For what it's worth, The Intercept has not been able to verify what this group is claiming.
>A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.
>The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group’s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted.
Who is the judge of “inflammatory” content? It’s just censorship plain and simple. Why not let the truth be told?
Edit: judging by the way the votes keep going up and down there's a yin to the gatekeepers of inflammatory content's yang. These are actions of a rogue state y'all.
There is a network of pro-Israel and even Israeli government affiliated corporations and NGOs that successfully lobby for extreme censorship and social restrictions, such as a ban on sharing and even viewing all Gaza war footage in Australia, and the numerous anti-boycott and anti-organization rules across government organizations in 30+ American states.
Even if it can't be confirmed as of yet, I have no doubt that they are working on or have actually achieved the connections to make this possible.
>Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism.
Does that still exist? If you do investigative journalism maybe you win the admiration of the public. If you align with the powers that be, no nasty things happen to you and maybe you earn some money.
The people with power over the journalists' career and reputation are in this case the party they'd piss off by doing proper journalism. They're not gonna do it. It's indirectly the main reason why no one trusts journalists in general anymore. Nearly everything is consolidated under the same people and whatever isn't gets smeared and blacklisted.
> I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact.
Virtually all information about the current conflict in the near east between Israel and Palestine might be considered "unverified rumor", whether the entity relaying the information is a state or a person with a camera. For better or worse, this is a standard of information we need to deal with.
Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept....
> Perhaps the idea of a "fact" is something that needs revisiting as a concept
The field of epistemology is ancient. The problem of what can be known and how we can know is even older. I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
This is a terrible point because what philosophers know have nothing to do with what the general public needs to learn right now. The idea of a "fact" absolutely needs revising for almost all people.
I don't think that fact is an 'idea'; if something can't be proven to be true, it isn't a fact. We should consider calling it something else.
The concept that needs revising is our understanding of social media posts as being automatically considered 'facts'.
If it can't be proven, if we can't trust any vehicle to independently verify its veracity, then we simply have to check as many sources as we can and consider it as a possibility, not a fact.
No, but decline of traditional journalism, social media, artificial intelligence, and post-truth society sure calls into question a lot of best practices to figure out probable facts.
Epistemology hasn't changed; but the engineering of how one ensures they are probably reliably informed sure has.
On the flipside, we have a lot more information about how brains tend to process and weigh information to form beliefs.
> I don't think this conflict raises any fundamentally new questions on an epistemic level.
There are plenty of philosophers that rejected the idea that objective consensus is possible, even more so when faced with assigning a truth value to arbitrary phrases. Off the top of my head, both Hume and Kant noted the impossibility of true posteriori certainty. You're quite correct that this is well-tread territory, but you're wrong to think that there's some widely agreed-upon, well-defined theory of truth or knowledge.
Pragmatically, we're completely immersed in floating signifiers and appear to rely on them for fundamental communication, so I'm more arguing for a move to discussion of degrees of certainty & consensus rather than a binary understanding of knowledge.
(...and this is even before diving into gettier problems!)
I often see posts in technical groups im in from people asking for help re-opening their hacked instagram or facebook accounts. Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to speed up the process for friends/family
Reminds me of the so-called “floating population,” a concept especially related to those living outside their “approved/official” province or municipality in China.
> Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.
Does anyone know if that’s a lot? I don’t know either way. I just have a gut feeling that compared to the number of posts made by bots on any political matter it barely matters.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be more efficient to counter with more bots going in the other direction with likes and posts.
You have to measure the effect by summing the reach of every removed post. Removing a post from n account with ten followers is not the same as removing one from an account with ten million followers.
Wouldn’t deleting posts of high-profile users be easily noticed and lead to Streisand effect? The article says it didn’t manage to verify the cited claims.
I'm just a random schmuck with no backchannel connections, but I get Twitter notifications several times a day about accounts being locked or suspended as a result of my report. The internet is awash with explicit antisemitism.
Perhaps because I’m not on a paid subscription, I either never hear from Twitter after a report or they reply along the lines of ”we found no issues with a photo of Hitler doing the Nazi salute in a thread concerning Jews”.
I flag most posts that I disagree with, don't understand, or simply don't like, and the success rate is hit-or-miss, but not in any kind of logical way, which just inspires me to cast as wide a net as possible. I call it stochastic decluttering.
I stay away from Twitter for my mental health, so I'm not well versed with their systems. Do you not have to select the reason you're flagging sometihing? Is flagging something that you don't understand or just don't like abusing their reporting system?
Personally, I always select the correct reason and it does not seem to help. I don’t think “disagree” is a valid reason, I report obvious misinformation/racial hate/threats/gore.
> Among a list of LinkedIn content that Iron Truth told its Telegram followers it had passed along to the company was a post demanding evidence for the beheaded baby claim, categorized by the project as “Terror/Fake.”
Just one instance of that is one too many in my books.
Is there a name for this tactic that people like you use? Where you think you can deflect attention from the disgusting atrocities of October 7 (atrocities which continue to this day as the perpetrators continue to torture hostages) by laser focusing on just one perhaps false claim made during the fog of war?
October 7 was a barbaric act of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping, involving men, women, children and babies. Women were forced to watch their children burned to death before themselves being burned alive. Men had fingers, toes, hands and feet removed before being shot in the head. I couldn't care less if the rumour of beheaded babies is false because there were enough atrocities at the same scale which have been confirmed. Shame on you for deflecting from this fact. Shame on you.
Nearly every single thing you have just listed as "things that happened on Oct 7" have ALREADY been debunked and shown by INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS to be a lie.
Mutilation. False. Burnings (except by Israeli tank shells and Hellfire missiles). False. Beheaded babies (the one thing you did admit to). False.
You just PROVED the entire raison d'etre of the article, and of the poster you responded to.
A lot of these are indeed missing evidence verified by journalists. But mutilation is not one of these. Mutilation of already dead bodies were captured on videos recorded by Hamas terrorists and released on the 40 min propaganda video by the IDF which has had public screenings and were watch e.g. by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. See e.g. this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc5iG3DX7ho) of a pro-palestine activist recount of that video. This is actually a good recount and does list quite many of the oft cited supposed atrocities which are indeed missing, at the very least, from this particular compilation.
And, in addition to what I posted above, that 1 non-Israeli-shill journalist (Owens) whose video you linked to, was NOT invited and actualy sneaked in by an acquaintance who was.
And needless to say, he wasn't allowed to take the footage away with him, so that a careful forensic analysis could be done.
All of which FURTHER UNDERLINES what I said above.
Two simple reasons a video like this wouldn't be circulated widely:
1. Out of respect for the dead.
2. Because they retain the option to circulate it more widely when it most benefits them politically. There's not much need right now; Israel has overwhelming mainstream support in the west, despite appearances to the contrary online.
A number of very credible news organizations have reported on the video, as has the State Department. You could bet against it, but given the cards remaining in the shoe, I wouldn't.
I don't know what you think Israeli war crimes, which I don't dispute, have to do with the veracity of the video footage the IDF has collected of Hamas's October 7 attack.
I have seen a gruesome hamas video of them hacking at a Nepali worker's neck with a hoe. It was publicly available in reddit. There were burnt remains of victims at different sites, and have seen media reporting them with graphic videos. It is interesting how hamas supporters downplay the horrors of the October 7 attack and try to change the narrative.
If you have to label everyone who goes against the narrative that Palestinians are "human animals" that must to be wiped off the Earth, and other things Israeli politicians said while the IDF is doing it (or even just anyone who cares about factuality full stop) a Hamas supporter, that should tell you something.
> If Israel’s cause is just, let it speak eloquently in its own defense. It is very telling that some of Israel’s own supporters instead go to extraordinary lengths to utterly silence the other side. Smearing one’s opponents is rarely a tactic employed by those confident that justice is on their side.
The same principles that condemn the crimes of Hamas condemn the Israeli atrocities. It's really not complicated once you strip away all the labels of pro-this and anti-that.
There's one unshakable truth emerging g from this genocide.
Israel TELLS you what happened, and it has been caught lying so much that it barely registers an upturned eyebrow any longer.
Palestine SHOWS you what happened, with 100s and 100s and 100s and 100s of videos, testimonies, etc, etc.
And that's why the vast majority of the world no longer believes you.
And why one side (guess which one?) is busy massacring journalists into the 3 figures now. If that side had the truth on their side, then they wouldn't be doing that.
Even if the October 7th attacks had been worse than the rumours, does anyone really think that justifies killing thousands of innocent people including women and children, displacing over a million, destroying hospitals and cutting off water and food supply?
When there is a school shooting, should it be punished by a massive bombing campaign on the town where the perpetrator lives?
These atrocities are just plane wrong, no matter the motivation. Pointing out the crimes of Israel is not the same as supporting violence by Hamas. Both sides are in the wrong for their treatment of innocent civilians, however Israel is entirely to blame for their illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
It's called "intellectual honesty". It's not a tactic, it's more like a strategy.
One crime doesn't justify or deflect from another. Simple as that. And to exploit the victims of the Hamas attacks to commit ethnic cleansing is not honoring them, it's really just exploiting them for jingoistic purposes, and to dehumanize all Palestinians. We've seen so much of that we won't forget for decades.
Not only that, but there is more than enough legitimately antisemitic or pro-terrorism content on these platforms for this to be fully legitimate reporting behavior.
It could be 100,000 posts and this would still be near meaningless without actual context on what is being reported. 1000 posts is a joke.
I dont think Israel is that interested in legitimate anti semitism. Orban ran an election campaign centered aroud an anti semitic trope and he gets along with Israel just fine, for instance.
Their primary target is anti-racist criticism of the state, the apartheid, the war and the genocide. All labeled as anti semitism despite being fundamentally antiracist and running counter to a racist Israeli narrative.
At least in several European countries there was a tendency to label any criticism of Israel as a state as antisemitism. This is the kind of antisemitism they are fighting. They do not seem to care about actual antisemitism in far-right parties, but then they broadly agree with them on policies such as how to deal with Arabs.
You have to multiply the post count by their reach. If it is a strong exponent power law the top 1000 may be the vast majority of what people see on the topic, but they may apply greater scrutiny in removing posts with high reach too.
> they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers. …
I wonder if they see how the whole thing backfires. “Look how we conspire with our secret workers integrated into the larger media and tech companies…”
I suppose the idea was that it wouldn’t be made too public.
This should be looked at in light of the problems Israel faces.
Israel is in serious danger of losing US support.[1][2] Outside of the US, there is very little support for what Israel is doing.[3] In the US, support is bought and paid for with political contributions. “If there was no lobby pushing Congress in a particular direction in a really forceful way, the position of the US Congress on the war in Gaza would be fundamentally different.”[4] The social media effort is only a small part of this.
It's not just social media... I think at this point, every newspaper I've read has more or less started saying that Israel is seriously screwing up, and there is especially unanimity in saying that Netanyahu needs to go.
I'm not going to try to enumerate Israel's mistakes, but when you decide to invite a coterie of journalists to the hospital you destroyed to provide proof of your claims that it was actually a hive center of terrorist activity, and all of them come away basically saying "this evidence isn't good enough," then that should be a sign that it's not PR that's the problem of Israel, it's Israeli actions that are the problem that needs addressing.
And on a personal level, I'm ashamed that my government is giving such unconditional support to a country that is acting in that manner.
> The bare, white-tiled rooms showed no immediate evidence of use — for command and control or otherwise. There are no signs of recent habitation, including litter, food containers, clothing or other personal items.
