[HN Gopher] Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove ...
___________________________________________________________________
Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine
posts on Meta
Author : jbegley
Score : 1063 points
Date : 2025-04-11 16:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dropsitenews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dropsitenews.com)
| Qem wrote:
| Archived version:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250411170102/https://www.drops...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| >> _The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown
| requests issued by Israel since October 7, 2023._
|
| Nice to see Zuckerberg taking free speech as seriously as he
| claims.
| seydor wrote:
| I m not sure he ever claimed that
| pmastela wrote:
| I recall he made changes at the beginning of the year
| specifically because "it's time to get back to our roots
| around free expression."
|
| Full transcript of his remarks can be found here:
| https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-
| anno...
| googlryas wrote:
| I'd like to see examples of actual posts that were taken down,
| rather than talk of the quantity, or who filed the reports.
| mef51 wrote:
| The HRW report[1] goes into details, at least on the 1050
| takedowns they documented
|
| > A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta's
| moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found
| that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed
| on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in
| support of Palestine, while just one post was content in
| support of Israel."
|
| [1] https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| > Human Rights Watch also found repeated inaccurate
| application of the "adult nudity and sexual activity" policy
| for content related to Palestine. In every one of the cases,
| we reviewed where this policy was invoked, the content
| included images of dead Palestinians over ruins in Gaza that
| were clothed, not naked. For example, multiple users reported
| their Instagram stories being removed under this policy when
| they posted the same image of a Palestinian father in Gaza
| who was killed while he was holding his clothed daughter, who
| was also killed.
|
| > While "hate speech," "bullying and harassment," and
| "violence and incitement" policies[74] were less commonly
| invoked in the cases Human Rights Watch documented, the
| handful of cases where they were applied stood out as
| erroneous. For example, a Facebook user post that said, "How
| can anyone justify supporting the killing of babies and
| innocent civilians..." was removed under Community Standards
| on "bullying and harassment."[75] Another user posted an
| image on Instagram of a dead child in a hospital in Gaza with
| the comment, "Israel bombs the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City
| killing over 500..." which was removed under Community
| Guidelines on "violence and incitement."[76]
| breppp wrote:
| HRW is a "complicated" organization. It took money from
| Saudis in return for not advocating for LGBT rights in the
| middle east [1]. It agreed to take money from the Qatari
| government, a government that also supports Hamas [2][3] and
| is involved in corruption cases and buying of politicians all
| over the world.
|
| [1] https://theintercept.com/2020/03/02/human-rights-watch-
| took-...
|
| [2] https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-
| east/1700763578-human-...
|
| [3] https://www.memri.org/reports/raven-project-leaks-
| alleged-qa...
| someotherperson wrote:
| This feels like a dog whistle rather than providing
| something substantive.
|
| The Israeli government also helped facilitate Qatar's
| support for Hamas[0], what's your point here?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
| #Isra...
| nickff wrote:
| Not previously involved in this discussion, but what
| exactly is the 'dog-whistle' you're calling out here? It
| seems that you're engaging in whataboutism; is that what
| you believe the parent is doing as well?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| someotherperson wrote:
| > In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or
| suggestive language in political messaging to garner
| support from a particular group without provoking
| opposition
|
| The nonsensical references to Qatar and Hamas while
| pushing conspiracies around a human rights group are
| standard Hasbara talking points.
| nickff wrote:
| You're asserting a dog-whistle for anti-arab racism, or
| anti-islam discrimination? Those references seem more
| like whataboutism than some sort of dog-whistle.
| breppp wrote:
| The Israeli government allowed transfer of Qatari money
| to Hamas as a mean to buy quiet, stemmed from the belief
| Hamas is a rational organization that strives to improve
| Palestinian life through its government of the Gaza
| Strip, an awful mistake.
|
| Qatar however is a supporter of the islamist Muslim
| Brotherhood ideology behind Hamas, financier and a host
| for most of its leadership.
|
| Furthermore involved in other terror financing in the
| region such as the Taliban, IRGC and Al-Qaeda [1][2].
|
| My point here is the HRW has shown before to be corrupted
| and flexible with their ethics in relation to the middle
| east, and there is evidence it took money from Qatar, a
| country deeply involved in this conflict and in the past
| used bribery in corruption to influence western politics
| [3]
|
| [1] https://thearabweekly.com/ahmadinejad-reveals-qatar-
| paid-ran...
|
| [2] https://www.iar-gwu.org/print-archive/an-analysis-of-
| qatari-...
|
| [3] https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-
| qatargat...
| googlryas wrote:
| This is exactly why I want to see the posts, because I don't
| really trust 3rd parties to accurately classify "peaceful
| content in support of Palestine". It's possible Facebook is
| wrong. It's also possible that it's filled with content that
| is peaceful in only the most shallow, ignorant reading
| possible. e.g. (paraphrasing from my facebook feed last year,
| on a post which was not taken down): "I'm planning a
| celebration on October 7th in support of my Palestinian
| friends, who wants to join me :)"
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The article mentions requests to remove posts quoting Ghassan
| Kanafani. The article introduces Kanafani as a literary figure,
| but then discusses his involvement in the PFLP. I don't know if
| they want the reader to form a particular judgement about this,
| or if they're just reporting the facts.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Imagine actively censoring a revolutionary your government
| assassinated 50 years ago. Is the dude haunting this person
| or something?
| abeppu wrote:
| It sounds like you're using the fact that the posts aren't
| available for you to view to evaluate as a weakness of the
| reporting on this suppression campaign, but of course they're
| not available _because_ of the suppression campaign.
|
| Surely the burden should be on the censors to establish clearly
| that something is in fact incitement to violence, rather than
| on external reporters to magically show that content which has
| been taken down is not incitement?
| bawolff wrote:
| Generally i hold the burden to prove wrong-doing is on the
| party allegging wrong-doing. Otherwise we get in a situation
| where it can be effectively impossible for the accused to
| prove their innocence, as it is much more difficult to prove
| a negative than a positive.
| abeppu wrote:
| ... and you're absolutely right, innocent people had
| basically no recourse when Meta took down their content, or
| shadow-banned them etc on the claim that they were inciting
| violence, pro-terrorist, engaging in hate-speech etc. The
| accused cannot publicly point to their post which merely
| used a palestinian flag emoji, or mentioned an assassinated
| writer. The burden should have been much higher for Meta
| when casting such accusations about.
| bawolff wrote:
| Both of these things can be true.
| abeppu wrote:
| Sure the burden _should_ be high in both directions.
|
| But the journalists seem to be doing a decent job of
| announcing and describing the data they have, and
| confirming it with multiple sources within Meta. They're
| engaged in a seemingly earnest and forthright effort to
| make the case. And to the degree that it's limited, it
| seems those limits are due to Meta itself.
|
| Meta, on the other hand, excepting these whistleblowers,
| makes very little information available about their take-
| down actions both at the level of individual cases or at
| the level of their systematic responses to governments.
| The whistleblowers claim that Meta regularly took down
| posts without human review when requested by the
| Israelis. That's the exact opposite of the high burden of
| proof that you're asking for.
| bawolff wrote:
| If we want to blame meta for having opaque review
| processes with little option to appeal then i'd agree.
|
| In terms of the implied proposition that israel is
| intentionally using the take down process to shield
| itself from criticism. I just dont think the evidence in
| the article supports that proposition. I would expect the
| stuff mentioned in the article to happen both in the case
| Israel is trying to get criticism taken down and in the
| case Israel is only interested in having "kill 'em all"
| type posts taken down. So i don't find the article very
| compelling.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > it can be effectively impossible for the accused to prove
| their innocence
|
| Except in this case, the accused are the ones who have all
| the logs, all the records, all the database entries, etc.
| They are in fact in possession of the complete and perfect
| means to prove or disprove these allegations, and their
| choice not to use this data to defend themselves (i.e. by
| not showing that the posts were in fact harmful or inciting
| violence, etc) lends credence to the allegations.
| edanm wrote:
| First, there are two parties here that could prove
| something. Meta itself, or the Israeli government.
|
| Second, you write: > [...] their choice not to use this
| data to defend themselves (i.e. by not showing that the
| posts were in fact harmful or inciting violence, etc)
| lends credence to the allegations.
|
| This article is from yesterday. I don't think it's fair
| to call not responding a "choice", surely you would
| expect it to take some time to actually respond. I might
| have missed it in the article, but did they reach out to
| the Israeli government or to Meta to ask for a response
| (as is normal journalistic practice)?
|
| Third, it's possible that some of the material is things
| that _cannot_ be publicized. I have no idea if this is
| the case (and I personally doubt it 's the majority of
| takedown requests), but if, for example, some of the
| requests were to remove e.g. images of abused Israeli
| hostages, bodies, etc, this might be material that they
| _won 't_ release, because the whole idea is to stop
| spread of such images. Of course, they can still describe
| the purpose of the various takedown requests.
| ang_cire wrote:
| > This article is from yesterday.
|
| The accusation that Palestinian voices were suppressed by
| social media companies has been being made for years.
| It's not a new revelation.
|
| > or the Israeli government
|
| Israel is the originator of the requests, not the one who
| is being accused of improperly complying (Meta), so why
| would they help or respond at all?
|
| > it's possible that some of the material is things that
| cannot be publicized
|
| Even the kinds of images you describe can be shown
| censored, in order to show the content being present
| without revealing sensitive material.
| esalman wrote:
| I am part of a neighborhood group where I grew up in Bangladesh
| and lived until 5th grade in the 90s.
|
| The group admin this morning let us know via Facebook post that
| he has received warnings frm Facebook. The group is "at a risk
| of being suspended" because way too many posts relating to
| "dangerous organization and individuals" have been removed. He
| wants everyone to be extra careful when posting about
| p*l*s*i*e, I*r*e*, g*z*, j*w* etc. He used asterisks himself
| just to be extra careful himself.
|
| Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis,
| which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation
| campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole country
| of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said misinformation
| campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I*r*e*.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| > Not to mention my country is dealing with rohingya crisis,
| which was fueled by Facebook and WhatsApp misinformation
| campaigns, and Facebook had 2 moderators for the whole
| country of Myanmar and refused to do anything about said
| misinformation campaigns. But they sure make exceptions for I
| _r_ e*
|
| Not sure why you're downvoted. This is all true.
| sneak wrote:
| ...and yet, they still use and support these censorship
| platforms.
|
| They'll do anything but leave.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Facebook is not the same there as it is here. It's not just
| a fun app you use, it's a huge part of how African and
| Asian countries interface with the internet. Trying to lead
| a group effort to leave the platform wouldn't work at any
| scale other than complete unanimity, and you're going to
| have trouble reaching that with the people benefiting from
| weaponizing Facebook.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Facebook is not the same there as it is here. It's not
| just a fun app you use, it's a huge part of how African
| and Asian countries interface with the internet.
|
| Could you give a little more detail about what that
| means?
| tim-kt wrote:
| At least in Africa, Facebook is responsible for a large
| part of internet accessibility. One can say that, in
| Africa, "Facebook is the internet" [0]. I can't comment
| on Asia.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/20/fa
| cebook-...
| shihab wrote:
| As a recent example, the instagram of guardian journalist Owen
| jones (well known Israel critic) was suddenly suspended without
| any explanation today.
|
| It has been since restored, after a predictable twitter storm.
| dijit wrote:
| Wasn't that caused by pro-palestinian people reporting him
| out of hatred for attending a "butt-mitzvah" Jewish gay
| party?
| dijit wrote:
| People are downvoting me, but the timing was really
| directly linked: https://www.instagram.com/p/DIMKETPNd5p/
| nashashmi wrote:
| Every pro Palestinian protestor has experienced some form of
| awareness suppression and content removal. They have known this
| was a thing long before anyone else did.
|
| Same thing happened during 9/11. Muslims saw suppression,
| bullying by the police and no one covered it. Then the tables
| turned on maga republicans after j6.
| dijit wrote:
| I'm too stupid to navigate this topic in anything other than
| a crude and adolescent way, however I think it could be
| tricky for pro-palestinians because they can fall easily into
| the trap of using party slogans used by proscribed
| organisations.
|
| My understanding of Hamas is that they are not considered a
| legitimate army, but if they were they would be guilty of an
| insurmountable number of war crimes (not unlike the IDF as
| many would say). Showing support for such things is beyond
| reasonable accepted discourse in my home country.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > it could be tricky for pro-palestinians because they can
| fall easily into the trap of using party slogans used by
| proscribed organisations
|
| Any excuse is good when you have power and want to justify
| repression. For example they tried to claim that the slogan
| "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free" is
| _genocidal_. Quite a jump. (Meanwhile, the Likud 's
| platform says "from the river to the sea there will be only
| Israel" but that's fine).
|
| > if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable
| number of war crimes
|
| They killed much less civilians than the IDF did, and they
| are not invaders nor illegal occupiers of someone else's
| country. What is acceptable or unacceptable is decided by
| those who are in power, and they are currently protecting a
| country whose prime minister in charge is wanted for
| _crimes against humanity_.
| jl6 wrote:
| > For example they tried to claim that the slogan "from
| the river to the sea Palestine will be free" is
| genocidal.
|
| It's actually just German for "The Bart, The".
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > they tried to claim that the slogan "from the river to
| the sea Palestine will be free" is genocidal.
|
| There is no other meaning. The slogan is a call to kill
| every single Israeli. That is literally what it means.
| Where will the israelis be when palestine is free from
| the river to the see? The hamas charter still to this day
| calls to kill every single israeli. This is the problem.
| You yourself dont even know what it is you are calling
| for, then you get mad when others point out that you are
| using slogans that call for a genocide. For the record I
| think Likud is awful as well, but at least in the US
| there are no serious israel supporters using the israeli
| version of the slogan.
|
| As far as counting deaths that doesnt work because Hamas
| is getting their own civilians killed on purpose while
| israel is doing the opposite. If hamas had a nuke it
| would wipe israel off the map, israel does have nukes and
| the palestinians are more numerous than ever. The
| palestinaians are deeply oppressed, but theyre also
| raging assholes who would love nothing more than to not
| just oppress but kill every isreali. Being oppressed
| doesnt make them right.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| Hamas isn't an army, it's the political party voted into
| office to administer Gaza. The problem is a subset of it,
| the Al-Qassam Brigades, that conduct asymmetric warfare. If
| that were shutdown and violence were disavowed, that would
| give them political respect and would cease giving
| Palestinians a bad name that holds them back from the
| atrocities committed against them from being recognized.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > that would give them political respect, cease giving
| Palestinians a bad name that holds them back from the
| atrocities committed against them from being recognized
|
| Yes the respect Fatah has. Look at the strong words of
| condemnation from world leaders for the daily pogroms
| Palestinians are subjected to in the West Bank. Look at
| the apartheid being enforced there, look at the
| demolished houses and villages, at the hundreds of
| illegal settlements, at the ethnic cleansing going on by
| the day.
|
| Hamas is an excuse as good as any. In fact, given its
| overwhelming power and impunity, Israel makes and chooses
| its counterparts. If a Palestinian leader looks too good,
| they can kill him. If the protests are too peaceful, they
| can shoot a few people until they turn a bit violent.
| Hamas was promoted to weaken Fatah. And so on.
|
| Hamas has proposed multiple times long term ceasefires
| (10 years) and has recognised the 1967 borders. All these
| proposals went completely ignored and mostly unmentioned
| in the Western media because that's not useful to Israel.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The reason is as you say: If someone gets too popular or
| a leadership looks too promising, Israel shoots them or
| compromises them. Fatah is seen as corrupt and liberal
| group too conflicted to create any meaningful movements
| for Palestinians. Hamas is seen as more sincere movement
| and has stronger support. They are primarily a social
| movement with a military wing. And so they are a stronger
| threat to Israel than Fatah could be. Fatah for its part
| is compromisable and pliable where as Hamas is a
| conservative strict disciplined movement with no hope for
| Israel to corrupt them.
| wordofx wrote:
| > Hamas has proposed multiple times long term ceasefires
| (10 years)
|
| Hamas has broken ever cease fire since they took power.
| There was a ceasefire in place when they attacked Israel.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Hamas has broken ever cease fire since they took power.
|
| Israel has broken every ceasefire, though US media tends
| to treat Israeli attacks as hiccups and challenges to
| ceasefires involving Israel and those on the other side
| as more serious. This is similar to the way that the same
| linguistic cause/effect separation (sometimes termed the
| "exonerative tense" or "exonerative mood") frequently
| used to deflect responsibility for domestic police
| violence to Israeli military actions, but not to their
| opponents on any side.
| mmooss wrote:
| The Palestinian people should unilaterally disarm and
| trust Israel's good faith? Trust the world to protect
| them? You are asking for a lot.
| js4ever wrote:
| Oh, I thought Hamas and Palestinians are not the same? So
| they are?
|
| Interestingly in WW2 a lot of Germans helped to save
| Jews. Exactly zero gazans helped to save an hostage. Some
| civilians even held hostages at home themselves.
