I do want to mention one more thing. There are more leaks that will be shared in the coming days. Many of which are related to mass censorship, theft, fraud going on at Meta.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
ICW was created with the purpose of exposing corruption related to government and anything tech related. We focus on high quality investigative work. By quality, I mean actually running experiments and going beyond surface level analysis. While everyone has their own biases/leanings, we try to separate our investigations from our opinions (which we do provide in a clearly labeled separate section, usually called "Discussions").
As you can see from our post timelines, I spend months doing this kind of investigative work. And it takes 100+ hours to do a proper investigation, let alone write the actual report.
You can check out our previous investigations here:
The Youtube Algorithm and Manufacturing Consent (https://archive.org/details/youtube-icw)
- We collected the worlds largest Youtube recommendation dataset using a custom built watch bot. We concluded that almost all Youtube users are 1-click away from far-right radicalizing videos.
What can we learn from the Andrew Tate data breach (https://archive.org/details/tate_data_breach/)
- We looked at the leaks of Andrew Tate's school and calculated through simulations exactly how much money he was making from the project, and allude to what this may mean for his taxes. We also run a state-of-the-art analysis into what kind of posts people make there, as well as survey the user demographics.
We do not currently have a website. And have had $0 funding so far. So entirely out of pocket. From the beginning we opened donations via BTC and ETH, but didn't receive anything yet.
I am NRU (alias) the lead investigator with a background in AI. I am currently driving the entire investigation for these projects. I occasionally collaborate with Drop Site News and BBC for some of the work we do.
There are several indications that this is a single person “organization”, and not a true research organization. And that’s okay if the research is actually factual and grounded, but the misrepresentation can be a bit off-putting to some, and many of the methodologies seem flawed for the conclusions drawn. There is a distinct lack of actual scientific rigor that seems to be brushed over with language like “state of the art” and “world’s largest” without any evidence those statements are actually true.
I would recommend considering these findings to be moderate to highly unreliable and entirely unverified due to the lack of scientific rigor. Effectively, it is best to consider this as potential political propaganda, which doesn’t indicate any sort of nefariousness, only that it may be motivated by an agenda to prove something rather than independent analysis.
Massive respect to dang et al, but a blind man can see that posts about Gaza get brigaded.
We would all love to see a report on unusual activity in regards to posts on Gaza.
I m not surprised a bit by this. Meta has again and again shown that they have no scruples and no moral compass. But it's surprising how little knowledge about it and reaction there is from its users, who are otherwise very very critical when "mainstream media" does propaganda on them. It's probably because FB takes a very low key approach with branding and tries to make itself transparent to its users.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.
I emailed the moderator and asked them why this post was constantly getting flagged and locked.
Here is their reply (quote):
"Looks like user vouches outweighed user flags, at least for now."
I am not familiar with how hackernews works, but this is what ChatGPT returned on this:
"""
On Hacker News, not all users have the ability to vouch for others. Typically, vouching is restricted to users who have achieved a certain level of trust or reputation within the community. This means that only established users, often those with a higher karma score or a longer history of positive contributions, can vouch for others.
If you find that you cannot vouch for someone, it may be because you haven't met the necessary criteria set by Hacker News. The platform aims to maintain the quality of endorsements, ensuring that only credible users can influence the reputation of others. If you're looking to vouch in the future, focusing on contributing positively to discussions and building your karma can help you reach that level.
"""
As someone who's paid a lot of careful attention to this for the past four years or so, frankely, I think dang and ycombinator (it's almost crazy they're still running a forum these days) is making the absolute best of an impossible situation. I'd challenge you to find anyone doing better.
Yes. The longest comment on this thread starts out by saying there's so many typos.
These might not be state actors, but like you said, a blind man can see that when someone's comment on genocide is "the article has so many typos", that person already started out with the conclusion.
As mentioned in my reply to you downthread, the issue with all of the spelling and grammar mistakes - as is clear from the comment itself - is that it belies the authors' claims of being actual "journalists". If they had been upfront and described themselves as Russian hackers or whatever it wouldn't really have been of note. But, in terms of credibility, this becomes something of a double-sin: to claim that you're a journalist implies that you adhere to a certain set of journalistic ethics; to lie about being a journalist means that not only do you not adhere to those ethics, it also means that you're a liar, which makes all of your claims suspect. I think calling this out on an HN post is worthwhile.
Second of all, it may be the longest comment on the thread, but it's never been a particularly popular one, so I wouldn't draw too many inferences about foreign influence on HN from it. The post's karma, which I care way too much about, has wavered between -1 and I think 2, which doesn't exactly suggest there's a whole lot of brigading going on for my benefit.
That doesn't imply that there's no brigading going on on HN - dang knows more about that than I do. Clearly Israel engages in attempting to control the narrative online, and there's clearly spaces on Reddit for example where they succeed quite well. HN is quite a bit smaller and more carefully moderated, though. That said, I've been on HN for a while, so I guess I'll say that I've noticed it's not hard for a post to get flagged; it wouldn't surprise me at all if something as contentious as the textbook example for contentious topics could organically end up getting flagged/vouched back to life a lot.
> a blind man can see that when someone's comment on genocide is "the article has so many typos", that person already started out with the conclusion.
Of course, it goes without saying, but that's not my "comment on genocide", nor is it more than a fraction of a fraction of my comment on the article itself. I don't really appreciate the strawman, and I'll point out that in your comments to me you explicitly vouch for starting from the conclusion, so I think you might be projecting.
I very strongly do suspect that the author(s?) isn't a native English speaker; based on the particular grammatical errors, like slip-ups around the definite article, "Russian hacker" was an educated guess and not pulled out of an RNG. The issues with the writing go beyond spelling and grammar, though - things like maintaining a consistent voice (i.e. not switching between "I" and "we") are fumbled.
I think that's somewhat beside the point, or perhaps reinforces my point: as someone who's known many journalists in my time, professional journalists understand the importance of good writing, and thus inevitably come to understand the importance of good editing. I can go onto foreign news sites based in just about any country in the world - Al Jazeera, YNet, RFI, NHK, RT, Reuters, The Pyongyang Times - and find English articles written by non-native English speakers that aren't sloppy in the way this is, because they're professional outfits that ensure through rigorous editing that the quality of their writing matches the seriousness with which they pursue journalism. Any journalist worth their salt with a big scoop would want to ensure the way it was communicated in words came across as legitimate.
Hell, this isn't even just a journalism thing. I can log onto JSTOR and read papers in English written by scholars all over the world who aren't native English speakers and who aren't even supposed to be professional writers, and the quality of the writing will still be better 95 times out of 100. It's about professionalism, and like I said in my other comment, they're just obviously not professionals in any sense of the word. It's amateur.
"Israel ranks 3rd in the most posts targeted by TDRs out of any country.
"On a per-capita basis, Israel ranks 1st in the most posts targeted by TDRs, and has 3 times more TDR targeted posts per-capita than the country with the 2nd most submissions.
"Its important to contextualize this with the fact that almost all governments reporting to Meta primarily censor citizens of their own countries. Israel is the exception as only 1.3% of its takedown requests are actually targeted towards Israeli’s (14th most targeted country).
"For reference, 63% of Malaysia TDRs target Malaysian content, and 95% of Brazil’s TDRs target Brazilian content"
(Back to me): They are saying that Israel is doing this at a huge scale and, very unusually, almost exclusively targeting people in other countries.
