds of me making the post. Impossible for that to always be organic. Glad others observe this here. Dang will of course deny this happens, but it is happening for sure.

Most spicy comments get rapid downvotes, and it's organic.

I know mine do.

Long time HN readers frequently load https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments to see where the interesting conversations are happening right now .. and they pretty much all reflexively downvote comments that appear to be rude or attacking other users directly rather than discussing their positions.

Trying to keep everyone happy is keeping no one happy.

Hashtags like #GazaStarving got banned on Instagram for no reason. Yea there is bad censorship.

are the pictures of the hostages being removed for no reason?

Can someone explain how every single post about Palestine/Israel is flagged and removed the instant it hits front page?

I have seen this with around 4-5 threads personally and who knows how many I missed

Users are flagging them. I don't think it's hard to understand why: it's a divisive and flameprone topic.

Two positions that people urge us to take (different people, obviously) are (1) treat it as off topic and flag everything; or (2) have no limits, which means letting it dominate the front page. Neither of these positions are viable for HN. For reasons why I say that, see past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... - these are general explanations, not specifically about Gaza, but they apply to that also.

HN has had at least two major related threads so far:

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

'Like we were lesser humans': Gaza boys, men recall Israeli arrest, torture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616550 - Dec 2023 (1309 comments)

Here are some explanations I posted the last time this question of flags came up, in case helpful at all:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527

Obviously we want commenters to have thoughtful, respectful, open conversation with each other rather than just fighting a war on HN. Equally obviously, it's pretty hard to avoid the latter. These things can only be 'graded on a curve', i.e. moderation has to shift somewhat, relative to the topic - not to do that would be expecting people not to be human, which is a losing proposition. But that does not mean the rules somehow switch off. Accounts that break the HN guidelines egregiously (such as by getting aggressive or posting in the flamewar style) are going to get warned and/or banned, regardless of who they're battling for or against. More than that, I'm not sure what we can do.

Have you noticed any patterns or organization in the flagging and voting of this subject, or does it all look organic?

What if it was organic? It would suck wouldn't it eh?

I haven't looked closely, but based on what I have looked at, plus prior experience, I believe that flags of this kind are a coalition between two subgroups of user: those who dislike the content of an article for political or ideological reasons, and those who are more concerned about the content being bad for HN (e.g. because they're worried about flamewars).

> because they're worried about flamewars

Huh? I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

I wish HN was more granular about measures for users, e.g. by marking these highly contested topics and just giving people topic-bans. Some people just completely lose their shit, and then other people lose their shit in response, and these people post a million messages by the time the rest of us managed to actually read the article and perhaps some relevant background info. It just craps up everything.

That's what Wikipedia does. Works reasonably well.

Of course it'd have to be programmed.

> I've never seen a flamewar on this topic?

What? Do you have showdead on?

I flagged this one, because “discussions” on this topic are mostly hot garbage, they are dominated by extremely motivated people shitting canned flamebait all over the place, especially early on. Indeed by the time I saw and flagged this there were already like four or five people doing exactly that, and by keeping it up, more of this type of users are invited. They are largely flagged by now, leaving an entire page of flagged stuff and more interwoven in the somewhat visible page; must be one of, if not the lowest signal-to-flag stories on HN. I can only see like 20% of 352 comments so far without showdead.

> What? Do you have showdead on?

I was joking – "woosh" as I believe the kids say.

And this is why I'd be in favour of a "topic ban".

The problem with topics bans is that you can sabotage topics you don't like to silence them. E.g. Rust evangelicals could have been silenced quite easely by flame baiting their posts.

Some people really don't need a whole lot of baiting; for example there's a top-level comment that reads (entire comment): "'peaceful support of Palestine'", without condemning Hamas is still pro-Hamas action in this case."

Never mind the stuff that's just outright beyond the pale.

So we can start with that.

Just some blend war mongerer trying make us choose side between Netanyahu and Hamas, pretending those are the options. Or what is your analysis?

