Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta

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I like to think we are in a better place than russia for instance with all its propaganda and jailed journalists, but then i see these kind of article come over and over....<p>Most of the people in the &#x27;free world&#x27; goes on mainstream media, like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to &#x27;suck up&#x27; to the government because at the end they are business, they need to be in good term with ruling class.<p>you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that because no one has the time to fact check everything.<p>One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone can actually look for real information, but even in russia people have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.<p>Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that&#x27;s true but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream media and they enforce the government narrative, you can&#x27;t speak there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe the government propaganda, your arguments won&#x27;t be heard at all.<p>The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

So when the government pointed to the disproportionate support for Palestine on TikTok vs Instagram, it was actually because Instagram was suppressing it. It is ironic.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;hawleymo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1717505662601609401" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;hawleymo&#x2F;status&#x2F;1717505662601609401</a>

The missing part of this article: are the requests valid? Are they actually incitements to terrorism and violence or is it just a clamp down on criticism? The headline of the article implies the latter but the body does not provide any evidence for that.<p>Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that. I would expect there to be quite a lot of incitement to violence related to that. I would expect the israeli government to be mostly concerned with incitements of violence against its citizens. In the context of this conflict i would expect such incitements to be mostly be made by the demographics cited in the article due to the nature of the conflict. The article seems like it could be entirely consistent with take downs being used appropriately. It needs more then this to prove its headline.<p>Heck, from this post we dont even know relative numbers. How does this compare against take down requests from other groups?

Not a surprise. I remember last year seeing that posts to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.birdsofgaza.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.birdsofgaza.com&#x2F;</a> were being blocked, and it&#x27;s hard to think of a more innocuous way of speaking out.

I&#x27;d like to see examples of actual posts that were taken down, rather than talk of the quantity, or who filed the reports.

One off test, but for this guy, with large BSky and Twitter accounts, made the same pro-UA post on both, the post on Twitter was suppressed for about 12 hours, until it was spammed by hate bots, and <i>then</i> was made widely visible. The BSky post had lots of responses, starting from the moment of posting, almost wholly pro-UA.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;willhaycardiff.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lkjabe5wmk2v" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bsky.app&#x2F;profile&#x2F;willhaycardiff.bsky.social&#x2F;post&#x2F;3lk...</a><p>On the face of it, Twitter itself is suppressing in line with Donald&#x2F;Elon&#x27;s agenda, and running hate&#x2F;love bots.<p>Also saw another BSky poster showing a horrific anti-immigration post on Twitter getting spammed by love-bots.

I just re-read the article, and there’s no evidence of wrong doing. There’s a bunch of circumstantial stuff that people are choosing to feed into their narrative.<p>Facebook has some rules and community guidelines, the Israeli government recognized some posts that violate those and asked for them to be taken down, and Facebook complied in accordance to their own rules.

Just want to call out that the head of the trust and safety&#x2F;integrity division, Guy Rosen, is an Israeli citizen with a strong pro-Israel bias. He’s also a person of questionable morals. From Wikipedia:<p>“ Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger founded Onavo in 2010. In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo&#x27;s analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp. Since the acquisition, Onavo was frequently classified as being spyware, as the VPN was used to monetize application usage data collected within an allegedly privacy-focused environment.”<p>That Meta considered his questionable ethics a feature not a bug, and repeatedly promoted him, is very problematic.

This sort of thing has happened before in the US:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2011&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-the-robber-b...</a>

This is the same reason they want to buy TikTok and banned it had nothing to do with Chinese influence it was that the censoring of pro Palestinian content was not being done like in western platforms and Israel and Israel bought US politicians did not like it.

The role of the media (including social media) is to move in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy. This has been known for some time [1]. It&#x27;s never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying &quot;hey, silence X&quot;. It&#x27;s about a series of filters that decides who is in the media and who has their thumb on the algorithmic scales, as per the famous Noam Chomsky Andrew Marr interview [2] (&quot;What I&#x27;m saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn&#x27;t be sitting where you&#x27;re sitting&quot;).<p>Noam Chomsky is a national treasure.<p>When a former Netanyahu adviser and Israeli embassy staffer seemingly has the power to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on Meta platforms [3], nobody should be surprised.<p>If you&#x27;re a US citizen who is a journalist critical of a key US ally, that ally is allowed to assassinate you without any objection of repercussions [4].<p>This is also why Tiktok originally got banned in a bipartisan fashion: the Apartheid Defense League director Jonathon Goldblatt said (in leaked audio) &quot;we have a Tiktok problem&quot; [5] and weeks later it was banned. Tiktok simply suppresses pro-Palestinian speech less than other platforms.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;consent01&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chomsky.info&#x2F;consent01&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.middleeasteye.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;metas-israel-policy-chief-pushed-removal-pro-palestinian-instagram-posts-report" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.middleeasteye.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;metas-israel-policy-chief...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;israeli-forces-killed-abu-akleh-without-justification-un-inquiry-says" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aljazeera.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;2023&#x2F;10&#x2F;16&#x2F;israeli-forces-kil...</a><p>[5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Roots_Action&#x2F;status&#x2F;1767941861866348615" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;Roots_Action&#x2F;status&#x2F;1767941861866348615</a>