The leakers speculate that Israel is doing this at at scale that is poisoning Meta's ML filtering inputs, so that they are now, without direct Israeli involvement, Meta is carrying on their own censorship of other countries. Since Israel's active TDR's produced the vast bulk of recent terrorism related TDRs, the leakers think that almost all of the 38 million Facebook posts that were censored automatically by Facebook ML for terrorism reasons during the period since the Simchat Torah attacks were because of this poisoning, but here they are drawing more on inference than direct evidence.
I had not realized the scale of the program here, or that they were targeting external countries like this, so I (someone reasonably familiar with Facebook's moderation) learned something from reading this.
Exactly, this study was on antisemitism but you can imagine other countries doing this for other content.
By overloading the Meta ML loop, they’re guaranteeing that the censorship is from meta and not them.
Antisemitism, political posts, rallies, anti-government sentiment, it’s an assault on free speech. Add the fact that news organizations have basically bent the knee to this US Administration and it’s pretty much game over for free thinking journalism w/ access. (Good journalism doesn’t necessarily require red tape access)
Sorry, what they perceive as antisemitism. Taking down of anything critical of their actions in Gaza, targeting Palestinians specifically. Speaking the truth isn’t antisemitism. However, that administration claims everything critical is antisemitism.
The article was about takedown abuse by national actors. With a call out to a specific actor (and nods to the others). I used my power of deduction here. But it could very well be Israel asking to take down fuzzy cat videos.
I very much support Israelites standing up and saying enough is enough. To hate. To violence. To Netanyahu. To Gaza. All of it. And Meta is happy to help organize (ugh)
Many many countries are doing this, which is shown in figure 5. However, no other country comes close to the amount of censorship done by Israel. Additionally, most countries primarily do internal censorship. Again, Israel is the only country that is censoring other countries to this great extent. And almost all of it is related to the ongoing events.
People should be aware too that OpenWeb is owned by Israeli’s and that platform has swept all the major news sites as the comment system. The platform partakes in HEAVY automoderation, so much so that it is hard to post anything constructive. However plenty of inflammatory coded stuff gets through.
Are we really shocked by this? It's screaming obvious but we still have many people whose head is buried deep in the sand.
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
Furthermore I've started hearing people calling it "the Palestinian Holocaust" (I think it's entirely fitting). Israel has owned that word for very long as has used it as an asset that they milk. It's about time they lose ownership.
I haven't had time to dig into the report, but this is utterly unsurprising given previous reports, and due to employee and former employee whistleblowers. See also:
I disagree with the rampant flagging practices that many HNers engage in, but I do think it's worth noting that it's not always "censorship" as much as it is people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section. Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship, but it's a lot more nuanced than that IMHO.
> s people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section.
I’ve never understood this argument: if you don’t want to participate in a discussion, then don’t, but why stop others from doing so? No one is obligated to click into the comments section, read, or take part in any discussion on HN. Even when discussions get heated, in my experience they’re still better than similar discussions elsewhere on the internet.
> Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship
Completely agree with you about why pre-flagging topics is silly. I get that people love echo chambers for many reasons, but it doesn't seem that hard to me to just not read a thread that bothers you
If you don't think there's active censorship of certain topics from HN leadership you're naive beyond belief. There's a reason that most of the topics that get auto-flagged also happen to be a threat to the financial interests of YC and its backers.
The fact that many pro israel person believes they are the right side, and we just don’t get it.. is just bothering.
Literally every sane human being there is seeing what is going on, yet they refuse to see. Really interesting; especially when you think people used to question how germans followed hitler, and did not see what is going on. I think we all saw how such might happen these days.
Also the fact is; this whole thing will be considered as a genocide, will be told for generations. Palestinian holocoust will he the new one told in the ‘not again’ lessons, and name ‘israel’ will live with it.
>" Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters. "
>Can anyone help on this?
>Without fail, every single time it gets removed instantly.
Hello, yes, I can help! You see, dark pattern algorithms found that polarization, infuriation, etc maximizes engagement maximizes profit. Reddit specializes in the deletion / banning meta, which is yet another form of engagement maximization. Are you not frustrated? Are you not so compelled to return to reddit, to finally succeed with your post, to drink that precious updoot milkshake? --- A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
Is there any info on the language distribution of the censored content (or was this about english content only)?
Are there random (or cherry picked) examples of censored content somewhere? Is anything known about the selection process (just keyword based? more sophisticated?).
This talks about the dangers of manipulating public opinion and poisoning future automatic classifications, but how effective were the 'Israelis specifically with that (on a spectrum from "censors everything that contains the words river+sea" to "picks censorship targets strategically in order to shift discourse/opinion in favor of Israel")?
The language of the posts is usually representative of the user country. E.g. USA=English, Egypt=Arabic.
However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.
Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
Look at the username you're replying to, then at the username who posted the article on HN, then at the username who submitted the content to Internet Archive.
I say this not in defence of the Israelis (ab)use of Meta's takedown system, nor in defence of the Israelis conduct towards Palestinians: this is low-quality, sensationalist work.
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
Agreed, as an Israeli Jew, them saying that Jews don’t work on Shabbat there shouldn’t be reports on the 7th, shows so much their lack of objectivity, ignorance and the will to connect random points together.
Do they think that the police in Israel don’t work on Saturday? Does the CIA stops working on sundays? If they tried to visit Tel Aviv on Saturday they would see how lovely it is.
This is not a speculation on the part of the whistleblowers or some unknown fact related to "Jews".
The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.
This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.
But that makes sense, as the OP said, oct 7th was a huge terror attack that was live-streamed and shared throughout all social media. Hamas filmed themselves on Facebook live doing horrific acts, and people shared and cheered. So obviously there would be an uptick of takedown requests.
Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?
Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
> Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
You don't understand that in the face of genocide people cling on to anything? Some times even, yes even! gasp, if the article has typos?
The issue with the typos or grammatical errors aren't the typos per se - it's that it strongly implies that their claims of being "independent journalists" is misleading or dishonest. At which point, a critical reader might ask themselves 1) why are they being dishonest about their identity; and 2) what else might they be being dishonest about?
Obviously, none of this matters if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, only its political purpose (not even how effective it is at achieving that). But if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, why are you even discussing it?
This is harsh, but I agree with most of your points. The "blackmail" remark I find particularly damning: Threatening future leaks until Facebook stops "involvement with the Israeli government" is basically a self-admission that you put political success over journalistic integrity.
That turns you from a "legitimate" whistleblower (like Snowden) into an activist (at best) in my eyes.
Just out of curiosity, what do you believe Snowden intended by leaking what he leaked? From your comment it almost reads as if you think the publication was the point, not that those implicated by the leaks should be made to change their ways?
Snowden himself says that he saw a surveillance state being built and the people responsible lying about it under oat in front of democratic representatives (see James Clapper).
In his words, he wanted the American public to know about what was going on, and to get a say.
But when you say "I'll stop publishing once my political goals are achieved", you are openly admitting that:
1) You publishing this informations causes harm
2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
That, to me, is the difference between "whistleblowing" and "blackmail".
> 2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing
> 3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.
This is a super lame post. It’s not a “leak”, it’s an analysis someone did without citing any sources except one report a few years ago. Moreover, without question ISIS and other terror entities are certainly responsible for some number of the posts that were flagged on Facebook.
I’m sure the state department has asked Facebook to remove many anti-US posts abroad. That’s the way the world works. Just look at Google’s history in China. It’s been a really shitty issue in general for a while.
Making this some special sort of thing about Israel is ridiculous.
That said, I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion.
Where in the linked pdf is any evidence that the reported content was actually innocent?
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
Human rights watch's report covers more individual examples.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.
Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.
Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
> Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that are counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed
No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.
It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?
