[HN Gopher] Israeli group claims it's using back channels to cen...
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Israeli group claims it's using back channels to censor
"inflammatory" content
Author : ilamont
Score : 125 points
Date : 2024-01-10 18:43 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theintercept.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theintercept.com)
| Qem wrote:
| Archived:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240110185343/https://theinterce...
| jjulius wrote:
| For what it's worth, The Intercept has not been able to verify
| what this group is claiming.
|
| >A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel's tech sector is working
| tirelessly to remove content it says doesn't belong on platforms
| like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those
| and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside
| official channels, the project's founder told The Intercept.
|
| >The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that
| sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the
| group's complaints or verify that the group was behind the
| removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Although this is in the grand scheme of things hard to verify.
| Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Anyone who has ever posted a "I need help" here on HN and gotten
| support has also used "backchannels".
|
| An actual concern would be if this "backchannel" turned out to be
| messaging an insider who acts outside of policy. We know the
| Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at
| least, but I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-
| israel insiders in say, TikTok.
| octopoc wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > Iron Truth members have flagged thousands of posts for
| removal, from clearly racist or false content to posts that
| _are merely sympathetic to Palestinians_.
|
| (emphasis added)
|
| If you aren't connected enough to get Google to fix your email,
| your business is disrupted. It's unfair but life moves on.
| Maybe next time you don't use Gmail.
|
| The stakes are much higher here in an actual war / genocide.
| People are starving, dying, having their homes stolen, etc. and
| this is an attempt to deny them a voice.
|
| Also FTA:
|
| > I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in
| [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for
| Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and
| actually they removed it after a few days."
|
| American companies should not engage in propaganda for a
| foreign country. I find it reprehensible that foreign nationals
| from a nation currently engaged in conflict are deliberately
| working together to push a foreign agenda on the people of the
| entire world.
|
| This is way, way different than not being able to use Google
| apps for business.
| baz00 wrote:
| I think it would be safer to remove all political posts from
| social media (both sides) as policy. There is a massive
| propaganda war on both sides and all it does is amplify
| sentiment, create further division, hurt more people and
| compromise security over time.
|
| The press are bad enough at coming up with verified claims
| from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
|
| Of course our current American social media dictators are
| pretty lax on doing anything positive for society as a whole
| while it benefits them.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| How do you disambiguate "political" content from "content
| people want to share?"
|
| The hard thing about "getting politics out of X" is that
| every time people are involved, politics is involved.
| Politics is just what people think the group should be.
|
| > The press are bad enough at coming up with verified
| claims from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
|
| No doubt. One of these days we might successfully drill
| into people's skulls "Stop getting your news from social
| media; that's not news that's rumors."
| macintux wrote:
| > No doubt. One of these days we might successfully drill
| into people's skulls "Stop getting your news from social
| media; that's not news that's rumors."
|
| It's much worse than rumors: it's often deliberately
| misconstrued/out of context, or outright lies.
|
| Rumors I don't mind so much, since they're usually pretty
| obvious.
| baz00 wrote:
| Indeed. Then again "the news" is well known for carefully
| editorialising things and conflating unverified sources
| as facts on and off. General journalistic standards have
| been compromised because there's a race to get the
| information in front of people faster than social media
| and it is now seen as ok to correct it later. This is
| mostly online though. Print and televised media is
| usually not as real time.
|
| Everything is a shit show.
| Qem wrote:
| > We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders
| in Twitter at least
|
| That former twitter employee was found guilty of acting as an
| agent of a foreign government. So far the Israeli lobby has a
| free pass to meddle in without triggering the same treatment.
| See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-twitter-employee-
| found...
| yorwba wrote:
| Lots of open positions
| https://careers.tiktok.com/m/position?keywords=content%20mod...
| If you really need an insider, you can probably just recruit
| someone who's already working there, but getting someone new in
| is also unlikely to be difficult.
| maratc wrote:
| TikTok has an office in Tel-Aviv.
| xenospn wrote:
| They all do.
| dijit wrote:
| > I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel
| insiders in say, TikTok.