Thank you dang for allowing this discussion. Our profession needs to wrestle with issues like this openly, and do so in a respectful way in the spirit of John Milton and John Stewart Mill.

> posting in the flamewar style

What is the flamewar style?

Presumably aggrssively calling people names, spamming the replies with insults and trying to provoke others into an argument without actually expressing any ideas.

The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572675 - Dec 2023 (1673 comments)

I posted that one, and while it went somewhat well by the standards of such a controversial topic, it was still contentious and had a lot of bad feeling. I submitted it because there was a nexus to both the dynamics of influence operations and individual movers and shakes in the SV community.

In general I think submitting on a topic like this requires some sort of hacker-specific angle - involving people in the industry, or the impact of technological change, or a new dynamic emerging from some unexpected source (eg cheap consumer-tech drones in the Ukraine conflict).

It's not that other topics shouldn't be discussed on HN, anything sufficiently unusual to be news cn be worth a look. But we should also be mindful that if the community can't provide more than baseline insight/expertise on a trending news topic, the resulting discussion will probably be shallow and have little value.

Because it doesn’t belong here and it’s inflammatory. Also most articles are heavily biased but claim not to be. For example, they trust numbers given by an internationally recognized terrorist organization. But tell me again how it’s not biased.

I've also had my por palestinian posts flagged. the really insane thing is I never call for violence and every assertion I make about human rights violations I make gets backed up with a link to a documentary or news story. I even tryto avoid using aljezeera as a my lone source. Over the last to months I've spent a lot of time researching teh history of the conflict and it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.

> it becomes clear that the israeli side depends on people being apathetic to whats going on.

this is flamebait

Possibly due to the topic attracting emotional, inflammatory responses rather than an objective, on-topic discussion.

Some people can't resist and have to turn every thread into a battlefield as if this achieves something on the ground. (Often citing the exact same disinformation that has been propagating across social media.)

Not only Meta, but Reddit, Google as well

extremely disturbing

One day, there will be a bigish war, and comms between the sides will be cut off, either by law, or all comms links severed.

At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

I suspect that few businesses have prepared for such an eventuality, and I suspect severe disruption can be expected when it happens.

For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do is to never use sequences for database ID's. By using random id's, you can mostly let your replicated database partition itself, and a later merge isn't too hard as long as most users have been operating on only one side of the divide.

> At that point, every global business will have to figure out how to split their business in two, their database in two, their server infrastructure in two, etc. and have both halves work.

Or give up serving one side. Probably the one the executives of the company don't live in. Like how many companies stopped operating in Russia after their war in Ukraine got into high gear.

In such a situation, I foresee something more like the splitting of the Roman Empire. There's no reason to stop serving global customers just because the users are separated from HQ. Especially if the servers are already on both sides of the geo-political border.

The Roman Empire split was relatively friendly. Theodosius split it between his two sons.

The Roman empire had a tradition of splitting the control of the areas between multiple people at several points starting from Diocletian's tetrarchy onward.

The last east/west split was different on that it was that last one.

In a way, you could look at the period of absolute control by a single person as an exception in Roman history.

Did many businesses stop operating in russia? Or did many of those shops/restaurants/etc physically located in Russia simply rename and continue operations independent from the parent company?

For example, Mcdonalds is now operated as Vkusno i tochka [1], and has awfully similar menu and branding to Mcdonalds.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkusno_i_tochka

“halves”

I love, in honestly both somewhat sarcastic but mostly very real sense, that hacker news discussion of global thermonuclear war...is how to prepare your database unique ID scheme for unforeseen sharding :->

We may be living in a radiological hellscape but at least we won't have ID collisions!

"The great EU/US Spanner schism of 2032"

METRIC WILL WIN

Little endians already won!

But beware the big endian insurgency

Just do what everyone does to fragile egos. You show Russia and China what they believe, and you show the rest of the world something else.

> For anyone designing something new today, the main prep you can do

"Our new SaaS offers high security, reslience to deal with usage spikes, and compatability with doomsday scenarios where fascist governments have taken over during war-time while implementing draconic wars that are to sure to end with society as a dystopian nightmare. Oh, and we're Soc 2 compliant."