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| Violent resistance isn't a successful strategy at this
| point because the Axis of Evil has already won. The
| correct strategy is to take the moral high ground with
| nonviolent, peaceful, moral courage in forums other than
| where there are snipers. It will be risky but the same-
| old, same-old isn't working.
|
| Violence doesn't win political credibility when you're
| extremely weak, and not in control of the media narrative
| to manufacture consent or justifications for aid and arms
| shipments.
| mmooss wrote:
| > they can fall easily into the trap of using party slogans
| used by proscribed organisations.
|
| It's taking it way to far to suppress speech - political
| speech, the most important speech - for slipping in the
| 'wrong' slogans.
|
| > My understanding of Hamas is that they are not considered
| a legitimate army, but if they were they would be guilty of
| an insurmountable number of war crimes
|
| While Hamas commits many horrors and is oppressive and
| awful, I don't think the ligitimate army argument holds
| water:
|
| If Hamas acted like a legitimate army under the laws of
| war, they'd be massacred in an instant. It would require
| them to dress in uniforms so they can be identified, and
| only fight against the enemy's military. Hamas has some
| rifles and RPGs and a few rockets. Their enemy has tanks,
| fighter planes, etc etc etc. If Hamas wanted to be a
| legitimate army, their only option would be to immediately
| disband.
|
| The laws of war seem written by large powers to protect
| their interests. There are legitimate 'freedom-fighting'
| insurgents out there who also are limited in their ability
| to be a 'legitimate army'.
|
| > (not unlike the IDF as many would say). Showing support
| for such things is beyond reasonable accepted discourse in
| my home country.
|
| So can people show support for either Israel (it's not the
| IDF, it's a political entity - Israel) or Hamas (also a
| political entity)? How do they talk about the war?
| chacham15 wrote:
| Since nobody here has actually read the article, it states that
| the reason the posts were taken down was "prohibits incitement
| to terrorism praise for acts of terrorism and identification or
| support of terror organizations." This type of speech
| (incitement) is illegal in the United States and support is
| very borderline depending on the type and meaning of "support".
| Now, if the reason doesnt match the actual content removed that
| should definitely be addressed which is your point, but I think
| that the reason is valid.
| janalsncm wrote:
| You can see some examples here (linked in the OP):
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-
| promises/...
|
| On the one hand there are comments from users that want to
| "turn Gaza into a parking lot" or worse and were not removed
| because they don't violate the community guidelines.
|
| On the other hand there are people posting educational
| explainers about Palestinian human rights censored under hate
| speech or dangerous individuals rules.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The article links to a much longer article from Human Rights
| Watch with a good number of examples:
| https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...
| zombiwoof wrote:
| People still use Facebook?
| ben_w wrote:
| Personal anecdote: whever I log in to the feed, 1/3 of posts
| are ads, 1/3 are algorithmic recommendations, and 1/3 are pro-
| Palestine posts by a former partner.
|
| Almost none of my other connections post anything, though there
| are occasional exceptions.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| I like to think we are in a better place than russia for instance
| with all its propaganda and jailed journalists, but then i see
| these kind of article come over and over....
|
| Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media,
| like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to
| 'suck up' to the government because at the end they are business,
| they need to be in good term with ruling class.
|
| you end up with most media complying with the official story
| pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that
| because no one has the time to fact check everything.
|
| One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone
| can actually look for real information, but even in russia people
| have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.
|
| Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your
| opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true
| but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream
| media and they enforce the government narrative, you can't speak
| there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner
| out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe
| the government propaganda, your arguments won't be heard at all.
|
| The more i think about it, the less difference i see.
| gooosle wrote:
| The difference with Russia is that they are much worse at
| hiding their corruption and censorship.
| rchaud wrote:
| Russia doesn't bang the drum of "free speech" ad nauseam the
| way US social media magnates do.
| gooosle wrote:
| Sure, the 'free speech' propaganda is a conscious part of
| the (better/more effective) public opinion manipulation
| playbook.
| tryauuum wrote:
| True. I was born in Russia and to be honest I wish Russia
| would at least "bang the drum of free speech" as well. If
| you pretend to have some values you actually make people
| start to believe in them a bit
| rchaud wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Russia still preaches a lot of admirable
| things that it doesn't actually practice. Talk is cheap
| yet people will put stock in it anyway.
| int_19h wrote:
| Strictly speaking, Russia has quite explicit free speech
| protections in its constitution. So much so that it
| separately covers freedom of speech and freedom of press,
| and in regard to the latter straight up says "censorship is
| prohibited".
|
| Whenever this topic comes up, the government just nods at
| the document, as if it had any relation to the real world.
| newsclues wrote:
| It's not a better or worse government (although it may be),
| it's just different.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| You're not arrested for posting this, so that is a pretty big
| difference to Russia (and other authoritarian nations like
| China and Turkey), no?
|
| https://rsf.org/en/country/russia
| Cyph0n wrote:
| You do realize that this is where things are going, right?
| Have you not heard of the arrests and recent deportations of
| student protestors?
|
| I don't understand why we keep forgetting that
| authoritarianism is a slippery slope.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| You have a point with democratic backsliding - but then
| your rights hinge on the impartiality of the judicial
| system (as a whole, and eventually, not necessarily
| individual decisions evidently). It's pretty obvious that
| the legal systems even in flawed democracies is still
| vastly better than in those autocracies.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| A tale as old as time: watch from the sidelines while
| things are relatively "good" before suddenly finding
| yourself on the naughty list.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Checks and balances are a crucial feature of American
| democracy.
|
| It's almost as though the framers of the Constitution
| foresaw the possibility of the two elected branches of
| government (executive and legislative) being monopolized
| by the same group, at some point.
|
| And that the very flexibility of regular, open, direct
| elections also required a check to protect the
| fundamental rights of all people in the country.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| They may have foresaw it but they did little if anything
| to prevent it. They lamented that political parties would
| probably be the downfall, and here we are...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _little if anything to prevent it_
|
| The prevention is literally in the Constitution! Do you
| think other branches of government would be deferring to
| the Supreme Court if it weren't spelled out that they
| must?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > You do realize that this is where things are going,
| right?
|
| This has been going on for decades.
|
| > Have you not heard of the arrests and recent deportations
| of student protestors?
|
| The legality of which will be decided (hopefully) by the
| courts. If this turns out to be legal, the fault doesn't
| lie at the hands of Trump and his cronies, but at a broken
| system we've had - for decades. Getting rid of him won't
| solve this. Having checks and balances will.
|
| Much of his and Elon's actions are within the power that
| has been legally granted to them. And _that_ is the
| problem. Congress is not limiting those powers. Voters are
| another part of checks and balances, and they happily
| wanted to give him those powers.
|
| The problem isn't Trump. It's the country. Been broken for
| a while, but it took time for someone to clearly
| demonstrate how broken it is.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| Agreed. And nowhere did I say that the problem is Trump.
| I was simply using current events as proof that we are
| already in a bad state.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Yea but there's also not much point in critiquing the
| government here. What we ever been able to do about it except
| riot? We can endlessly discuss the failures of government and
| as it stands I don't think we will never see these failures
| distinguish candidates in the voting booth. Which is
| confusing, because you'd think the democrats would have
| wanted to win this time.
| pydry wrote:
| Yea people are actually
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
|
| The western endorsement of the genocide in Gaza has been some
| of the best PR Putin could ever have hoped for.
|
| It simultaneously underlined the viciousness, the lack of
| moral credibility and extreme hypocrisy of western leaders in
| the eyes of the nonaligned world (e.g. the global south),
| none of whom sanctioned him.
| perihelions wrote:
| America's arrested rather a large number of people in recent
| weeks--university students, mostly--for expressing viewpoints
| on the I/P conflict. The current Administration is claiming,
| and no one's yet stopped them, that First Amendment rights
| don't apply to non-citizens such as international students.
|
| - _" You're not arrested for posting this"_
|
| For what it's worth, it's widely reported that ICE is
| trawling social media to find targets (targeted for their
| speech/viewpoints). HN itself is one of their known targets.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if they're citizens or not if the
| government is skipping court thus not being required to
| prove it either way. Then when they oopsie you to another
| country they have to at least try to pretend to get you
| back but the courts need to show "deference owed to the
| executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs".
|
| Which is a long way of saying the executive can blackhole
| anyone it wants to a foreign country and no one is going to
| do anything because god forbid we step on the executive's
| role to give up people in our country to other countries.
| aeternum wrote:
| >Which is a long way of saying the executive can
| blackhole anyone it wants
|
| Do you have examples of the executive doing this to
| citizens or are you being hypothetical here?
|
| Countries generally grant far fewer rights to non-
| citizens. Have you considered how allowing non-citizens
| to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Do you have examples of the executive doing this to
| citizens or are you being hypothetical here?"_
|
| "Do you have examples of this severity-11 CVE being used
| in the wild, or are you just being hypothetical here?"
| It's a horrifically exploitable bug, were it left
| unpatched.
|
| It's not some fringe conspiracy theory that this is how
| the law works and how the law _would_ work on contact
| with US citizens; the _Garcia_ SCOTUS concurrence
| explicitly underscored this perversity,
|
| - _" The Government's argument, moreover, implies that it
| could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S.
| citizens_ [sic!], _without legal consequence, so long as
| it does so before a court can intervene... That view
| refutes itself. "_
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.p
| df
| packetlost wrote:
| Here's the executive branch getting ordered by SCOTUS to
| bring someone back for doing just that:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62gnzzeg34o
| gs17 wrote:
| They were asking about it happening to citizens. From
| your article:
|
| > Mr Garcia, a Salvadoran
| miltonlost wrote:
| He's a permanent resident. Splitting hairs over
| citizenship when he was here legally massively misses the
| problem with blackholing people here legally.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > Splitting hairs over citizenship when he was here
| legally massively misses the problem with blackholing
| people here legally.
|
| And on top of that this case should be horrifying to
| anyone regardless of whether they want to split hairs
| because:
|
| A) they admitted he was deported in error
|
| B) they are now effectively trying to argue there is no
| way to get him back
|
| So even if you believe they would never knowingly do this
| to an actual citizen they are only one slightly different
| mistake from disappearing a citizen, whether or not it
| has happened yet.
|
| Nevermind the fact that Trump himself has repeatedly
| floated the idea of deporting citizens: https://www.washi
| ngtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/10/trump-...
|
| And then lastly and most importantly IMO it is wildly un-
| American to believe anyone (regardless of citizenship or
| legal status) is not entitled to due process.
| smcin wrote:
| He's *not* a permanent resident; he's on "withholding of
| removal" status since 2019 [*]. It's not splitting hairs
| to discuss that, but you're right that the govt is
| (deliberately) pursuing a "camel's-nose-under-the-tent"
| approach first on a small class of people where Congress
| and INA haven't defined a direct clear path to PR or
| becoming a citizen, unlike a GC would since both his wife
| and child are US citizens.
|
| He was granted "withholding of removal" status in 2019,
| which protected him from deportation to El Salvador (for
| fear of gang violence/extortion, which is why he came to
| the US).
|
| The current DOJ acknowledges that at the time (2019) the
| "[first Trump admin] government did not appeal that
| decision [to grant withholding of removal], so it is
| final". It also seems like they never previously made any
| allegation that he was a gang member, and that they don't
| have any solid proof now that he is (other than
| supposedly one informant who incorrectly claimed Garcia
| lived in NY, so basically no credible evidence
| whatsoever).
|
| By jumping the gun on deporting Garcia without due
| process, the current admin seems to unwittingly be
| forcing the issue to the Supreme Court very soon.
| (UPDATE: SC has just ruled unanimously 9-0 that the admin
| must try to release Garcia.) Looks like the SC's going to
| be very busy this May-June.
|
| [*] Withholding-of-removal is a pretty rare status,
| rarely granted by court (>99% rejection rate), much rarer
| than Green Card, and applicants have to demonstrate
| credible fear. [0] This procedure is defined in INA SS
| 208 (INA = Immigration and Nationality Act) [1]
|
| As of 12/2024 there were over 100,000 individuals (from
| Cuba, China, Venezuela, Mauritania, Nigeria, Turkey,
| Iran, Afghanistan, etc.) with orders of removal remaining
| free in the US due to various special interest statuses,
| including withholding of removal, according to a report
| from FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform).
| [2]
|
| (Does anyone have stats on what historically happened to
| people in withholding-of-removal (what % became citizens,
| what % got GC, what % voluntarily left, what % got
| deported, what % moved to a different status etc.)?)
|
| [0]: https://www.justice.gov/eoir/reference-
| materials/ic/chapter-...
|
| [1]: https://www.uscis.gov/laws-and-
| policy/legislation/immigratio...
|
| [2]: https://www.fairus.org/news/executive/new-data-show-
| over-100...
|
| [3]: https://time.com/7276642/kilmar-albrego-garcia-
| error-deporta...
| packetlost wrote:
| He's married to a citizen which gives him an avenue
| towards legal residency and full citizenship.
|
| It doesn't matter anyways because the government
| _admitted_ he was deported due to a administrative error
| and because they actively undermined and sidestepped the
| courts authority on several occasions, there is
| effectively nothing stopping them from doing it to full
| blown citizens. Honestly, it sounds like it 's just a
| matter of time if this keeps up.
| gs17 wrote:
| I agree it's bad, and yes, the government admitted they
| shouldn't have done it. But regardless, the question was
| about if it has happened to a citizen, not a person who
| maybe could be a citizen one day but is not, and you
| responded with them "doing just that" when they did not,
| in fact, "do just that".
|
| I'm not sure why there's a need to mislead when what's
| actually happening is bad enough.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| It's not a need to mislead. You're grasping at a
| technicality. Citizenship is irrelevant if you're not
| given the chance to demonstrate it, which he wasn't, and
| again, he was actually deported because of the
| administrative error, not an on-purpose action, the
| correctness of which is irrelevant.
|
| You're arguing whether a car wrapped around a tree has a
| bad alternator. Surely a fact useful to someone,
| somewhere, and worth knowing. But also certainly not the
| reason there's a problem.
| biker142541 wrote:
| 100% this. To echo another poster below, it's really
| important to read the Supreme Court's own words here.
|
| >"The Government's argument, moreover, implies that it
| could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S.
| citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does
| so before a court can intervene. " From https://www.supre
| mecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
|
| I suspect that is one of the main reasons behind the
| order. It's very obvious that citizen vs legal resident
| matters very little here, if due process is not given.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You would agree that this whole discussion would be
| considered insanity in America like 4 months ago, right?
| wqaatwt wrote:
| I thought that's what half of America wanted just 6
| months ago?
| Hikikomori wrote:
| If they can ignore due process in this case what's to say
| they cannot do it to proper citizens? It's clear they're
| probing their way into creating a blueprint to get rid of
| people critical of trump.
| kenjackson wrote:
| But the administration has now stated they are
| investigating how to deport citizens as well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8gYlWcV6wE&t=1s
|
| She says only the most violent dangerous criminals --
| although I feel like we've heard that line before...
| karpatic wrote:
| So.. the very post you share prooves it's not happening.
| Incredulously, I gotta wounder: Did/ do you really
| believe your link supports your claim that it's been
| happening?
| kenjackson wrote:
| What did I claim? Read what i wrote. The video says
| EXACTLY what I stated.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| So you think it's sane to do nothing and wait till it's
| happening when they are explicitly saying they are
| looking for ways to make it happen? Really?
|
| At this when they say something absurdly unhinged and
| unthinkable and if you still don't believe they will try
| it.. well.. maybe you're in the market for a bridge?
| curt15 wrote:
| None of the Trump admin's excuses for why they "can't"
| bring back that guy depend on his citizenship status.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >He's married to a citizen which gives him an avenue
| towards legal residency and full citizenship.
|
| You seem as if you're trying to leverage that to actual
| citizen rights... "look, he could be a citizen someday,
| so that means he has these same rights reserved to
| citizens". But it does not work that way.
|
| >there is effectively nothing stopping them from doing it
| to full blown citizens.
|
| Be sure to raise the alarm when they do. I'd be curious
| if it ever got that far. I think that some on the left
| worry that it might not, because if they don't have the
| absurd slippery slope argument then many people would
| never be concerned about this at all.
| amalcon wrote:
| Would his being a citizen have mattered to any of the
| procedures prior to his rendition? The government never
| made any effort to prove that he was here illegally
| (which is important since he wasn't), and he never had an
| opportunity to offer a defense.
| empath75 wrote:
| It happens to be the case that he's not a citizen or
| claiming to be a citizen, but he wasn't given due
| process, and there's absolutely nothing stopping them
| from picking anybody up off the street, claiming they're
| here illegally, and shipping them off to an El Salvadoran
| prison.
|
| All people in the us, legal or illegal, citizen or not,
| have fourth amendment protections, and if you strip those
| rights from anyone, you remove them from everyone.
| billfor wrote:
| Do they? We generally don't give noncitizens the right to
| own a gun in the us, so clearly we are selective about
| applying the 2nd amendment protection. The 4th may need
| adjudication.
| empath75 wrote:
| Permanent residents have the right to own a gun in the
| US.
|
| The supreme court has upheld many many times that the
| fourth amendment applies to all people within the borders
| of the US.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| And just what _process_ is due a person under risk of
| deportation? People say "due process" quite often
| without even giving any thought to what the term means,
| and I doubt that 1 in 4 could give a casual definition.
|
| One might think that the only process due to such a
| person would be the opportunity to contest that they were
| a citizen and to provide evidence to that claim. Was he
| denied this? Did they slap a muzzle on him as he tried to
| scream "but my birth certificate's in the sock drawer,
| just take a look!"? If the agents who detained and
| deported him ran any sort of check that would have
| discovered his citizenship in time to prevent a
| deportation (had he been a citizen), this seems about all
| the process that could or should be due.
|
| PS Am I the only one that notices how the news media
| always describes him as "from Maryland" when he wasn't
| born there, didn't attend school there, etc?
| KingMob wrote:
| > the only process due to such a person would be the
| opportunity to contest that they were a citizen and to
| provide evidence to that claim
|
| They should have the due process to prove they are here
| legally. And yes, they were denied that.
|
| Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only, you
| can't prove citizenship status without due process, so it
| has to be given to _everyone_.
|
| Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming
| you're not a citizen and shipping you off to El Salvador.
| How would you prove otherwise?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > They should have the due process to prove they are here
| legally.
|
| This sounds like a nonsense statement. Non-citizens are
| only ever here legally at the pleasure of the United
| States. If we allow them in for 2 weeks, or 3 months, or
| whatever _on a visa_... we can change our minds and
| cancel it early.
|
| The idea that they can have some absolute _temporary_
| right to be here ignores what it means to be a non-
| citizen. You have no right to be here, just a temporary
| privilege that can be revoked at any point for entirely
| arbitrary reasons.
|
| >And yes, they were denied that.
|
| I've heard no evidence that this was the case. "Due
| process" rights are, in many cases administrative. No
| trial, no judge.
|
| >Even if you imagine due process is for citizens only,
|
| I did not say this, and I do not imagine it. I just
| happen to know what due process rights actually are.
|
| >you can't prove citizenship status without due process,
|
| Was he denied his opportunity to prove citizenship to the
| agents who detained him? Did he try to get them to look
| in his wallet for papers, but they ignored that? Did he
| beg them to just look in his closet and see his birth
| certificate? That would be denial of due process.
|
| >Otherwise, nothing's stopping ICE from just claiming
| you're not a citizen
|
| So you claim. But it's absurd to think that will happen.
| If you believe it will happen, then just wait and sound
| the alarm when it does. I'll be genuinely surprised.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > . But it's absurd to think that will happen
|
| Really? The things that are happening now are so absurdly
| insane that nobody could have imagined them just a few
| years ago, and you are still gullible enough to say
| something as silly like that...
|
| > sound the alarm when it does
|
| The loons will just move the goalposts yet again. So what
| would that achieve?
| kamlaserbeam wrote:
| If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and
| defend yourself in public court, nobody here is really
| legal or not. It doesn't matter if your birth certificate
| is in the other room. Without due process it's whatever
| the ICE agent that's bagging you feels like. What are you
| gonna do? You don't get due process, you get no court
| hearing, you get the pleasure of getting onto a plane and
| flown out to a slave labor prison in El Salvador. Also
| Garcia had full legal permission to be here but it shows
| they never checked it and thus he was whisked away like
| we can expect other's to be if things stay on the current
| path.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >If we don't have due process, in that, you can't go and
| defend yourself in public court
|
| That's not _due process_. Due process rights do not
| guarantee you any sort of court hearing or trial. It does
| not require a judge. 90% or more of due process is
| administrative in nature. The bureaucracy infringes your
| due process rights when they don 't "go through the
| motions" of how to handle a particular situation. How
| should they handle deporting someone? By checking that
| they're not deporting a citizen. If they failed to check,
| if they failed to give him the opportunity to prove
| citizenship, they denied his due process rights. Did they
| do this?
