Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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