These types of things are already arriving via data sovereignty laws.

Any global business will arrive in such a war already having split businesses

This already exists with China. You have to run a Chinese version of your infra that is separate from the global version.

In such dire straits as you describe, companies and individuals will likely be forbidden to provide any sort of commercial services to the opposing side.

Any distributed database worth its salt is already using UUIDs of some sort.

I think most companies will naturally align a certain way and there won’t be a big deal compared to the actual war.

The Western companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon will all align with the US

The European companies will align with the US as well

The Chinese companies Huwaei, ByteDance, Alibaba will align with China.

This is something people have to relearn over and over again.

A lot of the people who are not upset with Meta limiting opinions and content related to the war in Gaza¹. Were gloating and happy when Meta limited opinions and content from right wing politicians² not so long ago.

Once you invite censorship for content you dont like, how can you expect it wont bite you in the ass later on.

This is why freedom of speech is an important principle. That overshadows how someone "feels" about speech.

Everyone is in favor of freedom of speech. ""Dictators such as Stalin and Hitler, were in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise." -Noam Chomsky

Slightly related though originating from a different context.

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. —Martin Niemöller

Which in this context I use it to highlight that the protection of freedom of speech is not something you can ignore because you dont care about a topic. One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited. If we dont, then it becomes a bit more limited, and a little bit more, and eventually it will strike upon something you do care about, and it is far too late to speak up.

¹,² For this post I am assuming this is accurate. But i cannot prove either.

I think the problem with the right wing politicians was that they were presenting their warped view of reality as fact?

As if the left wing politicians dont also present warped facts.

Not to the same degree or extent… the departure from reality and rejection of any facts they don’t like, rejection of scientific thinking, is waaaaay way more of a right wing problem.

Left wing politicians have the tendency to overstate things, but (in my experience) they don’t often make up things altogether.

Something about the idealism required to be a left wing politician in this political climate?

That's what everyone says when they want to censor someone they don't like

I’m fairly certain this was found to be true by various sources.

Of course if you are already disinclined to accept that because it doesn’t align with your view of reality, there’s not much I can say to change it.

If you provided the sources it would help to atleast have a productive discussion of the merits of that point of view. Without the sources it just sounds like you don't like right-wing politicians.

While that is true, I have found that quoting sources doesn’t particularly help unless people are already inclined to believe me, so it just wastes my time to find them every time.

Might be cynical, but ultimately I don’t really believe I can change any minds just with a comment. If you ask why I make the comment in the first place then, that’s a good question.

That is quite understandable. I don't think you not wanting to waste your time finding sources is cynical. The part about not believing minds can be changed might be a bit cynical, but probably warranted given the state of online discourse today. I'd suggest tho not looking at it as trying to change anyone's mind so much as having just a productive discussion where all parties involved learn something, e.g. with sources being explicit there's prly details that would be learned on both sides. Anyway, happy holidays

"Freedom of speech for me, not for thee."

Those at both sides of the political horseshoe [1] want it this way, and do not believe the pendulum will swing out of their favor.

The best way to enshrine this in society is with new legislation to protect our means of communication (won't happen) or robust P2P social protocols (also probably won't happen).

Remember that the ACLU used to defend everyone. Even distasteful groups such as the KKK, neo-Nazis, Nation of Islam, NAMBLA, Westboro Baptist Church. And that's what it takes to defend free speech. Defending even the speech and the people you don't like.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

While I agree that one's views on censorship should not be based on whether one agrees or disagrees with the views presently impacted, I don't think your comparisons are reasonable for multiple reasons:

- Stalin and Hitler were _state_ censorship, where the state itself (and its heavy-handed use of force) were used to silence dissent. Meta is not a state, and Meta is not itself using force.

- When Niemöller says "they came for ...", he doesn't mean shadow-banning social media accounts. Silencing accounts on social media isn't _nothing_ but it's also definitely not equivalent to being sent to a prison camp.