|
| >It doesn't matter if your birth certificate is in the
| other room. Without due proces
|
| You miss the point. I wasn't asking if his birth
| certificate was there or not. I'm asking "did they give
| him the chance to claim as much, and did they follow up
| and make sure it wasn't there". If they didn't give him
| the opportunity to make the claim, if they ignored such a
| claim, this is a denial of due process.
|
| And there was no denial. If you had more than a second
| grader's understanding of due process, you wouldn't be so
| confused here.
|
| > What are you gonna do? You don't get due process,
|
| "Look Mr. ICEman, you're making a mistake. We can clear
| this up in minutes, pull my wallet out and take a look at
| my identity documents, some of which indicate I'm a
| citizen. It'll only take two minutes to reveal me as a
| liar if that's not the case."
|
| And if they refuse, then my due process rights have been
| denied.
|
| >Also Garcia had full legal permission to be here
|
| He showed up without such permission, then weaseled his
| way into getting contested permission after the fact.
| Which was always the case under previous policy, there
| was no practical way to send them back if they made it
| 100 yards across the border.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > One might think that the only process due to such a
| person would be the opportunity to contest
|
| Well a federal judge thought otherwise. The government
| ignored him and did what they wanted anyway. That's your
| definition of due process?
|
| > Am I the only one that notice
|
| So your comment is actually sarcastic?
| int_19h wrote:
| Not just permanent residents, either. I have legally
| owned numerous firearms while on L1 and H1B visas in US.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The executive branch is merely going to ignore everything
| and then apply pardon powers to any sort of actual
| enforcement by the judiciary branch.
|
| But how can this judiciary enforce anything, or the
| legislative for that matter?
| mmooss wrote:
| You are believing the trash talk and allowing it to
| intimidate you. You are helping them by spreading it and
| legitimizing it.
|
| The executive branch is obeying the courts, with some
| pushback.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Is it an issue that the Executive is trash talking "they
| aren't going to obey the courts" ? You think that should
| be ignored?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Or are you dismissing overt signalling of fascism as
| "just owning the libs"? Are you just cherry picking
| communication you feel safe about and ignoring the huge
| glaring signs being flashed by dozens of appointees? Are
| you pretending Obama and bush established legal
| precedents for classifying citizens as enemy combatants
| for rendition, denial of due process, and murder by drone
| without trial? That we don't have a better than 1984
| turnkey oppression and total.monitorinf infrastructure
| for any despot of sufficient motivation which this admin
| has amply stated affection towards?
|
| Language is important from leaders. So is consistency and
| some degree of integrity. Even disingenuous cowtowing to
| appearances and political norms constrains power and
| abuse.
| efnx wrote:
| What about that guy who got deported to El Salvador even
| though he was legally here and the court had also ordered
| he not be sent back to El Salvador for his own
| protection? I'm pretty sure the admin admitted it was a
| mistake then refused to bring him back.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The Supreme Court resolutely batted that down 9-0 in a
| few days.
|
| >> _The [District Court] order properly requires the
| Government to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's release from
| custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is
| handled as it would have been had he not been improperly
| sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term
| "effectuate" in the District Court's order is, however,
| unclear, and may exceed the District Court's authority.
| The District Court should clarify its directive, with due
| regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in
| the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the
| Government should be prepared to share what it can
| concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of
| further steps._ https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p
| df/24a949_lkhn.pdf
|
| The only question at this point is how detailed in
| demands the District Court can be.
|
| The administration attempted to push the boundaries of
| executive power and lost in court, as has been happening.
|
| Turns out, conservative justices with lifetime
| appointments aren't too legally thrilled about an
| unbridled executive either.
| passive wrote:
| This order was toothless, and the administration has
| already flouted it.
|
| All John Roberts is doing is asking Trump to go further
| next time. Whether it's intentional or just cowardice on
| his part doesn't really matter to the rest of us.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It matter to me, since there are 2-3 conservative
| justices on the current Supreme Court that are likely to
| tire of administration excesses.
|
| A long game player might even say Roberts is angling for
| that, by tailoring consensus opinions that nonetheless
| leave room for the administration to demonstrate further
| stupidity.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yes, that is where my quote came from. From your own
| quote:
|
| > The District Court should clarify its directive, with
| due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch
| in the conduct of foreign affairs.
|
| Which is such a ridiculously bullshit line of thought.
| This wasn't some person who willingly went to some random
| country, this is someone the executive illegally put
| there against the person's will _in coordination with_
| said foreign government. I can guarantee you that any
| order with teeth will be struck down by SCOTUS on this
| line of thought.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'm not sure why people obtusely intepret Supreme Court
| rulings as though they're part of the current
| administration.
|
| The court is obviously saying that (1) it's correct and
| necessary to bring him back but that (2) the District
| Court doesn't have unbridled authority to order any
| foreign policy-influencing remedy it wants.
|
| I.e. a US court couldn't order a president to sign a
| treaty
|
| If the administration tries to foot drag further, the
| Supreme Court will likely order more specific remedies.
|
| By not taking the L here, the administration is just
| burning whatever conservative goodwill they might have
| started with on this Supreme Court.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| They're already disobeying the court, including both the
| lower court's order and the supreme court's order to
| attempt repatriation, as well as the lower court's order
| to provide information on the victim's location and
| attempts to retrieve him. They disobeyed numerous court
| orders to rehire people they fired and re-fund things
| they defunded.
|
| What makes you think the administration cares about
| goodwill after that? Disobeying direct court orders is
| crossing the Rubicon. There's no going back to the
| illusion that judicial judgements will be respected by
| this administration.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I think the SCOTUS was right on the money this time, and
| I am well to the left of any of its members. My read of
| their verbiage about effectuation/article II was a
| suggestion to the District Court judge to eliminate any
| wiggle room the administration would try to exploit.
| zzrrt wrote:
| > Do you have examples of the executive doing this to
| citizens
|
| Feels like moving the goalposts. First they were going to
| clear out "illegals" by any means, now the line includes
| any non-citizens. Granted maybe you personally didn't say
| both though.
|
| > Have you considered how allowing non-citizens to spread
| discontent within a country could be abused?
|
| Is it meaningfully different from allowing citizens to
| "spread discontent"? Why not just start taking
| everybody's 1st amendment rights, by the same logic? I'm
| not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there's long precedent
| that non-citizens are granted most of the same rights,
| including freedom of speech and assembly.
|
| If non-citizens are being supported, instructed, etc by
| their government in spreading discontent, there are
| probably laws like espionage for that; you don't have to
| take away everybody else's freedom to stop them.
| cmurf wrote:
| Does the Constitution provide for due process to persons?
| Or only citizens?
|
| If non-citizen have been human trafficked without due
| process, what additional protection against it is
| provided to citizens? Where is that stated?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I am aware of some US citizens being deported by mistake
| under previous administrations, but there was a general
| consensus that those were genuine mistakes, examples of
| negligence rather than policy:
| https://immigrationimpact.com/2021/07/30/ice-deport-us-
| citiz...
|
| However the current administration is explicitly
| considering the idea of deliberately deporting citizens:
| https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-
| legal-bl...
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >Countries generally grant far fewer rights to non-
| citizens. Have you considered how allowing non-citizens
| to spread discontent within a country could be abused?
|
| The most powerful person in the country lied and still is
| lying about elected fraud, undermining the basis for our
| Democratic system and was rewarded with a 2nd term.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Not great but still better than defenestration I guess.
| pydry wrote:
| Well, it's not like they were Boeing whistleblowers or
| leaked video footage of a war crime.
| elcritch wrote:
| I've seen a few news articles on arrests and the headlines
| are attention grabbing "Ivy League Student arrested for
| protesting" and it's worrisome to see.
|
| However then buried in the article is something like they
| overstayed their visa, etc. Take a sibling comment's link
| to an article with a "second student arrested" in the
| title. As in that seems like there isn't a "large number".
| This is nothing like the reports of arrests in Russia.
| Especially as some of these pro-Palestinian protestors
| advocate violence or intifada pretty freely. I've seen that
| with my own eyes.
|
| If I were a foreign national protesting and advocating for
| violence against any other country or people group I'd
| expect to be denied a visa or possibly deported for
| participating in such events. It'd be arrogant not to
| expect that outcome IMHO.
|
| Visa applications in European Union countries often include
| things such as "indicators of good civil behavior". Take
| the quotes from that sibling comment's linked BBC article:
|
| > The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her
| student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack
| of attendance". It did not say whether she had been
| attending Columbia or another institution. > She had
| previously been arrested in April 2024 for taking part in
| protests at Columbia University, according to DHS. > "It is
| a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the
| United States of America," said Homeland Security Secretary
| Kristi Noem in a statement. > "When you advocate for
| violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked,
| and you should not be in this country."
| colanderman wrote:
| Rumeysa Ozturk did not overstay her visa nor advocate
| violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3
| %BCmeysa_%C3%...
|
| Nor did Rasha Alawieh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depo
| rtation_of_Rasha_Alawieh
| elcritch wrote:
| And cases like Rumeysa Ozturk's are different. I also
| believe DHS should have to abide by the courts as well.
| Her case is also getting national and international
| attention and legal help.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Why is DHS going after these people in the first place?
| yatopifo wrote:
| By your logic, in the grand scheme of thing, it's ok to
| deport elcritch and then say "elcritch's" case was
| different and provide it with national and international
| attention and legal help.
|
| Full disclosure, i'm not arguing in good faith. As a
| Canadian I don't believe the US has a future, so I'm
| merely highlighting an argument which is symptomatic of
| the country's downfall.
| elcritch wrote:
| You could construe my logic that way, but no I'm saying
| the DHS was likely wrong in that instance and it caused
| uproar and backlash. Unlike other nations where few would
| care if the government overstepped. Governments will
| always overreach, it's how people pushback which matters.
|
| Also I'm more likely to be arrested and deported for
| silently praying in the UK.
|
| However there's also political tactics of "look at that
| poor student being deported" when said student was
| calling for jihad, intifada, and antisemitism and
| violating visas on top of that, which was sort of my
| original point.
|
| Heh and is Canada fairing any different? Remember when
| Trudeau froze bank accounts for truckers protesting Covid
| lockdowns or whatnot. Maybe Trudeau shutting down
| parliament to seemingly avoid scrutiny. Hopefully it's
| just news sensationalism and not the downfall of Canada.
| empath75 wrote:
| > As in that seems like there isn't a "large number". ---
|
| > "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or
| hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
| That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the
| whole regime had come immediately after the first and
| smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been
| sufficiently shocked--if, let us say, the gassing of the
| Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm'
| stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But
| of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come
| all the hundreds of little steps, some of them
| imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be
| shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than
| Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why
| should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
|
| And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever
| sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of
| self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor
| incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a
| baby, saying 'Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once,
| and you see that everything, everything, has changed and
| changed completely under your nose. The world you live in
| --your nation, your people--is not the world you were
| born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched,
| all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the
| mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the
| holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because
| you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the
| forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and
| fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know
| it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is
| transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without
| responsibility even to God. The system itself could not
| have intended this in the beginning, but in order to
| sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way." --
| Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The
| Germans 1933-45
|
| ---
|
| You have to say "No" loudly and clearly at the _first
| offense_, and not wait until it's too late.
| elcritch wrote:
| Poignant quote. Should we as a society accept students
| who are calling for violence and intifada on Israel or
| Jewish people in general? If anything some of those pro-
| Palestinian protests were more reminiscent of the 1933
| "German Firm" boycotts the quote mentions than not:
|
| > A boycott sign posted on the display window of a
| Jewish-owned business reads: "Germans defend yourselves
| against Jewish atrocity propaganda. Buy only at German
| shops!" Berlin, Germany, April 1, 1933.
|
| It seems that a number of these students have been
| participating in events and protests calling for
| violence. After all there's probably 10's of thousands of
| student protestors, and likely many of them foreign
| students too. So it doesn't seem like a "deport all
| Muslim students" either.
|
| Peaceful protests are one thing, but I've seen some of
| these protests in person and it's clear they're not all
| peaceful demonstrations. Also supporting Hamas and
| Hezbollah is not supporting peaceful innocent freedom
| fighters. Both groups are clear and open on their stance
| for genocide against Israelies.
|
| However we shouldn't deport students who are peaceful and
| haven't called for violence against others. It's great
| that those cases are being called out and publicly
| criticized . But not every one of these cases are an
| innocent student getting caught up either. What is
| happening is Gaza is terrible all around. It shouldn't be
| used as an excuse to call for more violence against Jews
| or Muslims.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Nazi rallies occur periodically in the US
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/us/columbus-ohio-neo-nazi-
| mar...
| elcritch wrote:
| International students attending those events should
| probably be deported as well. Especially if they're
| helping to lead or promote them.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| What about American citizens and why should they be
| treated differently?
| elcritch wrote:
| They're American citizens and our problem to handle and
| tolerate?
|
| Also the US is hardly unique in deporting extremists:
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2016/06/16/france-to-
| deport-n...
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy48v8n389ro
| whatshisface wrote:
| The way it works in American culture is quite simple. You
| are allowed to say whatever you like, but certain acts
| (like vandalism, or causing bodily harm to another
| individual) are criminalized. What we find in practice is
| that the truly awful people commit these crimes _in
| addition_ to speaking awful things. We avoid punishing
| the merely incorrect.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| This isn't quite true. The last language from the Supreme
| Court, in _Brandeburg vs. Ohio_ ( 1969) was "imminent
| lawless action". There's also standards for the public
| airwaves, which are regulated by the FCC. maybe not as
| important as they used to be, but still there and the
| major networks which are also broadcasters abide Also
| there's specific exceptions like threatening the
| President, and "obscene" material, such as porn.
|
| The there's the question of private ownership of the
| platform. You certainly can't say whatever yiu want on
| YouTube, for instance.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The topic is American culture and norms, not the rights
| of corporations to make deals with foreign powers
| concerning domestic activities.
| thatcat wrote:
| gp's example is a slippery slope fallacy, adjusting
| political speech by deportation seems inappropriate.
| elcritch wrote:
| There is a difference in a foreign national engaging in
| political speech and a citizen. If anything allowing
| foreign nationals to adjust political speech here while
| supporting violence or terrorism would be inappropriate
| and unwise. After all, it's easy for a foreign power to
| send radicalizers to a foreign country to influence or
| topple them. Well trodeen history there. Sending radical
| students is much more effective than a few thousand
| Twitter bots.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| https://www.aipac.org/
| thatcat wrote:
| respecting the rights of others to hold opinions that
| differ from your own is always appropriate and wise in
| the united states.
| elcritch wrote:
| Of course, and as it stands foreign nationals on Visa's
| in the US don't have the same rights as citizens. Not
| that they shouldn't have some degree of free speech, but
| they can also be scrutinized and deported for advocating
| for violence and terrorism.
| thatcat wrote:
| That scrutiny is a waste of federal resources since
| you're basically extending the notion of advocating
| violence to supporting any side in any war - perhaps meta
| should just go ahead and remove all posts on both sides.
| elcritch wrote:
| No I'm not, but in case you missed the news several of
| the pro-Palestinian protests were violent or openly
| called for violence. Similarly with the posts in
| question.
| PieTime wrote:
| It's hardly an equal fight, Gaza is an occupied and
| colonized territory that has limited ability for
| resistance. We wouldn't be having this same discussion
| about South Africa overthrowing their apartheid.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> Israel or Jewish people in general?_
|
| as a person of jewish faith, I ask that you please not
| falsely conflate these two completely different concepts
|
| someone who opposes jewish people in general is bad, but
| someone who opposes the ongoing genocide of palestinians
| is good
|
| your usage of _" or"_ here would indicate that the above
| good person is grouped together with the above bad person
|
| _> If anything some of those pro-Palestinian protests
| were more reminiscent of the 1933 "German Firm" boycotts_
|
| structuring your metaphor like this, strikes me as an
| example of DARVO _[0]_ , considering what is being done
| to innocent palestinians. how many israelis patronize
| businesses based in palestine? how many such businesses
| do _you_ patronize?
|
| _0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO_
| maeil wrote:
| Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance
| revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and
| not rigged.
|
| His coworkers at SentinelOne (almost certainly most of who
| are citizens) also had their clearances revoked, despite
| never speaking out on the topic, purely as a North Korea
| style "punish the whole family" approach to strike fear
| into people of guilt by association, so that those who have
| spoken out in any shape or form become social pariahs.
|
| Citizens having their career taken away for saying an
| election wasn't rigged, or for happening to work at the
| same place as someone who said this.
|
| If you think the status quo hasn't yet changed to "In
| countries like China, Russia and the US, speaking out
| against the government puts both your livelihood and that
| of those in your vicinity at serious risk", you're dead
| wrong.
| wtf_is_this wrote:
| In case anyone is curious about this (as I was) here's an
| article: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3958808/trump-
| revokes-secu...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| There are many reasons to question Krebs' tenure and not
| all of them have to do with ignoring the state of
| election security, The Disinformation regime, viewpoint
| discrimination, or election interference.
|
| There is a list of things
| nobunaga wrote:
| And what are they? Because unlike you, Chris has a very
| well known, positive, respected reputation in the
| industry.
|
| Instead of just making accusations, back them up.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I'm not doxxing myself.
|
| However many of my issues with CISA are based on my own
| professional work in security, and that of accomplished
| professors like J Halderman & M Blaze saying our election
| infrastructure is insecure.
|
| We've been saying the same thing in hackerdom for 30
| years!
|
| If my career has been completely about the security of
| federal & military systems, then some lawyer like Krebs
| saying our infrastructure is secure when it's running
| Windows 7 is a giant slap in the face, particularly given
| all of the censorship.
|
| You wanted evidence. Here goes:
|
| The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA
| was bringing to bear has been over the top.
|
| At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our
| election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as
| Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election
| security said the opposite.
|
| This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue
| with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of
| insecurity.
|
| Those of us in security are convinced that all this
| unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying
| about election security isn't being open and truthful
| with the American people.
|
| https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-
| subsites/republicans-j...
|
| - The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of
| vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems,
| highlighting risks in swing states.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-
| systems-u...
|
| - NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in
| voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking.
| [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020
| titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to
| Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but
| this matches the description in the thread. The full URL
| is not available in the provided web results, and I
| cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look
| up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise
| link.]
|
| - The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used
| weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a
| distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...
|
| - The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked
| database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns
| about phishing and identity theft.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-
| record...
|
| - Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on
| outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014.
| https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-
| arent...
|
| - Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was
| hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious
| firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08
| /2016-electio...
|
| - CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting
| machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter
| votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-
| how-voting-...
|
| - ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be
| hacked, especially in close elections, with malware
| erasing itself post-attack.