|
| The sheer volume of pro-palestine, pro-hamas (those are not the
| same), pro-islam and anti-jewish sentiment I am bombarded with
| on Tiktok tells me that either:
|
| * there is no moderation
|
| * There is absurdly overwhelming pro-terrorism and racist
| sentiment
|
| * The bot/spam farms are in full war mode.
|
| I find it hard to believe that content is being moderated with
| any pro-israel bias on tiktok.
| baz00 wrote:
| Someone's got to try and take out the trash seeing as the social
| network owners don't bother policing their own estate while there
| are clicks and revenue rolling in.
|
| I tried to take out one 5G nutjob who was telling people to burn
| down phone towers and nothing happened. This was after my local
| 4G tower was actually burned down and we were without phone
| service for a week because someone decided to copy the idiot.
|
| There are real consequences for real people for posting this
| shit.
|
| Edit: not sure why this is now flagged? Would a moderator care to
| comment before I'm silenced permanently?
| shmatt wrote:
| I thought this was common knowledge?
|
| I often see posts in technical groups im in from people asking
| for help re-opening their hacked instagram or facebook accounts.
| Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to
| speed up the process for friends/family
| xenospn wrote:
| Correct. I did exactly that for my friend.
| tazu wrote:
| > Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees
| to speed up the process for friends/family
|
| You can also sleep with those employees to speed it up [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/kittylixo-onlyfans-instagram-
| em...
| octopoc wrote:
| Many of us are in the tech industry. Has anyone seen this sort of
| thing happen? Or is this something we wouldn't be aware of since
| it's usually on the "content moderation" side of the house? (I
| haven't ever worked in social media, so not really familiar with
| content moderation other than removing the occasional dick pic)
|
| Edit:
|
| > Most of them are product managers, software developers. ...
| They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to
| forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.
| kornhole wrote:
| If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news
| around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn
| about the direct back channels many government agencies had to
| directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow
| banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest
| violation of free speech in modern history. He ordered the
| government to no longer contact the social media companies
| unless something is found to be illegal. This applied to
| government agencies but does not apply to these groups that
| might be organized or funded by a foreign government.
| Yoric wrote:
| I remember browsing through the Twitter Files and finding
| nothing interesting in them.
|
| Yes, all social media have open channels with law
| enforcement. That's because social media have legal
| obligations and when someone comes to a moderator claiming to
| be a law enforcement officer working on a kidnapping or
| preventing a terrorist attack and needing time-sensitive help
| to save lives, you don't want the moderator to have to guess
| whether that's a real emergency or a hoax.
|
| It's... not a secret. If you live in a democracy, you can
| quickly find out the name of these channels, they have
| websites.
|
| Source: I've been part of a moderation team. Not on something
| that large, though.
| Yoric wrote:
| I've been part of a moderation team in a (much) smaller
| context. Most people want to do good work, but in the end,
| we're all human, so of course anybody could be influenced,
| especially in such volatile situations.
|
| How far people are actually influenced and in which
| direction... that's anybody's guess.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What if there is pressure from bosses, from outsiders,
| socially. What if they say, 'are you supporting terrorists?'
| kevingadd wrote:
| only one data point, but fwiw when I worked for Google I found
| some actively toxic youtube content w/upwards of 500k views
| that was telling children to off themselves, and despite using
| my employee back-channel connections the most I was able to get
| was an eventual "I'm not allowed to do anything about this"
| from a YouTube moderator, though it seemed to be for technical
| reasons (all the nasty content was in annotations, which
| apparently weren't wired into the moderation pipeline). There
| definitely wasn't a red button for me to hit as an employee to
| get it taken down.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| _> Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to
| the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as
| false, antisemitic, or "pro-terrorist" across platforms such as
| X, YouTube, and TikTok._
|
| Does anyone know if that's a lot? I don't know either way. I just
| have a gut feeling that compared to the number of posts made by
| bots on any political matter it barely matters.
|
| I wonder if it wouldn't be more efficient to counter with more
| bots going in the other direction with likes and posts.
| strulovich wrote:
| My experience is that it's a drop in the bucket.