> “This room was evacuated, and all the gear was evacuated. I guess it was evacuated when they knew or understand that we were going to enter Shifa Hospital,” Hagari said in the video.
As far as you're aware. Okay? What am I supposed to do with that? 2 seconds of googling yielded this:
> According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 26 out of the 35 hospitals across Gaza are non-functional because of damage sustained during the Israeli military assault or the lack of power.
> I'm not going to try to enumerate Israel's mistakes, but when you decide to invite a coterie of journalists to the hospital you damaged to provide proof of your claims that it was actually a hive center of terrorist activity, and all of them come away basically saying "this evidence isn't good enough," then that should be a sign that it's not PR that's the problem of Israel, it's Israeli actions that are the problem that needs addressing.
Americans really have the strangest views of Israeli politics. Bibi is about as moderate as you will find electable and maintain a gov’t there. All the alternates are worse.
I predict Congress will invite Bibi to a joint session of Congress to bolster support and let him trash a sitting Democratic President just like they did to Obama.
Then Bibi can visit Elon again and address any Trump talking points to the enjoyment of alt-nazis on X.
> I predict Congress will invite Bibi to a joint session of Congress to bolster support and let him trash a sitting Democratic President just like they did to Obama.
Interesting. Do you have a link of him coming into the whitehosue and trashing Obama? I assumed that relationship was fairly neutral after Obama gave him $40 Billion over the next 10 years.
> Bibi is about as moderate as you will find electable
Netanyahu is not electable. I mean, Israelis do not "elect" their Prime Minister, but still.
> I predict Congress will invite Bibi to a joint session of Congress to bolster support and let him trash a sitting Democratic President just like they did to Obama.
Israel owns our politicians and those who cross them are cut off and via AIPAC they run candidates to replace them.
Losing US support? In what circumstances? We are printing billions to send to Israel with zero oversight.
They launched a $100 million fund to oust “the squad“ & offered $20 million to people to run against them.
Now take a look over on Maui, in La Haina, where US citizens are still having to pay mortgages on the houses that were burned to the ground. Dust & Ash. Where are our aircraft carriers from the pacific fleet bringing infrastructure, supplies, Seabees, Army Corps of engineering and the best minds to rebuild OUR OWN GOD DAMNED communities?
Between AIPAC & DMFI they have hands on most politicians.
Look at the amount of money they’ve spent on Biden—-who proudly states his is a Zionist. Look at Blinken & his background—Google him and his family.
There is zero means to even cobble up a group of politicians to vote against anything regarding Israel.
39 US STATES have laws outlawing BDS or any boycott of Israel if you work for state funded positions. Why? Who funded those laws?
There is zero neutrality & how on earth does our American government portray themselves as diplomats or influencers towards Israel? Or earnest negotiators?
Between our secret military bases there and arms depots and unlimited funding for weapons & aid.
The American public is not aligned with that at all, but that doesn’t matter. PACS & Dark money controls this. Feeding the military industrial complex.
It will take other governments & international courts to change this. We’ll see what happens on Thursday & Friday.
The US has rendered the UN impotent with their security council vetoes.
AIPAC & DMFI should be regulated as foreign lobbyists.
Everything you’ve written is factual and if you wrote it about any other country there would be an outcry. Instead, writing this under your real name will get you fired and could genuinely destroy your life. Isn’t that a bit strange?
> Israel is in serious danger of losing US support
I don't see it happening. Israel has some kind of connection to the US that overrides pretty much anything that Israel does. If you look at any presidential address, Israel's flag is there. I don't think that is just because Israel is our partner. Israel must have something pretty important that we depend on.
Robert Maxwell was Epstein’s mistresses father. We know that Israel has the best in person intel, why would that be limited to the Middle East? Coupled with the long record of nuclear espionage by Israelis it’s not a stretch to think they have a pile of compromat on the NSC and related power groups in the US (Congress, judges, administrators)
They are throwing millions at US politicians left and right, they're not loosing the US support they're loosing the young generation that are on tiktok
>they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers.
And no one gets fired for working in secret for dubious, shady groups. No internal rules were broken, no laws were broken.
I wonder if this group also operates on HN. Two weeks ago I posted a ask HN post that was immediately removed. After seeing that, I concluded that I should drastically reduce my exposure to the media since I think It's just a tool to manipulate.
If you're worried about specific examples, you should email the mods (dang, that is), at hn@ycombinator.com and ask what's going on. I've found dang to be super responsive and thoughtful in his replies when I've had an occasion to ask something about HN's operation.
That's a silly conclusion to those events. HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than israel/palestine.
> HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than Israel/palestine
This does not preclude the effective operation of an astroturfing operation. I would be absolutely shocked if the site were not a target of such a campaign given its reputed influence.
I don't see any Ask HNs on @sigma5's profile. I don't know if flagged or dead posts show up in the profile, but I guess I figured they did (especially if you have showdead on, like I do). It would be a different story if the post were somehow removed entirely, not just downvoted or made dead.
Many of us are in the tech industry. Has anyone seen this sort of thing happen? Or is this something we wouldn't be aware of since it's usually on the "content moderation" side of the house? (I haven't ever worked in social media, so not really familiar with content moderation other than removing the occasional dick pic)
Edit:
> Most of them are product managers, software developers. … They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.
If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history. He ordered the government to no longer contact the social media companies unless something is found to be illegal. This applied to government agencies but does not apply to these groups that might be organized or funded by a foreign government.
I remember browsing through the Twitter Files and finding nothing interesting in them.
Yes, all social media have open channels with law enforcement. That's because social media have legal obligations and when someone comes to a moderator claiming to be a law enforcement officer working on a kidnapping or preventing a terrorist attack and needing time-sensitive help to save lives, you don't want the moderator to have to guess whether that's a real emergency or a hoax.
It's... not a secret. If you live in a democracy, you can quickly find out the name of these channels, they have websites.
Source: I've been part of a moderation team. Not on something that large, though.
"LERS is a system in which a verified law enforcement agent can securely submit a legal request for user data, view the status of the submitted request, and download the response submitted by Google.
If you are a sworn law enforcement agent or other government official who is authorized to issue legal process in connection with an official investigation, you may submit your request through this system."
You may not have read enough. It went way beyond law enforcement which would have been fine and legal. People were censored for talking about dangers of vaccines, war with Russia, and whatever the administration, FBI, or other government agencies determined to be malinformation. The impact of this censorship is still being felt to this day. People were misinformed about the vaccine and the war causing the deaths of millions of people. If people understood that Ukraine had no chance of defeating Russia or that the largely untested vaccine was not safe, many people could still be alive today.
> or that the largely untested vaccine was not safe
At this point, I think enough of us have lived through being vaccinated that this canard fails to hold water.
(Nothing is 100% safe, and the deaths due to vaccine reaction were tragic. The vaccine was orders of magnitude safer than COVID ripping through the population unchecked).
> If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history.
I've been part of a moderation team in a (much) smaller context. Most people want to do good work, but in the end, we're all human, so of course anybody could be influenced, especially in such volatile situations.
How far people are actually influenced and in which direction... that's anybody's guess.
You work at one of these companies for enough years and someone will accuse you of supporting terrorists eventually.
What you learn working for a multinational corporation is that as an international community, people don't agree on much. Including definitions of "terrorism," fairness, geopolitical borders, or the law.
It's a weird feeling. If you ever wonder how companies can stray so far from "obvious" morality... That's how. Things get a lot less obvious when you're in the position that everyone has an opinion and the opinions often conflict.
So to answer your question more directly... It doesn't take long for outsiders accusing you of supporting terrorism to be met (if only in your own internal filters) with "Oh you have a problem with my approach? Get in line."
(On the flip side, a lot of the training for people acting in that capacity in a big corp is how not to get phished. When you are in the front-line of moderation / customer interaction / etc., bad actors will attempt to use you to compromise third parties. There's a reason there are formal processes for dealing with law enforcement, for example).
> If you ever wonder how companies can stray so far from "obvious" morality... That's how.
I don't generally disagree with your point, but I suspect the relentless pursuit of profit above all other values figures more relevant to this narrative than cultural drift.
only one data point, but fwiw when I worked for Google I found some actively toxic youtube content w/upwards of 500k views that was telling children to off themselves, and despite using my employee back-channel connections the most I was able to get was an eventual "I'm not allowed to do anything about this" from a YouTube moderator, though it seemed to be for technical reasons (all the nasty content was in annotations, which apparently weren't wired into the moderation pipeline). There definitely wasn't a red button for me to hit as an employee to get it taken down.
I ended up digging around on the channel and tracked it back to some people of that type, and they had some other uploads that were basically gloating that the video was immune to moderation. It was a rip of the Undertale soundtrack, so laser-targeted at kids (if you're unfamiliar with Undertale, it's recognizable enough that one of its characters got added into one of Nintendo's games)
Sadly if the Undertale soundtrack was aggressively content ID'd/DMCA'd, that would have been a way to take it down. But that would penalize everyone who uploads footage of that game, so obviously that's not done.
Yet if the video sampled Metallica for too long, it would be removed and the feds at your door within minutes. Such is an algorithm that is tuned ad revenue and lawsuites, as opposed to protection. The above story just confirms what the scammers in this video say about youtube about wholesale content scamming with AI editing software.
I used to help run a Facebook page that shared a variety of content. We'd post political things sometimes and we'd get a few angry messages, that was normal.
One incident stands out because we received far more messages than I'd ever seen, it was the time we posted a news story about Netanyahu blaming a Palestinian for the Holocaust. We got several messages about what horrible lying racists we were, that was common to all the messages, but they had one main difference. About half the messages claimed Netanyahu never said what he said. The other half claimed he did say it, but he was right.
Yes, of course. Content management is the expected standard when dealing with crowdsourced content. This includes any data coming from social media. This is subject to essentially private, subjective concerns.
Even if you look into it from the outside you see it happen. This isn't a new phenomenon, it really took off steam around 2014 or 2015. Then when Trump was elected it hit another level.
It was clearly shown in the Twitter files that there are many relations deep into social media companies and that is very likely true for every larger platform.
It would be surprising if there weren't backchannels, because they have become relevant, sadly.
It’s notable that suddenly there’s push back against DEI initiatives, anti-racism and “decolonize” language the moment it was used to criticize Israel.
No, Many criticized these initiatives for years because they are a bundle of bad ideas. And it was predictable that these ideas would also be used to criticise Israel as the alleged oppressor.
It was a predictable as its failings to alleviate prejudice in any form. It is because of the bad ideas, not political allegiance.
I think there's a big difference between the opinion of most of the people in tech and those at the very top (CEOs and VCs). I see wide support for Palestinians with pretty much everyone, but the VCs are almost universally, militantly, Zionist. It's a huge issue that those funding the industry and those working in it (and consuming it) hold such extremely different opinions on an issue as serious as genocide.
Hard not to see these recent stories about backchannel deplatforming and social media accounts getting accidentally-ed and not recall the warnings that this behavior won't stop with just the people/views you prefer not to see. It was all great fun when "election deniers" and lab leak "conspiracy" theorists were getting ban hammered right and left. But now we're where you were told we'd get, and the righteous defenders of establishment narrative have you in the crosshairs.
In the long run, anyone who thinks for themselves will eventually be on the "wrong side" of an issue, and the people who copy the leaders, even when the leaders change, remain "right" through all of them. See also: the huge number of brilliant intellectuals burnt to death by the Church because they applied the principle of making up their own minds about stuff to religion. That means, if there is a policy of "burning" people who are "wrong," it will eventually catch every free thinker.