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-
| russia...
|
| - The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting
| risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a
| Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a
| rchive/2016/08/elect...
|
| - FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton
| professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes
| undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001
|
| - Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers
| hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts
| via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-
| machine-hack-demonstra...
|
| - Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows
| XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking.
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134
| educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
|
| - PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting
| systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-
| migh...
|
| - Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old
| voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper
| trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-
| decrepit-vot...
|
| - PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless
| machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-
| electi...
|
| - Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including
| Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without
| paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-
| elections-hacking-...
|
| - Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems
| could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper
| ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-
| voting-system...
|
| - Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election
| center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and
| passwords.
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-
| the-...
|
| - NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack
| election systems, potentially targeting ballot
| programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-
| voting-machines-...
|
| - HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable
| touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-
| hackable_n_59...
|
| - Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted
| vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and
| paperless machines.
| https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-
| democrac...
|
| - Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent
| letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about
| security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters
| is not provided in the web results. These letters were
| sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine
| companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search
| for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters
| 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a
| government or senator's website.]
|
| - A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election
| system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016
| election.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-
| syste...
| arunabha wrote:
| Ending the statement with 'There is a list of things' and
| not providing it strongly suggests that you don't
| actually have any data or hard facts to back up your
| claims.
|
| You are a random person on an internet forum, the onus is
| in _you_ to provide data to back up incredible claims.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Ok
|
| The censorship & viewpoint discrimination pressure CISA
| was bringing to bear has been over the top.
|
| At the same time Krebs was talking about how secure our
| election infrastructure was, prominent professors such as
| Matt Blaze & J Halderman that have researched election
| security said the opposite.
|
| This historically has been a bipartisan& Aceademic issue
| with more Dems & Repubs & Academia supporting claims of
| insecurity.
|
| Those of us in security are convinced that all this
| unpatched windows7 usage is crazy and Chris Krebs lying
| about election security isn't being open and truthful
| with the American people.
|
| https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-
| subsites/republicans-j...
|
| - The Associated Press reported in 2019 on the use of
| vulnerable Windows 7 software in election systems,
| highlighting risks in swing states.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/new-election-
| systems-u...
|
| - NBC News revealed in 2020 that ES&S installed modems in
| voting machines, making them susceptible to hacking.
| [Note: The exact NBC News article from January 2020
| titled "Voting Machines Vulnerable to Hacking Due to
| Modems" is not directly linked in the web results, but
| this matches the description in the thread. The full URL
| is not available in the provided web results, and I
| cannot search for it in real-time. You may need to look
| up the NBC News article from January 2020 for the precise
| link.]
|
| - The Guardian exposed in 2015 that WinVote machines used
| weak passwords like "abcde," easily hackable from a
| distance. https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2015/apr/15/virginia-vot...
|
| - The New York Times reported in 2015 on a leaked
| database of 191 million voter records, raising concerns
| about phishing and identity theft.
| https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/us/politics/voting-
| record...
|
| - Wired noted in 2016 that many voting machines ran on
| outdated Windows XP, lacking security patches since 2014.
| https://www.wired.com/2016/08/americas-voting-machines-
| arent...
|
| - Politico detailed in 2016 how a voting machine was
| hacked in minutes by replacing ROM chips with malicious
| firmware. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08
| /2016-electio...
|
| - CBS reported in 2016 that hackers demonstrated voting
| machine vulnerabilities, showing a $15 hack could alter
| votes. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hacker-demonstrates-
| how-voting-...
|
| - ABC News confirmed in 2016 that voting machines can be
| hacked, especially in close elections, with malware
| erasing itself post-attack.
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/hack-election-experts-
| russia...
|
| - The Atlantic warned in 2016 about electronic voting
| risks, citing a case where a machine was turned into a
| Pac-Man console. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a
| rchive/2016/08/elect...
|
| - FOX News covered a 2016 demonstration by a Princeton
| professor hacking a voting machine to shift votes
| undetected. https://www.foxnews.com/video/5126932108001
|
| - Fortune reported in 2016 that Cylance researchers
| hacked a Sequoia AVC Edge machine, altering vote counts
| via a memory card. https://fortune.com/2016/11/04/voting-
| machine-hack-demonstra...
|
| - Vox highlighted in 2016 that voting machines on Windows
| XP and voter databases online were vulnerable to hacking.
| https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/7/134
| educed/hackers-election-day-voting-machines
|
| - PBS noted in 2016 that five states used digital voting
| systems without paper trails, increasing hacking risks.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/heres-how-hackers-
| migh...
|
| - Slate reported in 2016 that 42 states used decade-old
| voting machines, prone to hacking and lacking paper
| trails. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/11/our-
| decrepit-vot...
|
| - PBS revealed in 2016 that Pennsylvania's paperless
| machines made it impossible to verify vote tampering.
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/recounts-no-u-s-
| electi...
|
| - Politico warned in 2016 that 15 states, including
| Pennsylvania, used electronic voting machines without
| paper trails. https://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/us-
| elections-hacking-...
|
| - Scientific American stated in 2017 that voting systems
| could be hacked by foreign powers, advocating for paper
| ballots. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-
| voting-system...
|
| - Politico reported in 2017 on a Georgia election
| center's server misconfiguration, exposing voter data and
| passwords.
| https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/14/will-
| the-...
|
| - NPR cited a 2017 NSA report on Russian attempts to hack
| election systems, potentially targeting ballot
| programming. https://www.npr.org/2017/06/14/532824838/if-
| voting-machines-...
|
| - HuffPost noted in 2017 that 15 states used hackable
| touch-screen voting machines without paper trails.
|
| https://www.huffpost.com/entry/voting-machines-
| hackable_n_59...
|
| - Senator Elizabeth Warren's 2019 article highlighted
| vulnerabilities like outdated voter databases and
| paperless machines.
| https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/strengthening-our-
| democrac...
|
| - Senators Warren, Klobuchar, Wyden, and Pocan sent
| letters in 2019 to voting machine companies about
| security concerns. [Note: The direct link to the letters
| is not provided in the web results. These letters were
| sent to the private equity firms owning voting machine
| companies, as noted in the thread. You may need to search
| for "Warren Klobuchar Wyden Pocan voting machine letters
| 2019" to find the original source, possibly on a
| government or senator's website.]
|
| - A 2019 compilation of media articles detailed election
| system vulnerabilities over four years post-2016
| election.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/new-election-
| syste...
| esafak wrote:
| Maybe it's time to rethink the visibility and permanence
| of HN discussions.
| maeil wrote:
| That would be great, but I don't see it. HN has already
| been obviously violating GDPR and all other right-to-
| forget laws since forever by not allowong for account
| deletion, and everytime this has been brought up, dang
| has pretty much confirmed they don't care ("it would look
| bad if there were deleted comments [and that's more
| important than these laws]").
| bolognafairy wrote:
| huge shock that y combinator doesn't give a shit about
| legal risk considering the huge chunk of its successful
| startups were just law-breaking mobile apps.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Move fast and break democracy.
| sneak wrote:
| It turns out that in real life you don't have any right
| to be forgotten, and trying to legally manufacture one is
| not only nonsensical, it's impossible.
|
| HN is a public forum, if you don't want your statements
| here being public, don't post.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The right to be forgotten is a natural consequence of
| reality - nothing is by default permanent. It's digital
| systems that have perverted reality by persisting
| information beyond its normal short lifetime.
|
| If there's one law of the universe it's that nothing is
| permanent.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| What if I did something and it was written down in a
| book?
| com wrote:
| Books have limited print runs. Many books in libraries
| are only borrowed and perhaps read a few times. Niche
| titles more so. Books go out of print and are hard to
| search for arbitrary text.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| We can "what if" ourselves into any position we want. The
| fact is that digital surveillance is here and does
| collect information about people in a scope that is
| qualitatively different than putting information in
| books.
| anileated wrote:
| There are many cases where laws that are made for humans
| before certain tech are not sufficient once certain tech
| arrives.
|
| You don't need the right to be forgotten outside of
| specific tech because human brain forgets by default,
| paper rots, and all of the above is restricted
| geographically and does not scale.
| vunderba wrote:
| I have a hypothetical. Let's say you attend a rally and
| give a hate speech and the entire event is live-streamed
| / recorded for posterity. Can you use "right to forget"
| laws to impel all sites hosting that video record to blur
| out your face in the original videos?
|
| What's the functional difference to writing a bunch of
| hate speech with your username and wanting it scrubbed
| from the "public record" (which I would argue a popular
| forum such as HN would be classified) using RTBF?
|
| Same thing if you wrote a "Letter to the Editor" to the
| New York Times expressing something distasteful. I don't
| see how anyone should be allowed to wield RTBF as a tool
| for suppressing information.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Does it really matter if your name isn't connected to
| your real life identity?
| mmooss wrote:
| Will that matter in a world of AI? Can't the connection
| be made - for example based on writing style, political
| opinions, time of day you post, networks you use, etc
| etc.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| I'm sure it could be figurded out but not easily?
| whatshisface wrote:
| The whole idea behind right to forget is that people
| don't live their entire lives under condemnation for
| something they stopped doing. You can debate whether or
| not permanent ostracism is effective as a deterrent, but
| let's not ban the removal of gang tattoos.
| econ wrote:
| You could be indoctrinated or paid to give the speech.
| You might regret it or change your mind. The video
| doesn't have to be real, it could be generated, it could
| be someone with the same name who looks like you.
|
| Maybe you got drunk and climbed on stage naked 10 years
| ago. Should you be that guy forever?
| nindalf wrote:
| When I asked dang about GDPR this is how he explained
| HN's stance on not allowing broad comment and account
| deletion
|
| > Re GDPR: our understanding based on the analysis done
| by YC's legal team is that HN does not fall under the
| GDPR, so for the time being we're sticking with the
| approach of not deleting account histories wholesale but
| helping with privacy concerns in more precise ways.
|
| > Re "aren't these comments owned by the person who wrote
| them"? That's a complicated legal question, no doubt, and
| also philosophically. From my perspective, two other
| factors are that (1) the threads are co-creations (see pg
| on that here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226) and (2)
| posting to an internet forum is publishing something, not
| dissimilar to sending a letter to the editor of a
| newspaper.
|
| > Obviously there are many reasonable takes on this. Ours
| is that we're trying to balance the community interests
| of a public forum (mainly the interest of commenters not
| to have their comments deprived of context, and the
| interest of the community in preserving its archive) with
| the need to protect individuals. That's a lot of work--we
| end up taking care of requests manually for people every
| day--but we're committed to both sides of it because it
| seems like the only way to do justice to both sides.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| For a supposedly intellectual site that I clearly am at
| best in the middle tier of intellectual ability, this
| place is shockingly passive and accepting of the
| converging futures of authoritarian AI and the marked
| collapse of political discourse, if not rule of law.
|
| Maybe I'm just a dumb one that speaks up, everyone else
| has gone dark forest.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Never stop speaking out, and if they come for you do not
| go peacefully. That's about all an individual in an
| authoritarian society can control.
| throwaway91201 wrote:
| Dictatorships tend to do worse economically, the biggest
| example was the Soviet bloc which fell for economic
| reasons mostly.
|
| You can accelerate this effect by doing sabotage. The WW2
| CIA sabotage manual contains a lot of ideas that have
| pretty good ratio of problems created to personal risk.
| PieTime wrote:
| That's the truth, if we remain silent we will be targeted
| eventually. I am extremely disappointed by the lack of
| tech colleagues calling this out. I took an oath of
| ethics to do no harm and I see many people willing to use
| technology to find and silence critics of the government.
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| Fuck Donald Trump and his gross, weird, pathetic mafia.
|
| This regime is a rogue autocracy strangling anything good
| about this once great country.
|
| I hope every single person responsible for the many
| crimes they have committed (and they have committed
| crimes) faces justice, if not in this life, then the next
| one.
|
| Oh, that feels good to get off my chest.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| There is no next life. This is all we got. Let's make the
| most of it.
| mmooss wrote:
| That has been the case for years:
|
| IME the authoritarian politics had much more support
| here; I'd say it was the majority of voices heard. It
| diminished considerably when Trump was elected and then
| took office.
|
| But the silence has been a long-standing problem: HN has
| long been largely silent on the social and political
| dangers of IT - really an outrage; here are the people
| most responsible, and the outcomes are predictable. That
| would include especially disinformation and
| misinformation, and propaganda more generally; and also
| the power of social media. Those are what makes it
| impossible to do anything.
|
| When things became so polarized, years ago, shutting down
| discourse everywhere, HN didn't work to solve the problem
| - they stopped talking too. Again, a big failure of the
| people with the knowledge, skill, and power. But shutting
| down discourse is not politically neutral - it's a great
| help to the corrupt and evil to hide what they do and
| prevent people from responding to it. Democracy dies in
| darkness, I've heard.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| There's this macrocycle of fatigue related to Godwins law
| for, what, 30 years of online discourse.
|
| The undeniable long term trend during this period has
| been increasing surveillance, control, centralization of
| power in the executive, weakening of rights, due process,
| legal authority, politicization of the judiciary, and
| majority minority slowly building a core base of
| manipulatable populism.
|
| Maybe I'm naive about the past, even the last 75 years of
| what was really going on in Washington, but a Seig heil
| on national television with no pushback or consequences
| beyond grassroot pushback (and it has been ALL grassroot)
| was a crystallizing moment.
|
| This isn't stuff to roll your eyes over as just Godwins
| law style hyperbole.
|
| The only in the I mean only saving grace, is that the
| stock market exists for immediate political blowback. But
| the fact that the only functional political bulwark
| against trump is the second by second ticker of financial
| health of the oligarchs is really depressing.
| arunabha wrote:
| I'd say it goes beyond silence. Anything political used
| to be flagged and pushed of the front page in minutes
| till about a couple of weeks ago.
|
| Not very surprising given the current political
| environment.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Lets say that a ton of us got a leaky look at what the
| likes of thiel datamimed from the humanity dataset. The
| last mile of the enlightenment wrecks all those romantic
| ideas of eternal progress by technology, self
| actualizationa and retardation repair by education pretty
| thoroughly. Those that are not in the know mimic those
| that are or just develop a amoral stance to whether and
| survive the times which are a changing. It turns out the
| civil liberty lessons do not survive the contact with the
| lovecraftian reality beneath. This whole 10 year ride
| since 2016 was not foreseen, predicted, effectively
| countered and not even mitigated by protecting cultural
| artifacts and institutions against the decay. The science
| whose prediction power is zero, who has no eclipse to
| show, is not one.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when
| someone postulated that the election _was_ rigged, or
| that COVID couldn 't be stopped by masks. You're
| essentially asking for conservatives to be the bigger
| person and stop the blood feud.
|
| IMO both approaches should have been more measured, but
| who do you think will propose the ceasefire agreement?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is not true. People who claimed the election was
| rigged were asked to back up their claims with evidence.
| Typically they never did, although a smaller number made
| an effort...but the profferred evidence was nonsensical.
| I am not just talking about talking heads widely quoted
| on TV or social media posts, I read a _lot_ of election
| litigation.
|
| I think the anti-mask people had some valid points, but
| they sank their own boat by ranting about 'masktards' and
| 'face diapers' while also demonstrating callous
| indifference to the large number of deaths.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Dave Lobue and Justin Mealey should be forever shamed for
| the farce they put up during the hearings in Georgia.
|
| https://www.charliekirk.com/news/georgia-data-scientist-
| prov...
|
| If you check their work based on the publicly available
| data, you find that based on their logic there was a
| clear case for Trump cheating. Right wing media reporting
| the story, of course, did not.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Can you give some examples of things related to those
| topics you think are equivalent to what is happening
| right now? Are you referring to facebook and twitter
| censorship of those topics?
| const_cast wrote:
| Nobody was made that people thought the election was
| rigged. They were frustrated with their lack of evidence,
| and then mad at their attempt at an insurrection. And
| then really pissed off at their complete lack of
| accountability afterwards.
|
| Same thing with Covid. Nobody was mad if you thought
| masks were stupid. They were mad if you didn't wear your
| mask, putting immunocompromised people at risk for your
| own selfish reasons.
|
| There's a difference between speech and actions. Doing
| things that actually, literally, kill people is a
| problem.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when
| someone postulated that the election was rigged, or that
| COVID couldn't be stopped by masks. You're essentially
| asking for conservatives to be the bigger person and stop
| the blood feud.
|
| Did anyone have their, and their coworkers', security
| clearance revoked just for saying either of those? (There
| are other activities that could have been taken by people
| saying the election was rigged that could have led to a
| loss of security clearance, but I don't think that just
| the statement did it.)
| edmundsauto wrote:
| So people in government claiming it was rigged should
| probably lose their jobs, as they were advancing harmful
| narratives related to their jobs. Journalists were
| (rightly) ridiculed, but there is a significant
| difference. I might not use a mechanic who is antivax; I
| would advocate a doctor be fired.
| mmooss wrote:
| There's a difference between truth and lies - an actual,
| material, essential difference. It's not politics, it's
| truth.
|
| People can take any relativistic position they want, but
| that difference is essential to anything and everything:
| The truth about database i/o performance is essential to
| your project; the truth about climate change is essential
| to preventing catastrophe; the truth about Covid was
| essential to saving millions of lives - and many died and
| much blood is on the hands of the liars.
|
| But the liars were not, and shouldn't have been,
| arrested, deported, extorted, threatened, etc.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >To be fair...the other side was just as ferocious when
| someone postulated that the election was rigged,
|
| No they weren't
|
| Not in the amount of court cases, elected politicans
| stating the view, and January 6th
|
| When a few Democrats starting objecting to the 2016
| results. Joe Biden, in congress during the certification,
| slammed the gavel down and said "it's over"
|
| https://www.npr.org/2017/01/06/508562183/biden-to-
| democrats-...
|
| To even compare the two situations it's insane.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >Chris Krebs just yesterday had his security clearance
| revoked solely for saying the 2020 election was fair and
| not rigged
|
| Considering how Republicans control all three branches
| (to an extent), the "2020 election fraud" was a key
| talking point of Trump, and how stealing an election
| would be a historic crime in American history....the
| justice department has done nothing so far.
|
| The Republican House spent a year or so investigating
| Hunter Biden to obtain a gun plus tax charge (also with
| the hopes of tying Biden to a crime) but not trying to
| find who stole the 2020 election?
| XorNot wrote:
| Yes but that was after the American people voted for an
| administration which explicitly ran on a platform of "we
| will do exactly that".
|
| The attempted framing is as government oppression by "the
| elites", but half the country - the regular people -
| they're all for this.
| moogly wrote:
| https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/02/us/israel-protesters-
| us-s...
| ath3nd wrote:
| > You're not arrested for posting this
|
| Your funds might be cut off though: https://www.theguardian.c
| om/commentisfree/2025/apr/07/trump-...
|
| Or your president might declare a wartime law to deport all
| the immigrants:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp34ylep987o
|
| Or you, a honors student (but not a citizen) might find
| yourself in an unmarked van if you dared to question the
| powers that be.