You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
Unfortunately links to individual posts can't be accessed as the posts themselves are removed. The HRW report is excellent as they documented this individual cases and recorded them.
Okay well you don't have any proof, any in general, I would consider it a good use of tax shekels to reduce the number of pro-hamas posts on social media. So until you can dig up any proof, I'm considering this whole post to be a nothing burger
Did you look at the article? This investigation directly corroborates existing reports from third parties like Human Rights Watch. There is even an intake form directly from the Israeli government calling for the censorship posts of posts at Meta. We even posted their phone and fax number in case anyone is interested in having a friendly chat with them.
All data collected is directly from Meta, and the whisteblowers themselves are open to sharing this data with any authority or court willing to look into this. Everything is well documented. Where and how the data was obtained is also documented as well.
All 1049 posts were peaceful?
The pdf mentions this was mostly after October 7th, a terrorist (as in, meant to induce fear by targeting civilians) attack which was live streamed on Facebook and posted repeatedly during that day.
I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?
I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.
EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.
In this case it's being alleged that sending a thousand false takedown requests which were then acted on would not be a bungling, but rather a success.
The pdf says there's a 95% accept rate on their takedown requests. They use that as evidence of censorship but, to me, that looks like evidence of judicious requests that meta agrees with.
Without data on what was taken down, there's no way to explain the difference. There's no reason not to make the entire dataset public (anonymized if you'd like but, since the content is implied to be benign, what's the harm in not?) and show some examples.
The implication that, because Israel submits the most requests that they must be acting in bad faith makes sense only of all countries had an equal amount of content generated that they'd like filtered. It's very easy for me to believe that Israel would have more content directed towards it that violated the Meta TOS.
Israel is not the target of a terrorist group. It is a terrorist state subjugating a trapped population to forced starvation and hunger. It's a second holocaust live streamed to your phone and you still think they are acting rationally.
Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
Most would disagree, not the least of which are people in that region. Hamas does not have many friends outside of Iran because most governments in the region see them as a destabilizing force. And they are. The
> It is a terrorist state subjugating a trapped population to forced starvation and hunger.
They are using tactics that, if put up to scrutiny in a trial in an international court of law, would probably be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity. The same would probably be true of Hamas' tactics on October 7th, 2023.
> Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
Ultimately you have two Semitic peoples - Palestinians and Jews - who want to establish an ethnostate in what used to be Mandatory Palestine. Both have some ancestral title to at least some of the region. Quite a few Jewish subgroups, like Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, would be considered "brown", to borrow your term.
The way forward will require both parties to recognize each other's right to at least some of the land. It's worth noting that this has not been, and still is not, a view held by either party's governments.
Do you think Israel was created through peace or through zionist bombing attacks?
Do you think only the brown bombers should be labelled terrorists?
You sound racist and like you're ok enabling the killing of children. As a doctor Tarek Loubani reported today "I've been to many wars, it has never felt like the war is against children"
Before the state of Israel, Jewish groups were bombing British mandate offices. Not civilians, and definitely not on purpose.
But I’m trying to understand your logic. Attacking innocent civilians is legitimate if your goal is to establish a state?
And BTW, you don’t know me personally, ad hominem attacks just weaken your argument
I can fully grant the list as accurate and even undercounting the number of attacks that have happened.
It, frankly, pales in comparison to the number of civilians the IDF has killed and is currently killing. No amount of terrorist attacks can justify starving a population or dropping bombs on the tents of refuges.
Like, I'm sorry, but an attack in 2024 that injures 20 people and an attack in 2023 that kills 1000 is simply not comparable. There are literally 1000s dying weekly right now in gaza. The IDF is daily shooting starving children that go to the Israel's ran aid sites.
Israel does not have the right to commit genocide.
Sure, I don't agree with that assessment, but I get where it comes from.
I find the "what-about"ism somewhat tiring at this point. What Israel is currently doing is unconscionable.
This is really not unlike trying to criticize the war crimes committed during the Warsaw uprising or the actions of John Brown. Were they wrong? Yes. Were they understandable? Absolutely. Bringing them up whenever someone brings up the actions of the Nazis or the slave owners is what's problematic. It tries to strip away the humanity of people that are being slaughtered in order to justify the slaughtering.
Yeah I did. I have friends that lost family from these terror attacks. Twice while on a date with my wife at our local bar we had to flee because of a Palestinian started shooting random people in the street. I had the luck to have a birthday party cancelled at this location on this date https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphinarium_discotheque_bom...
So having a random person on the internet explicitly lying about these experiences and having other people upvoting him kind of grinds my gears.
Now, do you condemn the genocide? Because the problem here is that even though you've experienced a traumatic event, 1000s of Palestinians who never shot at or bombed your family are being shot at, bombed, and starved.
Do you acknowledge the Palestinian right to exist?
Of course I acknowledge their right to exist. I only wish it would be reciprocated, however, time and time again we were shown that this is not the case. Gaza was left alone on 2006, look what happened. They could’ve made an example of a prosperous territory and enabling trust. Instead they chose war death and terror.
I wish what happened wouldn’t have. On oct 7 and in Gaza. But people keep forgetting that we still have living hostages in tunnels under Gaza, and we can’t accept a militarized Gaza anymore.
For the last 2 years there are 2 principles that have not changed. Hamas should return the hostages and surrender its arms. The moment that happens the war is over. It could’ve happened 2 years ago and this thousands of deaths could’ve been avoided. But until that happens, the war continues.
So I don’t believe there’s genocide, as it precludes explicit desire. There’s war. And it will end the moment Hamas want it to.
>They could’ve made an example of a prosperous territory and enabling trust.
How do they create a prosperous territory? Israel destroyed Gaza's airport. Israel destroyed the foundations of Gaza's seaport. Israel maintains a maritime blockade of Gaza, so it's not like they can freely engage in trade with other sovereign territories. Israel maintains control over exploitation of Gaza's natural gas deposits.[1][2]
> But people keep forgetting that we still have living hostages in tunnels under Gaza, and we can’t accept a militarized Gaza anymore.
Even before Oct7, there were something like 350-500 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, charged with no crimes but indefinitely detained. They are functionally the same as hostages. Why should Gaza accept Israel holding hostages? Why should Palestine accept a militarized Israel? [3][4]
> Hamas should return the hostages and surrender its arms.
Israel should return its hostages and surrender its arms. And then the leadership should stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. We put some Hamas leaders on trial at the same time if you like, I'm fine with that, but the total disarmament of Israel and the prosecution of its leadership will likely be an overwhelming net good for the rest of humanity.
There's no error in my post. "terrorism" is a political racist term mainly used to benefit white colonial powers and label freedom movements as below their oppressors.
I don't think brown people trying to save themselves from a concentration camp are terrorists, therefore the terrorist state of israel is not the target of a terrorist group. In fact how could they be when it is them that are invading Gaza for 40+ years.
I know you're not this stupid, you're just racist.
How is this whataboutism? He said that Israel is not a target of terror attacks. In response I provided a list of terror attacks against Israel, this is exactly on topic
You don't have to convince me that you don't get it. I believe you. I'm not here to change your mind. I'm calling what you say out for the benefit of others.
It's whataboutism because the statement also included that Israel is a terrorist state. By giving a list of attacks on Israel as a rebuttal, you are saying Israel is not a terrorist state because it's been attacked by Hamas. Do you see how silly that sounds? Since Hamas is a terrorist group for all of its viscousness, Israel must be as well, because the viciousness of Israel is more than 10 times that of Hamas.
I'm not sure how effective it was; I've seen plenty of content related to Gaza on Meta platforms, and I'm located in the US.