>I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
Some commenters here ask, "is this guy lying," but I can't help but wonder... was there any correlation between him flagging the post and Facebook's internal misinformation police taking it down on their own? They take down a lot of content every day. It would be pretty funny if the whole crusade was made up of people who could find doomed posts a few minutes before the moderation system does, and so think they're the ones taking things down.
Anyone who has ever posted a "I need help" here on HN and gotten support has also used "backchannels".
An actual concern would be if this "backchannel" turned out to be messaging an insider who acts outside of policy. We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least, but I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
> We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least
That former twitter employee was found guilty of acting as an agent of a foreign government. So far the Israeli lobby has a free pass to meddle in without triggering the same treatment. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-twitter-employee-found...
> I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
The sheer volume of pro-palestine, pro-hamas (those are not the same), pro-islam and anti-jewish sentiment[0] I am bombarded with on Tiktok tells me that either:
* there is no moderation
* There is absurdly overwhelming pro-terrorism and racist sentiment
* The bot/spam farms are in full war mode.
I find it hard to believe that content is being moderated with any pro-israel bias on tiktok.
Ask the pro Palestinian content creators about how many posts get smothered with zero traction, how many get infractions and how many replace the word Israel with invented words to not be blocked by TikTok’s algorithm. How many now have backup accounts because they are threatened with removal.
> Iron Truth members have flagged thousands of posts for removal, from clearly racist or false content to posts that are merely sympathetic to Palestinians.
(emphasis added)
If you aren't connected enough to get Google to fix your email, your business is disrupted. It's unfair but life moves on. Maybe next time you don't use Gmail.
The stakes are much higher here in an actual war / genocide. People are starving, dying, having their homes stolen, etc. and this is an attempt to deny them a voice.
Also FTA:
> I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
American companies should not engage in propaganda for a foreign country. I find it reprehensible that foreign nationals from a nation currently engaged in conflict are deliberately working together to push a foreign agenda on the people of the entire world.
This is way, way different than not being able to use Google apps for business.
I think it would be safer to remove all political posts from social media (both sides) as policy. There is a massive propaganda war on both sides and all it does is amplify sentiment, create further division, hurt more people and compromise security over time.
The press are bad enough at coming up with verified claims from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
Of course our current American social media dictators are pretty lax on doing anything positive for society as a whole while it benefits them.
How do you disambiguate "political" content from "content people want to share?"
The hard thing about "getting politics out of X" is that every time people are involved, politics is involved. Politics is just what people think the group should be.
> The press are bad enough at coming up with verified claims from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
No doubt. One of these days we might successfully drill into people's skulls "Stop getting your news from social media; that's not news that's rumors."
> No doubt. One of these days we might successfully drill into people's skulls "Stop getting your news from social media; that's not news that's rumors."
It's much worse than rumors: it's often deliberately misconstrued/out of context, or outright lies.
Rumors I don't mind so much, since they're usually pretty obvious.
Indeed. Then again "the news" is well known for carefully editorialising things and conflating unverified sources as facts on and off. General journalistic standards have been compromised because there's a race to get the information in front of people faster than social media and it is now seen as ok to correct it later. This is mostly online though. Print and televised media is usually not as real time.
I have found a lot of pro-Palestinian YouTube videos are put behind warnings pages unnecessarily - the preventing them from going viral.
Here is a great example, this Chris Hayes of MSNBC news segment on the MSNBC YouTube channel where he is incredibly critical of what Israeli leaders are saying:
Here is probably the best example, here is an official IDF video that shows clearly dead bodies and there is no YouTube content warning, just a warning that the IDF put in their video - thus allowing this video to still go viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta7ScT67vQ0
This is extremely concerning and hints at a potential intentional organized suppression of information that is calling out the horrors that are being committed in Gaza.
It has been going on for decades, openly discussed among pro-palestine activists in the US since the early days of social media. One of the first and most reliable "mainstream" users of reddit was israel posting "idf thirst traps" though that nomenclature didn't exist for it back then.
I was a mod of a few semi-popular subs back then and we'd get bombarded by requests to remove comments critical of israel in those threads. A few times messaged by state employees under their real names making their case for a pro-israel mod stance. This was like circa 2008-2011, real ron paul le bacon atheism obama days.
Actually, the fact that Gazans are far better off than Syrians and other Arabs in other conflicts is rarely discussed. Israel is required to destroy Hamas in Gaza as the US was required to destroy Germany and Japan. But Israel has been using hi-tech weaponry rarely discussed even on HN, a tech website.
For example, Iron Sting, a mortar guided by both GPS and laser is used even at night so that when a Hamas terrorist emerges from tunnels, they are immediately blown up. This helps to preserve Gazan civilian lives but not discussed in the media.
I was asked to sign in to watch that video, since it has a content warning. Is that something that happens to other news broadcasts dealing with war footage?
Usually yes, anything that has “on the ground” footage or even b-roll of soldiers conducting maneuvers often comes with content warnings. Even on broadcast news.
Three days ago a number of accounts with massive followings were suspended from Twitter; @zei_squirrel, @AlanRMacLeod, @kenklipperstein, and @TrueAnonPod. They were later reinstated and Twitter claimed its algorithms had misidentified them as spam accounts. Strange how that so frequently happens to pro-Palestinian accounts, but never to Zionist accounts. Clearly, there are well-organized and well-funded (and possbly even state-sponsored) "flagging campaigns" working to remove as much pro-Palestinian content as possible.
whats interesting is that zionists often feel the opposite occurs and its hilarious to watch, as someone’s whose algorithm surfaces content from multiple sides of this conflict based on my friends being on multiple sides of this conflict
every side is saying “but you never see it happening to them!”
“why is nobody discussing this! I know, it’s because they are secretly wishing for our annihilation!”
like get a therapist lol. algorithm driven echo chambers going to echo.
You can see this happen out in the open when Paul Graham (or anyone else) posts statistics about who's been killed, raw footage... he's immediately swarmed by people, some major players in the industry, accusing him of "antisemitism", which it most definitely is not.
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.
From my understanding their numbers have been fairly accurate throughout the years, do you have any specific examples of prior extreme discrepancies? (Because from what I followed, even the US believes those numbers to be accurate, but I would be happy to be corrected)
I'll answer your question, but first I'll ask you a question: Do you know how the Gaza Health Ministry generates their death toll? What do you think of their methods? My guess is you don't know but you trust it because you see these numbers repeated in the media (just like China's COVID death toll).
If you ask me how Israel calculates its death toll the answer is pretty simple: they use archaeologists, forensic medical teams, and more
One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy was the Health Ministry claiming that ~500 innocent civilians died when Israel bombed al Ahli hospital. Of course, we later discovered the hospital wasn't bombed, the parking lot was, the bomb wasn't dropped by Israel but was rather an errant rocket from Hamas, and that far fewer people died. In other words, a series of lies. The Health Ministry never corrected the death toll and kept adding from that.
You can google around for dozens more. As I said to the prior commenter, I'd rather not have a debate here about whether the numbers are accurate (not because I'm not confident but rather because of the famous XKCD) and I simply mean to point out that Paul Graham has one standard for China's COVID death toll and a completely different standard for Hamas's Health ministry figures.
I still this still ignores important points, and ill make some comments and questions, some of which might be pedantic so feel free to ignore them
1. Regardless of the method, it was fairly accurate for years, and matched closely to Israeli estimates of casualties in prior conflicts.
2. The US, Israeli's largest ally, is not doubting those numbers. This alone says alot given that the US from a strategic perspective would want to present Israel in the best possible light they can given the majority of the globe is heading towards leaving Israel in isolation.
3. The Israeli claim against Almamadani hospital incident is placing the blame on Islamic Jihad (not Hamas) (pedantic point)
4. The issue of Almamadani hospital incident is still not settled, especially as the Israeli claimes have been debunked by multiple entities most notably the New York times. [1]
5. Ignoring the questionable numbers of this specific incident, because you might be right, but its interesting that the US's admission that the death toll coming from Gaza is accurate came at a date way after the Al mamadani hospital incident (my claim would be that this incident has been taken into consideration by the US officials when they admitted the accuracy of the death toll coming from Gaza). This paired with the US's strategic support of Israel makes their admission that the death toll is accurate is way more trust worthy than possibly exaggerated COVID death tolls, as in one case its an admission playing against the admitter, whereas the other case the admission is in favor of the admitter.
But thank you for sharing the Twitter thread, I'll investigate it and look into other sources as well
Hi keefle, thanks for taking the time to write this in such a reasonable, friendly way. I appreciate that. I notice you still didn't answer the question of how the Gaza Health Ministry gets their data. Do you have confidence in their methods? Are they going into North Gaza (now controlled by Israel) and looking at dead bodies?
2. The American government's position has shifted over time from outright denial of the Health Ministry numbers to "we don't know, but we do know there are too many deaths." Let's see how it continues to shift as the conflict evolves.
4. Remember the context. You asked for an instance of the Gaza Health Ministry lying and I provided one. Are you now saying the 500 dead figure was accurate? Because if so, you're wrong that the matter is unsettled. While the exact estimates vary from as few as a dozen KIA to ~300 KIA, the entire open source intelligence community, all western intelligence agencies, and most publications agree the initial death toll was wrong. Also--not to be pedantic--but the NYT retracted their early coverage of the al Ahli hospital incident; the piece you link to was widely panned by open source intelligence experts; and it doesn't actually question the incident -- it just calls into question one particular piece of evidence.
5. I don't think you're following the narrative. Israel has said that the total death toll may be roughly 30% lower than what the Gaza Health Ministry asserts, but they also argue the list is NOT accurate. The list says almost everyone dead are women and kids, whereas Israel claims that roughly 8,000 militants have been killed and 1,000 captured.
First, Israel has been carpet bombing Gaza for weeks on end. They have destroyed everything & bombed housing, schools, mosques, churches, universities, kids schools, restaurants, bakeries & every aspect of civilization there.
How many Palestinian journalists have been murdered or had their families targeted and extended family bombed by the IOF?
The IDF have targeted & murdered more journalists in 2 months than in any other conflict.
The IDF is the only military on the planet that has a military court for juveniles and imprisons them by the thousands. You can search this all out on YouTube & see footage of it. They were holding boys in open air cages in the winter. Their parents not even knowing which military prison their kids were in.
We see the US bombs falling 24/7 on all of Gaza. We see what is going on every single day.
We know the Israeli policy of “mowing the lawn” every few months.
We SEE it. You should own it and be revulsed by it, just as you should by the Israeli Apache gunships emptying their machine guns at Israelis at the concert or the tank rounds. Or shooting unarmed Israeli civilians hostages waving a white flag.
What policy is that called by the IDF again? Oh yeah, The Hannibal Directive. Only now they target their own.
- Israel has not carpet bombed gaza. They've used a higher portion of smart bombs than any other military in history and use F16s to guide their dumb bombs. Israel has dropped more than 25,000 bombs, and according to the high estimates fewer than 25,000 palestinians have been killed, meaning each bomb kills less than one person. Israel also establishes humanitarian corridors, drops leaflets, sends evacuation warnings, allows in aid, establishes safe zones, and much more.
- You're upset that Israel imprisons minors like these guys? https://www.wionews.com/world/are-hamas-resorted-to-training... Save some of your outrage for Hamas using child soldiers. Also, plenty of other countries, including the United States, imprison minors.
- I can see you've been listening to lots of Norman Finkelstein? Israel does not just wake up one day and say "let's mow the lawn" - each time they bomb gaza it's been in response to something like a suicide bomb or stabbing, which has happened for decades in Israel.