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrn57340xlo
|
| Sure it happens to immigrants only for now, brings memory to
| this poem:
|
| First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
| Because I was not a socialist.
|
| Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak
| out-- Because I was not a trade unionist.
|
| Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
| Because I was not a Jew.
|
| Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for
| me.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Sure it happens to immigrants only for now
|
| ... and they're trying to end birthright citizenship. I.e.
| people who are literally not immigrants (were born here and
| perhaps have never lived anywhere else) are already being
| lined up for this.
| throwing_away wrote:
| It's not unreasonable to see the situation as "Then they
| came for the Jews, and the administration finally deported
| the people who were coming for the Jews".
|
| The president's literal argument for doing it is that the
| activist groups are coming for all of American life.
|
| I'm not a big fan of either side's rhetoric, but clearly
| the horseshoe has become a ring.
| ath3nd wrote:
| > I'm not a big fan of either side's rhetoric, but
| clearly the horseshoe has become a ring.
|
| Either side? Tell me which "side" does that sound like?
|
| - hostility towards non traditional sexuality
|
| - immigration being used as the scapegoat for economic
| problems
|
| - strong feeling of national exceptionalism
|
| - assault on women's productivity rights
|
| - politicizing of science
|
| - deportation for political reasons
|
| - "Roman" salutes
|
| It brings parallels with some things happening in Europe
| some time ago.
|
| > activist groups are coming for all of American life.
|
| I wonder who's actually going for all of American life
| though. Let's take Birthright citizenship, which has been
| established in 1868. Is that American life enough for
| you?
|
| "All persons born or naturalized in the United States,
| and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of
| the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
|
| And guess who goes against this American way of life
| value? An orange grandpa married to an immigrant. You
| really can't make this up.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5327552/trump-takes-
| bir...
| throwing_away wrote:
| > Either side? Tell me which "side" does that sound like?
|
| Up until you got to the "Roman" salutes, it sounded like
| both sides in the US.
|
| Or rather, it will sound like whichever side you aren't.
| That's the point.
|
| But using "Then they came for the Jews" when you're
| discussing deportation of these particular people is
| perhaps a new level of absurdity in the discourse.
| mmooss wrote:
| > "Roman" salutes, it sounded like both sides in the US.
|
| The liberals / Dems can barely organize a picnic. They
| can't agree on anything. There is no Fox News, there is
| nobody they bow down to. The obsequiousness to Trump is
| unprecendented.
| throwing_away wrote:
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/04/04/picnic-
| before...
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > Let's take Birthright citizenship, which has been
| established in 1868. Is that American life enough for
| you?
|
| Birthright citizenship was to ensure freed slaves could
| not be denied citizenship.
|
| It's served its purpose and we can repeal it and join the
| vast majority of nations that don't have this pathway.
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| Ok, but _if_ we want to repeal it there 's a defined
| process for that. The president doesn't just get to
| declare people's citizenship invalid, that's Nazi shit.
| That's why I call Trump and everyone who tacitly or
| explicitly supports him a Nazi. He's trying to rule by
| executive fiat to enforce white nationalism.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| And the 2nd amendment was for an armed milita to protect
| the country.
| mmooss wrote:
| If you want to repeal it, then convince your fellow
| citizens to do that. The president can't do it.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Someone mentioned the 2nd Amendment in this thread.
|
| If a president stretched the limits of executive power to
| go after guns, half of the country would cheer for it.
|
| The Constitution is a living document, and the line is
| constantly pushed back and forth on its interpretation
| and enforcement.
| mmooss wrote:
| It's not at all equivalent.
|
| > The president's literal argument for doing it is that
| the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
|
| What is American life? Why can't people criticize
| whatever they want - that is American life.
|
| > "Then they came for the Jews, and the administration
| finally deported the people who were coming for the Jews"
|
| The vast majority of antisemitism is on the right. The
| administration does nothing about it (and supports and
| legitimizes much of it).
|
| Also, the Jews will be next. By attacking critics of
| Judaism, they are entrapping Jewish people (and others)
| in legitimzing this oppression, and in making themselves
| into targets of hate. Then when the white supremecists
| turn on them, and say Jews are conspiring to control
| American, what will these Jewish supporters of arrests,
| oppression, and deportations say?
| subscribed wrote:
| But Zionism is not Judaism.
|
| Most of the pro-Palestine or anti-Zionist content I see
| is denouncing Israeli war crimes and genocide. No one is
| bashing Jews because of their ethnicity or religion.
|
| Also a lot of this comes from the Jews (who are then
| attacked for being confused or..... antisemitic)
|
| We're not at the point of people hunting Jews because
| they're Jews. We are at the point when opposing
| targeting/killing medics, press, children or hospitals
| may result in being kidnapped from the street and either
| locked up without charges or trafficked to the torture
| camp.
|
| I do not disagree with your comment in general, I
| disagree with you putting "Judaism" while the almost all
| the critique and rebuke is aimed at the Israeli war
| crimes or the Zionist supremacy ideology.
| ath3nd wrote:
| > I do not disagree with your comment in general, I
| disagree with you putting "Judaism" while the almost all
| the critique and rebuke is aimed at the Israeli war
| crimes or the Zionist supremacy ideology.
|
| It's good that you brought this up!
|
| It's a common right-wing tactic to conflate themselves
| with the purest version of something that is highly
| regarded and hide behind it. E.g the Nazis conflated
| themselves with "pure" Germanness, the fascists in Italy
| conflated themselves with "pure" Italianness, the same
| way now Israel conflates itself with Judaism/Jewishness.
| Then it naturally follows that if you attack Israel's
| genocide of the people in Palestine, you are attacking
| Judaism/Jewishness. If you question Netanyahu's genocidal
| ultra-supremacist ideology (which many Holocaust
| survivors, Jewish themselves, have done repeatedly), you
| are anti-Jewish, and so on.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4OdkaTqmDs
|
| A similar thing is happening in the US where the current
| administration is trying to position itself as America-
| first, so naturally any critique on them must be anti-
| American, right? You will find that this playbook is
| always the same. First will be immigrants, then non-
| traditional sexual orientations and women's reproductive
| rights, then the press and universities and finally just
| whoever they feel like.
|
| Fortunately, if history goes to show us anything, it's
| these hate-fueled-orders always end up imploding.
| KingMob wrote:
| Got called a "self-hating Jew" for the first time on
| Mastodon a year ago, for criticizing Israel.
|
| Unfortunately for those of us in the diaspora, Israel has
| really muddied the waters by convincing people that anti-
| Israel = antisemitism, because it's given real
| antisemites cover. E.g., like when the ADL came to Musk's
| defense after his Nazi salute because he officially
| supported Israel.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Almost all far-right / neo-nazis groups with a long
| (real) antisemitism trajectory like the ones Elon Musk
| supports are now pro-Israel and pro-Gaza genocide. Sounds
| weird, but it makes total sense, as:
|
| - The Zionist project is an ethno-state, just like those
| groups want for their countries. This also echoes the
| Zionist-nazi collaborations before WWII to move jewish
| population out of Germany to Palestine.
|
| - Israel works as an spearhead of the global imperialism
| configuration, if you support imperialism on the Middle
| East -as those groups and their bourgeoisie do- you must
| support Israel.
|
| - European neo-nazi groups are militant against
| immigration, and a big chunk of that immigration to their
| countries is muslim, so they are more than open to the
| Israel narratives against the muslim world... even the
| most extremist ones that de-humanizes Gaza children
| ("those children are future terrorists").
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > The president's literal argument for doing it is that
| the activist groups are coming for all of American life.
|
| American life is defined by the acceptance of dissent and
| the encouragement of even distasteful free speech. If
| that's not American, what even is American?
| KingMob wrote:
| Horseshoe theory is one of those idiotic centrist
| oversimplifications that pretends extremist differences
| don't matter.
|
| It's like watching the rebels and the Empire shoot at
| each other, and saying "There's no difference, because
| they're both violent."
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Right. We don't have to arrest. We can just disappear
| anything you say critical of our masters, I mean, our
| overlords, I mean, our government, I mean, a foreign
| government, I mean, a foreign government that hacks American
| companies and sells the hacks to Middle Eastern dictators who
| breed an ideology that trained people to attack our own
| country, I mean...
| shihab wrote:
| As someone who came from a pretty authoritarian country- let
| me assure you that people there do routinely criticize their
| government, mock them all the time. Governments often do not
| have the bandwidth to deal with the volume of criticism, and
| even when they do- they wisely realize that letting people
| vent a little online is better than complete crackdown. I
| myself routinely did this in Facebook, where many in my
| friend list were government employees and (ex-ruling) party
| members.
|
| I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from USA
| as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and please
| trust me I am not exaggerating here.
| selectodude wrote:
| >I am in fact far more afraid of pro-palestine speech from
| USA as an immigrant than I was in my home country- and
| please trust me I am not exaggerating here.
|
| I would have laughed at this until pretty recently. How
| wrong I was.
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not just non-citizens, either. Look into
| denaturalization and all the fascination with it in pro-
| Trump circles lately.
| fundad wrote:
| Do you mean pro-Palestinian sentiments scare you or are you
| afraid of expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment?
| MPSFounder wrote:
| Likely he means expressing any pro-Palestine sentiments.
| Doxxing is very common and if Ivy League deans were taken
| down, immigrants are likely to be deported for expressing
| any empathy towards the Palestinian.
| fundad wrote:
| Yes that is a very legitimate fear.
|
| But the people doing the doxxing complain that any
| criticism of I _r_ e* for their war crimes makes them
| feel like there is no place they are safe, I don't buy it
| but the complainants have a lot of allies.
| hurtuvac78 wrote:
| Actually now US citizens are impacted too.
|
| _Michigan-based attorney Amir Makled [a US citizen] was
| detained by federal immigration agents while returning home
| from a family vacation_
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5357455/attorney-
| detain...
| intermerda wrote:
| They've discussed deporting US citizens to gulags -
| https://truthout.org/articles/white-house-press-sec-says-
| tru...
| BeetleB wrote:
| He was detained at immigration. This happens all the time,
| and has been happening routinely since 2001.
|
| (Not saying it's good or anything - just not new).
| cma wrote:
| Freest country, hardly anyone lives within 100 miles of
| the coast I'm sure https://www.aclu.org/know-your-
| rights/border-zone
| tdeck wrote:
| The authoritarian future isn't evenly distributed. Some
| groups of people have been dealing with it for decades,
| while others are in for a surprise.
| testing22321 wrote:
| If you post it and nobody ever sees it, that is functionally
| the same result as not being allowed to post it.
| tdeck wrote:
| > and other authoritarian nations like China and Turkey
|
| And Israel, where a history teacher was arrested for making a
| post on Facebook:
|
| https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/22/meir_baruchin
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This Israeli as well, had everything taken from her for 4
| IG posts:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/03/magazine/israel-free-
| spee...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| I think UK leads here:
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54123/were-
| over...
|
| (many links in the responses and comments, eg:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/arrests-for-
| offensive-... - " 625 arrests were made for alleged section
| 127 offences in 2010 " just in london)
| rozap wrote:
| He could have his visa revoked though.
| newaccountlol wrote:
| People who have spoken out against the genocidal apartheid
| regime are being black-bagged in the street by plainclothes
| officers all across the United States. The gap between the
| supposedly enlightened West and Russia grows smaller by the
| day.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| They don't need to arrest him because the narrative is
| already controlled, as shown by the article, and by going to
| any traditional news site.
| anonair wrote:
| Why arrest if you can silence?
| garyrob wrote:
| As someone said above, "America's arrested rather a large
| number of people in recent weeks--university students, mostly
| --for expressing viewpoints on the I/P conflict. The current
| Administration is claiming, and no one's yet stopped them,
| that First Amendment rights don't apply to non-citizens such
| as international students."
|
| America is changing. What was true before isn't necessarily
| true now, and may get worse, depending on election outcomes.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Well, Israelis are not abruptly incompetent and culturally
| allergic to progress, with a predictable habit of grovelling
| to whichever tyrant comes next -- but they certainly do share
| some methods.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| > Israelis are not abruptly incompetent and culturally
| allergic to progress, with a predictable habit of
| grovelling to whichever tyrant comes next
|
| I can't tell what you mean by this? Is it sarcasm? Is there
| another group who is like this?
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Oh, I see. The parent comment was referring to russia,
| but the replies got so long that it's hardly noticeable.
| I should have mentioned it."
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| Still not sure what you mention. Hard to say that
| Israelis don't grovel to whatever tyrant comes next when
| they are currently ruled by a tyrant who would rather
| endanger his citizens and commit war crimes than gold and
| election he knows he'll lose. Also they have elected him
| over and over again despite how he endangers them and
| funded their current biggest enemy Hamas, in a cynical
| ploy to weaken his more moderate opposition at the time,
| the PA
| colordrops wrote:
| My wife deleted all her social media posts because she's a
| green card holder. Let's stop mincing words.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| If you are not constantly posting fake and not recieve money
| from foreign entities you are not being arested at all in
| Russia. You may get a fine, and that's not always the case.
| graemep wrote:
| Claiming people are being funded by "foreign entities" is
| one of the commonest excuses dictatorships use for
| persecution.
|
| I do not know what the state of free speech in Russia is,
| but that explanation is not credible.
| int_19h wrote:
| "Fake" like calling the "special military operation" a war
| of aggression?
| yatopifo wrote:
| Any difference is going to disappear in only a few years.
| What matters is the direction the US taking. This happened to
| Russia about 14 years ago, and it's happening to the US now.
| scottyah wrote:
| It's still humans being humans, we just have a covert culture
| while they are more overt. I personally like being
| tricked/manipulated more than forced. I'd rather get Tom
| Sawyered into painting a fence than being held at gunpoint.
| NoTeslaThrow wrote:
| Indeed. The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often
| staffed with people who attended the same schools and classes
| as those running the country. The social circles of the two
| worlds are extremely closely linked.
|
| Of course, this means that the reporting isn't very good at
| addressing its blind spots-i.e., most of the news in the
| country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy
| league coastal elites. And I say this as a member of that same
| class. Most of the political perspectives in my life are
| completely unrepresented in the opinion columns, which
| generally tend to pander upwards rather than downwards.
|
| I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long
| as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking
| the government permission to report on what they're doing.
| shihab wrote:
| The NYT's Executive Editor Joe Kahn is the son of a
| billionaire who was on the board of lobby group CAMERA, a
| group devoted to pressuring US media to be more pro-Israel.
| mmooss wrote:
| Just rumors and conspiracy theories.
|
| Where can we see evidence of what you claim?
|
| What do you claim Kahn has done? Do you have evidence? The
| NY Times regulary publishes news critical of Israel.
|
| Children and parents, siblings, etc. disagree, sometimes
| extremely, regularly. Children and parents disagreeing is
| one of the most common stories in humanity. Should Joe
| resign because of dad's activities?
| jgil wrote:
| Not OP but -- there is reporting by The Intercept on a
| leak of guidance that explicitly contains double
| standards. [1]
|
| Before the leak there was already data-driven analysis
| about coverage that, in aggregate, shows imbalance. [2]
|
| 1 - https://archive.ph/eEwi0
|
| 2 - https://archive.ph/fp4vQ
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> Where can we see evidence of what you claim?_
|
| This is not only a reasonable question, but it is a good
| one, too. Unfortunately, the line beforehand:
|
| _> Just rumors and conspiracy theories._
|
| ...makes it seem like you 've already made up your mind,
| and makes it difficult to interpret your post as a good-
| faith attempt on your part to learn something new from
| someone.
| shihab wrote:
| And here is an article on Raffi berg, BBC's Middle East
| editor:
|
| https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-
| bia...
| YZF wrote:
| And here is an analysis of BBC's anti-Israeli bias:
| https://asserson.co.uk/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-r...
|
| And from the BBC itself:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d4egk17l2o "Questions
| still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary"
|
| https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/skcfkb1iyx "From
| bias to blunders: The BBC's anti-Israel shift since October
| 7"
| KingMob wrote:
| And opposite all _that_ are Tiktok videos by Israeli
| soldiers, for which questions of journalistic bias are
| irrelevant.
| YZF wrote:
| Bad things happen in wars. And yes there are questionable
| videos of Israeli soldiers on TikTok. I'm not sure how
| this supports your view point. It's is entirely possible
| for Israel to be the good guy, for the BBC to have a
| strong anti-Israeli bias, and for there to be
| questionable actions by certain Israeli soldiers
| (including on TikTok). There are also questionable
| actions by Ukrainian soldiers and there have been
| questionable actions by American, British, and Australian
| soldiers in their war on ISIS and Al Qaeda and there have
| been questionable action by the allies in WW-II. Israeli
| soldiers are young adults fighting an enemy that has
| complete disregard to human life (theirs or others) or
| pretty much anything else. That enemy has been attacking
| them for decades. Many of them may have friends and
| family that have been impacted by this enemy's brutality.
| So yes- there are going to be questionable incidents.
| This is human nature.
|
| We can fix this by forcing Hamas to release the hostages,
| surrender, and end this war. Could have happened a long
| time ago if the pressure was on the right side.
|
| You can't get a picture of reality through anecdotes. In
| every war you can cherry pick any narrative. For what its
| worth I've spoken to soldiers who fought in Gaza and they
| maintain they hold high standards and the incidents you
| hear of are outliers.
| banannaise wrote:
| More importantly, these newsrooms are run by people who get
| their money from the same places.
|
| How much are they going to tolerate narratives that go
| against their financial interests?
| mmooss wrote:
| Just endless conspiracies. Which newsroom leaders get their
| money from what places? Why do leaders in government and
| business hate journalists so much and invest so much in
| discrediting them?