|
| But, there's a power law distribution for virality, so removing
| the top 1000 most viral posts might still be impactful.
| ars wrote:
| 1,000 posts is absolutely nothing. If that's all they removed
| then I don't get why this article even exists.
| xenospn wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook (Reddit
| as well) probably add more than 1000 posts each on this topic
| every hour.
| Yoric wrote:
| I suspect that we're closer to 1,000 per second.
| cma wrote:
| You have to multiply the post count by their reach. If it
| is a strong exponent power law the top 1000 may be the vast
| majority of what people see on the topic, but they may
| apply greater scrutiny in removing posts with high reach
| too.
| dralley wrote:
| Not only that, but there is more than enough _legitimately_
| antisemitic or pro-terrorism content on these platforms for
| this to be fully legitimate reporting behavior.
|
| It could be 100,000 posts and this would still be near
| meaningless without actual context on what is being reported.
| 1000 posts is a joke.
| bjourne wrote:
| You have to measure the effect by summing the reach of every
| removed post. Removing a post from n account with ten followers
| is not the same as removing one from an account with ten
| million followers.
| klyrs wrote:
| Deleting 1000 of my posts: inconsequential. Deleting 1000 of
| Musk's posts: inconceivable.
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| Wouldn't deleting posts of high-profile users be easily
| noticed and lead to Streisand effect? The article says it
| didn't manage to verify the cited claims.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Yeah, but the reposts of it would be from lower-reach
| follower accounts that would also potentially be vulnerable
| to deletion if they spread
| DarkByte wrote:
| If this "Iron Truth" is a smoke screen to remove any information
| that is true and sympathetic to Palestinians through mis-
| categorizing and mis-labeling and that is not hateful then it is
| a system of oppression and must be stopped.
| smoothjazz wrote:
| You can see this happen out in the open when Paul Graham (or
| anyone else) posts statistics about who's been killed, raw
| footage... he's immediately swarmed by people, some major players
| in the industry, accusing him of "antisemitism", which it most
| definitely is not.
| rthkljlkrj wrote:
| Of course they are. Anyone who's seen that documentary about
| Israel meddling in UK politics know that these people have a lot
| of power that isn't just military.
| ok123456 wrote:
| "The Labour Files" is on youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiODoWurA64
| myth_drannon wrote:
| I stopped reading The Intercept when it became a Russian
| propaganda mouthpiece. Had high hopes for Greenwald after the
| Snowden affair, but alas he found his niche.
|
| This "Iron Truth" thing is blown out of proportion. A lot of
| techies are organizing and helping in many different ways. Iron
| Truth is one of them, I saw messages from them. Not sure how
| successful it is, the internet is drowning in so much vile
| propaganda. There are better ways to spend the energy than
| cleaning up a garbage dump. IMHO the main point of Iron Truth is
| to troll the Hamas supporters (who believe the old antisemitic
| trope that Jews control the media) not to achieve any kind of
| cleanup. Based on comments here, plenty are foaming at the mouth
| feeling vindicated "See, we told you so! They do control it!".
| Mission accomplished I guess?
| hax0ron3 wrote:
| Russian propaganda such as what? Do you have any specific
| examples?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Huh? Greenwald left The Intercept in a big huff when they
| pushed _back_ on his attempts to do that.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Resignation_of_G...
| bjourne wrote:
| Three days ago a number of accounts with massive followings were
| suspended from Twitter; @zei_squirrel, @AlanRMacLeod,
| @kenklipperstein, and @TrueAnonPod. They were later reinstated
| and Twitter claimed its algorithms had misidentified them as spam
| accounts. Strange how that so frequently happens to pro-
| Palestinian accounts, but never to Zionist accounts. Clearly,
| there are well-organized and well-funded (and possbly even state-
| sponsored) "flagging campaigns" working to remove as much pro-
| Palestinian content as possible.
| davidf18 wrote:
| Pulitzer Prize Winner, and Snowdon interviewer, and Intercept co-
| founder Gleen Greenwald left the Intercept because of censorship
| of his article by editorial staff.
|
| https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...
|
| "The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological
| homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed
| the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my
| own articles."