- I see you think you're familiar with the Hannibal directive. Can you link me to the text of this directive? The principles are tactical rather than strategic and followed by many other militaries, including the US.
This is a bold claim to make considering the evidence. We have satellite photos of Gaza and many estimates are that over 60% of the housing stock in the entire Gaza strip are damaged or destroyed[1] (some estimates up to 70% [2]; the lowest I could find was 45.3% [3]). Entire neighborhoods have been leveled in all parts of the Gaza strip. At least 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas. Over 65% of the population is displaced. More than 200 heritage and archaeological sites have been destroyed in the Israeli bombardment[2].
The bombings are not uniformly distributed, so if we focus on the most destroyed areas, which is norther Gaza and Gaza city, the numbers are much worse. Looking at this map[4] published by the BBC you can see that every part of Gaza city, Jabalia and Beit Hanoun have been targeted. Between 70% and 90% of all housing stock in these areas are damaged or destroyed[5]. Khan Younis south of the evacuation line has also had most of its areas targeted in Israeli bombardment and with an estimate 50% of all housing stock damaged or destroyed[5].
Here is what wikipedia has to say about carpet bombing[6]:
> Carpet bombing, also known as saturation bombing, is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land.
You have to be extremely selective in you consideration of reports on the evidence to deny that Gaza has been—and is currently in to process of being—carpet bombed. So selective in fact, that you would not just be wrong, but obviously wrong.
Carpet bombing is what the allies did to Dresden. Carpet bombing is indiscriminate. For every bomb that israel drops there is a lawyer approving it. There is lots of damage, particularly in the north (which Israel did its best to evacuate before bombing), because Hamas had built military infrastructure virtually everywhere: under schools, UN buildings, under residential houses, hospitals, etc.
I'm not trying to say there has been little damage to Gaza. There's been lots. But that doesn't mean it's been carpet bombed. There's lots of damage because there was lots of military infrastructure.
You are arguing semantics, and I’m taking the bait. You can do the same with genocide (it is what the Ottomans did to the Armenians) or terrorism (it is what the Irish republicans did in England). But just like genocide, terrorism and apartheid the meaning has broadened outside of the initial conception and prototypical example.
In every explanation and definition of carpet bombing I find online the focus is on the destruction, not the method. Yes, historical examples of carpet bombing has used unguided bombs, and the targets have been indiscriminate. However what is important is the damage and the time period. That is, the damage has to be massive, involve every part of a large area, and it has to happen progressively (as opposed to all at once; this excludes the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima). The bombing of Gaza checks every one of this criteria.
What doesn’t matter is the bureaucratic process before a target is selected, whether the bomb is guided. If a military specifically targets over half of all residential building, many historic and cultural sites, civilian infrastructure, etc. runs this through lawyers, who approve the bombing, then uses precession guided bombs to destroy these targets, and does so over every area, than that is carpet bombing.
And just to hammer the point home. Hamas still to this day retains the ability to fire rockets over to Israel, despite this vast damage of civilian area. However Israel is picking their target, if they indeed intend on destroying military targets, than they are certainly doing a lousy job.
Of course target selection matters, as does the existence of checks and balances associated with each strike. There is lots of destruction because Hamas built its military infrastructure in and under urban environments.
Maybe this is semantics to you, but to me carpet bombing implies indiscriminate bombing, which is the opposite of what Israel has done, despite its having dropped many bombs.
The amount of residential areas being bombed seems to suggest that the bombing is indeed indiscriminate. It is hard to believe that 70-90% of all buildings in Gaza City are valid military targets.
Bombings can still be indiscriminate even when you carefully select and hit each and every target. The indiscriminateness is just moved from an imprecise bomb to a non-discriminatory target selection method.
But fine, don’t call this carpet bombing. Call it something else. The level of destruction is on the maps, and has been documented to be extremely severe. More severe than in any other bombing campaigns since World War 2. Perhaps this amount of destruction warrants a new name that accurately depicts the horrors of something worse than carpet bombings.
"the Earth goes around the sun, so this is not what you see with your own eyes" is not an argument. The declared aim is to make Gaza unlivable, the actions match it. Including just turning off water, talking about human animals. And the destruction is not "regrettable", it's a despicable atrocity.
And then there is the IDF just going into civilian buildings, villages, rigging them up and blowing them up, singing about moving into Gaza and all that. The idea that it's only about military targets does not hold a drop of water.
The declared aim is to make Gaza unlivable? Really? Israel has stated hundreds if not thousands of times that he declared aim is to (1) destroy hamas's ability to wage war; (2) return the hostages; and (3) prevent such an attack from recurring.
Yes, there have been particular government officials who've said they want to make Gaza unlivable, just as there are crazies in the US congress and senate who say things like we should nuke the middle east.
In terms of the earth going around the sun, the point I was trying to make is that at first glance it does look like the sun goes around the earth, just as at first glance it looks like Israel is trying to reduce Gaza to rubble, but after careful observation and adherence to scientific thinking we learn that the earth goes around the sun -- and that Israel is not carpet bombing gaza.
Under the Genocide convention, Israel is obliged to prohibit and prosecute such speech. US senators aren't the standard, just like Hamas is not the standard. Besides one US senators hardly being the equivalent of hundreds of public figures, from the head of state to security and education minister, to army generals and so on. They're crazies alright, but they're not fringe, they're in charge. Those who call it out get viciously attacked, such as Ofer Cassif or Israel Frey ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMKyH4jCnTE )
And the rhetoric matches the actions of the IDF. It's not "just" the bombing, it's also just blowing up whole villages demolition style, before/after making selfies and TikToks making fun of it. Just turning off water, plowing up the asphalts of streets, etc. etc.
It is absolutely 100% mainstream, repeated in almost every speech by Israeli politicians at a ratio of maybe 100:1 that the war goals are what I stated versus what you concocted. I understand it's tough for you to know this since you don't speak hebrew and may not follow Israeli media, but I can assure you--assure you as someone who has followed this topic for 20 years, criticized the Israeli government for 20 years, marched with free palestine-- that you're dead wrong in your assessment.
Also, not sure how much of an expert you are in the Genocide convention, but Israel allows free speech and like the United States it does not prosecute legislators for saying wild things.
There is a massive gulf between your confidence and knowledge.
(1) Hamas retains the ability fire rockets over to Israel despite 70% of Gaza city being destroyed or damaged.
(2) The USA consistently vetoes UN resolutions which would bring back the hostages. So (3) is obviously valued higher then the lives of the hostages.
(3) Do you honestly believe this is achievable via militaristic means?
Israels stated goals—if we ignore those who say the goal is genocide—seem rather vague and/or unachievable. And in the case of (2) Israel (or rather the USA) is self sabotaging.
No, I choose to believe the officials who claim ethnic cleansing is the goal. The reality from the ground seems to support their narrative.
1. This is true, and it's unfortunate that Hamas is firing rockets from safe zones. This makes Israel's job substantially more difficult. But what you're ignoring is that Hamas's military abilities have been substantially reduced, the number of rockets being fired has dwindled, and they are being fired from fewer places. Hamas has all but been displaced from Northern Gaza and Khan Younis will fall probably by the end of the month.
2. Israel will not accept a future in which Hamas, which has vowed to repeat October 7, remains in power. So any resolution that calls for a ceasefire (meaning Israel puts down its weapons but Hamas doesn't) without a return of hostages will not pass muster.
3. Yes, I do believe it is possible to achieve with military means, and moreover I believe it's impossible to achieve without military means. And I believe it already has been achieved in Northern Gaza. I'm not saying Hamas will go away completely, just as Nazism didn't go away completely, but just as the allies crushed the Nazis, Israel can crush Hamas. I think it's unlikely for Israel to get many more hostages back, but I'm glad it's trying.
Interesting to me that you believe the officials who claim ethnic cleansing is the goal rather than the 100x more numerous officials, including the head of the IDF and Netanyahu, who say the three goals are what I stated. Also, there is no ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the ground. The net reduction in the Palestinian population since the start of the war has been roughly 6k people if you believe Hamas's death toll claims (22k deaths, 16k births).
85% of the population of Gaza has been displaced. Officials have from the start constantly stated goals of evacuating people to live in tent cities on the Sinai peninsula. This includes lower or retired officials, leaked documents, and Netanyahu himself to foreign leaders. Make no mistake, this goal is ethnic cleansing. Just because they haven’t been successful, that doesn’t mean this isn’t their goal or that they haven’t been trying. It is my inclination to believe those official given that the reality very much matches their rhetoric.
That you invoke the historical example of the Nazis seems interesting to me. World War 2 is the most devastating war in human history. About 3% of the global population died in that war. You may think Hamas is that frightening but I think this level of destruction is not proportionate to the actual threat imposed by Hamas.
Instead I would like to invoke the historic example of the IRA. Another resistance group that did horrible acts of terrorism, causing countless civilian civilian casualties. IRA was not defeated militarily, instead the Catholic population of Northern Ireland were granted equal rights, and the system of oppression was dismantled.
Israel seem very reluctant to even consider a peaceful solution as an option. So far in the current conflict peaceful solutions has save over a 100 hostages, military options has saved a single hostage (and killed at least 3).
The point with these three goals you—and Israeli officials—claim, is that they are vague or unachievable. Genocide is hardly ever stated as a goal, instead it is hidden by a rhetoric such as these. Particularly the promise of security.
1. If Israel didn't evacuate people from the north, there would be more dead Gazans.
2. Gazans have been begging to go to Egypt; the idea is to allow them to; Egypt refuses.
3. I'm not comparing this war to WW2, I'm comparing the principle that "you can't kill terrorism because it's an ideology" to the comparable principle of "you can't kill nazism because it's an ideology."
4. Of course Hamas was an existential threat to Israel. It literally killed ~1,000 Israeli civilians in a brutal, premeditated mass slaughter, a crime against humanity. If Hamas were stronger, or if Israel were weaker, they'd have killed more.
5. There can be no peace while Hamas is in power, retains hostages, and vows to repeat their atrocities.
6. Not only are Israel's three war aims achievable, but I'd argue they are just months away from achieving the first war aim (neutering Hamas). Time will tell.
7. You started off this thread by saying Israel's stated war aim is to ethnically cleanse Gaza. When I pointed out this is wrong, you changed your argument to some Israeli officials have said that. So you're arguing your interpretation of Israel's war aims supersede the official documentary record.
> You started off this thread by saying Israel's stated war aim is to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
I started off this thread by disputing the claim you made that Gaza is not being carped bombed. To circle back to that point here is an interesting article by the Washington Post Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza[1]. Of particular interest is the comparison to the bombing campaign of Aleppo and Raqqa.
ISIS is without a doubt one of the worse terrorist organizations we have ever seen. What makes ISIS particularly bad is that—unlike Hamas, IRA, Mau Mau or the Viet Cong—they are not resisting oppression of an occupying state but for their fight—like the Nazis—are for their own fascistic ideology and dominance. Their strength and brutality was also far worse then Hamas has ever been. And yet, they were defeated in Syria with far less damage and destruction then what the IDF has already imposed (without success) in Gaza.
I want to be absolutely clear though that the people suffering both the ISIS rule and then later the bombing campaigns which successfully deposed them, were indeed horrendous.
Another point of argument here is that there was no peaceful solution to ISIS. There is one for Hamas. ISIS wasn’t resisting oppression, Hamas is—just like IRA, FLN, etc. before them.