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| The Washington Post being owned by Amazon for one
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| I believe he was referring to the constant barrage of
| anti-media rhetoric by Republicans.
|
| You can't trust the main stream media, the legacy media
| is lying, etc
|
| Why would they do this it the media is controlled by
| them?
| immibis wrote:
| Because their constituents are really so dumb they don't
| believe Fox News is mainstream media?
| Whoppertime wrote:
| https://www.emarketer.com/content/pharma-companies-
| increase-...
| https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/pharma-passes-
| tech-cl... Newsrooms, online or otherwise get a lot of
| money from Big Pharma Pharma has overtaken tech to become
| the second-largest industry for ad spending in 2023.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often staffed
| with people who attended the same schools and classes as
| those running the country. The social circles of the two
| worlds are extremely closely linked.
|
| This is a conspiracy theory - they are secretly conspiring.
| Do you have evidence of this conspiracy actually happening on
| any scale?
|
| Many attended the same universities on all sides of politics
| and issues. The universities are big places that have been
| operating for generations. Ask someone who went to a
| university - do they know and agree with everyone else who
| went there? It's absurd.
|
| > most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that
| isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites.
|
| You need to do more than throw around stereotypes. Give us
| some evidence.
|
| > I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so
| long as that press is floating on the cream of society and
| asking the government permission to report on what they're
| doing.
|
| Who asked permission?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >This is a conspiracy theory
|
| Doesn't meet the criteria of what people typically call a
| conspiracy theory. It's easily verified or debunked by
| amateurs with publicly available information, it doesn't
| seem absurd on its face, and it makes no claims other than
| those of association (certainly none of blatant felony,
| coup, or world domination).
| jl6 wrote:
| > no claims other than those of association
|
| Yeah but that's how modern conspiracy theories work. They
| have evolved beyond the old staples like flat earth and
| moon landing stuff which make clear statements. They
| instead just insinuate. And that's enough to achieve the
| intended effect: to move your predispositions, while
| remaining immune to debunking because they haven't made
| any specific claim.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Yeah but that's how modern conspiracy theories work. T
|
| That is indeed how modern conspiracy theories work. They
| make outlandish claims that aren't supported by
| scientific fact, that some shadowy group controls the
| world through improbable means, and offer no evidence.
|
| "Hey, these two groups are awfully cozy together" just
| isn't even close to being anything like a conspiracy
| theory. You've stretched your fallacious counter-argument
| too far.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| Which politcal perspective is being ignored by the media?
| alistairSH wrote:
| Is Meta really considered "mainstream media"? I always took
| that phrase to refer to NBC, CBS, NY Post, etc - the big legacy
| news organizations (print and TV).
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| How does "mainstream" America increasingly get its news?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I read "mainstream" as one of those words like "modern," to
| apply the media that was prevalent when the phrase was
| coined. Technically modern architecture, if we read the
| words literally and individually... well, I guess that
| would be tent-cities, that seems to mostly be what gets
| built nowadays.
|
| Facebook, the tent-city of media, actually it would kinda
| work if only the platform wasn't centrally controlled.
| ljm wrote:
| The big legacy news organisations would be legacy media.
|
| Social media is not even 20 years old but it's a tall order
| to deny it mainstream status since the younger generations
| get their news from scrolling TikTok and not cracking open
| the daily broadsheet.
|
| Legacy media has been sourcing from Facebook, Twitter, and
| Reddit for years. They're as mainstream as AP and Reuters but
| without the reputation or the credentials.
| petre wrote:
| It's mainstream, it's media, people read their news on it, so
| yes. But I'd rather trust NPR, BBC, the Guardian or some
| other legacy news outlet, because these unscrupulous tech
| bros will skew the narrarive by silencing some sources while
| brainwashing people with whatever suits them best.
| kubb wrote:
| Anna Politkovskaya - Investigative journalist and critic of the
| Chechen war, shot in Moscow (2006). Alexander Litvinenko - Ex-
| FSB officer poisoned with polonium in London (2006).
|
| Stanislav Markelov & Anastasia Baburova - Human rights lawyer
| and journalist, shot in Moscow (2009).
|
| Boris Nemtsov - Opposition leader, shot near the Kremlin
| (2015).
|
| Denis Voronenkov - Former Russian MP, shot in Kyiv (2017).
|
| Nikolai Andrushchenko - Journalist, beaten to death in St.
| Petersburg (2017).
|
| Alexei Navalny - Opposition leader, died in prison after
| previous poisoning (2024).
|
| ---
|
| The difference is that they murder their political opponents
| for show to make their people be afraid of dissent.
|
| You comparing it with some (disgusting, vile) social media
| company (which would improve the world immensely if it
| disappeared) is completely inappropriate.
| sharpshadow wrote:
| If you gonna mix in politicians and opposition the USA has a
| extensive list themselves.
| tdeck wrote:
| Fred Hampton would have something to say if, you know, he
| were still alive.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| I mean, you don't have to go far to find Soviet-style
| political repression in the USA.
|
| Julian Assange says hi.
| basisword wrote:
| "We're not as bad as them" is a poor argument. Particularly
| while America quickly slides in that direction. Just take a
| look at the deportation of Venezuelans especially the case of
| the wrongly deported man that the government conveniently
| "can't find". That's a story comparable to the stories
| Americans tell about Russia and China.
| bradly wrote:
| I think OP is more using this incident along with many
| others. Things similar to in February when the President
| signed executive orders that imposed sanctions on American
| law firms and lawyers which included suspension of security
| clearances, termination of government contracts, and
| restrictions preventing firm employees from accessing federal
| buildings. (https://www.justsecurity.org/110109/president-
| cannot-issue-a...)
|
| I have no idea how to talk equality to speak of whether they
| are comparable or not, but I do think people are seeing a
| different atmosphere.
| kubb wrote:
| Sure, combined with others it makes sense. Just Facebook
| isn't enough to draw equivalence though.
| vaidhy wrote:
| Is this an example of whataboutism?
| subscribed wrote:
| Trump is barely, like, 90? days into his presidency and his
| gestapo is already kidnapping people and shipping them to
| torture camps contrary to the court orders.
|
| Putler is an established dicktator with a long list of
| killing his own citizens with impunity.
|
| Give trump a couple of years. He can't do it overnight, he
| needs to cook the Americans slowly. Hitler didn't turn the
| Germans into Nazis overnight either.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I don't think this is necessarily an issue of censorship so
| much as it is highlighting that Facebook is clearly a fucking
| news publisher and should be treated as such under the law.
|
| It's time to revoke section 230 for any social media network
| that amplifies or buries content with a non-transparent
| process.
|
| In this case it isn't even merely an algorithm designed by
| humans. They have LITERAL human editors choosing which stories
| to put on the front page, just like the NYT, and they should be
| held liable for the content on their platforms just like legacy
| media is.
| mkolodny wrote:
| Are you saying you think human editors handpick what goes on
| billions of people's Facebook feeds?
| bolognafairy wrote:
| [flagged]
| mkolodny wrote:
| [flagged]
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Wait but if you perform an extremely complex method of
| algorithmic curation, at some point isn't the human
| designing the algorithm becoming an editor?
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Russia doesn't just put people in jail for speaking against the
| government. They weaponise the generational fear of being
| disappeared by the government. This is not close to what
| happens in America where you can post anything anywhere and if
| Facebook deletes it you can always make your own website about
| it. If you did this in Russia you go to jail. Even if you say
| things like "it is sad Ukrainian children die in children's day
| in Russia" you go to jail. I don't think you can compare modern
| USA with modern Russia in this way. USA does plenty of other
| things that are bad like jailing so many people for petty
| crimes without pushing much on speech. USA has its own problems
| and all these comparisons only hide them.
| spencerflem wrote:
| They are now denying visas, and deporting lawful residents,
| sending them to offshore torture prisons, for social media
| posts.
|
| For non citizens, regardless of length of time or legality,
| this is the case right now. For birthright citizens and full
| citizens it will be the case very soon
| jwr wrote:
| > birthright citizens and full citizens
|
| Is there a difference?
| SauciestGNU wrote:
| No, I think they meant "naturalized and birthright
| citizens".
| spencerflem wrote:
| They are intending to unconstitutionally remove
| birthright. I expect they will start having trouble
| slightly before third generation+ immigrants.
| jwr wrote:
| But... they can't remove citizenship retroactively. What
| I mean is today there are citizens and non-citizens, but
| there are no classes of citizens. Either you have
| citizenship or you do not, it doesn't matter how you
| acquired it.
| spencerflem wrote:
| That's their plan though :c
|
| So far a judge has blocked it when he tried the first
| time
|
| https://www.npr.org/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5270572/birthright-
| citi...
| pgkr wrote:
| Here are recent attempts to create a stratified class
| system among citizens based on how they became citizens:
| https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-
| media-ca...
| Ray20 wrote:
| I think it's disgusting hypocrisy. We're talking about the
| USA, aren't we? A country that has started many, many wars,
| a country that massacred innocent Vietnamese, Afghans,
| Iraqis. Even at this very moment, the US is participating
| in the killing of honest, decent, innocent Palestinians and
| Russians. But that's okay, not worth mentioning.
|
| But deporting lawful residents? How dare you, America? This
| is definitely the beginning of the end.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I hate all that too, the people they're deporting are the
| ones protesting to stop an ongoing US genocide, it's all
| connected.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Well yeah we're bad and getting much worse
| cma wrote:
| They are sending people to a concentration camp without any
| due process.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >Another difference would be that you are allowed to express
| your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail,
| that's true but only in a very limited way.
|
| Although not even close in number and punishment the US
| government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.
|
| I think we do have a much better system because we are aware of
| these cases, you can speak out about the issue, and our court
| system can rule against the current admin.
|
| What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or the
| US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This is
| regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it sets.
| whatshisface wrote:
| You only feel safe to speak out against the violations of law
| if you feel safe from them.
| ebcode wrote:
| No. I speak out, and I don't feel safe. It takes courage.
| 20after4 wrote:
| It stopped being safe in the USA for anyone not currently
| popular with the administration. And anyone's safe status
| can change on a whim.
| viraptor wrote:
| > and our court system can rule against the current admin.
|
| That is more and more often not happening recently, because
| courts are not involved. If they are and explicitly request
| planes to be turned around and people brought back - they're
| ignored without repercussions.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > without repercussions
|
| This part is not settled yet.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| If you are talking about Khalil, he didn't just speak against
| Israel, it seems like his role in an org which openly
| supported Hamas may have played a part but didn't matter
| legally. The legal issue was that he left out facts on his
| green card application.
|
| I am 100% sure that support of terrorist orgs can invalidate
| your green card.
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-claims-
| palest...
|
| > According to recent court filings, President Donald Trump's
| administration said Khalil failed to disclose when applying
| for his green card last year that his employment by the Syria
| Office at the British Embassy in Beirut went "beyond 2022"
| and that he was a "political affairs officer" for the United
| Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from
| June to November 2023.
|
| > "Regardless of his allegations concerning political speech,
| Khalil withheld membership in certain organizations and
| failed to disclose continuing employment by the Syria Office
| in the British Embassy in Beirut when he submitted his
| adjustment of status application. It is black-letter law that
| misrepresentations in this context are not protected speech,"
| the government said in the filing.
|
| Most of these things are not black/white. We should wait for
| all the facts to come out.
| tehjoker wrote:
| These are not terrorist orgs at all wtf are you talking
| about
| immibis wrote:
| The USA and Germany have ruled that UNRWA is a branch of
| Hamas and therefore illegal.
|
| Coincidentally, they seem to rule this about anyone who
| brings food or water to the Palestinians.
|
| The "Do you condemn Hamas?" folks have won.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > Do you condemn Hamas
|
| What's the alternative? Regardless of what Israel did or
| did not do Hamas could have ended this "war" at any
| moment they wanted to. None of their actions were in any
| way remotely in the interest of the people of Gaza.
| Providing them [Hamas] material or other support only
| prolonged it..
| tehjoker wrote:
| The alternative is obvious: a single democratic state and
| the end of ethnosupremacy.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > We should wait for all the facts to come out.
|
| Like indefinitely? Trump's administration is ignoring the
| courts and there is no real oversight. Also whatever facts
| come out they will be drowned by all the other insane
| idiocy that the US government is doing so nobody will pay
| attention anyway..
|
| When they start sending US citizens to El Salvador nobody
| is going to care about some guy whose green card got
| revoked.
| kurthr wrote:
| Exactly, it's the "they're the same anyway", "both sides"
| equivalency that allows the buildup of antidemocratic de-
| politicization and apathy. This is one of the goals of the
| _there_is_no_truth_ radicalization that is fundamental to
| Russian political control
| raverbashing wrote:
| This exactly right here ^
|
| But discussions on the internet seems to be with lots of
| people who have only a shallow understanding of the
| balances involved and low historical context
| Retric wrote:
| Ehh, I've got not particular stake in this conflict so it's
| really interesting to see how each side is using propaganda
| and how obvious the propaganda is when you're not
| emotionally invested.
|
| Each side is using different tactics to fit the strength of
| their positions and how well various messages resonate.
| "They are the same anyway" is useful for a side who wants
| people to be inactive, it's not some universal benefit to
| both parties. Instead each side wants different people to
| be engaged vs apathetic, which hardly unusual.
| baq wrote:
| Both sides want their side engaged and the other
| apathetic. On a national level this means FSB employing
| hundreds if not thousands of people to troll political
| discourse in social media in the west to maximize the
| amount of 'I don't care anymore' people. A very
| asymmetric setup exposing the underbelly of free speech
| cultures.
| logicchains wrote:
| >A very asymmetric setup exposing the underbelly of free
| speech cultures
|
| As opposed to non-free-speech cultures like Russia and
| China where people have absolutely no say in whatever
| their leaders do? Because that's inevitably what happens
| when you give people in power the power to restrict
| speech: they restrict any speech critical of them. We're
| even seeing this in developed democracies like Germany
| where a journalist was recently fined for posting a meme
| online of a politician holding a sign saying "I hate free
| speech".
| baq wrote:
| Whataboutism does not change anything about it being a
| weak spot. I'm only saying the free speech west can't use
| the same tactic against these kind of adversaries because
| they're insulated against them.
| Retric wrote:
| Free speech including paid speech isn't really a knock on
| free speech.
|
| Someone can be persuaded by an argument they heard once,
| but can't per persuaded by an argument they never hear.
| Thus blocking speech by preventing any kind of speech
| including paid speech is problematic.
| baq wrote:
| I'm saying 'free speech is an obvious weakness', not 'we
| should disallow free speech'. Very different things.
| Retric wrote:
| Having outside actors in the conversation is a strength.
| netrus wrote:
| It's important to be precise because everything is not
| the same. In the German case the ruling was not because
| someone posted a critical meme, but because it was not
| entirely obvious the picture was edited (as in: you and I
| can immediately see the photo was edited, but some people
| will not recognize the edit). I do not agree with the
| ruling, but as a citizen I am happy that in Germany we
| still care if claims are true or not (and try to prevent
| people from lying).
| Whoppertime wrote:
| Isn't that just relying on the stupidity of someone who
| may not exist? Like every single year people make the
| same dumb joke "Republicans vote on Tuesday and Democrats
| vote on Wednesday" leading to prosecution for
| misinformation when they cannot prove anyone actually
| tried voting on the wrong day because of the meme
| Retric wrote:
| Once you start talking millions of people someone will
| make that or any other mistake.
|
| The US has a higher threshold, but it's clear those
| standards mean many people are duped by "obvious" lies.
| It's kind of an arbitrary line, but ignoring the dumb
| feels like a mistake to me when dumb people are active in
| society, still vote, etc.
| immibis wrote:
| Does this happiness that some people care whether claims
| are true or not overrule the arrest and deportation of
| peaceful protestors, and people in general based on
| social media posts, or do you also feel happy about that?
| mlindner wrote:
| > Although not even close in number and punishment the US
| government is deporting people for speaking against Israel.
|
| You and I both know that isn't true and repeating that
| doesn't help anyone but further implant in people's minds
| that the other side is completely irrational and cannot be
| reasoned with.
|
| No, the US government is deporting people for supporting
| terrorist organizations, something that's always been a
| disqualifying position in US immigration law. You'll get your
| visa denied, or even your entry denied for holding such
| positions, let alone maintaining an active student visa or
| permanent resident visa. That has always been the case and
| simply enforcing laws already on the books does not change
| that.
|
| > What makes this possible to either the level of Russia or
| the US is how much the supporters of the regime want it. This
| is regardless of morality, legality, or the precedent it
| sets.
|
| Equating Russia and the US is an extreme take.
| kamlaserbeam wrote:
| Opposing the support for another foreign nation's genocide
| is not a support of terrorism? I mean you can look up
| Khalil's involvement in the Columbia encampments. He was a
| spokes person and negotiator to end Columbia's investment
| in Israel's apartheid regime. He did not give Hamas or any
| militant organization any type of material aid. The
| administration has already admitted yesterday in a memo
| after/during his immigration hearing that he has not acted
| unlawfully. In short they don't have anything on him,
| because you can't be arrested and deported for thinking
| something or having an opinion and sharing that opinion.
| karpatic wrote:
| A judge gave the green light on deportationn just
| yesterday.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Immigration judges are "administrative judges" and work
| for the executive (i.e. Trump), not an independent
| branch.
|
| It'll be appealed to a Federal court now.
| karpatic wrote:
| Mhmm! Thanks for adding context.
| immibis wrote:
| > Opposing the support for another foreign nation's
| genocide is not a support of terrorism?
|
| It is in Germany and also in the USA. It doesn't matter
| whether you agree with the government on this point or
| not, because the government are the ones with the legal
| right to lock you up.
| bjourne wrote:
| > No, the US government is deporting people for supporting
| terrorist organizations,
|
| Has it deported anyone voicing support for the Israeli
| Defense Forces or any of the other Jewish supremacist
| terrorist organizations currently terrorizing Palestinians?
| Regardless, your claim that Khalil would have offered
| material support or even voiced support for a terrorist
| organization is baseless. Not that it matters either
| because saying "I love Hamas" is free speech and covered
| under the First Amendment.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > Equating Russia and the US is an extreme take.
|
| Perhaps currently. How long do you think we should wait
| until we can start doing that? At the current pace probably
| a year or two?
|
| I mean.. Putin wasn't that bad in the early 2000s, nazis or
| fascists weren't that awful in the 20s or 30s either (in
| relative terms compared to everyone else at the time)
| either. Waiting until its too late do change anything is
| maybe not the smartest thing, though..
| charlescearl wrote:
| The united states has the world's largest incarcerated
| population. It currently dwarfs the number incarcerated by
| the Soviet Union during the 1930s. The USA has the fifth
| highest incarceration rate on the planet. In the Southeast
| United States, the incarceration rate of the Black population
| is 7% (as a point of comparison 2x the incarceration rate of
| minoritized Uyghur population of China per the World Uyghur
| Congress figures)
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> It currently dwarfs the number incarcerated by the
| Soviet Union during the 1930s._
|
| Not really. Estimates for the number of people in labor
| camps, labor colonies and prisons are all over the place,
| but based on their own fragmented records reached about 2
| million by the end of 1938. That doesn't count
| pretrial/administrative detentions or the hundreds of
| thousands that were simply executed that year or all the
| people exiled to inhospitable settlements. And of course,
| the mortality rate in their penal system was _extremely_
| high.
