Where in the linked pdf is any evidence that the reported content was actually innocent?
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
Are we really shocked by this? It's screaming obvious but we still have many people whose head is buried deep in the sand.
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
I'm not sure how effective it was; I've seen plenty of content related to Gaza on Meta platforms, and I'm located in the US.
It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
Its the same problem. Whats happening in Gaza is a direct result of the construction of an ethnostate. Whatever the resultant state is called, it should protect everyone who lives there, jewish or otherwise. Instead of a Jewish State, it should be a state where Jews are one of the people who are safe.
I haven't had time to dig into the report, but this is utterly unsurprising given previous reports, and due to employee and former employee whistleblowers. See also:
I say this not in defence of the Israelis (ab)use of Meta's takedown system, nor in defence of the Israelis conduct towards Palestinians: this is low-quality, sensationalist work.
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
I do want to mention one more thing. There are more leaks that will be shared in the coming days. Many of which are related to mass censorship, theft, fraud going on at Meta.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
I m not surprised a bit by this. Meta has again and again shown that they have no scruples and no moral compass. But it's surprising how little knowledge about it and reaction there is from its users, who are otherwise very very critical when "mainstream media" does propaganda on them. It's probably because FB takes a very low key approach with branding and tries to make itself transparent to its users.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.
Massive respect to dang et al, but a blind man can see that posts about Gaza get brigaded.
We would all love to see a report on unusual activity in regards to posts on Gaza.
The fact that many pro israel person believes they are the right side, and we just don’t get it.. is just bothering.
Literally every sane human being there is seeing what is going on, yet they refuse to see. Really interesting; especially when you think people used to question how germans followed hitler, and did not see what is going on. I think we all saw how such might happen these days.
Also the fact is; this whole thing will be considered as a genocide, will be told for generations. Palestinian holocoust will he the new one told in the ‘not again’ lessons, and name ‘israel’ will live with it.
38 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 78.8 ms ] thread*EDIT: It looks at 30 minutes in this post got flagged. Likely brigaded by mass downvote bots.
Any mod can take a look?
I have no proof, only suspicion. You can easily skirt “The Algorithm” using VPNs and get vastly different content.
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
Its the same problem. Whats happening in Gaza is a direct result of the construction of an ethnostate. Whatever the resultant state is called, it should protect everyone who lives there, jewish or otherwise. Instead of a Jewish State, it should be a state where Jews are one of the people who are safe.
- From 7amleh: Erased and Suppressed: Palestinian Testimonies of Meta's Censorship: https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te...
- AJ+ documentary "Inside Israel's Influence on Meta": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12btf2Oq820
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
On my FB wall Israel is losing. I see several pro-Palestinians posts every day and I am yet to see one pro Israel one.
Not a single one came from my friend or people in my groups. I am not interested in seeing neither side's propaganda.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.
Literally every sane human being there is seeing what is going on, yet they refuse to see. Really interesting; especially when you think people used to question how germans followed hitler, and did not see what is going on. I think we all saw how such might happen these days.
Also the fact is; this whole thing will be considered as a genocide, will be told for generations. Palestinian holocoust will he the new one told in the ‘not again’ lessons, and name ‘israel’ will live with it.