When someone flashes a knife and mentions $racist_slur -- or in the case of Israel, actually just arbitrarily kills people, turns off their water, blows up civilian buildings after posing for selfies, making all these sick videos playing with the children's toys of displaced or killed Palestinian families, attacks refugee camps even in the West Bank, just rips up roads, tears down shops with bulldozers, hands out weapons to utterly deranged settlers -- and then talks 5 hours about how they're a fan of African Americans or whoever they slurred, how much they like rap... you don't weigh these things against these other.
What could be weighed against it could be protest against and prosecution of the genocidal statements and actions. Nothing else, not ever.
There still are Israelis with conscience who are against this. But they're in the minority, as shown by Israelis demonstrating in front of the house of Ofer Cassir, tearing up a Palestinian flag with a scissor, grinning from ear to ear -- the first member of the Knesset they want to expel for supporting having this brought before the ICJ.
And there is the translate button. We can translate audio, too. Everybody speaks Hebrew. And whatever change in tune from here on out, while not changing the actions, will not change what Israel showed the world. Just like cutting off Internet access to Gaza will not make the world forget about Gaza.
But since we will simply not agree on this anyway, I want to ask, did you march with "Free Palestine", or with Palestinians? As in, in those 20 years, did you make Palestinian friends? If so, what are they saying?
1) Israel does not arbitrarily kill people. The ratio of dead combatants to dead civilians is roughly 1:2, which is better than the US or other Western powers achieved in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's obviously also significantly better than Russia achieved in Mariupol alone (75k dead civilians, about 5k dead combatants).
2) I repeat: The IDF, Netanyahu, and other leaders have said a zillion times that the goals are to neuter Hamas, bring back the hostages, and provide a Hamas-free future for Gaza. These goals are consistent with their actions, which include dropping leaflets, sending text messages, doing roof-knock warnings, establishing humanitarian corridors, safe zones, allowing in aid, and more.
3) Yes, I have many Palestinian friends, and while I would never march with the current #freepalestine movement, which I think is highly antisemitic, I did march with the movement for years. Most of my Palestinian friends are afraid to speak up for fear of career damage. I encourage them to speak up and tell their side! I can guarantee you I've donated more to Palestinian causes than you or almost anyone on the thread has.
4) Do you think when Israel goes into a West Bank town they just do so for fun or malice? I mean, seriously! What a weird conception of the world. They go in and risk their soldiers to get terrorists, of which there are many.
5) I encourage you to browse Israeli media and hit the translate button! Based on your limited knowledge, I would guess you're not doing this at present. If you were, you would never claim Israel's goals are to make Gaza unlivable.
6) Yes, there are bad apples in the Israeli military who destroy stores and worse, but that is illegal in Israel and those soldiers get punished and face the military justice system. The same thing happens in every war, including US wars. Remember Abu Ghraib? That was far worse.
I mean, they've been calling for genocide since ever: When Genocide is Permissible, Times of Israel (opinion, 2014), https://archive.is/EuUdc
> The same thing happens in every war, including US wars. Remember Abu Ghraib?
One crime doesn't excuse another. Genocide has also happened, as has ethnic cleansing. Those are not the Pandora's Box the World wants to open again, and rightly so.
Aizenberg55 seems like a disinfo propagandist shill. No different than any other shill, Gazan or Russian or German.
For instance, Aizenberg55 discounts the fact that over 10,000 bombs were dropped in the first 10 days, which resulted in higher casualties than in the later stages of the war, with fragile lives that of infants and young kids dying of shock and fear. It is also easier to count the fatalities when an entire building is reduced to rubble and everyone in it is either buried or dead. You don't need archaeologists and nuclear scientists to count.
> What do you think of their methods?
Their methods have been known to be robust. IDF, in the past wars, have arrived at similar numbers to those presented by the Gazans.
> One of the most obvious examples of a prior discrepancy.
- First, people are allowed to be wrong and change their minds when presented with facts. There is no need to hold them to prior beliefs and beat them for it forever.
- Second, if you don't personally know Paul Graham, I doubt you're in a position to judge whether he's willfully accepting ordinary claims just because he's a closet anti-semite, when the fact is, a wide number of independent institutions also accept those claims.
For example, Hamas claimed that an Israeli bomb struck a Gazan hospital and killed 500. Later the consensus viewpoint is that (1) it was a failed Gazan rocket launched at Israel that malfunctioned, and (2) it struck in a parking lot and the death toll is likely much, much lower. Hamas, a terrorist organization that repeatedly launches rockets at Israeli civilians, does not have a ton of credibility.
Yes, of course there is reason to suspect Hamas is untrustworthy. I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press. This doesn't mean they always tell the truth, but there is no equivalence between them and Hamas.
In terms of specific reasons to doubt the Gaza Health Ministry numbers specifically, I could go on forever about that, but I don't see the point of doing so on HN. It's not a tech-related question.
> Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press
Israeli law allows news censorship by the IDF. Currently, if you are a news outlet working in Israel, you have to pass your war coverage by them [1,2] even the CNN is forced to do this [3]. I don't know, but you seem to have a strange definition of free press. Should I list some of the series of scandals of IDF caught laying in the past to complete the picture? Just remember that they tried to convince people that the words [Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday] in Arabic are Hamas members names [4].
Can you name a country that doesn't allow news censorship by their military during combat? The same exact thing happens with US journalists embedded with the US military. It's obvious operational security. I'm guessing you don't speak hebrew, but Israeli journalists are even more critical of their government than American journalists.
I believe there is very little reason to assume the numbers are not accurate. Not only have their numbers been fairly accurate in previous conflicts, but also many US officials believe them to be accurate if not underreported.
It feels more like an Israeli attempt at using fog of war and the masses ignorance on the matter to soften the reaction and spread doubt about the real numbers. As this talking point was continously used by Israeli spokespersons even after US officials believed these numbers to be fairly accurate. I would be happy to be corrected, I wish the numbers are actually less, and would want this to be the reality.
Not the OP, but does it matter if I specifically know how the numbers are generated? I'll absolutely appeal to authority and accept that the United States, various United Nations agencies, MSF, etc accept these numbers as reasonably accurate and acknowledge that they're in a far better position to understand the provenance of the data than I'll ever be.
Great - I'll rely on scientific thinking -- nullius in verba -- and ask questions I'd ask anyone else about how they gather their data, how they know what they claim to know, etc. You believe in the church when it says the sun revolves around the earth.
I don't have the arrogance to assume I can become a domain expert in everything that happens. At the end of the day these people are dead. Killed by Israel. And the world's experts agree. One UN official explained how after previous conflicts they've engaged in post-hoc investigations to ascertain the accuracy of the Gaza health ministry numbers and found them accurate. It's unfortunate for Israel that the numbers make it appear that they're committing a genocide. There are any number of strategies Israel could employ other than indiscriminate mass slaughter. They'd rather deny the numbers than stop incrementing them.
Nobody is asking you to be a domain expert. When it comes to almost any other issue, people ask how and demand evidence. But when it comes to Hamas's claims of a certain number of dead, nobody seems to ask "How do they calculate it? Are they looking at morgue data? Are they doing photographs of mass burial sites, as Ukraine did? What is their method?"
So people are asking you to be scientific and critical rather than to uncritically repeat the claims of a belligerent in combat.
Finally, I'm not sure if you're saying this facetiously or if you genuinely don't know what Israel is capable of, or the lengths its gone to to reduce civilian harm but Israel is not doing indiscriminate mass slaughter. That's what Hamas did on October 7.
Ok, fair. My curiosity about methodology was satisfied when I saw an interview with a UN relief director who explained the retrospective examination of past casualty reporting that had happened.
I mean completely seriously that Israeli occupation forces are engaging in deliberate mass slaughter, including widely reported upon declarations of certain zones as safe for civilians followed by the bombing of those zones (https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-01-03-2024-...).
The UN is unfortunately not a credible source when it comes to this issue. Hostages have been held at UN employees' houses; the UN failed to condemn the October 7 attack for months; and they denied that rape occurred for months.
While you rely on authorities, I'll do what enlightenment thinkers do. Ask questions like "how" and "what is their method."
Israel has a vested interest in discrediting the UN, this does not mean that the UN is in fact not a credible source. I'll glaze over their non-condemnation (since nobody required to condemn the IDF to participate in this discourse) and I'll say that independent investigations have yet to substantiate the accusations of sexual violence and infant beheadings that the Israeli state makes. So at least on that accord, the facts are on the side of the UN denials.
It may well be the case that Israel has a vested interest in discrediting the UN, but it's also pretty clear that the UN doesn't have much of an interest in establishing its own credibility. The Human Rights Council includes military dictatorships and countries responsible for unquestioned genocides. It has had a standing agenda item ("Item 7") regarding Palestine and the "occupied Arab territories"; Israel is the only country to receive such attention. The Special Rapporteur on Palestine, Francesa Albanese, has accused the US and Europe of being "subjugated by the Jewish lobby". The UN itself sponsors several organizations dedicated to the Israel/Palestine conflict, despite drastically more severe human rights issues elsewhere on the globe.
None of this is to defend any of the Netanyahu administrations actions in Gaza. I think these discussions on HN are largely cursed, and nobody is going to persuade anybody to "switch sides". You don't have to agree that the UN is, as Israel's supporters would say, so clearly biased against Israel as to be fatal to their credibility. But I don't think you can dismiss the charge easily. If you dig in, you're going to read some uncomfortable stuff.
Probably not, plus as a former UN brat (DISCLOSURE!), this stuff tends to get my goat a little.
Since the org is huge, multipurpose and multifaceted (and often less than the sum of its parts), I'd say it's best to stay as specific as possible both when using some UN thing to buttress an argument or to critique the thing - so, what is the thing, by what org, person, representative, etc.
In this case, the specific thing is
an interview with a UN relief director who explained the retrospective examination of past casualty reporting that had happened
Which doesn't seem to be linked? From there the whole thing swerves into a discussion of 'The UN' which turns to vague generalities that are mostly (I think often unintentionally) recycled talking points. 'Israel seeks to discredit the UN' is a recycled talking point itself, of course. But I think 'HRC has bad members' is too - the UN is full of bad members. The Security Council has an aggressor state on it with veto power and everything! UN has a lot of orgs and items dedicated to the conflict? Sure, but Israel and the UN were almost born together and the conflict is one of the closest things the UN has to a foundational, OG issue - state formation, genocide, wars of aggression, right to defense, refugees, it's all there. Special Rapporteurs are kind of unserious (and why is there no Special Raconteur)? A real thing but doesn't seem clearly related to whatever interview the poster read.
Anyway, sorry for the grumptone, I just think substantive UN critique is such a fecund orchard of low hanging fruit there's not much point in settling for the frozen trope concentrate stuff.
These are all points well taken, and my general approach of dipping into fever threads only when there's something concrete I think can be added to the thread does in this case seem to be contributing to veering. It's just memorable to me because I got my ass handed to me in a conversation with a friend about how credible the anti-Israel bias argument was. But I don't pretend this is dispositive of anything; my only claim is that there's a colorable argument here, it's not just some random made-up thing.
Hey Paul, I just want to clarify that you are an idol of mine and I hugely respect your thinking. I've read your essays for decades. I think there may be an imbalance between your knowledge and confidence when it comes to these matters, but I still highly respect you and I know you're more philosemite than antisemite. Thanks for inspiring me for decades.
Hey, I'm sorry I didn't link the specific interview! I believe it was PBS, and I'm highly confident the individual from the UN in the interview was Martin Griffiths.
With regard to the evidence for sexual violence, can I ask you what would be an acceptable form of evidence for you that doesn't include watching a video of a girl getting raped?
Also, with regard to the beheadings, I know this is uncomfortable, but it's worth looking into a bit more than you have. There is lots of evidence that would pass muster in any court.