|
| _> In the Southeast United States, incarceration rate of
| the Black population is 7%_
|
| Nowhere in the US is there anywhere close to incarcerating
| 7% of the black population.
|
| That said, the US incarceration rate is ridiculously high
| and we should be ashamed of it.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > It currently dwarfs the number incarcerated by the Soviet
| Union during the 1930s
|
| That was certainly false if you look at the late 40s (not
| by much, only 2x or so though..)
|
| However if you actually think (since you post nonsensical
| "statistics" that's unlikely) about it the mortality rates
| in soviet concentration camps were massive, especially in
| the 1930s or during the war which significantly decreased
| the incarceration rate.
|
| Can't have a huge prison population if you just murder or
| starve everyone to death..
| mmooss wrote:
| This post is oddly nonsensical ...
|
| > mainstream media, like facebook
|
| Facebook is in the 'mainstream media'? That's a first in my
| experience. 'Mainstream media' usually describes established
| journalism organizations such as CNN, Fox, the NY Times, the
| WSJ. Facebook is universally grouped with 'social media' in my
| experience.
|
| > Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream
| media
|
| In fact, most people go on social media. The 'mainstream media'
| is losing audience rapidly.
|
| > you end up with most media complying with the official story
| pushed by government and friends
|
| I'm a bit confused here. Facebook complying with ... which
| government? The Israeli government has very little power over
| Facebook - Israel is a tiny market.
|
| Meanwhile, Trump has been calling the 'mainstream media', the
| 'enemy of the people' - because they constantly report what he
| doesn't like.
|
| Since the November election, many have shockingly capitulated
| but many remain. The NYT, for example, publishes negative news
| and criticisms of Trump and Israel daily.
|
| > The more i think about it, the less difference i see.
|
| You haven't established much of anything. Much of the comment
| doesn't make sense. Where is the Russian NYT? Which American
| journalists are in jail?
| kombine wrote:
| > Another difference would be that you are allowed to express
| your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail,
| that's true but only in a very limited way.
|
| This is more subtle. I have a lot to say about Israel, and I do
| post occasionally on Facebook, but I tone it down a lot because
| I have a few high profile people in the industry and academia
| among my Facebook friends (not actual friends). If I were to
| post what I really think, this would have serious career
| repercussions for me. People would brand me as an antisemite
| (they don't know that my grandfather is Jewish and he
| practically raised me).
|
| Can you compare this to Russia? Well, I am Russian and I live
| in the West, so my choice of living here gives an answer to
| this question. I'd be in jail in Russia if they read my
| Facebook posts about the war in Ukraine. Yet, I'm now
| disillusioned about the Western liberalism, all thanks to Gaza
| war.
| hello_computer wrote:
| The college deportations are the government, but I would guess
| that the Meta compliance has more to do with the fact that
| Cheryl Sandberg is a politically-connected turbo-Zionist.
|
| I wish we were neutral on this issue. As an American, it is not
| my business. I am in no position to justly arbitrate between
| them. But our politicians are whores, our Zionists have deep
| pockets, and they're not afraid to empty them out for the
| cause, so it looks like America's taxpayers are all on Team
| Zionist, whether we like it or not.
| earnestinger wrote:
| Technically, they are the same. As in: people with power want
| to control the narrative.
|
| This was so, is so and will always be so, everywhere.
|
| But but but... details matter. A lot.
|
| The west has traditions how and when to apply power, which is
| distinctly different from Russia.
|
| I hand-pick two illustrations of Russia:
|
| 1. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/09/27/moscow-police-
| accu...
|
| > Officers "beat up Kamardin very badly and stuck a dumbbell in
| his anus," according to Novaya Gazeta Europe.
|
| 2. Bald man claim to power was accompanies with mysterious
| explosions of apartment buildings after which Chechens were
| declared enemies and war started.
|
| Some interesting bits from wikipedia:
|
| > Three Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agents who had
| planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local
| police.[6] The next day, FSB director Nikolai Patrushev
| announced that the incident in Ryazan had been an anti-terror
| drill and the device found there contained only sugar, and
| freed the FSB agents involved.[7]
|
| And
|
| > 13 September 1999: Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov
| makes an announcement about the bombing of an apartment
| building in the city of Volgodonsk that only takes place three
| days later
|
| > 16 September 1999: Bombing in Volgodonsk, 17 are killed, 69
| injured
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Russian_apartment_bombi...
| AlexGrothen wrote:
| >hand-picked
|
| cherry-picked, actually
|
| 1. Almost exactly the same incident happened in the USA, NYPD
| sodomized Michael Mineo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pros
| pect_Park_alleged_police...
|
| None of the NYPD officers didn't have any sentence for this
|
| 2. That's an old conspiracy theory, even the Russian
| opposition (at least the reasonable part of it) doesn't
| support this theory. There are plenty of publications about
| it in Russian, and if you will do some effort you will find
| why
| earnestinger wrote:
| > Russian opposition
|
| Do you mean the guy who died relatively recently in Russian
| prison? Or his colleague who was part of prisoner exchange
| int_19h wrote:
| Most of Russian opposition does support this theory. Many
| people do, in general. It's hard to call it a conspiracy
| theory when they literally caught a couple of FSB guys
| loading bags of explosives into an apartment building. The
| official version is that this was a "security training",
| but c'mon.
| somethingreen wrote:
| Corruption of power is an inherent property of power. It is
| expected that people in power will get corrupted. The methods
| of power grabs are also fairly universal.
|
| The difference between a corrupt shithole and free world is not
| in what the government tries to do, but in how the governed
| respond.
| NoOn3 wrote:
| It is not so bad in Russia. Not so many sites are blocked. You
| can easily read foreign news if you want to. Hacker news is not
| blocked for example :).
| AlexGrothen wrote:
| Well, there is a difference with Russia, actually. One of
| Palestinian professors, who studied freedom of speech, shaped
| it this way: The difference is that people from Russia, Arab
| countries etc DO know that their media is lying - but also they
| know the Western media is lying, because they read all that
| nonsense the westerners write about their countries.
|
| Good for you that you started to realize how corrupt the
| Western media is.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > The more i think about it, the less difference i see.
|
| You might consider trying not to view the world entirely in
| black and white then.
|
| This sort of sentiment is not particularly productive
| especially in times like this..
| janalsncm wrote:
| So when the government pointed to the disproportionate support
| for Palestine on TikTok vs Instagram, it was actually because
| Instagram was suppressing it. It is ironic.
|
| https://x.com/hawleymo/status/1717505662601609401
| nashashmi wrote:
| Another reason why TikTok has to come under US ownership. How
| else are we going to censor things when they are under China's
| (lack of) control?
| square_usual wrote:
| And conversely, another reason why Trump's tariffs on China
| are a bone-headed move. They are not going to sell TikTok
| while the tariffs last, and the popular demand for it makes
| banning it a non-starter.
| bradly wrote:
| Exactly. China demands Apple Maps be ran on Chinese servers
| by Chinese workers. I would expect current U.S.
| administration to be frustrated with these imbalances as
| surveillance state measures increase. These imbalances were
| less important when there was less interest in information
| and truth suppression.
| bradlys wrote:
| At least for all the surveillance the Chinese do - the
| standard of life is improving overall. We don't even get
| that shit here in the US. Our life just gets worse by
| practically every measure as the years go on and we're
| taken advantage of on top of it.
| cj wrote:
| What benchmark are you using for standard of life?
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Number of citizens reeducated, I presume.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| More organs harvested from political prisoners.
| bradlys wrote:
| Ah yes, the US known for putting people in prisons where
| we use techniques the Nazis developed as part of our
| "enhanced interrogation".
|
| USA is totally way better than China here!
| econ wrote:
| Comparing apples to oranges works surprisingly well if
| they are rotten enough?
|
| 50th vs 70th
|
| https://index.goodcountry.org/
|
| Both the US and China score surprisingly bad on
| everything listed here.
|
| I do prefer the way janalsncm described quality of life.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43659542
|
| Is there an index for those some place?
| bradlys wrote:
| At the very least, wages for the average citizen. It's
| not perfect but at least there's movement towards
| building something. What is the US building towards?
| Enriching billionaires?
| tempodox wrote:
| "AI" avatars. Totally gonna make the world a better
| place.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43626707
| janalsncm wrote:
| There's probably not one single benchmark (and I won't
| say that all of them are negative in the US) but we can
| just think generally about the things we'd like in a good
| life:
|
| Life expectancy. Chronic disease rates. Suicide rates.
| Depression rates. Violent crime rates. Marriage rates.
| Home ownership rates. Education rates. Debt rates. Labor
| participation rates. Wealth inequity.
|
| No one metric is a complete picture but together they
| tell a story. If America was a product and the above was
| on a dashboard, you would fire the CEO.
| fma wrote:
| Anyone who has visited China 25 years ago, and visited
| today, wouldn't argue that quality of life has not
| improved as a whole.
|
| As for America, it is very debatable.
|
| FWIW, the dashboard idea...was on the 2020 Presidential
| Candidate. Andrew Yang's platform.
| corimaith wrote:
| 70% of these metrics are solved in China (or most places
| in Asia) through methods that most people in this thread
| would be vehemently against. You can put the mentally-ill
| back into sanatoriums, enforce quick and draconian
| response to petty crime, and pay an economic underclass a
| pittance to clean your streets if you wish.
|
| Unfortunately for Americans, it's not the CEO at fault
| here actually, it's the middle class and left-
| leaning/progressive that are directly responsible for
| many of the problems here. The funny thing is that
| Republican Party being in complete power with Trump would
| be more similar to the CCP than the Democrats or
| Progressives. Suppressing dissenting voices like Pro-
| Palestine in order to force national homogenity is a big
| part of that.
|
| And I say this as someone who supported Biden and Kamala,
| but these left-wingers or libertarians who are so
| vehemtly opposed to the US Gov but then simp for China
| are just being childishly incoherent.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > enforce quick and draconian response to petty crime
|
| In the Bay Area the median response to petty crime is
| zero consequences for the criminal. This is because in
| practice criminals are not caught or punished.
|
| If the cost of having laws enforced is that we need
| better surveillance (read: more security cameras) then
| guess what? We are already heavily surveilled.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Homeless population
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| Years of salary to purchase home. Life expectancy.
| Obesity rates. Overall life satisfaction surveys.
| Loneliness rates. Suicide rate.
|
| I could go on.
| bognition wrote:
| Where do you think the servers that power TikTok in the
| United States are? Who do you think administers those
| servers?
| bradly wrote:
| I have no idea. I worked on the team at Apple that
| deployed Apple Maps across the globe and China was very
| different than other countries. South Korea had some
| interesting requirements as well. I've not worked on that
| team at TikTok and wouldn't expect the knowledge of the
| exact requirements to be shared publicly.
| RedComet wrote:
| Yes. This was clearly the reason for the ban in the first
| place.
| nikkwong wrote:
| While this may be part of the story, it's certainly not the
| full picture. We know that the CCP is actively manipulating the
| algorithm on Tiktok to further their agenda on multiple other
| geopolitical issues--something we have ample evidence for. I
| don't know if there is a smoking gun on this one topic in
| particular, but the CCP's goal has always been to divide the
| American audience; and we know that older Americans skew pro-
| Israel whilst younger Americans are more oriented towards being
| pro-Palestinian. If someone looked in the right places, they
| would more likely than not find evidence of algorithm
| manipulation to favor a Palestinian bend.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > something we have ample evidence for
|
| Can you share some of that evidence? My impression from the
| SCOTUS case is that the government only alleged it could
| happen, not that it was happening. So I'm a bit surprised to
| see someone so confidently assert it is happening.
|
| > more likely than not find evidence of algorithm
| manipulation
|
| I think a lot of people have been looking. For years. Yet you
| admit there is no smoking gun. Perhaps if we look in the
| right place we will find Russell's teapot orbiting Jupiter as
| well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I'd like to see that evidence too, hopefully for more than
| one instance/source.
|
| IMO, it's been obvious that the danger seen in TikTok is
| that it's a propaganda tool out of USA's control. If it was
| really a national security danger, USA could simply ban it
| instead of fighting so hard to own it.
| nikkwong wrote:
| You don't have to look that hard--there have been several
| independent groups who have noted different ways in which
| the algorithm is skewed pro-CCP:
|
| https://networkcontagion.us/wp-content/uploads/NCRI-
| Report_-...
|
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/social-
| psychology/artic...
| throw310822 wrote:
| So, we have proof of a strong algorithm manipulation _by
| Israel_ on the entire family of main US social media (those
| used by the older segment of the population); and yet you
| still manage to point your finger to a hypothetical, unproved
| manipulation of the algorithm on the competitors ' social
| media to explain the difference in attitude between
| generations? But you have the answer here, there has been
| manipulation of the social media consumed by the older
| segment!
| liorsbg wrote:
| Where's the proof? Facebook agreeing to take down some
| contents that violates its policies is hardly proof of
| anything.
| bjourne wrote:
| The proof is supplied by the article: "Multiple
| independent sources inside Meta confirmed the
| authenticity of the information provided by the
| whistleblowers. The data also show that Meta removed over
| 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs submitted by the Israeli
| government in an average of 30 seconds." 90k take-down
| requests in 18 months is quite a lot.
| nashashmi wrote:
| We find in mainstream media a pro Israel bend. We also find
| the same in US companies. Manipulation? Yes
| mmooss wrote:
| Who is we?
| nashashmi wrote:
| Americans
| lossolo wrote:
| > something we have ample evidence for.
|
| Please show this "ample evidence" because it seems you (or
| "we" - whoever that is) have something the rest of the world
| doesn't.
| toofy wrote:
| it wouldn't surprise me at all if it were being manipulated,
| but we know for absolute certain facebooks sites and twitter
| are manipulated.
|
| we should be looking to stop all manipulation, whether from a
| state or billionaires. this kind of manipulation is awful no
| matter what the source is.
|
| i have a hard time understanding why so many are terrified of
| tiktok yet turn around and seem eager to suck from twitter or
| facebook's firehose.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Most americans support Israel in this conflict. Maybe the
| samples are just biased?
| mjevans wrote:
| I think my country (USA) would be healthier if a common sense
| viewpoint was selected and held.
|
| Conflicts are always terrible, and the Eurasia / Africa region
| countries are particularly brutal.
|
| Every citizen of every country has a human right (in a civilized
| civilization / society) to live a life that does not involve
| violence. A life where they are not worried about RPGs, bombings,
| (etc,) or military invasions.
|
| Some sources of conflict involve places which various (different)
| religions hold as sacred / holy. Those sites should become UN
| world heritage locations and be managed by the UN in ways that
| only allow non-military peaceful access for any who want to
| visit.
|
| With respect to Gaza my personal opinion remains unchanged. Both
| an innocent civilian people who suffer, and a terrorist
| government, remain in that region. The civilians should be
| evacuated. The terrorists who remain after (or whom are caught
| and found guilty in a trial) should be purged. The country should
| then be cleaned up, rebuilt, and returned to the innocent people
| along with a training-wheels UN supported government that brings
| stability, peace, and prevents a resurgence of hate and
| terrorism. In a few generations the country can grow more stable
| and graduate from the guided government structure.
|
| That would be not just a two state solution, but a two states and
| global peace sites solution.
| devilbunny wrote:
| I just don't see a way that a two-state solution works. A
| _three_ -state solution might be feasible (Gaza and West Bank
| governed separately), but then you have to deal with internal
| Israeli politics, and I really don't know enough about them to
| make even an educated guess about how hard it would be to get
| that through (I would imagine very, but like I said, I know
| very little about their politics).
| thot_experiment wrote:
| this is grossly misunderstanding the situation in Gaza, a two
| state solution was never acceptable to Israel, Hamas as it
| exists today is a result of Netanyahu policy. Israel created
| the monster to justify their genocide.
| mjevans wrote:
| That might be the case, but that man cannot live forever. I
| am thinking long term, but am also just a civilian in the US.
| If there is good reason to have another policy I would like
| the experts to articulate that logic to us.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| > a two state solution was never acceptable to Israel
|
| Wrong, they accepted the 1947 partition plan and agreed to
| the Oslo accords
| cbzbc wrote:
| The Oslo accords were intended - in the words of Rabin - to
| give the Palestinians 'less than a state', and arguably the
| division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C have
| allowed for the expansion of settlements in the latter.
|
| Whether the 1947 partition was accepted as a final state
| depends on who you ask, it's fairly clear that prominent
| figures viewed it as a stop along the way to a more
| comprehensive settlement. Take Ben Gurion ("After the
| formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment
| of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the
| whole of Palestine.") or Chaim Weizmann ("partition might
| be only a temporary arrangement for the next twenty to
| twenty-five years"). Menachem Begin's Herut continued to
| use the slogan 'Both banks of the Jordan River", and this
| language is reflected in Likud's founding charter.
| sfx77 wrote:
| Not just 1947, Jews have been been in the area continuously
| and have bought land many times. 27 million dunams, which
| is equivalent to about 7-8 million acres if I'm not wrong,
| but were attacked since Jews are somehow an exception for
| owning land. During the same time period Israel was
| created, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and I believe 2-3 other Arab
| Muslim countries were created, yet those countries were not
| attacked.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Except Hamas took over Gaza in 2006/7 more or less in it's
| current form, before Netanyahu came back into power at 2009.
|
| Hamas has always been an extreme organization, they executed
| a bunch of Fatah members by throwing them off buildings when
| they took over gaza, not exactly a fun loving bunch.
|
| Sure Netanyahu didn't exactly help to see the least, but
| saying he is somehow solely responsible for Hamas is pretty
| biased.
| tdeck wrote:
| > executed a bunch of Fatah members by throwing them off
| buildings when they took over gaza
|
| Was this before or after Fatah lost an election and then
| refused to step down, instead staging a violent coup?