- I think there is a legitimate broader question about what "censorship" should mean when talking about companies whose products involve communication. A requirement that user-provided messages should have equal reach irrespective of what they're saying seems to is in tension with the firm having its own freedom to not put certain things on their screens, on pages with their branding.

> One must speak out against censorship and against limiting freedom of speech, whenever it is being limited.

- I also think there's a legitimate question of whether people have a right to spread false information, including deliberate misinformation, irrespective of the platform. Claims that a chemical is medically effective in treating a specific disease need to be backed by clinical evidence. Intentionally lying to harm someone's reputation is defamation. "Censorship" in the form of "you can't criticize The Party" or "you can't publish that novel with its dangerous ideas" seems pretty different from "you can't say that your horse drug treats covid". Perhaps all viewpoints should have the same freedoms of expression, but we don't get to have our own facts. One can have principled reasons for believing that not all speech should be equally free.

I don't think the question will land on the issue if people have a right to spread false information. Instead the big question will be if people have a right to decide which information is false and which is not. If people do not have this right, and we instead want a small elected people to have a exclusive right to define which information is false, then what form of process should those people be elected.

A common argument of anti-censorship advocacy is to only allow censorship if a court of law has agrees to it, and then only if that law is identical in every country. Only then do we have a direct link between elected people who has mandate to define what is true and what is false.

With the covid chemical in question one should ask why the person who suggested horse drugs was not charged and found guilty in the country where they reside. Why did the law allow people to provide harmful medical advice in time of a pandemic?

Freedom of speech is drastically compromised when there's a lower and lower ceiling of freedom of thought. Meta or any platform limiting speech is a 2x "win" because it also limits further proliferation of such ideas.

That is, people can't think what they aren't aware of. People can't change their minds when the alternatives are limited.

Even here there are some thoughts you are not allowed to voice. And I’m not just talking about violence/etc but calling out ideas too vigorously etc will get you censored here too. “Flamewar style” is the trope used to justify it.

and in general this site also has a massive trend of people who are losing a debate leaning in to rules-lawyering as a means of suppressing disagreement etc.

“sorry sir you’re not allowed to mention that they didn’t read the literally-one-line parent comment and are replying to the exact opposite of the argument it’s making! Flagged my good sir, this is a forum for civil debate!”

A truly open and free debate includes the freedom to point out that the moon is not made of cheese and in fact I do think less of you for arguing that it is. But that’s back to the “flamewar style”. In reality not everyone is engaging in good faith or isn’t just part of some shitty bandwagon/etc and banning the ability to call that out just lowers the debate, because now it becomes a deliberate strategy that is formed by the rules themselves. Gameplaying rules-lawyering maximalists will ruin anything.

at some level, anti-censorship and curation are fundamentally opposed goals. You can’t have a high level of discourse and also be covering 101-level or incoherent arguments. And attempting to do so produces a false equivalence which results in worse outcomes for truth-seeking. The moon is not made of green cheese and it’s a waste of everyone’s time to rebut that in every single thread, against someone who doesn’t want to admit that it’s an incoherent position.

> and in general this site also has a massive trend of people who are losing a debate leaning in to rules-lawyering as a means of suppressing disagreement etc.

Is this specific to or more prevalent on this site though? Seems like common human/business behaviour. If you can’t win on merit, win on technicality, etc.

You're correct, it is common. However, it's the sell. That is, HN sells itself on not being The Common; perhaps even better than The Common. So the irony is, those defaulting to such nonsense should be the ones being down voted (for violating the community standard), and instead they take up the role of The Down Vote Police and/or disingenuous countering arguments.

I do agree with your synopses of HN. It's good and exceptional, until it's not. Then it drops of the cliff of being sound and reasonable.

Regardless, I remain fearless. That is, down votes don't stop me from expressing myself. In fact, often enough the DVs are vindication in the sense I know they didn't take the time to consider the idea(s). "This doesn't fit my oversimplified paradigm...down vote!!!" The actusl possible merit of the idea never given a chance.