> With regard to the evidence for sexual violence, can I ask you what would be an acceptable form of evidence for you that doesn't include watching a video of a girl getting raped?
> “She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast. “One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.”
If people accept that at face value from a party that calls people "human animals" and turns off water for civilians and all that, while prepping to take over occupied territory it doesn't even consider occupied but theirs, well.
> Also, with regard to the beheadings, I know this is uncomfortable, but it's worth looking into a bit more than you have. There is lots of evidence that would pass muster in any court.
If it would pass in court, you can link to it here. Because, again, so far it's been claims accepted at face value, then attacking those who ask for evidence (it's in the OP article even, someone asking for evidence being flagged as "terrorist/fake"), then still no evidence.
I'm kind of tired of showing people evidence of rape, but yes, all the evidence does exist, and at some point you will see it. You can even find it today if you search around carefully.
And the refrain gets old when used as a cover for Israels terrible actions, but it actively makes me ill nowadays, maybe not as ill as "IDF is the most moral army in the world" when I think about the tens of thousands of kids they have blown up (killed and injured) I suppose.
The blame for kids dying lies on Hamas for (1) recruiting child soldiers; (2) building weapons factories in children's bedrooms; (3) building terror tunnels under schools; (4) preventing civilians from evacuating from the north... I could go on.
Not sure if you're a Hebrew reader, but you don't know what you're talking about with regard to journalism in Israel. Have you ever read Gideon Levy? There is tons of criticism of the government and its conduct in this war in Israeli media.
The blame for the kids dying lies firmly with the IDF/Israeli government. They have agency and they have made a choice to seal borders, cut off food, water and electricity, and bomb the living shit out of a captive population. Hamas have their own crimes they can answer for. I wouldn't mind if the leadership of Israel, IDF and Hamas were dragged before the ICC war crimes. Lock them all up, tbh.
Reporters Without Borders are a widely recognised and reputable organisation. Here's the direct link to the entry on Israel:
At the beginning of 1945 the allies had most of germany occupied. The nazis didn't surrender, and the allies killed countless german civilians until they did. Who was responsible for their deaths? The allies or the nazis?
That's like saying America isn't a liberal democratic state because of Trump and the republican party. Israel is a liberal democracy, far more liberal than America, and there were hundreds of thousands of people who marched against Netanyahu.
Israel has a parliamentary system, no? It seems appropriate to blame the parties that forms the coalition for the behavior of the state, and there's certainly no shortage of illiberal actions Israel has done against their own citizens in the last three months to point to.
Regardless, our (USA) parties are in fact the biggest blockers to our functioning correctly as a liberal democracy. One is desperate for votes from anyone, the other party is terrified to pass anything or imagine any kind of future that isn't a slightly less grim version of what the republicans offer. Just by our ability to come to a consensus and do things as a country, we seem to have ground to a complete halt. So yea, people should be a lot more critical of whether or not we're actually espousing the democratic ideals we claim.
Friend, Israel has a shitty party in power and a shitty prime minister in power, but that doesn't mean it's not a liberal democratic state. It's pretty obvious that you don't know much about Israel. Do you know that the kibbutzim that were attacked on october 7 were full of people who used to go to Gaza to drive gazans to Israeli hospitals? I myself have donated to gazans and marched with palestinians for decades. I will not stand silent as people who know much less than they think they do make overconfident statements maligning Israel.
I agree that having Likud in power is not in and of it self a reason to cast doubt over democracy in Israel. However I do think that the occupation over the West Bank, the Blockade of Gaza, the double judicial system for Palestinians vs. Israeli, the apartheid, the unequal paths to citizenship, etc. together makes Israel no more democratic then Apartheid era South Africa or pre-civil rights era USA. Neither of which constitute a liberal democracy be modern standards.
2 million Palestinians live in Israel as equal citizens. They're called Israeli arabs. They disagree with you that Israel is an apartheid state. There are arab supreme court justices in Israel. Those Palestinians love Israel. There is no separate judicial system for them. There is no apartheid. There is a separate judicial system for foreigners, like people living in Gaza, just as there is in the United States.
I do not agree with Israel's policies on the West Bank, but the issue is more complicated than I suspect you think and I encourage you to read Israeli perspectives on it.
Gaza is not part of Israel. They have their own government (Hamas), their own military (Hamas) and their own administrative functions. Israel withdrew in 2005, forcibly pulling out every Jewish person that lived there (and Jewish people have lived there for thousands of years).
Gaza is and has been effectively occupied by Israel since 1967. It's independent from Israel in the same way that Xinjiang is independent from China. Sovereignty and autonomy in Gaza have been aspirational ideas since Sharon's 2005 disengagement. Meanwhile: only a small fraction of the population of Gaza has ever voted (they're too young to have, in the last election, wherein Hamas threw supporters of the PA off rooftops), so it's deeply misleading to describe Hamas as "their own government".
Pro-Palestinian rhetoric on this site goes off the rails in so many directions, and because it seems to be the majority opinion on the site, there are many more examples of off-the-rails comments from that side. But this assertion of Gaza's independence from Israel is one of the reliable off-the-rails pro-Israel sentiments I see here.
To me "occupied" means there is control enforced by troops on the ground. Israel didn't have any control of what went on inside Gaza.
Gaza was blockaded. Israel tried to control who and what goes in and out of Gaza (to try to limit the weapons Hamas has). But Israel had no control over what the Hamas Gaza government did in Gaza, how they spent their budget, what they built, what they taught in schools, what their military was planning.
A common pattern for state autonomous zones seems to be devolved local governance, but no foreign policy or inter-state security, which seems to describe Gaza pretty well.
The national / federal government is able to send agents and enforce its will on states / provinces. Israel was not able to send anyone into Gaza.
It would be a "breakaway province" situation, except that:
a. Israel intentionally got all its citizens out of that place and
b. Israel had no intention of taking control and forcing Gaza to join back into Israel.
Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.
Gaza was mostly an independent country at war with Israel and not even a little bit an autonomous province of Israel. The war could not be resolved and so it was stuck in a state where Israel thought it prevented Hamas from bringing in heavy weapons but did not want to commit to conquering a city.
I think some people thought that after Israel pulled out in 2005, and Gaza became autonomous, it would become a normal independent country, and people still treat Gaza of 2023 as if it's the Gaza of 2005.
By dint of Gaza's small size, dependence on Israel for resources, lack of control of its own borders (or, for that matter, it's own seafront), mandated lack of control of its airspace and complete inability to land an airplane, total inability to conduct international trade or international relations of any sort, political interdependence on the discontiguous territory of the occupied West Bank, and repeated IDF and IAF military incursions over the last 15 years, it seems facially unreasonable to suggest that Gaza is an independent country just because Ariel Sharon withdrew settlements just under 20 years ago.
I think if someone is going to raise the "Gaza isn't Israel it's an independent country" argument, the facts lining up against an natural reading of that kind of statement make it incumbent on the speaker to lay out the qualifications and contingencies, rather than counting on other speakers on the thread to do it for them. It's not a thing you can just say and pretend is clear; it's more or less an extraordinary claim.
I'd entertain the argument if someone wanted to explore it in a curious fashion. But, like, it's not true. Gaza is occupied territory in the intuitive meaning of the term.
This paints a very rosy picture of the actual situation. Hardly any international organization would call Gaza an independent nation, not even Israel does that. Most (all?) international organization describe Gaza as an occupied territory of Israel.
Having control over a territory is what makes it occupied. And Israel very much has control over Gaza. The government and the legislator is one of few things which Gazans them self control, almost everything else is controlled by Israel, including the population registry, what goes in and out, etc.
> Israel mistakenly thought Hamas was transforming into a national government that is busy governing its territory.
They never thought such thing. There were regular bombing campaigns which Israelis described as “mowing the lawn” (talk about dehumanization) where the Israeli military went into Gaza—sometimes with groundtroups—including in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. In 2018 the Israeli military indiscriminately shot at unarmed protestors inside Gaza. Israel always assumed Hamas to be a terrorist organization first, and an illegitimate government of Gaza second.
Speaking as someone very familiar with the situation in Xianjiang (my best friend is a world authority on it), there are countless differences. The most obvious difference is that Xianjiang became a part of China in 1949, whereas Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Gaza has also been a part of Egypt. Moreover, China's control is focused on assimilation, a crackdown on religious practices, and re-education, whereas Israel is concerned with none of those things. I could go on forever.
B) Apartheid South Africa used the same excuse. That black people lived in independent bantustans who were self governing and therefor not apart of South Africa.
C) You are ignoring the fact that Israel very much controls Gaza, including every border crossing, the airspace and sea access, imposes a blockade, controls the registry, etc. Unlike apartheid South Africa, Israel does not recognize independent Palestine, let alone independent Gaza.
A) I thought we were talking about Gaza? The Palestinian Authority controls the West Bank, so obviously there is a different legal system there. I don't like Israel's west bank policies either, but unless you consider palestinians living there to be Israelis (something I think they'd object to) then of course they have different ways of life and different administrative functions.
B) The apartheid in South Africa was based on race. By contrast the different policies in the West Bank reflect the historical and cultural context there: that it used to be part of Jordan, that the people there want to be separate from Israel, etc.
C) Israel does not control Gaza's border crossing any more than the US controls Canada's border crossing. Israel is an independent, sovereign country, so of course they get to control who goes in from Gaza. The other border gaza has is with Egypt, and Egypt has the same policies.
Your point C is bad. Israel has a border with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Israel tries to control its side of those borders. But Israel doesn't try to control whether those countries have sea and air ports. Israel very much tried to ensure Hamas in Gaza didn't have a sea and airport, to limit the weapons Hamas has. There was (and is) a blockade. Gaza was reliant on Israel and/or Egypt for bringing in food, fuel and electricity. If it was a regular independent country (albeit a small one), it would have control of its own sea and air port, and would be able to bring in heavy weapons from Iran.
Israel controls its borders with Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan. That's what a state does; it's what a state is supposed to do. I too don't like the fact that Israel limits Gaza's maritime access (though it's worth noting Hamas developed a surprisingly sophisticated Navy indicating some degree of control of its maritime access). Hamas has not tried to build an airport in Gaza, though Qatar has proposed one, and proposed managing it. I can surely understand why Israel wouldn't want that.
Gaza was reliant on Israel for water because Hamas not only didn't invest in infrastructure, but literally dug up water pipes to make rockets. Why the heck should Israel be responsible for providing Gaza with water, food, fuel, or electricity? Do you also believe Ukraine should provide this stuff to Russia?
We are debating whether Israel can count as a liberal democracy. And I am using the occupied territories to dispute that, because modern democracies have equal rights for its subjects, and imposing an apartheid system discredits any argument in favor of calling Israel a modern liberal democracy.
Palestinians in the occupied territories may not be Israeli citizens, but neither were the South African residents of the bantustans, so which passports the subjects of Israel holds doesn’t matter. What matters is that Israel controls most aspect of their lives and imposes different rules and condition depending on whether you are Israeli or Palestinian. However you separate the population doesn’t matter either, the fact that Israel does is all that counts.
There is a different legal system on the West Bank, true, however the Israeli settlers living there get charged in Israeli courts, and so do Palestinians, except that Palestinians get charged in a different court system, namely military court. This is a double justice system, and there is no other way of describing it. Modern liberal democracies don’t have those, only apartheid states do.
> I'm not trying to argue one should take Israel's word at face value (of course you should subject it to scrutiny as well), but yes, Israel, a liberal democratic state with a free press, strong left-wing movement, and the second biggest tech sector out of silicon valley, is far more trustworthy than Hamas, a repressive, fundamentalist, authoritarian regime with no free press.