&quot;Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel...Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs submitted by the Israeli government in an average of 30 seconds...All of the Israeli government’s TDRs post-October 7th contain the exact same complaint text, according to the leaked information, regardless of the substance of the underlying content being challenged. Sources said that not a single Israeli TDR describes the exact nature of the content being reported&quot;

Realistically, how can we uncover this type of foreign interference? As in, is there any hack someone in our community can perform to expose Israeli propaganda? Israel locked journalists out of Ghaza, and has pretty much dominion over social media in the US. How can someone remain informed or expose misinformation campaigns (ideally without repercussions, which is a dangerous control they have over our gov)?

“According to internal communications reviewed by Drop Site, as recently as March, Cutler actively instructed employees of the company to search for and review content mentioning Ghassan Kanafani, an Arab novelist considered to be a pioneer of Palestinian literature.”<p>So this person is actively thinking about a Palestinian revolutionary that was assassinated by Mossad over half a century ago, and is using their position to push for internal censorship of him accordingly.<p>Imagine if a Palestinian employee at Meta suggested censoring mentions of past members of Haganah.

Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people is seen as pro-Hamas, even if I shout at the top of my voice that I don&#x27;t care for the armed factions and political jockeying of either side.<p>I will expect to be downvoted to hell for this.

If Apartheid South Africa could last just a little bit longer, they would still be an apartheid state like Israel is today.<p>Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-censoring which is reprehensible.<p>The idea of Hamas wouldn&#x27;t exist if Gaza (and the West Bank) wasn&#x27;t occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.

... so while we were all worried about TikTok, being owned by a Chinese company, would be a vector for that government to push a skewed&#x2F;propagandized stream of content on the world, Meta has already been doing it for a foreign government despite not having foreign ownership.

This is John Spencer the chair or urban warfare studies at West Point Academy. The most prestigious military academy in the world. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=25xaPTsmGGE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=25xaPTsmGGE</a>

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;ex-meta-engineer-sues-company-claiming-he-was-fired-over-handling-of-palestine-content-123057080.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;ex-meta-engineer-sues-company-claim...</a>

People who have been posting against the Israeli genocide have been familiar with this for a long time now. The censorship is extremely evident; thankfully the truth is coming out. Food for thought: if you are on the side of truth, you do not need to censor.

The problem is the pro-Palestine movement irrecoverably linked themselves to Hamas, a terrorist organization, it&#x27;s made supporting Palestine a toxic position to hold for anyone of any significance.

Why shouldn&#x27;t _any_ radical propaganda (unfortunately this is the case with most of pro-palestine content, even if for understandable or good reasons) be removed?

Globalize the enchilada !

And then Zuckerberg says he&#x27;s all about free speech, even mocking Europe as not being free-speech enough

Just like IBM on &quot;IBM and the Holocaust&quot; (a must read). A genocide being supported by the US companies &#x2F; media just in front of our noses.

If this appals or surprises you but then you call others conspiracy theorists when they&#x27;re disseminating things that don&#x27;t align with your mainstream political views, you need to learn from it and stop playing the game.

&gt;&gt; <i>The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023.</i><p>Nice to see Zuckerberg taking free speech as seriously as he claims.

Facebook&#x27;s boss has repeatedly shown that he&#x27;s an amoral hypocrite , most blatantly after Trumps election. I m not particularly sympathetic to palestinians but what&#x27;s going on here. Its not just Israel, facebook has succumbed to authoritarian governments like Turkey in the past. The ubiquity of facebook and its monopolies are directly contradicting the spirit of democratic Constitutions worldwide. What&#x27;s the point of guaranteeing freedom of expression when a single entity&#x2F;person controls the attention of billions and billions of people.<p>I think we need a rethink of freedom of press laws in the age of international monopolies.