Godspeed

I agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that Congress should consider extending common carrier rules to large social media platforms and force them to carry all legal content. This would in a sense be a form of "compelled speech" in that those companies would have to expend resources to distribute communicates that their management finds objectionable, but at scale the marginal costs would be virtually zero. And they would still be able to give individual users the tools to filter out or block content that they don't want to see.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984440891/justice-clarence-th...

At scale the marginal cost would be the platform losing users to smaller platforms with less compelled garbage

And at another scale another cost would be that you're compelled to say something you find objectionable

Legal according to whom? The laws are different in different countries.

Unworkable. Relevancy neutrality is unworkable. Think his idea through. Justice Thomas is not an independent thinker. Justice Scalia was an independent thinker, justice Thomas is malleable by the conservative Zeitgeist. Please take his ideas with a grain of salt.

I used to believe this, but the sad reality of modern society is that the current "meta" is suppressing viewpoints that damage society from your point of view, and if you decide not to play the meta by, say, opting for carte blanche free speech, others who have damaging views that actively harm your position will embrace this "meta" instead and YOUR views will eventually be suppressed (see Karens flooding local school boards to get basic LGBT literature banned, who have no problem being hypocritical about the fact that they just want to censor things they disagree with but will leave literal Nazi literature alone). It's an arms race of who can control the dialogue and get their views in front of the most eyeballs, unfortunately, and if you fail to see it that way, you will lose.

In the face of fascism, restraint in the name of principles make you weaker than the fascist.

>The sad reality of modern society is that the current "meta" is suppressing viewpoints that damage society from your point of view,

My viewpoint is freedom of speech regardless of my opinion of it, or yours.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” ― George Orwell

> If you decide not to play the meta by, say, opting for carte blanche free speech, others who have damaging views that actively harm your position will embrace this "meta"

My viewpoint is freedom of speech regardless of my opinion of it, or yours. If people express viewpoints I do not agree with I will fight for their right to say it. That is what freedom of speech means.

Which is why ACLU defended a Nazi group´s right to protest.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” ― S.G. Tallentyre, The Friends of Voltaire

I dont care who is doing the burning, nor why they are doing it. People burning or banning books is the antithesis of freedom of speech. Something I clearly reject.

>. It's an arms race of who can control the dialogue and get their views in front of the most eyeballs, unfortunately, and if you fail to see it that way, you will lose. In the face of fascism, restraint in the name of principles make you weaker than the fascist.

You appear to advocate that your opinion of the world must be the true opinion, and thus, needs to be enforced and dissent silenced lest our nation becomes "facist"¹

This means that you become the arbiter of what is truth and what is not. What is harmfull or not. Or yu delegate this ot the state, or to private corporations or all of the above. That is the definition of an autocracy in my opinion.

You would probably be more comfortable in Saudi Arabia where dissent is dealt with in a proactive manner.

“I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.” -- Oscar Wilde

¹ https://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

The position you have about this topic serves the status quo of corporations and advertisers deciding on what speech is acceptable. That is the status quo today with the major tech platforms. Personally I find it detestable. And you'd find your viewpoints a bit extreme in countries around the world. Nazi speech in Germany is banned for a good reason and is popular with the populace.

And sharing quotes by long dead authors is hardly relevant to the systems we've built today which reward inflammatory speech for the sake of monetizing eyeballs. Personally I find that more dystopian than setting some rules for engagement about how you discuss sensitive topics, like we have here on HN. But that's expensive to do so these platforms just deplatform such content no matter how inflammatory or neutrally it is presented.

I believe its relevant to mention that this doesnt have to be ill intent on part of Meta. Israeli intelligence is spending a lot of resources on influencing narratives. Its not surprising that this would include exploiting and influencing moderation. And its not like social media sites figured out perfect moderation yet, they are an easy target for such determined influences.

Israeli intelligence is likely spending virtually no resources at all on influencing narratives. And if they are, they are failing spectacularly.

More likely, the ministry of the exterior, the IDF spokesperson office, and civilian operations are trying to influence narratives.