None of this has any bearing on whether or not Israel's word is actually worth anything (...or Hamas's word, for that matter).
Yes it does. When the Hamas government lies in Gaza (say about a death toll) there is no one to question them or dispute their narrative. By contrast, in Israel, when the government lies it's a national pasttime to criticize and dispute them. For this reason, it's easier to tell when the Israeli government is lying than when Hamas lies.
If this "Iron Truth" is a smoke screen to remove any information that is true and sympathetic to Palestinians through mis-categorizing and mis-labeling and that is not hateful then it is a system of oppression and must be stopped.
If you look at the original article what they're looking for is a mix of false information but also things rebuking false things stated by the IDF. Such as the 40 beheaded babies. That's not false information, it was a lie spread by the IDF.
Of course they are. Anyone who's seen that documentary about Israel meddling in UK politics know that these people have a lot of power that isn't just military.
Eh, meddling in foreign politics is just the name of the game of a globalist world. Not really the panacea of a sin I think you're making it out to be.
The mere existence of intelligence agencies is proof, sending aid to others is also proof (which we know gets intercepted all the time), having military bases or consulates, even more.
If all of the above, and more including the recession of all foreign aid would make me believe its a sin again, doubled with strong isolationist thinking and very strict border control.
People can make documentaries all they want, it doesn't matter, they're crying about things their country does all day, every day, and probably even better than those they're accusing. They just don't want egg on their face. I definitely don't really feel bad for hypocrites.
“We have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,”
If this is confirmed it's bad news, and not just for the Palestinian cause. 'They all work together as part of a cabal' in one of the big anti-semitic tropes. This will harm the cause of Jews everywhere, not just Israeli Jews.
I am surprised that reporting on Twitter works. I've gotten positive action on 150+ very vile posts in the past month. Not posts which go against my views, but posts which clearly violate all TOS and social mores. Call me a Karen, but I report hate speech no matter whom it is directed at. Twitter and Reddit are the only sites which take action.
You can post "Hitler was right, too bad he failed at killing all of the Jews" on Threads, Instagram and Facebook with no punishment. You can post it on Twitter, and it will stay there until somebody reports it, but then that account will be locked until they delete the content. Instagram and Threads will say "We received your report" then never give an update. Facebook will do the same, then eventually either say they reviewed the content and it did not violate community standards, or that the are too busy to review the content.
> If this is true, if Israel was really in cahoots to censor anything pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli, I wish they would do a better job. I would pay $100/month to each of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get a Palestine/Israel-free feed.
Just add mute words in Twitter for Israel, Palestine and a few variants and you can ignore what is going on really easily. I did this for Elon and Musk and it made the platform much more bearable for me.
> Without exaggeration, 99% of all suggested content I get on each of these three platforms is pro-palestinian.
Well, unfortunately social media doesn't stop wars, otherwise it would have stopped by now based on likes and retweets. I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
> I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
The politicians want you to think that, but they are beholden to public opinion and follow the herd. There's a reason that powerful actors spend many resources on manipulating social media.
In my experience political donations make more of an impact on politicians than social media. AIPAC is incredibly effective and it is ramping up donations to keep politicians supportive of Israel in their seats: https://readsludge.com/2024/01/02/aipac-makes-record-donatio...
Your glib, sarcastic, bombastic, inappropriate remark aside, the point is that NOBODY is being censored. Claims of censorship are an age old tactic by groups of all sides to get attention.
Censorship actually does happen. In the case of the Gaza war, there's a bunch of evidence. Your refutation doesn't offer much argument: Saying it's impossible a priori is obviously false. Saying you see allegedly censorable content argues, to a degree, against a strawperson: That if censorhips worked there would be no such content.
> I'm not sure I have seen a single post ono any of those platforms which more than 50 comments which did not have at least one "ceasefirenow", palestinian flag and watermelon emoji, or in the case of facebook, a crude palestinian flag from different colored emojis.
This is from your first post. Why do you think people have had to resort to watermelons and other emoji combinations in comments on those platforms?
The only censorship I am seeing anywhere is when somebody challenges the notion that censorship is happening, because that challenges the wound-seeking nature of the post.
His remark is inappropriate, but you saying you don't care about the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and wish Israel did a better job of censoring it is appropriate?
How is killing 30,000 civilians defensive? How is continuing to take hostages in both the West Bank and Gaza defensive? How is targeting journalists reporting on the conflict defensive? On a prima facia basis, it's laughable to call it "defensive."
Hamas's rockets in Gaza are high school science fair-level munitions. It's not like they're getting billions in US taxpayer money.
Israel is just using this as an excuse to "liquidate" the Gaza Strip.
Expressing the views that they do in that video does not make them Russian shills. As I understand the word "shill", they would be shills if they were expressing those views because they worked for Russia. But I see no evidence that they do.
Agreeing with certain arguments that supporters of Russia in the current war make does not make someone a Russian shill. It also does not make someone into a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, unless you are willing to say that any time that a person agrees with a government's propaganda about anything, it makes that person a mouthpiece for the government's propaganda, even if when it comes to other issues the person might fundamentally disagree with that government.
No, this is not the meaning of the word. The reason why they do this is not important - though I wouldn't be surprised if both of them would benefit personally in one way or another. Only very naive person would not see the connection.
Your second claim is also not correct. Even Russians themselves are not in 100% agreement with the Russian government and many of them even criticize it heavily - not enough Ukrainians are killed.
Of course not all Russians share this sentiment. There are people, of whom many have by now emigrated, who are against Russian government genocidal actions and there is large part of people who are either ignorant or indifferent.
Ah, sorry, didn't realize that! He probably only does The Intercept Brazil.
But he is the founder, and you can see his dna in that publication. Same ludicrous ideas and assumptions.
Flags don't come from moderators but from users with enough karma.
I suspect your were downvoted and flagged because you aren't really engaging with the content of the article and dismissing claims made in the article without evidence in a way that doesn't contribute to productive discussion.
"If Palestinians had accepted being killed and colonized, they would have had a state since 1948. Since they weren't okay with that, we will keep killing them and steal their home and land to build illegal settlements".
You can't post like this here. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is dang disgusting as it proves that backchannels really are at work here. There are comments denying Palestinians the right to live but they never get dang attention. HN moderation is declining fast.
I understand the fear, but that's not the case. There have been plenty of times when I've scolded and/or banned accounts for posting slurs in the opposite direction. Btw this has been true—in both directions—for many years, and will continue to be true.
It may surprise some people, but this isn't one of the harder parts of moderating. There are borderline cases, but fewer than you might suppose, and asking people to make their substantive points without slurs (and/or banning the egregious cases) is usually fairly clear-cut and fairly accepted by the community, regardless of who the slur is directed against.
In this case, for example, I can't imagine that fair-minded advocates for Palestinians would have any problem with us moderating an obviously trollish comment referring to "jew tunnels". On the contrary, they'd surely be happy to have that cleared off HN so there is no chance of being associated with it.
p.s. there were no backchannels here. I ran across the comment randomly and it was a straightforward moderation call. I gave the user a path to get unbanned, if they want to, because they weren't a brand new account.
> There are comments denying Palestinians the right to live but they never get dang attention
If such comments exist, I certainly want to see them. Keep in mind that we don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I appreciate the moderation work and the patience to explain your perspective in this matter although I continue to think that HN is biased in this and other cases - if more users flag any comment related to the Palestine perspective but not as many flag the comments calling Palestinians terrorists the moderation work becomes a backchannel for that cause by design.
That's an ongoing issue on a lot of topics. We're willing to, and sometimes do, turn off flags when it feels like an article can provide a basis for a substantive discussion and (<-- note that 'and') the topic has had relatively little coverage on HN lately. When it comes to Israel/Gaza, we've done that several times so far:
I hope you find some others because so far it's been 2 articles with claims that Jews control the media, and 1 article from an unreliable source.
(The unreliable source has lines saying, for example, that Israel beat Palestinians for not understanding Hebrew which is extraordinarily unlikely - Israel has plenty of Arab speakers. That newspaper is simply not a reliable source, and it should never have been allowed to become a post on HN.)
> The unreliable source has lines saying, for example, that Israel beat Palestinians for not understanding Hebrew
Israel calls 10 years kids terrorists, jail and kill them. Are you really saying that it is extraordinarily unlikely that some soldiers beat those kids because they couldn't understand Hebrew? There are many humor sketches coming from Israel making fun of palestinians in an horrendous way. Beating kids for not understanding hebrew is almost nothing compared with what we have videos of israeli soldiers doing and saying.
The Israeli extremist right-wing and its supporters and lobby groups aren't "the Jews".
Would you deny that, say, the Russian or US government are messing with social media, or media in general? Does that mean they "control" the media? Of course not.
In my experience HN does have biases, but many of them can be very dependent on time of day, topic or article. Sometimes you'll see one bias in a new thread but by the end of the day it will have reversed.
"Backchannel" means something different from the way you are using it here.
My understanding of 'backchannel' in this context is that when a comment or post provokes a certain group within this forum, they have a method to influence the moderation. This is done through the backchannel by flagging the comment and then guiding people on appropriate or inappropriate behavior beyond the main discussion.
Thank you for your effort in keeping the discussion healthy.
However my impression is that this thread is lower in the HN rankings compared to what I usually see for something this new and with this score and discussion.
Am I wrong in perceiving this? Can you please help me understand?
Tell us what they said or ban me too. You want to make an example, so give the actual example.
Thank you to the reply who told me that you can turn on "showdead" in your profile and then see the removed comment that warranted banning the account and gloating about it.
A dominant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the belief that Jewish people have undue influence over the media, banking, and politics. Based on this conspiracy theory, certain groups and activists discuss the "Jewish Question" and offer different proposals to address it. In the early 21st century, white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis have used the initialism JQ in order to refer to the Jewish question.
I want to challenge you from the other side on this. Americans should not be self-satisfied with the rudimentary level of free speech they have from the first amendment. In practice people are afraid to express good faith disagreement with the ruling ideology in fear of being socially ostracized and losing their job.
Free speech is an interesting topic, it's not an absolute good and the full version is not actually desirable.
I would argue free speech is much more preferred as a citizen of one of these countries as too many are walking around convinced their understanding of facts is truth when it is in truth not.
Free speech is a necessity learned from the past horrors of fascism.
Fascism is literally being empowered today by unrestricted free speech in Western societies - something Western "liberal" politicians are constantly shouting from the rooftops. Nazism took root in the Weimar Republic essentially unmolested. The Germans censor Holocaust denial today. And you're telling me the lesson learned from all this is the virtue of free speech?
That doesn't really fit with my experience in Canada, especially given that Canadian law has robust freedom of expression provisions in the charter of rights and freedoms.
I don't want to start a shouting match and have to prove my case for every country but this is from Wikipedia.
"Hate speech, obscenity, and defamation are common categories of restricted speech in Canada. During the 1970 October Crisis, the War Measures Act was used to limit speech from the militant political opposition."
That isn't evidence that Canada barely considers free speach "good in and of itself."
Different countries have different rules and restrictions on free speech and every country has some. If you setup a framework for comparison, you can rank them, but this doesn't always end up with the USA on top and often it's not even in the top 10. Canada often ranks over the USA.
Your assertion is thus pretty clearly not true by the best objective measures we have.
What do you think of the trucker protests and how they were handled? I find it hard to believe any Canadian can honestly claim that Canada has more free speech than the US.