It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
The US was actually very low on Israel's targeting list: they came in at #18 on the list (0.7% of all TDR's submitted by Israel), lower than Israel itself (#14, 1.3%). I would speculate, given that previous reporting (the Facebook Files from Frances Haugen) has said that Facebook treats moderation in America differently from in other countries, that Israel is not focused on censoring US speech the same way because Meta would be more likely to object to their TDR's covering Americans.
The nature of the censorship is that it isn't targeted at who's seeing posts, but rather at the posts themselves. So it's not necessarily the case that the Israelis are treating different countries differently; it could simply be that Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine are all producing the largest amount of content related to the war given their proximity, involvement, and interest in the conflict.
The whole point of Facebook is that your friend network is going to be largely similar to you: that's how they can impute your interests from analyzing the interest of your friend network and then target ads for you. So what most Americans will see will be largely posts by other Americans. Immigrants from Algeria etc. will have overlapping interests and serve as node-points to move posts from one network to another, but still the majority of posts that an American will see, even on a controversial international topic like Israel/Palestine, will be from Americans, and thus largely outside of the Israeli censorship program.
Thus, my point is that your claim of personal experience as an American doesn't really have much bearing on the question of the scale of the censorship here. They are trying to bring to life censorship that is largely happening away from Americans, where Facebook historically doesn't exercise the same levels of care and respect for speech that they do with Americans (see Haugen's Facebook Files leaks).
I've also got to say that this article has apparently been flagged out twice already seems to be in line with the point of the original article. I know from experience that Facebook moderation discussions don't usually attract this level of flagging, so I'm pretty sure that this has to be related to Israel/Palestine, not Facebook.
Have you used Facebook recently? 99% of my posts are from random meme pages and groups; one's own social networks produce very little of the content you see.
Its the same problem. Whats happening in Gaza is a direct result of the construction of an ethnostate. Whatever the resultant state is called, it should protect everyone who lives there, jewish or otherwise. Instead of a Jewish State, it should be a state where Jews are one of the people who are safe.
Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Now it may be the case that Israel would rather leave that spot and remove itself from those norms, but given its history that'd be tantamount to suicide.
> Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Most of the West is made up of nations that are, to at least some degree, ethnostates. If they aren't explicitly ethnostates, then they have large political blocs that grew out of ethnic groups. See: Sinn Fein, Bloc Québécois, Scottish National Party, Basque Nationalist Party, Republican Left of Catalonia, Plaid Cymru, and others.
Most of the above listed seek to exercise political power in a given region based on ethnicity. Some even have large delegations to regional or national legislative bodies. All are in countries generally identified as Western.
Even some of what you would define a country as, generally speaking, is somewhat influenced by ethnic factors like language and religion.
alternatively, the US could just not dump billions of dollars in aid and weapons to those countries. social media companies could strengthen their content moderation systems against these kinds of state-sponsored attacks. no need to "act against" anyone.
That would, again, mean not engaging with most countries on Earth, because most of them are, or have at least some qualities of, being ethnostates, religious states, or some other combination of putting one group above another in society based on immutable characteristics or characteristics of conscience.
If you're not Han in the PRC, they're going to try to "normalize" you in the direction of acting like you're Han. If you're not ethnic Russian, same with you in Russia. The only way to keep the former Yugoslavia from continuing to be a bloodbath was by essentially setting up ethnostates. And, yes, all of them use or have used violence to enforce these conditions.
China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
> China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Tell that to the Uyghurs they were re-educating.
> Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
They should go back to that then, but at the heart of it, you'd still have a mostly Jewish populace. Kind of like how the state that Hamas or Fatah would like to establish would be mostly Palestinian Arab.
> Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
Most of the countries in the world are ultimately ethnostates or have political factions and geography seriously impacted by ethnic groupings. Don't believe me? Go suggest to about any European or Asian group that some other ethnic group get majority control of their land, resources, and government. They'll be reluctant at best.
PRC, Russia, Serbia... Isn't that a list of US current opponents on the world stage? If I was Israeli I would be hoping my country did not go down this path (and of course I say hoping because I wouldn't have the ability to prevent it.)
I do want to mention one more thing. There are more leaks that will be shared in the coming days. Many of which are related to mass censorship, theft, fraud going on at Meta.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
Can you tell us a bit about ICW? Does it have a website? Where does its funding come from? What is NRU?
ICW was created with the purpose of exposing corruption related to government and anything tech related. We focus on high quality investigative work. By quality, I mean actually running experiments and going beyond surface level analysis. While everyone has their own biases/leanings, we try to separate our investigations from our opinions (which we do provide in a clearly labeled separate section, usually called "Discussions").
As you can see from our post timelines, I spend months doing this kind of investigative work. And it takes 100+ hours to do a proper investigation, let alone write the actual report.
You can check out our previous investigations here:
The Youtube Algorithm and Manufacturing Consent (https://archive.org/details/youtube-icw) - We collected the worlds largest Youtube recommendation dataset using a custom built watch bot. We concluded that almost all Youtube users are 1-click away from far-right radicalizing videos.
What can we learn from the Andrew Tate data breach (https://archive.org/details/tate_data_breach/) - We looked at the leaks of Andrew Tate's school and calculated through simulations exactly how much money he was making from the project, and allude to what this may mean for his taxes. We also run a state-of-the-art analysis into what kind of posts people make there, as well as survey the user demographics.
We do not currently have a website. And have had $0 funding so far. So entirely out of pocket. From the beginning we opened donations via BTC and ETH, but didn't receive anything yet.
I am NRU (alias) the lead investigator with a background in AI. I am currently driving the entire investigation for these projects. I occasionally collaborate with Drop Site News and BBC for some of the work we do.
You can contact us with:
- https://bsky.app/profile/icw-nru.bsky.social
- icw_nru@protonmail.com
There are several indications that this is a single person “organization”, and not a true research organization. And that’s okay if the research is actually factual and grounded, but the misrepresentation can be a bit off-putting to some, and many of the methodologies seem flawed for the conclusions drawn. There is a distinct lack of actual scientific rigor that seems to be brushed over with language like “state of the art” and “world’s largest” without any evidence those statements are actually true.
I would recommend considering these findings to be moderate to highly unreliable and entirely unverified due to the lack of scientific rigor. Effectively, it is best to consider this as potential political propaganda, which doesn’t indicate any sort of nefariousness, only that it may be motivated by an agenda to prove something rather than independent analysis.
Will it be another report without citations or an actual leak?
Massive respect to dang et al, but a blind man can see that posts about Gaza get brigaded. We would all love to see a report on unusual activity in regards to posts on Gaza.
Dang admitted they're getting brigaded months ago. They've chosen to do nothing about it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024
It clearly says they are doing something, turning off the bans on certain subjects.
Occasionally, when it comes to their attention, often after the reach has been lost.
I m not surprised a bit by this. Meta has again and again shown that they have no scruples and no moral compass. But it's surprising how little knowledge about it and reaction there is from its users, who are otherwise very very critical when "mainstream media" does propaganda on them. It's probably because FB takes a very low key approach with branding and tries to make itself transparent to its users.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.
I emailed the moderator and asked them why this post was constantly getting flagged and locked.
Here is their reply (quote): "Looks like user vouches outweighed user flags, at least for now."
I am not familiar with how hackernews works, but this is what ChatGPT returned on this:
""" On Hacker News, not all users have the ability to vouch for others. Typically, vouching is restricted to users who have achieved a certain level of trust or reputation within the community. This means that only established users, often those with a higher karma score or a longer history of positive contributions, can vouch for others.