From what I can tell these other efforts are not doing so well either.

I think you are wrong on both parts.

Cognitive / Narrative warfare has become part of standard doctrine for most major militaries.

Earlier discussion about "corporate" spin offs from the intelligence sector. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34803779

Looking how many countries backed the current Israeli government for how long despite targeting the civilian population, as well as stuff like OP on most major platforms they seem to be horrifically effective.

Hyperlocal public opinion bot campaigns in third world countries are different from swaying public opinion in the west.

I would not say any governments other than the US government "back" the Israeli government. The most the Israelis get is a cold neutrality, and an occasional abstention instead of yea vote in the many UN general assembly votes against Israel.

>I would not say any governments other than the US government "back" the Israeli government.

The situation in Germany is really bad. Openly illegal bad. It seems to be similar in large parts of the EU, despite countries like Ireland showing some backbone. Ruling politicians are using "obviously illegal means" (according to court ruling after court ruling) to silence and prosecute opposition to crimes against humanity. Going as far as police dragging away people with signs pointing to statements from UN officials.

Its "Neighboring countries should be worried" levels of bad here. I told what is happening here to an old friend who did his time in the Swiss military as an analyst and i am unable to contact him since.

On another news, the UN, which is a political international organization, and not a company or an "app", have a large blind spot for many attrocities around the world.

It is important to criticize those apps but most important to look at the reality you really face, like "Denmark and Germany arrest terror suspects planning attacks in Europe" [1].

Also, you can follow by the HRW 2023 report [2]. I think they forgot to put an executive summary that gives you a quick glance around the world. [3] helps.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2023/12/14/denmark-...

[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023

[3] https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2023/01/World%...

Whataboutism[0] at its finest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Censorship has been done to both people with right-wing views and left-wing views. It's not a question of if it's been done.

We need to stop censorship of people on both sides. Obviously, this is very hard (or it would have been done by now). My idealist brain wants some big, overarching solution but I don't think that's really possible.

There’s a good piece from someone (formerly?) at Reddit about how to do moderation without consideration if content; I’m not expressing a take either way behind it being worth a look.

I'm not sure it's correct to classify this particular instance as either left- or right-wing; additionally, misinformation should be censored.

From the article: >Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”. Even HRW’s own posts seeking examples of online censorship were flagged as spam

This issue seems almost parallel to the paradox of tolerance in that algorithms which promote content at a global scale - largely without human oversight - should not be unregulated.

It is factual to say that human rights violations are occurring in Palestine. It is also factual to say that people have a right to defend themselves, and to recognize that atrocities are atrocious. But to silence the already-oppressed furthers oppression, and Meta is to blame here, again.

We should also consider the potential implications that Meta, with a market capitalization of hundreds of billions of dollars, has in regard to US foreign policy vis-a-vis support of Israel.

Supporting Palestine is generally a left-wing view (proof: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2022/07/11/american-views...).

So Meta is censoring a mostly left-wing viewpoint.

What you've cited is US-centric; it's both reductive and fallacious to categorize this as left- or right-wing, when again, the article states that this phenomenon was observed in more than 60 countries.

Perhaps where you're located it is a predominately left-wing viewpoint, but the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.

The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid being a US right-wing viewpoint is somewhat unsurprising, though.

> "the rest of the world in general is very much against what Israel is and has been doing.

The casual admission that support of war crimes / apartheid..."

The "rest of the world" in general supports a ceasefire in the Gaza strip as evidenced by recent UN votes.

I'm not aware of any Anglosphere, European or Asian nation describing Israel's actions as either war-crimes or perpetuating apartheid.

While I'm happy to be corrected with sources - conflating the two seems like both a extreme reach and needlessly political.

The majority of the UN has consistently recognized and attempted to resolve what Israel is doing, as evidenced by their voting history in the years (decades?) prior to the events of the last few months.

For your situational awareness, sarge - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_war_crimes

Don’t just downvote; lmk what you think!

I didn't downvote you but I can see why you were - your Wikipedia article doesn't support your argument - the strongest point it makes is that the UN HRC has an enquiry into Israel's actions.