I agree with some parts of how it was handled and strongly disagree with others.
The USA also has had plenty its own issues with blocking speech. Few people know that the origin of the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" metaphor was coined by the supreme court to justify cracking down on political dissent.
I don't think it's particularly useful to attempt compare levels of free speech between the two countries without laying out a clear framework under which to do the comparison. There are organizations that do this, though you may or may not agree with the framework they use.
Free speech doesn't mean unlimited speech. In the US you are not free to defraud, slander, physically endanger, etc. And everywhere, in everything, there are failures and imperfections.
The freeness of speech is a continuum. In some countries you can't say anything critical of the ruling party, even if it's true. In other countries you can say untrue and critical things as long as you don't know they are untrue. The standards and penalties for defamation and libel are an important part of the freeness of speech.
Countries have different standards for what qualifies as obscenity and what the consequences are.
Countries have different standards for what types of hate speech are allowed.
> In other countries you can say untrue and critical things as long as you don't know they are untrue.
In case it's not clear, in democracies a private citizen can knowingly say false things about public figures, especially political figures. A private citizen can sue you if you damage their reputation. Journalists can't usually knowingly publish falsehoods as news, but can as opinion. (Generally speaking; each country has its own implementations, of course.)
> democracies a private citizen can knowingly say false things about public figure
That is not true.
> Journalists can't usually knowingly publish falsehoods as news, but can as opinion
Also not true.
In the USA, journalists and private individuals have the same free speech rights and there no legal distinction between "opinion" and "news", it just matters if a reasonable person would see a statement of fact.
Yes, but you can sue anyone for anything. You not being a "journalist" doesn't provide any additional protection. Biden being a public figure does though, as he would have to demonstrate "actual malice" on your part to win.
> Can I be arrested?
Only about 1/4 of states in the USA have criminal libel laws and I am not familiar enough with them to say which if any would apply.
> The Constitution provides special protection for the press, as do many other laws, precedents
The supreme court has consistently ruled that "the press" in the first ammendment covers anyone publishing anything in any format, not just journalists. The constitution provides no special protections for journalists but instead extends those rights to everyone.
See: Associated Press v. NLRB, Bartnicki v. Vopper, Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. and more.
Most states do have "media shield laws" that specifically help journalists protect their sources, but these aren't constitutional rights. A district court in Branzburg v. Hayes did rule that a blogger didn't qualify as a journalist under Oregon's media shield law, but that was strongly influenced by the blogger soliciting payment to take the article down so isn't conclusive even there.
Supreme court precedents and the law. I've provided several of the relevant cases
> Imagine how many people write falsehoods about Biden with clear, actual, malice! Biden cannot sue them (in a meaningful sense).
The main reason that it would be difficult to win those cases is that as a public figure Biden would have to show "actual malice" for each person he sued regardless of if that person was a journalist or not.
In practice, the expected value if suing a large number of people with limited media reach is generally not worth it, but that has nothing to do with the constitution.
Where being a journalist might help is that media shield laws, depending on the state, could allow the journalist to protect their sources from discovery once they've veen sued.
What I mean is, are you lawyer in this field? Did you read a book about it (what book)?
I see things that are clearly wrong afaik (unless I misunderstand you), and others I don't know about. So I'm wondering what the source is. I can cite cases too, but I really don't have expertise.
I don't understand your question. We can list many things that are protected, but you know that. You also know that sometimes we don't execute perfectly, including on free speech. So I'm a bit lost ...
* critique of arguments for the existence of God (reasonable or otherwise)
* critiques of national policy of a given political party (reasonable or otherwise)
* reporting on the alleged wrongdoing of a powerful political official
* allegations of infidelity of people considered royalty within a given country
* finding and reporting security bugs in medical devices that use proprietary software
* satire
* propaganda
* thought experiments
* standing in a public square and lying about established facts of science
**
If you can categorize the speech and its not in the category of yelling fire in a crowded theater, I bet it's protected by the 1st Amendment.
Edit: clarification
Edit 2: Since this is HN and you didn't specify 1st Amendment in your question, let me be pedantic and add an empty bullet point for a type of speech that is protected by the 5th amendment:
*
Edit 3: I think my empty string is in the wrong scope. One must invoke the fifth amendment by speaking. So the bullet point should look like this:
* invoking the fifth amendment to say this: (NUL byte goes here)
> The concept of free speech as a value that is good in and of itself is something that barely exists outside of the USA.
That's demonstrably false; rights like free speech are enshrined in societies all over the world. Other countries don't have a First Amendment, but they have free speech, free press, etc.
don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well what was meant. We are talking about free speech _absolutism_, an extremist viewpoint with the most traction in the United States.
No, that meaning is absolutely not clear in any of what you've written.
In my experience, "free speech absolutism" is more of a siboleth than an actually meaningful label. I've yet to encounter anyone who actually believes that there should never be any limits on speech.
So your argument is "other countries don't care about free speech, America should be more like other countries? This is a bizarre take, I was with you up until the last word.
Saying Israel set this up is quite misleading. This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
This is a grassroots organization doing this and in fact its funding and support mostly comes from Americans, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the Israeli-American Council.
Your rhetorical point about Alex Jones is contradicted within your own post. Alex Jones does not receive grant funding from the US government, but this group does receive a portion of its funding from the Israeli government.
James Bamford has written at least 3 good articles about Israeli government influence of US civil society (social media) and elections (the leak of the DNC hack materials), all in the last year or so, at The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/authors/james-bamford/
And until extremely recently, the IDF and associated arms of the state have been engaging in even more deceptive actions, such as creating sock-puppet accounts to bolster support for government policy, targeting Israelis themselves: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-admits-psychological-warfa...
It's impossible to be certain of anything related to these highly unaccountable and secret operations, but the "grain" of truth runs very much in the direction of Israeli state interference, with quite wide scope -- but effectiveness unknown.
You are wrong. It is part of a campaign called 4il which is supported and spearheaded by the staffed by the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry. Act.il's is staffed by former intelligence officers and its founder and CEO is former intelligence officer Yarden Ben Yosef who said that "both Israels military and the Shin Bet security service were making specific requests from Act.il for its help in getting violent anti-Israel videos removed from Facebook and other platforms." before walking the statement back. If you call that no affiliation, then you're spreading misinformation.
I'm wrong about what? A specific claim was made that act.il receives funding from the Israeli government and that is simply false. Nothing you've presented in any of your posts indicates in anyway whatsoever that the Israeli government has funded act.il
The very link you present even states that the army and Shin Bet do not request help from act.il.
It's in the very next sentence from the one you chose to highlight.
You obviously didn't read the original source: "Watchdog The Seventh Eye revealed that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs spent almost $2 million on one propaganda campaign in 2017 – part of which was allocated to Act.IL."
And it links to an article at https://www.972mag.com/the-israeli-government-is-paying-for-... "Another large sum (from the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs), around NIS 2 million ($570,000), was budgeted for building the Act.il website and producing multi-media content for it."
You're strangely confident that act.il getting government funding is "simply false" when you're simply wrong.
On the question of funding, I must partially apologize, I did muddle things. I based my comments on a separate article on this topic, not the OP, and forgot that fact. While I still support my claims, I didn't explain that it was based on further research not present in the OP, and hence, my whole bit about "within your own post" was way too strong: https://electronicintifada.net/content/inside-israels-millio...
> Watchdog The Seventh Eye revealed that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs spent almost $2 million on one propaganda campaign in 2017 – part of which was allocated to Act.IL.
> A global influence campaign funded by the Israeli government had a $1.1 million budget last year, a document obtained by The Electronic Intifada shows.
> In its annual report, from January, Act.IL says its goal is to “influence foreign publics” and “battle” BDS – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights.
I think that's a reasonably credible source, but you may disagree. The EI piece is a compilation of other people's work, in particular, The Seventh Eye, affiliated with +972.
On your point about "affiliation", that is clearly false, based on the OP article, and numerous other (more universally credible) sources, such as Forward[1], and Haaretz[2].
> The Herzliya headquarters is the base of Act.il, a hybrid Israel advocacy effort and online information operation. A joint project of two Israeli not-for-profits, it is led by former Israeli intelligence officers and has close ties to Israel’s intelligence services, its Ministry of Strategic Affairs and American Jewish casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Act.il’s leaders frame the program as an effort to counterbalance anti-Israel attitudes online.
> “We know each other,” he said of his group’s relationship with members of Israel’s intelligence community. “You don’t get [sent] a link to [a specific video]. We talk with each other. We work together.”
> A pro-Israel social media advocacy app that partners with the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry is asking activists to influence Googles search results for the term BDS.
> Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) told the plenum that “boycott organizations are spread out geographically and act in different areas. The organizations built a network of activity and act in coordination with the Palestinian Authority. There is a campaign of falsehoods fueling hate.”
> ”Since this is a battlefront like any other, the ministry put together a strategy for running the campaign against this phenomenon,” Minister Erdan stated.
> ”One of the principles for success is keeping our methods of action secret…Since most of the ministry’s actions are not of the ministry, but through bodies around the world who do not want to expose their connection with the state, we must protect the information whose exposure could harm the battle.”
> Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) told the plenum that “boycott organizations are spread out geographically and act in different areas. The organizations built a network of activity and act in coordination with the Palestinian Authority. There is a campaign of falsehoods fueling hate.”
> ”Since this is a battlefront like any other, the ministry put together a strategy for running the campaign against this phenomenon,” Minister Erdan stated.
> ”One of the principles for success is keeping our methods of action secret…Since most of the ministry’s actions are not of the ministry, but through bodies around the world who do not want to expose their connection with the state, we must protect the information whose exposure could harm the battle.”
I don't know whether the specific legislation went into effect. Regardless, it clearly states that "actions [...] not of the ministry, but through bodies around the world" is an ongoing strategy for their success (in their view).
> This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
Who gives a damn about affiliation? What matters is the material effect on the world, and it's hard to find a more notorious propaganda movement in the world than hasbara
Associating an independent politically motivated group with an ethnic state as a whole is a common means of disseminating racist views. Israel is no more involved in act.il than the U.S. is involved with Alex Jones, and it's worth pointing that out because otherwise people might think that this operation has some kind of official endorsement by the Israeli government.
You are right about anti-semitic tropes, and it's a serious accusation, but if it's happening it's a problem. Not that official endorsement should be the standard to follow. Crowdsourcing a troll army for positive coverage is deceptive, regardless of whether support is official or shadier.
Read it again. The CEO said they do and then walked it back. I specifically said that because the walkback was not credible. But if that's your only reply, I'll take it you concede there is government endorsement from the Strategic Affairs Ministry whose campaign this is addressing and in the form of expertise from the intelligence officers working on it.
The second link is also about a crowdsourced online influence program affiliated with the Israeli government. I never restricted my concern to just one program. Care to claim Hasbara is not affiliated either?
And yet you couldn't defend your claim. "No affiliation to Israeli Government" -> "You're wrong" List involved ministries -> "Wrong about what?" -> "Wrong about no government affiliation" -> (Crickets).
Maybe flagging reasonable comments is what winning looks like to you. Given your defence of an organization crowdsourcing coverage manipulation that's not so surprising. But it is how you know you're on the wrong side. I'm embarrassed for you.
And it's important to not make such claims lightly. But organised crowdsourcing of public discussion is happening in the open under the guise of "counter dangerous trends online" or "making sure Israel is presented fairly and accurately". Any propagandist can use similar justifications for what is bordering on censorship.
The sad fact is this will be used by anti-semites, but that's precisely why the State of Israel (Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, intelligence or others) should NOT engage in it.