Judges have now ruled that suspected &quot;expected beliefs&quot; that are &quot;otherwise lawful&quot; is grounds for deportation, if those suspected thoughts are &quot;antisemitic&quot; (read- supportive of peace in Palestine).<p>They are literally arresting and deporting people for suspected thoughts.<p>Student visas are being denied based on social media posts.<p>This is fascism.

Once again, the USA is #2 to their Israeli masters.

Honestly who cares? They just fit into the region, which is one murderous, genocidal cesspool. The fact that it happens to the usual genocidal majority in the region (sunni-muslim) is the only thing that drives this artificial outrage and the muslim brotherhood oilstates who push it. They have wiped all minorities from nearly all middle-east countries over the course of the last 70 years, so if a thoroughly murdered minority wants to run a defensively structured ethno-state- be they copt, greek christians, armenians, belotschis, druse, kurds, jesidi, zhorthastrian, hindu or whatever - just go for it.<p>The western delusional denial about the realities of the ground when it comes to multicultural societies (think Beirut) shouldn&#x27;t pave the way for more murder and atrocities as it already did.

&gt;Meta’s Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, Jordana Cutler, has also intervened to investigate pro-Palestine content. Cutler is a former senior Israeli government official and advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.<p>Concerning...as another billionaire would say

Was anyone else confused reading the title? At first pass I was asking myself &quot;metadata from what?&quot; then figured out oh not metadata, data from Meta.

Why is the word Israeli removed from the title? and Meta added? Seems like quite a politically-important modification

[flagged]

Mark needs to go

Edit: I&#x27;m deleting most of my post, to avoid politics part and only preserving my &quot;point&quot;<p>Basically I&#x27;m saying: Nobody has a right to free wide distribution of their thoughts on social media anyway, and also, those who provide these free ad-supported platforms have many reasonable motivations to remove content -- including the belief that the speaker is wrong&#x2F;spreading lies and propaganda. That doesn&#x27;t &#x27;silence&#x27; them any more than not letting them into my house silences them.

People still use Facebook?

Yesterday, my high school son was sitting on the couch. Asked him what he was doing… “social studies on the partitioning of Palestine in 1948”. More spicy a topic that I was expecting. Intrigued, I asked ChatGPT a few questions about the religious populations of modern Israel throughout the centuries. Got some interesting results and asked it for some clarification on the political sensitivity of this topic. It agreed it would be challenged by many. Anyway, decided to share it with my son, and texted it to him on his iPhone from my iPhone. Normally that would be sent via iMessage, fully end to end encrypted, and yet this time, when I was sending potentially politically charged views on israel, it was sent as SMS!! Now, I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but… that got me questioning why, on any of the thousands of messages I’ve sent my son, this specific one wasn’t sent encrypted. Hmm

&quot;Israeli Campaign&quot; is it really that weird for someone to ask to take down posts calling for their annihilation?

Is it just me or is this post very low on the hacker news order even though it has much more upvotes in a short time than much of the posts above it.

This is a <i>really</i> hard problem. Just consider that there are ~150 Muslims for every Jew worldwide. In the USA it&#x27;s the reverse - 2:1 in favor of Jews, concentrated in particular geographic areas.<p>Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system, you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can represent Jewish history. It&#x27;s clear to me <i>why</i> this happens, but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely difficult.

I think my country (USA) would be healthier if a common sense viewpoint was selected and held.<p>Conflicts are always terrible, and the Eurasia &#x2F; Africa region countries are particularly brutal.<p>Every citizen of every country has a human right (in a civilized civilization &#x2F; society) to live a life that does not involve violence. A life where they are not worried about RPGs, bombings, (etc,) or military invasions.<p>Some sources of conflict involve places which various (different) religions hold as sacred &#x2F; holy. Those sites should become UN world heritage locations and be managed by the UN in ways that only allow non-military peaceful access for any who want to visit.<p>With respect to Gaza my personal opinion remains unchanged. Both an innocent civilian people who suffer, and a terrorist government, remain in that region. The civilians should be evacuated. The terrorists who remain after (or whom are caught and found guilty in a trial) should be purged. The country should then be cleaned up, rebuilt, and returned to the innocent people along with a training-wheels UN supported government that brings stability, peace, and prevents a resurgence of hate and terrorism. In a few generations the country can grow more stable and graduate from the guided government structure.<p>That would be not just a two state solution, but a two states and global peace sites solution.