There's several references to various NGOs calling for action against Israel but as we've seen recently at the Harvard and other Ivy's, that's deeply murky territory.

That's very, very far away from your claim that the rest of the world generally accepts that Israel is committing war crimes and instituting apartheid. To repeat, its well established that the rest of the world generally (and increasingly) supports a humanitarian ceasefire in the region.

Desmond Tutu alleges "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/06/southafrica.is...

Irish President accuses Israel of war crimes: https://www.timesofisrael.com/with-irelands-sinn-fein-on-the...

UN Representatives from South Africa, UK, and India author report on war crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Fact_Finding_Mi...

Israel's Attorney General accuses state of apartheid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Israel#Accusation...

Then-VP Biden criticizes settlements in east Jerusalem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/0...

...and similar statements from an EU High Representative: https://www.consilium.europa.eu//uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressd...

US Department of State report on racism / discrimination: https://2001-2009.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41723.htm

UK MP compares actions to Nazi Germany: https://www.jta.org/2009/01/16/global/mp-kaufman-likens-isra...

Ergodan describes enacted laws as Zionist, fascist: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-...

South African cabinet minister "That is what apartheid and Israel have in common": https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/06/southafrica.is...

That should be a sufficient sample to show this viewpoint is not isolated to only NGOs or one geographic area, and the variance in time should highlight how long this commonly-held recognition has been stated publicly by elected officials.

Many of these examples have external or ideological reasons to do so though. Criticising Israel has no costs while supporting them has costs, but I would imagine that most of them are not going to put actual policy with consequences with that. If anything, they'd be more than enthusiatic to work with Israel when the question of a trade deal or security agreements come up.

"Criticising Israel has no costs while supporting them has costs"

It often carries a cost in domestic support. It carries trade costs as the US, Uk and others punish BDS, while no Arab countries impose secondary sanctions on countries that trade with Israel (as many themselves do). This is just untrue.

You’re now arguing in bad faith - your original claim was the world generally accepts that Israel commits war crimes and institutes apartheid.

You’ve just posted a bunch of links that reference criticisms of Israel, most of which mention neither war crimes nor apartheid. Every nation has faults and the West Bank settlements are deservedly criticised.

They are neither apartheid nor a war crime, however.

It's not accurate to say that the non U.S. world largely supports Palestine in this conflict. At least the EU seems to lean more towards Israel support.

>misinformation should be censored.

Misinformation is just information that people in power don't want people knowing.

> misinformation should be censored.

This is such a fallacy. When the ones in power don't allign with your view, your view will be "missinformation".

The Vietnam war, Iraq war all got started on made up missinformation. Guess what kind of "missinformation" any laws about it would target?

How is it a fallacy? I mean misinformation by definition; you’re correct that power structures may distort truth to achieve an objective, and that’s not good - that’s the prima facie misinformation I’m talking about here.

I agree it would have been better if news outlets like the NYT didn’t regurgitate things like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as factual, but that will happen when the intelligence community is embedded at said news organizations.

The fallacy is that there will be no objective classification of what is considered misinformation. Rather, it will be arbitrary. So you can't censor misinformation. You will censor information.

As someone who professionally dealt in mis- and dis-information, I strongly disagree. It sounds as though you’re bending the definition to your own dystopian ideas.

What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

The fact is people are unprincipled and will either complain about free speech or will clamor for it, or complain about censorship or clamor for it depending on point of view.

I wish people were principled and stood on principle and not what dog they have in a fight.

Yep, everyone is full of shit and self interested. Accepting that makes it easy to tune out weak rhetoric from all sides.

You could try paying attention to human rights reports instead of assuming a false equivalence.

Sadly I agree with this. It seems like the best summary of how most people treat free speech is basically:

"If my side is the underdog, talk about how important it is and complain that we're being censored, and if my side is winning, talk about how it's not necessary and those people can go elsewhere"

It was extremely obvious when Twitter was bought by Musk and the rules changed to favour far right wing content and rhetoric. Suddenly all the folks talking about that XKDC comic and no free speech on a private platform had a very different tune once their side was the one getting banned or censored there...