If you find that you cannot vouch for someone, it may be because you haven't met the necessary criteria set by Hacker News. The platform aims to maintain the quality of endorsements, ensuring that only credible users can influence the reputation of others. If you're looking to vouch in the future, focusing on contributing positively to discussions and building your karma can help you reach that level. """
That is accurate though I can’t quote the source or threshold offhand. I have faith in this community to keep vouching for it.
Hopefully more users see your quote.
Massive respect to dang et al, but a blind man can see that posts about Gaza get brigaded.
We would all love to see a report on unusual activity in regards to posts on Gaza.
dang knows, it's his handlers who don't care.
As someone who's paid a lot of careful attention to this for the past four years or so, frankely, I think dang and ycombinator (it's almost crazy they're still running a forum these days) is making the absolute best of an impossible situation. I'd challenge you to find anyone doing better.
Yes, they know: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024
Yes. The longest comment on this thread starts out by saying there's so many typos.
These might not be state actors, but like you said, a blind man can see that when someone's comment on genocide is "the article has so many typos", that person already started out with the conclusion.
Oh, hey, that's my comment.
As mentioned in my reply to you downthread, the issue with all of the spelling and grammar mistakes - as is clear from the comment itself - is that it belies the authors' claims of being actual "journalists". If they had been upfront and described themselves as Russian hackers or whatever it wouldn't really have been of note. But, in terms of credibility, this becomes something of a double-sin: to claim that you're a journalist implies that you adhere to a certain set of journalistic ethics; to lie about being a journalist means that not only do you not adhere to those ethics, it also means that you're a liar, which makes all of your claims suspect. I think calling this out on an HN post is worthwhile.
Second of all, it may be the longest comment on the thread, but it's never been a particularly popular one, so I wouldn't draw too many inferences about foreign influence on HN from it. The post's karma, which I care way too much about, has wavered between -1 and I think 2, which doesn't exactly suggest there's a whole lot of brigading going on for my benefit.
That doesn't imply that there's no brigading going on on HN - dang knows more about that than I do. Clearly Israel engages in attempting to control the narrative online, and there's clearly spaces on Reddit for example where they succeed quite well. HN is quite a bit smaller and more carefully moderated, though. That said, I've been on HN for a while, so I guess I'll say that I've noticed it's not hard for a post to get flagged; it wouldn't surprise me at all if something as contentious as the textbook example for contentious topics could organically end up getting flagged/vouched back to life a lot.
> a blind man can see that when someone's comment on genocide is "the article has so many typos", that person already started out with the conclusion.
Of course, it goes without saying, but that's not my "comment on genocide", nor is it more than a fraction of a fraction of my comment on the article itself. I don't really appreciate the strawman, and I'll point out that in your comments to me you explicitly vouch for starting from the conclusion, so I think you might be projecting.
Have you considered that the author might not be a native English speaker?
I very strongly do suspect that the author(s?) isn't a native English speaker; based on the particular grammatical errors, like slip-ups around the definite article, "Russian hacker" was an educated guess and not pulled out of an RNG. The issues with the writing go beyond spelling and grammar, though - things like maintaining a consistent voice (i.e. not switching between "I" and "we") are fumbled.
I think that's somewhat beside the point, or perhaps reinforces my point: as someone who's known many journalists in my time, professional journalists understand the importance of good writing, and thus inevitably come to understand the importance of good editing. I can go onto foreign news sites based in just about any country in the world - Al Jazeera, YNet, RFI, NHK, RT, Reuters, The Pyongyang Times - and find English articles written by non-native English speakers that aren't sloppy in the way this is, because they're professional outfits that ensure through rigorous editing that the quality of their writing matches the seriousness with which they pursue journalism. Any journalist worth their salt with a big scoop would want to ensure the way it was communicated in words came across as legitimate.
Hell, this isn't even just a journalism thing. I can log onto JSTOR and read papers in English written by scholars all over the world who aren't native English speakers and who aren't even supposed to be professional writers, and the quality of the writing will still be better 95 times out of 100. It's about professionalism, and like I said in my other comment, they're just obviously not professionals in any sense of the word. It's amateur.
I don’t think it’s just Israel. I think more countries (cough cough) are doing this. Why would they all show up on Inauguration Day? Yeah…
I have no proof, only suspicion. You can easily skirt “The Algorithm” using VPNs and get vastly different content.
From the article:
"Israel ranks 3rd in the most posts targeted by TDRs out of any country.
"On a per-capita basis, Israel ranks 1st in the most posts targeted by TDRs, and has 3 times more TDR targeted posts per-capita than the country with the 2nd most submissions.
"Its important to contextualize this with the fact that almost all governments reporting to Meta primarily censor citizens of their own countries. Israel is the exception as only 1.3% of its takedown requests are actually targeted towards Israeli’s (14th most targeted country).
"For reference, 63% of Malaysia TDRs target Malaysian content, and 95% of Brazil’s TDRs target Brazilian content"
(Back to me): They are saying that Israel is doing this at a huge scale and, very unusually, almost exclusively targeting people in other countries.
The leakers speculate that Israel is doing this at at scale that is poisoning Meta's ML filtering inputs, so that they are now, without direct Israeli involvement, Meta is carrying on their own censorship of other countries. Since Israel's active TDR's produced the vast bulk of recent terrorism related TDRs, the leakers think that almost all of the 38 million Facebook posts that were censored automatically by Facebook ML for terrorism reasons during the period since the Simchat Torah attacks were because of this poisoning, but here they are drawing more on inference than direct evidence.
I had not realized the scale of the program here, or that they were targeting external countries like this, so I (someone reasonably familiar with Facebook's moderation) learned something from reading this.
Exactly, this study was on antisemitism but you can imagine other countries doing this for other content.
By overloading the Meta ML loop, they’re guaranteeing that the censorship is from meta and not them.
Antisemitism, political posts, rallies, anti-government sentiment, it’s an assault on free speech. Add the fact that news organizations have basically bent the knee to this US Administration and it’s pretty much game over for free thinking journalism w/ access. (Good journalism doesn’t necessarily require red tape access)
Can you tell me what part of the article leads you to think that it is about antisemitism? Give me a few quotes.
Sorry, what they perceive as antisemitism. Taking down of anything critical of their actions in Gaza, targeting Palestinians specifically. Speaking the truth isn’t antisemitism. However, that administration claims everything critical is antisemitism.
The article was about takedown abuse by national actors. With a call out to a specific actor (and nods to the others). I used my power of deduction here. But it could very well be Israel asking to take down fuzzy cat videos.
I very much support Israelites standing up and saying enough is enough. To hate. To violence. To Netanyahu. To Gaza. All of it. And Meta is happy to help organize (ugh)
Many many countries are doing this, which is shown in figure 5. However, no other country comes close to the amount of censorship done by Israel. Additionally, most countries primarily do internal censorship. Again, Israel is the only country that is censoring other countries to this great extent. And almost all of it is related to the ongoing events.
Why does Figure 5 only include those eight countries?
The report focused on the top 8 country governments who use the content enforcement system the most at Meta. The countries selected aren't random.
@icw_nru we need a way to stay connected in case they take down your profile. Please provide a secure avenue for communication.
People should be aware too that OpenWeb is owned by Israeli’s and that platform has swept all the major news sites as the comment system. The platform partakes in HEAVY automoderation, so much so that it is hard to post anything constructive. However plenty of inflammatory coded stuff gets through.
There should be a push to abandon OpenWeb.
I would love a further investigation into how lopsided their moderation is, too.
This Unit 8200 shit is for the birds.
Are we really shocked by this? It's screaming obvious but we still have many people whose head is buried deep in the sand.