|
| If The Intercept was willing to censor Greenwald, exactly how
| much can we rely on the Intercept to give us a complete message?
| How can we say that they're a trustworthy source?
|
| We live in a world where Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, filmed
| their killing and raping of women on bodycams/helmet cams, killed
| 360 at an overnight festival, and kidnapped over 200, including
| children and elderly women.
|
| Not only was their brutality surprising, but most surprising is
| that people across the world supported Hamas and their deeds,
| they tore down posters of people who had been kidnapped. This
| happened in my country, the USA, of all places. It is hard to
| understand Americans saying, "From the river to the sea...." the
| protests blocking traffic, on college campuses.
|
| None of these people addressed the attempt to commit genocide
| against Jews in 1948 against the resurrected Jewish nation by
| some Palestinians and 5 Arab armies. In the process of the
| attempt at Jewish genocide, this time not by Germans but by
| Arabs, the Palestinian state was destroyed. Had there been no
| attempt at genocide by the Arabs, The Palestinian state would
| have existed since 1948.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| "If Palestinians had accepted being killed and colonized, they
| would have had a state since 1948. Since they weren't okay with
| that, we will keep killing them and steal their home and land
| to build illegal settlements".
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| The concept of free speech as a value that is good in and of
| itself is something that barely exists outside of the USA. It's
| hard for an American to grok this, but the more you travel (or
| read foreign news) the more you'll realize this.
|
| If you ask an Israeli (or a European or even Canadian) "which do
| you prefer the law prioritize, 'Truth' or free speech" you will
| most likely get, the former.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Maybe they're afraid to be honest about which they prefer?
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| That doesn't really fit with my experience in Canada,
| especially given that Canadian law has robust freedom of
| expression provisions in the charter of rights and freedoms.
|
| https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| I don't want to start a shouting match and have to prove my
| case for every country but this is from Wikipedia.
|
| "Hate speech, obscenity, and defamation are common categories
| of restricted speech in Canada. During the 1970 October
| Crisis, the War Measures Act was used to limit speech from
| the militant political opposition."
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Free speech doesn't mean unlimited speech. In the US you
| are not free to defraud, slander, physically endanger, etc.
| And everywhere, in everything, there are failures and
| imperfections.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| If "hate speech and obscenity" aren't covered by free
| speech protections, what is?
| DarkByte wrote:
| I would argue free speech is much more preferred as a citizen
| of one of these countries as too many are walking around
| convinced their understanding of facts is truth when it is in
| truth not.
|
| Free speech is a necessity learned from the past horrors of
| fascism.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| So your argument is "other countries don't care about free
| speech, America should be more like other countries? This is a
| bizarre take, I was with you up until the last word.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| No, I am firmly in the free-speech camp. Which is why 'truth'
| is in quotes...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The concept of free speech as a value that is good in and of
| itself is something that barely exists outside of the USA.
|
| That's demonstrably false; rights like free speech are
| enshrined in societies all over the world. Other countries
| don't have a First Amendment, but they have free speech, free
| press, etc.
| bhouston wrote:
| I have found a lot of pro-Palestinian YouTube videos are put
| behind warnings pages unnecessarily - the preventing them from
| going viral.
|
| Here is a great example, this Chris Hayes of MSNBC news segment
| on the MSNBC YouTube channel:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WTHVseqZdw
|
| Notice the warning says:
|
| "The following content may contain graphic or violent imagery"
|
| But there is no graphic or violent imagery in the video at all,
| it is just quotes from Israeli leaders.
|
| This to me seems to be unfair censorship because once that
| warning is on a video, it will not be recommended to others in
| any way - basically it can not go viral.
|
| There are no such warnings on the official MSNBC website on this
| video, thus it is specific to YouTube: https://www.msn.com/en-
| us/news/other/chris-hayes-the-war-in-...
|
| I've seen this happen on another video, one calling on the games
| industry to be supportive of the Palestinian struggle:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDB_wYdn5f4
| mtalantikite wrote:
| I was asked to sign in to watch that video, since it has a
| content warning. Is that something that happens to other news
| broadcasts dealing with war footage?
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