If you disagree with how a platform is run, go somewhere else.

I agree that it's sad you agree with this.

No matter what people say it's a private company and they can censor or use your data anyway they wish. If you don't like it go elsewhere.

I hate that idea but I accept it. If I didn't accept this then I am in favor of random political entities dictating what is accept content.

The vast majority of people are principled on outcomes, not the details of how to get there.

So when aiding in an attempted coup or a coordinated effort to manipulate votes to subvert democratic institutions, their principles are focused on stopping that from happening. But we simultaneously admire the founding fathers - who committed a coup and massaged democracy to embed their own power and ideals. And it's regularly asked (though less commonly with time) why Germans didn't just "kill Hitler", by people who would call the assassination of Abraham Lincoln appalling. Because it aligns with their principles for the outcome of "a better world for people", which is what they actually care about.

Being dogmatic on the implementation details is important as a preventative measure for abuse by bad actors later, mostly. But forgetting that the end goal is a more just world is just as deadly, because it can let institutions be warped and abused, even if they technically don't break "principles". Plus, I think the last 100 years have made it fairly clear that the real threats and tyrant don't care, they'll just break your principled rules and just... Do it?

Anyway, I find it curious that you call "being against an active genocide of a race of people, the murder of innocent women and children in their open-air prison" a simple "dog in the fight". As if stopping thousands of deaths isn't worth breaking a principle or two? Now I don't know enough about the situation to say that's what's happening or not, but that's what these people are the very least feel. Try to use that perspective when engaging the discussion.

The platforms are large enough now that there is a public interest in the moderation decisions that they make. Like a utility or a mail carrier or an internet service provider, if you reach a certain size in an industry that tends towards a natural monopoly, then the public has an interest in regulating your behavior towards neutrality.

> Their platform, their rules?

This works at a national level too: "our country, our rules (laws)"

And FB and the like have been found to break a number of laws in the past: https://edpb.europa.eu/news/news/2023/12-billion-euro-fine-f...

Perhaps alternative planforms would have a better chance if FB played fair?

> What was it we used to hear? Their platform, their rules?

Yes, and it's absolutely still their platform and their rules. And people also have every right to criticize that platform and its rules, as they're doing. What Meta is doing is wrong, but it should emphatically not be illegal.

> What Meta is doing is wrong

The very first example in the report is "river to the sea" which is arguably a dog whistle for genocide. Parts of liberal Europe have banned this slogan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_river_to_the_sea#Lega...

This comment section is a blast.

Btw, just saying “this phrase is considered hateful by many” is inane. Many people find many things hateful but they don’t get the same weird instant “you bigot!” label as some of what I see directed towards Palestinian supporters. It’s nuts.

I have no dog in the fight. Just giving some useless anecdotes for people to get angry over.

But also, 1000 is not that many in the grand scheme of things like Meta said.

Meta is as rigged and rotten as it gets. I live in Iran and whenever I have posted something political (not just rants, something serious) or any serious about the gov, it always got taken down. During the Woman,Life,Freedom movement everybody reported how instagram would take down important rebel news and posts and journalisms. you would think meta would work against something like the Islamic republic but it seems like it love all corrupt dictator governments. Let it be Islamic republic or Israel.

Thank god I have left all meta platforms for about 3 years now. But anyone who claims Meta is not pure evil is either evil themself or really really stupid.

People still use Facebook?

Instagram, yes. Some billion of them, I'd hazard a guess.

(Depending on your country) Whatsapp has Channels, some of those news channels' views are completely one-sided.

Odd. When I open instagram reels all I see are pro-Palestinian posts, including the now intolerable “threads” box. I doubt that report is accurate.

I have nearly no followers on Threads and follow only 2-3 people yet somehow I am bombarded with pro palestine content on the odd occasion i open it. I somehow doubt the guardian is right on this one. This “newspaper” is known to gave all sorts of dubious agendas.

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