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
Ycombinator hosted an Israeli soldier AMA while he was in gaza terrorizing people, our industry is full of genocide-apologists.
There are lots of them in this very site. That's why most posts about ongoing genocide voted down immediately.
This post is ranked very low, most likely it's getting lots of down vote.
Can you share more about this?
I tried looking for it but it might have been deleted. It was pretty much "I'm an IDF soldier in Gaza AMA"
Absolutely vile.
This is all I found https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1b71unn/im_an_idf_sold...
To be clear, you're saying YC hosted a soldier for an AMA? Where? Like as a speaker, or in Bookface, or what?
What Israel does in the digital space to cover his Gaza genocide is Goebbels for the 21st Century.
Absolutely.
Furthermore I've started hearing people calling it "the Palestinian Holocaust" (I think it's entirely fitting). Israel has owned that word for very long as has used it as an asset that they milk. It's about time they lose ownership.
Israel is the 21st century reincarnation of the Nazi racism. It is an ethnostate engaging in genocide.
This is just the tip of the iceberg...oh the irony!
I haven't had time to dig into the report, but this is utterly unsurprising given previous reports, and due to employee and former employee whistleblowers. See also:
- From 7amleh: Erased and Suppressed: Palestinian Testimonies of Meta's Censorship: https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te...
- AJ+ documentary "Inside Israel's Influence on Meta": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12btf2Oq820
Isn't it because Israel does propaganda at state level while pro-Palestinian groups do it via other channels?
On my FB wall Israel is losing. I see several pro-Palestinians posts every day and I am yet to see one pro Israel one.
Not a single one came from my friend or people in my groups. I am not interested in seeing neither side's propaganda.
will probably get flagged in a couple of hours as usual, HN censorship
I disagree with the rampant flagging practices that many HNers engage in, but I do think it's worth noting that it's not always "censorship" as much as it is people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section. Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship, but it's a lot more nuanced than that IMHO.
> s people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section.
I’ve never understood this argument: if you don’t want to participate in a discussion, then don’t, but why stop others from doing so? No one is obligated to click into the comments section, read, or take part in any discussion on HN. Even when discussions get heated, in my experience they’re still better than similar discussions elsewhere on the internet.
> Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship
I think this is the main reason for flagging.
Completely agree with you about why pre-flagging topics is silly. I get that people love echo chambers for many reasons, but it doesn't seem that hard to me to just not read a thread that bothers you
If you don't think there's active censorship of certain topics from HN leadership you're naive beyond belief. There's a reason that most of the topics that get auto-flagged also happen to be a threat to the financial interests of YC and its backers.
The fact that many pro israel person believes they are the right side, and we just don’t get it.. is just bothering.
Literally every sane human being there is seeing what is going on, yet they refuse to see. Really interesting; especially when you think people used to question how germans followed hitler, and did not see what is going on. I think we all saw how such might happen these days.
Also the fact is; this whole thing will be considered as a genocide, will be told for generations. Palestinian holocoust will he the new one told in the ‘not again’ lessons, and name ‘israel’ will live with it.
Hey, please share the leaks as soon as possible. HN is compromised too and they demoted your post.
Thanks for sharing your concern. We will post soon, and the leak will always be there on our BlueSky feed.
https://bsky.app/profile/icw-nru.bsky.social
I tried reposting this on Reddit and my post got autodeleted in 1 second. Which is unusual because I have posted on reddit before.
" Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters. "
Can anyone help on this? I tried on r/technology r/truereddit r/global_news_hub
Without fail, every single time it gets removed instantly.
It may be because the account you used to post is relatively new or that you tried to post the same thing across multiple subreddits.
>" Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters. "
>Can anyone help on this?
>Without fail, every single time it gets removed instantly.
Hello, yes, I can help! You see, dark pattern algorithms found that polarization, infuriation, etc maximizes engagement maximizes profit. Reddit specializes in the deletion / banning meta, which is yet another form of engagement maximization. Are you not frustrated? Are you not so compelled to return to reddit, to finally succeed with your post, to drink that precious updoot milkshake? --- A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
reddit is much better with detection of bots and propaganda.
We can answer any questions anyone has about this.
*EDIT: It looks at 30 minutes in this post got flagged. Likely brigaded by mass downvote bots.
Any mod can take a look?
Is there any info on the language distribution of the censored content (or was this about english content only)?
Are there random (or cherry picked) examples of censored content somewhere? Is anything known about the selection process (just keyword based? more sophisticated?).
This talks about the dangers of manipulating public opinion and poisoning future automatic classifications, but how effective were the 'Israelis specifically with that (on a spectrum from "censors everything that contains the words river+sea" to "picks censorship targets strategically in order to shift discourse/opinion in favor of Israel")?
The language of the posts is usually representative of the user country. E.g. USA=English, Egypt=Arabic.
However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.
Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
Who's "we"?
FWIW, it's "them" https://archive.org/details/@icw_nru
Look at the username you're replying to, then at the username who posted the article on HN, then at the username who submitted the content to Internet Archive.
The whistleblowers mentioned in this article.
Stop Gaza genocide
This is a big deal. Great work!
Interesting, seems to contradict with actual facts
Who says the truth?
https://mronline.org/2022/07/14/meet-the-ex-cia-agents-decid...
Unsurprisingly this has been buried on HN, plenty of posts with way fewer votes per time on page 1. The censorship is everywhere. Utterly depressing.
This is the main reason I browse HN via https://hckrnews.com so that my "front page" cannot be tampered with by HN.
Plus, much easier to see where you left off from last time.
Worth mentioning Hacker News Removals as well:
https://github.com/vitoplantamura/HackerNewsRemovals
"List of stories removed from the Hacker News Front Page, updated in real time."
I say this not in defence of the Israelis (ab)use of Meta's takedown system, nor in defence of the Israelis conduct towards Palestinians: this is low-quality, sensationalist work.
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
Agreed, as an Israeli Jew, them saying that Jews don’t work on Shabbat there shouldn’t be reports on the 7th, shows so much their lack of objectivity, ignorance and the will to connect random points together.
Do they think that the police in Israel don’t work on Saturday? Does the CIA stops working on sundays? If they tried to visit Tel Aviv on Saturday they would see how lovely it is.
This is not a speculation on the part of the whistleblowers or some unknown fact related to "Jews".
The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.
This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.
But that makes sense, as the OP said, oct 7th was a huge terror attack that was live-streamed and shared throughout all social media. Hamas filmed themselves on Facebook live doing horrific acts, and people shared and cheered. So obviously there would be an uptick of takedown requests.
Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?
Yes starting from page 16 and 18, we dive exactly into what you ask. How takedown requests trend pre, during, and post October 7.
Let me know if you have any further questions.
Weird that you choose to focus on the quality of the material. Surely the underlying fact that Israel is committing genocide is a lot more important?
...is that weird?
Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
> Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
You don't understand that in the face of genocide people cling on to anything? Some times even, yes even! gasp, if the article has typos?
The issue with the typos or grammatical errors aren't the typos per se - it's that it strongly implies that their claims of being "independent journalists" is misleading or dishonest. At which point, a critical reader might ask themselves 1) why are they being dishonest about their identity; and 2) what else might they be being dishonest about?
Obviously, none of this matters if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, only its political purpose (not even how effective it is at achieving that). But if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, why are you even discussing it?
You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel
> unix_fan
> You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel
That's a weird thing to say. I certainly don't agree and would like to hear the rationale of anyone who supports that view.
This is harsh, but I agree with most of your points. The "blackmail" remark I find particularly damning: Threatening future leaks until Facebook stops "involvement with the Israeli government" is basically a self-admission that you put political success over journalistic integrity.
That turns you from a "legitimate" whistleblower (like Snowden) into an activist (at best) in my eyes.
Just out of curiosity, what do you believe Snowden intended by leaking what he leaked? From your comment it almost reads as if you think the publication was the point, not that those implicated by the leaks should be made to change their ways?
Snowden himself says that he saw a surveillance state being built and the people responsible lying about it under oat in front of democratic representatives (see James Clapper).
In his words, he wanted the American public to know about what was going on, and to get a say.
But when you say "I'll stop publishing once my political goals are achieved", you are openly admitting that:
1) You publishing this informations causes harm
2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
That, to me, is the difference between "whistleblowing" and "blackmail".
> 1) You publishing this informations causes harm
…Harm to a company supporting genocide
> 2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals
Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing
> 3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).
Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.
This is a super lame post. It’s not a “leak”, it’s an analysis someone did without citing any sources except one report a few years ago. Moreover, without question ISIS and other terror entities are certainly responsible for some number of the posts that were flagged on Facebook.
I’m sure the state department has asked Facebook to remove many anti-US posts abroad. That’s the way the world works. Just look at Google’s history in China. It’s been a really shitty issue in general for a while.
Making this some special sort of thing about Israel is ridiculous.
That said, I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion.
Where in the linked pdf is any evidence that the reported content was actually innocent?
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
Human rights watch's report covers more individual examples.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.
Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.
Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
> Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that are counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed
No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.
It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?
You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
The report: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
Unfortunately links to individual posts can't be accessed as the posts themselves are removed. The HRW report is excellent as they documented this individual cases and recorded them.
Okay well you don't have any proof, any in general, I would consider it a good use of tax shekels to reduce the number of pro-hamas posts on social media. So until you can dig up any proof, I'm considering this whole post to be a nothing burger
Did you look at the article? This investigation directly corroborates existing reports from third parties like Human Rights Watch. There is even an intake form directly from the Israeli government calling for the censorship posts of posts at Meta. We even posted their phone and fax number in case anyone is interested in having a friendly chat with them.
All data collected is directly from Meta, and the whisteblowers themselves are open to sharing this data with any authority or court willing to look into this. Everything is well documented. Where and how the data was obtained is also documented as well.
Or alternatively, you can wait for the next leak.
google search for "human rights watch israel censorship" turned this up: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/media_2023/12/ip_met...
check "illustrative examples" section.
Wow, is almost like you're committed to obfuscation what Israel is doing. Couldn't possibly be that tho...
All 1049 posts were peaceful? The pdf mentions this was mostly after October 7th, a terrorist (as in, meant to induce fear by targeting civilians) attack which was live streamed on Facebook and posted repeatedly during that day.
I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?
I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.
EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.
In this case it's being alleged that sending a thousand false takedown requests which were then acted on would not be a bungling, but rather a success.
This was my takeaway as well.
The pdf says there's a 95% accept rate on their takedown requests. They use that as evidence of censorship but, to me, that looks like evidence of judicious requests that meta agrees with.
Without data on what was taken down, there's no way to explain the difference. There's no reason not to make the entire dataset public (anonymized if you'd like but, since the content is implied to be benign, what's the harm in not?) and show some examples.
The implication that, because Israel submits the most requests that they must be acting in bad faith makes sense only of all countries had an equal amount of content generated that they'd like filtered. It's very easy for me to believe that Israel would have more content directed towards it that violated the Meta TOS.
Israel is not the target of a terrorist group. It is a terrorist state subjugating a trapped population to forced starvation and hunger. It's a second holocaust live streamed to your phone and you still think they are acting rationally.
Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
> Israel is not the target of a terrorist group.
Most would disagree, not the least of which are people in that region. Hamas does not have many friends outside of Iran because most governments in the region see them as a destabilizing force. And they are. The
> It is a terrorist state subjugating a trapped population to forced starvation and hunger.
They are using tactics that, if put up to scrutiny in a trial in an international court of law, would probably be considered war crimes and crimes against humanity. The same would probably be true of Hamas' tactics on October 7th, 2023.
> Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
Ultimately you have two Semitic peoples - Palestinians and Jews - who want to establish an ethnostate in what used to be Mandatory Palestine. Both have some ancestral title to at least some of the region. Quite a few Jewish subgroups, like Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, would be considered "brown", to borrow your term.
The way forward will require both parties to recognize each other's right to at least some of the land. It's worth noting that this has not been, and still is not, a view held by either party's governments.
self determination, through-violence*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_...
Would you say that this list is incorrect? Or that any attack on civilians in Israel is justified and thus not a terrorist attack?
Do you think Israel was created through peace or through zionist bombing attacks? Do you think only the brown bombers should be labelled terrorists?
You sound racist and like you're ok enabling the killing of children. As a doctor Tarek Loubani reported today "I've been to many wars, it has never felt like the war is against children"
Before the state of Israel, Jewish groups were bombing British mandate offices. Not civilians, and definitely not on purpose. But I’m trying to understand your logic. Attacking innocent civilians is legitimate if your goal is to establish a state?
And BTW, you don’t know me personally, ad hominem attacks just weaken your argument
Do you believe these events were terrorist attacks?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(1937)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balad_al-Shaykh_massacre
https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zzFlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MIkN...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
Well yeah, the 30s and 40s were a horrible time of terror attacks from both groups against each other.
> Before the state of Israel, Jewish groups were bombing British mandate offices. Not civilians, and definitely not on purpose.
Why did you make this assertion?
And what makes them terrorist attacks?
No, you see, it's not terror when the bomb falls from a jet fighter or a drone /s.
Or when it's biological warfare on civilians for the purpose of depopulation either apparently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
Is killing a child terrorism? Because israel has killed over 18000 in the last few years.
You didn’t answer my question
I can fully grant the list as accurate and even undercounting the number of attacks that have happened.
It, frankly, pales in comparison to the number of civilians the IDF has killed and is currently killing. No amount of terrorist attacks can justify starving a population or dropping bombs on the tents of refuges.
Like, I'm sorry, but an attack in 2024 that injures 20 people and an attack in 2023 that kills 1000 is simply not comparable. There are literally 1000s dying weekly right now in gaza. The IDF is daily shooting starving children that go to the Israel's ran aid sites.
Israel does not have the right to commit genocide.
The OP said that Israel is not a target of terror attacks.
Yes, very good, OP's wrong and you're right.
Now, if you'd address the 8,000,000lb elephant in the room that would be great.
Sure, I don't agree with that assessment, but I get where it comes from.
I find the "what-about"ism somewhat tiring at this point. What Israel is currently doing is unconscionable.
This is really not unlike trying to criticize the war crimes committed during the Warsaw uprising or the actions of John Brown. Were they wrong? Yes. Were they understandable? Absolutely. Bringing them up whenever someone brings up the actions of the Nazis or the slave owners is what's problematic. It tries to strip away the humanity of people that are being slaughtered in order to justify the slaughtering.
I pointed out the error in his post, everybody else is “what-about”ing at me in response.
K.
Did you need to point out that error? You can see why we'd read your response as running cover for a state actively committing genocide, right?
Yeah I did. I have friends that lost family from these terror attacks. Twice while on a date with my wife at our local bar we had to flee because of a Palestinian started shooting random people in the street. I had the luck to have a birthday party cancelled at this location on this date https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphinarium_discotheque_bom...
So having a random person on the internet explicitly lying about these experiences and having other people upvoting him kind of grinds my gears.
Understandable.
Now, do you condemn the genocide? Because the problem here is that even though you've experienced a traumatic event, 1000s of Palestinians who never shot at or bombed your family are being shot at, bombed, and starved.
Do you acknowledge the Palestinian right to exist?
Of course I acknowledge their right to exist. I only wish it would be reciprocated, however, time and time again we were shown that this is not the case. Gaza was left alone on 2006, look what happened. They could’ve made an example of a prosperous territory and enabling trust. Instead they chose war death and terror.
I wish what happened wouldn’t have. On oct 7 and in Gaza. But people keep forgetting that we still have living hostages in tunnels under Gaza, and we can’t accept a militarized Gaza anymore.
For the last 2 years there are 2 principles that have not changed. Hamas should return the hostages and surrender its arms. The moment that happens the war is over. It could’ve happened 2 years ago and this thousands of deaths could’ve been avoided. But until that happens, the war continues.
So I don’t believe there’s genocide, as it precludes explicit desire. There’s war. And it will end the moment Hamas want it to.
>They could’ve made an example of a prosperous territory and enabling trust.
How do they create a prosperous territory? Israel destroyed Gaza's airport. Israel destroyed the foundations of Gaza's seaport. Israel maintains a maritime blockade of Gaza, so it's not like they can freely engage in trade with other sovereign territories. Israel maintains control over exploitation of Gaza's natural gas deposits.[1][2]
> But people keep forgetting that we still have living hostages in tunnels under Gaza, and we can’t accept a militarized Gaza anymore.
Even before Oct7, there were something like 350-500 Palestinians held in Israeli jails, charged with no crimes but indefinitely detained. They are functionally the same as hostages. Why should Gaza accept Israel holding hostages? Why should Palestine accept a militarized Israel? [3][4]
> Hamas should return the hostages and surrender its arms.
Israel should return its hostages and surrender its arms. And then the leadership should stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. We put some Hamas leaders on trial at the same time if you like, I'm fine with that, but the total disarmament of Israel and the prosecution of its leadership will likely be an overwhelming net good for the rest of humanity.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/6/21/palestines-forg...
[2] https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/the-gas-fields-off-gaza-a-gif...
[3] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2020/10/un-expert-ca...
[4] https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-prison-intifada-supporting...
There's no error in my post. "terrorism" is a political racist term mainly used to benefit white colonial powers and label freedom movements as below their oppressors.
I don't think brown people trying to save themselves from a concentration camp are terrorists, therefore the terrorist state of israel is not the target of a terrorist group. In fact how could they be when it is them that are invading Gaza for 40+ years.
I know you're not this stupid, you're just racist.
But you said that Israel is a terrorist state, so that isn’t political? Which is it?
This is whataboutism. Either address the parent comment or go away.
How is this whataboutism? He said that Israel is not a target of terror attacks. In response I provided a list of terror attacks against Israel, this is exactly on topic
You don't have to convince me that you don't get it. I believe you. I'm not here to change your mind. I'm calling what you say out for the benefit of others.
It's whataboutism because the statement also included that Israel is a terrorist state. By giving a list of attacks on Israel as a rebuttal, you are saying Israel is not a terrorist state because it's been attacked by Hamas. Do you see how silly that sounds? Since Hamas is a terrorist group for all of its viscousness, Israel must be as well, because the viciousness of Israel is more than 10 times that of Hamas.
In the words of the ancient Spartans: If
I'm not sure how effective it was; I've seen plenty of content related to Gaza on Meta platforms, and I'm located in the US.
It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
The US was actually very low on Israel's targeting list: they came in at #18 on the list (0.7% of all TDR's submitted by Israel), lower than Israel itself (#14, 1.3%). I would speculate, given that previous reporting (the Facebook Files from Frances Haugen) has said that Facebook treats moderation in America differently from in other countries, that Israel is not focused on censoring US speech the same way because Meta would be more likely to object to their TDR's covering Americans.
The nature of the censorship is that it isn't targeted at who's seeing posts, but rather at the posts themselves. So it's not necessarily the case that the Israelis are treating different countries differently; it could simply be that Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine are all producing the largest amount of content related to the war given their proximity, involvement, and interest in the conflict.
The whole point of Facebook is that your friend network is going to be largely similar to you: that's how they can impute your interests from analyzing the interest of your friend network and then target ads for you. So what most Americans will see will be largely posts by other Americans. Immigrants from Algeria etc. will have overlapping interests and serve as node-points to move posts from one network to another, but still the majority of posts that an American will see, even on a controversial international topic like Israel/Palestine, will be from Americans, and thus largely outside of the Israeli censorship program.
Thus, my point is that your claim of personal experience as an American doesn't really have much bearing on the question of the scale of the censorship here. They are trying to bring to life censorship that is largely happening away from Americans, where Facebook historically doesn't exercise the same levels of care and respect for speech that they do with Americans (see Haugen's Facebook Files leaks).
I've also got to say that this article has apparently been flagged out twice already seems to be in line with the point of the original article. I know from experience that Facebook moderation discussions don't usually attract this level of flagging, so I'm pretty sure that this has to be related to Israel/Palestine, not Facebook.
Have you used Facebook recently? 99% of my posts are from random meme pages and groups; one's own social networks produce very little of the content you see.
>its nature as a Jewish state.
Its the same problem. Whats happening in Gaza is a direct result of the construction of an ethnostate. Whatever the resultant state is called, it should protect everyone who lives there, jewish or otherwise. Instead of a Jewish State, it should be a state where Jews are one of the people who are safe.
> less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state
Explicit ethnostates are against law and norms.
Then we've got a very, very long list of countries to act against.
No in the west we don't.
Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Now it may be the case that Israel would rather leave that spot and remove itself from those norms, but given its history that'd be tantamount to suicide.
> Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Most of the West is made up of nations that are, to at least some degree, ethnostates. If they aren't explicitly ethnostates, then they have large political blocs that grew out of ethnic groups. See: Sinn Fein, Bloc Québécois, Scottish National Party, Basque Nationalist Party, Republican Left of Catalonia, Plaid Cymru, and others.
Most of the above listed seek to exercise political power in a given region based on ethnicity. Some even have large delegations to regional or national legislative bodies. All are in countries generally identified as Western.
Even some of what you would define a country as, generally speaking, is somewhat influenced by ethnic factors like language and religion.
Nearly every country in Europe is an ethnostate.
alternatively, the US could just not dump billions of dollars in aid and weapons to those countries. social media companies could strengthen their content moderation systems against these kinds of state-sponsored attacks. no need to "act against" anyone.
That would, again, mean not engaging with most countries on Earth, because most of them are, or have at least some qualities of, being ethnostates, religious states, or some other combination of putting one group above another in society based on immutable characteristics or characteristics of conscience.
If you're not Han in the PRC, they're going to try to "normalize" you in the direction of acting like you're Han. If you're not ethnic Russian, same with you in Russia. The only way to keep the former Yugoslavia from continuing to be a bloodbath was by essentially setting up ethnostates. And, yes, all of them use or have used violence to enforce these conditions.
China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
> China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Tell that to the Uyghurs they were re-educating.
> Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
They should go back to that then, but at the heart of it, you'd still have a mostly Jewish populace. Kind of like how the state that Hamas or Fatah would like to establish would be mostly Palestinian Arab.
> Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
Most of the countries in the world are ultimately ethnostates or have political factions and geography seriously impacted by ethnic groupings. Don't believe me? Go suggest to about any European or Asian group that some other ethnic group get majority control of their land, resources, and government. They'll be reluctant at best.
PRC, Russia, Serbia... Isn't that a list of US current opponents on the world stage? If I was Israeli I would be hoping my country did not go down this path (and of course I say hoping because I wouldn't have the ability to prevent it.)