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| Are you actually trying to defend the execution of
| prisoners?
|
| And that's putting aside whether what you said is right
| or wrong (which I'm sure you'll get very different
| answers from each side)
| basisword wrote:
| >> Hamas has always been an extreme organization, they
| executed a bunch of Fatah members by throwing them off
| buildings when they took over Gaza, not exactly a fun
| loving bunch.
|
| Agreed. And Israel have annihilated over 50,000 Gazans. Not
| exactly a fun loving bunch.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| I didn't say I agree with what Israel is doing so I'm not
| sure what the point of your comment is.
|
| The truth is that there are zealots on both sides.
| sfx77 wrote:
| saying he is somehow solely responsible for Hamas is more
| than bias it's propaganda and lies. On the one hand people
| will defend Hamas and claim Israel is the aggressor and in
| the same sentence damn them while still blaming Israel.
| What kind of s#$% is that?
| Adverblessly wrote:
| > a two state solution was never acceptable to Israel
|
| Most recently in 2008, Israel made exactly such an offer and
| was rejected.
|
| "Abbas has since confirmed that he turned down an Israeli
| offer for a Palestinian state on nearly 95% of the West Bank.
| In September 2008, Olmert had presented him with a map that
| delineated the borders of the proposed PA state, for which
| Israel would annex 6.3 percent of the West Bank and
| compensate the Palestinians with 5.8 percent (taken from
| pre-1967 Israel), which Abbas stated he rejected out of hand,
| insisting instead to demarcate the 4 June 1967 borders of
| Palestine. He said that Olmert did not give a map of the
| proposal and that he could not sign without seeing the
| proposal. Abbas also said that he was not an expert on maps
| and pointed to Olmert's corruption investigation (he was
| later convicted).[68][69] Abbas said in October 2011 that he
| made a counteroffer to let Israel annex 1.9% of the West
| Bank."
|
| Sadly, English wikipedia has a lot less information on this
| than the Hebrew wikipedia, but maybe turn your translation
| software to this: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%99%
| D7%97%D7%95%D7%AA...
| mef51 wrote:
| "The civilians should be evacuated." They don't want to leave
| and Israel uses these "evacuations" to make sure Palestinians
| never return, as they did in 1948, 1967, etc[1][2]. This is
| whitewashing genocide and is an extremely violent view,
| packaged in reasonable sounding words. Israel has a long
| documented history of using terrorism to build its state. If
| you truly oppose terrorism I recommend starting with the books
| I've sourced.
|
| [1] The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
|
| [2] The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler
| Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Kahlidi
| mjevans wrote:
| It should be the UN, and with the express intent outlined in
| my post above. To return them back to their country once the
| criminals have been removed.
| xp84 wrote:
| The criminals would all line up with the civilians if it
| came to that, and they'd also still raise all their
| children to become the next generation of terrorists.
| brewtide wrote:
| Assuming any children survive, how many do you think want
| to have a tea party with Israel these days?
| yoda97 wrote:
| A two state solution is never possible when one state keeps
| expanding with impunity, and every time the second state
| resists it is called a terrorist state. My country resisted
| colonization in the mid 20th century and the resistance efforts
| were called terrorism by everyone, nobody calls them terrorists
| now.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| What country are you from? It is entirely possible they are
| still terrorists you just decided as society to ignore it.
| yoda97 wrote:
| The ICC has never issued any arrest warrants for our
| elected/appointed government officials if that's what you
| are asking.
| sfx77 wrote:
| They've also not targeted your country either like they
| did Israel. Even Hungary has recognized their strange
| obsession with Israel recently. The ICC is part of the
| U.N. and have passed more resolutions against Israel,
| then the rest of the world combined. It's pure insanity.
| Especially when comparing a democracy in the Middle East,
| a place where every other country is either
| authoritarian, totalitarian, run by terrorists, or
| dictators. Bashar-Al-Assad has killed over 700,000
| people, yet somehow Israel is worse. It's pure insanity.
| YZF wrote:
| Israel has not expanded. It has shrunk. It returned Sinai to
| Egypt. It returned Gaza to the Palestinians. It gave control
| of west bank cities to the Palestinian Authority after
| allowing it's bitter enemy leadership (the PLO and Arafat) to
| return to the West Bank.
|
| I'm reading Ireland between the lines. There is _zero_
| similarity.
|
| A two state solution is not possible because most
| Palestinians do not want that solution. They want Israel
| erased and Jews "erased" from the middle east. Offers were
| already on the table and refused and the Oslo peace process
| was killed by Hamas violence.
| sfx77 wrote:
| Correction a two state solution is never possible when your
| neighbors are a terrorist organization backed by Iran, who
| coordinates with other terrorist organization who are also
| funded by Iran. This word play of calling Israel will not
| work. Unfortunately not everything is relative and words have
| actual meanings. When an organizations policy is to kidnap,
| torture, rape, and murder civilians with impunity, that is a
| terror organization, unlike the defense force of a democracy.
| tmnvix wrote:
| And I assume after this evacuation, purging, and installment of
| a new government Israel will magically change its ways? You
| need to address both sides to find a solution.
| MPSFounder wrote:
| Realistically, how can we uncover this type of foreign
| interference? As in, is there any hack someone in our community
| can perform to expose Israeli propaganda? Israel locked
| journalists out of Ghaza, and has pretty much dominion over
| social media in the US. How can someone remain informed or expose
| misinformation campaigns (ideally without repercussions, which is
| a dangerous control they have over our gov)?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Meta could start by being transparent when they are asked to
| take down a post and could be transparent when they comply.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| They have released this data for at least ten years at this
| point. That's one of the sources the Human Rights group used.
| elihu wrote:
| One defense against it might just be to actively crawl Facebook
| and externally record the contents of posts as soon as they're
| posted. Then you have a record of everything that got deleted.
|
| I don't know how you scale that up to make it easy for everyone
| to find "disappeared" content on any platform. Maybe some kind
| of peer-to-peer system where everyone's browser cache basically
| acts as a searchable archive, with a browser plugin that
| inserts a button into web pages to show disappeared content.
|
| (It's also worth noting that probably a lot of content that was
| removed by moderators was removed for a legitimate reason. So,
| ideally you'd have some sort of crowd moderation to get rid of
| the stuff that really is spam or hate speech or whatever.)
| ajb wrote:
| This sort of thing has happened before in the US:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b...
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Why is the word Israeli removed from the title? and Meta added?
| Seems like quite a politically-important modification
| dang wrote:
| Edit: ok you guys, all your responses have convinced me that I
| misread the room, and I'm going to reverse the title edit now.
|
| -- original reply: --
|
| I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait
| effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation
| practice (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have
| by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a
| big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.
| mef51 wrote:
| I think in this instance the perpetrator is central to the
| story/article
| zzzeek wrote:
| speaking as someone who gets a lot of their posts flagged
| (to the annoyance of dang), a less-inflammatory headline
| can be less satisfying but a post that isn't flagged will
| get a lot more traffic than one that is flagged
| alistairSH wrote:
| The entire endeavor was orchestrated by Israel - that's kinda
| the point here. Meta didn't act on its own, as the edited
| title would imply.
| dang wrote:
| I know, but for HN purposes, the point I made about titles
| is the higher-order bit.
|
| Threads like this, at best, waver on the edge of a hell
| pit. If it plummets in, the discussion won't stay on HN's
| front page anyhow. Title de-baiting is a way to support
| having a discussion that doesn't completely suck, to the
| extent that this is doable.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Thank you for your efforts to preserve the qualities of
| one of the few bastions of organic discussion on the
| Internet.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its meta's website. Its entirely in their control as to how
| they respond to a takedown request.
| instagib wrote:
| At this point, is it feasible to implement user-submitted or
| generated tags for submissions that can subsequently be
| concealed?
|
| Our focus is shifting towards the news aspect rather than the
| hacking aspect, which is the primary reason for my presence
| here.
| dang wrote:
| There are fluctuations, such as a swing towards current
| affairs stories during turbulent times, but the basic mix
| has been stable for years and the baseline isn't likely to
| change. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869
| for how far back this question goes...
|
| Not that it helps, necessarily, but the people who have the
| opposite preference to yours are complaining loudly about
| how much they feel the current affairs stories are being
| suppressed on HN.
|
| Re tags: I've always resisted the idea of adding it to the
| core HN site, but I do think we can do more to support
| alternate front-ends to HN. With any luck, we can publish
| the next version of the API this year, which should make
| that a lot easier.
| instagib wrote:
| Least favorite anecdote: Reddit. After an introduction, a
| friend said, "Why are you on the front page like a new
| person?" I am auto-subscribed to the front page content
| channels when I want to be in my subscriptions. However,
| I miss relevant content because others overwhelm the
| front pages.
|
| I appreciate your response and the work you continue on
| the front ends. I obtain political news content from
| other sources, so my cumulative content feed contains a
| significant amount of duplicate content.
| square_usual wrote:
| FWIW I support this. It's more relevant to HN to talk about
| Meta, the big tech company, doing something wrong than a
| nation, regardless of where you stand on this issue.
| halayli wrote:
| I totally understand the contention around this topic but
| you're altering the keypoint of what the article is about.
| Why remove one country name and keep the other? The article
| is not about Meta, but how their platform is being
| manipulated by one country against the other. Your edit shows
| a strong evidence you're not taking a partisan position and
| have a preference. I am not sure you should be editing
| contenious posts when you don't hold a partisan position.
| Your edit is in the same realm as what the post is talking
| about. I understand moderation is tricky, but this goes way
| beyond moderation.
| dang wrote:
| > this goes way beyond moderation
|
| I'm sorry, but that's not true--quite the opposite.
|
| If you guys had any idea how next-to-impossible it is to
| host substantive discussions about a topic like this, you
| should recognize that you're getting what you want
| (frontpage attention for this story) instead of complaining
| about a secondary detail (the title edit).
|
| A title edit like that is not making a statement about the
| underlying story, and certainly not trying to suppress any
| aspect of it. The article is one click away for people to
| read and make up their own minds about. This thread is
| filled with comments about the detail that I took out of
| the title; no one is missing it.
|
| Rather, what I did was bog standard HN moderation, the sort
| of thing we've done thousands of times on hundreds of
| topics over 15+ years, purely for the purpose of supporting
| a substantive discussion of the article that you (I don't
| mean you personally, but the set of commenters who have
| been complaining about this) want to be discussed in the
| first place. From my point of view, that amounts to
| demanding 100% instead of saying yes to the 90% that you're
| getting in this case. That's not a realistic assessment of
| the tradeoffs with a thread like this.
|
| Edit: I'm sorry if that sounded tetchy--I certainly
| understand the feeling you're expressing and why it feels
| that way.
| halayli wrote:
| I'll try to explain myself better. What triggered my
| response was that the edit is not different from NYT/CNN
| publishing an article titled '20 people died when a
| building collapsed on their head' instead of '<entity>
| launched a missile on a civilian building'. What's the
| criteria we are using here to keep or remove '<entity>'?
| The article involves 3 entities and dropping anyone of
| them changes the narattive.
|
| I have been hanging out on HN since 2009 and I truely
| appreciate your dedication to keep this site civil and it
| definitely is one of the very few that did not degenerate
| over time. That's the main reason why HN is in my
| bookmark bar. I appologize if my comment triggered you,
| and I totally understand where you are coming from as
| well. If it was my decision, I would keep politics out of
| HN as I never saw anything fruitful come out of these
| posts and stresses out moderators as they have to police
| the thread and find themselves in the way of fire.
| ncr100 wrote:
| The current title (11:36 AM PST) is:
|
| "Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-
| Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram"
|
| @dang IDK if this matters, nor when the title was changed (from
| submission, to now). Just an FYI.
| dang wrote:
| Btw there's a lot more information about the moderation on
| this post here, if you or anyone want to read about that:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657264.
| dpifke wrote:
| It's unfortunate that turning off flags for a story
| empowers the people who want to use this site for
| ideological battle. "dang made an exception once for <my
| pet topic>, so the guidelines forever more don't apply to
| it!" There were several variants of this sentiment
| expressed on the tomhow welcome thread.
| dang wrote:
| I'm not following the argument here, but turning off the
| flags on a given story doesn't turn HN into a free-for-
| all on a topic (on the contrary, we don't want too much
| repetition of _any_ topic), and certainly the guidelines
| continue to apply as much as anymore. More, in fact ( "
| _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive._ " -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
| switch007 wrote:
| Because you can't imply Israel is a bad actor. It's
| politically-censored in the US, including self-censorship.
| dang wrote:
| We can't control which words people are super-reactive to in
| titles; we can only empirically observe what they are and try
| to dampen the effect, with the hope of making a thoughtful
| discussion at least a little more likely.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| I this case you have completely changed the meaning of the
| title though. It sounds Like Meta did this of their own
| initiative which is a very different message.
| dang wrote:
| I don't read it that way, FWIW.
|
| I think some of you are overly focusing on the title
| instead of the overall effect of the moderator
| interventions here, which is that the article gets more
| attention and the story more coverage. In that sense, I'd
| think it would be in you guys' interest to take yes for
| an answer, much as zzzeek has here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657317.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I am not sure that linking to one post that agrees with
| your decision to provide your own title for the article
| (in contradiction to one of HN's core rules no less) in
| order to intentionally steer discussion _away from the
| subject of the article_ is that compelling of a way to
| convince people that your editorial decision here was
| correct. It certainly does nothing to address a valid
| concern about the precedent that this sets.
|
| Rather than taking on the task of manually editing
| headlines to be more sympathetic to Israel perhaps the
| site could implement a filter that disallows the word
| from being used in titles or posts altogether? If that is
| the aim, it would save you time having to answer
| questions about it.
| dang wrote:
| > in contradiction to one of HN's core rules no less
|
| There's no contradiction. The rule is " _Please use the
| original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait._ "
|
| Nor is there any attempt to steer discussion away from
| the subject of the article. That would have been a
| hapless attempt, had it existed, since the thread is
| filled with such discussion.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Nor is there any attempt to steer discussion away from
| the subject of the article.
|
| > I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the
| flamebait effect of the title
|
| Your goal was to "reduce the flamebait effect" without
| having any impact on the discussion? Those two sentiments
| are contradictory.
|
| > That would have been a hapless attempt
|
| No argument there, it actually makes the whole endeavor
| of manually inventing an Israel-friendly title to
| substitute a neutral and factually accurate one even
| stranger.
|
| The goal here appears to be to make it seem as though a
| campaign to remove pro-Palestinian content simply
| happened on its own, which only works if the title that
| you wrote successfully dissuades people from reading the
| article. It looks like all this choice accomplished,
| though, was raising some eyebrows where you've now had to
| post several times to defend it, with little to no impact
| on the quality of the discussion of the topic. That being
| said, the fact that it was a half measure doesn't provide
| adequate cover for the obvious intent in this particular
| editorial choice.
|
| So again, why even bother with the half measures? If any
| mention of Israel lowers any topic below the community
| standards for discussion, you can simply outright ban
| mentions of Israel and any Israel-adjacent topics rather
| than manually intervening to write bespoke, more positive
| headlines for the country to suit any mention.
| dang wrote:
| Of course I wanted to have an impact on the discussion: I
| wanted to nudge it in a more thoughtful, less hellish
| direction.
|
| That's not steering away from the subject of the article
| --it's steering toward it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I certainly did. I saw this late and read the comments
| before reading the article, which I often do to save
| myself time if it turns out there's some glaring
| evidentiary or logical hole in a politically themed news
| story. I took the headline at face value and got 3/4 of
| the way down the page before discovering the direct
| involvement of a state actor. I absolutely expected to
| read a story about Meta execs doing this exclusively on
| their own initiative.
|
| Posting this not to argue about your decision but to
| describe the impression I formed from reading the title.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I hear you and have reverted the title.
| Maken wrote:
| The problematic point here is that Facebook is more than
| willing to obliterate certain topics and political views when
| requested, not which ones or by whom orders in particular.
| switch007 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| No, what it proves is that users will flag unsubstantive
| flamewar posts on Hacker News, regardless of the topic or the
| commenter's position on the topic.
|
| This is a good thing. Posts like your comment here break the
| site guidelines badly*, and the users who flagged it were quite
| correct to do so, regardless of your (or their) political
| opinion.
|
| * for example, this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful
| and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ ",
| and this one: " _Don 't be snarky._". Can you please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing
| those things? We'd appreciate it.
| turnsout wrote:
| Mark needs to go
| jsheard wrote:
| I think he has a majority of the voting shares, so nobody can
| get rid of him unfortunately. Meta is too big to fail and Zuck
| is set to be dictator for life if he wants to be.
| abeppu wrote:
| ... so while we were all worried about TikTok, being owned by a
| Chinese company, would be a vector for that government to push a
| skewed/propagandized stream of content on the world, Meta has
| already been doing it for a foreign government despite not having
| foreign ownership.
| brewtide wrote:
| It's all skewed, obviously. It's all about alignment.
| bazalia wrote:
| Is it just me or is this post very low on the hacker news order
| even though it has much more upvotes in a short time than much of
| the posts above it.
| dang wrote:
| This is in the FAQ: see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#whyrank ("Why is A
| ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?").
| But here's a longer answer.
|
| In the case of a story like this, which has significant new
| information (SNI) [1] on a major ongoing topic (MOT) [2], and
| at least some hope of a substantive discussion, moderators
| sometimes turn off the user flags on the story [3] so that it
| can spend time on HN's front page.
|
| In such cases, we usually adjust the degree to which we turn
| off the flags so that the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags
| isn't affected too dramatically. Usually the best way to
| support a substantive discussion is for the story to remain on
| HN's front page, but not in the highest few slots, where it
| would burn much hotter.
|
| Since upvotes and submission time are public data but flags
| aren't, it can appear like a story is being downweighted when
| in fact the opposite is the case, as with this thread. That's
| not a rule, though--we do also downweight stories sometimes.
| That's why the FAQ explains that you can't derive rank from
| votes and time alone.
|
| The reason moderation works this way, btw, is that HN is a
| curated site [4] (and always has been--here's me explaining
| this when I took over HN 11 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621).
|
| Moderators' job is to jiggle the system out of the failure
| modes [5] it would otherwise end up in if the software were
| running unattended. Turning off flags on certain stories, and
| adding downweight to other stories, are two examples. The goal
| is the same: to support substantive discussion on interesting
| stories, and (as a necessary condition for that) prevent the
| site from burning too hot if we can.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [3]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [4]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| [5]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| bazalia wrote:
| Thank you for the detailed and professional response. I'm
| glad I learend something new out of this as I was ignorant
| about the complexities of managing HN post rankings.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Just like IBM on "IBM and the Holocaust" (a must read). A
| genocide being supported by the US companies / media just in
| front of our noses.
| nova22033 wrote:
| >Meta's Director of Public Policy for Israel and the Jewish
| Diaspora, Jordana Cutler, has also intervened to investigate pro-
| Palestine content. Cutler is a former senior Israeli government
| official and advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
|
| Concerning...as another billionaire would say
| jmyeet wrote:
| The role of the media (including social media) is to move in
| lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy. This has been known
| for some time [1]. It's never as simple as the White House
| calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X". It's
| about a series of filters that decides who is in the media and
| who has their thumb on the algorithmic scales, as per the famous
| Noam Chomsky Andrew Marr interview [2] ("What I'm saying is if
| you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where
| you're sitting").
|
| Noam Chomsky is a national treasure.
|
| When a former Netanyahu adviser and Israeli embassy staffer
| seemingly has the power to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on
| Meta platforms [3], nobody should be surprised.
|
| If you're a US citizen who is a journalist critical of a key US
| ally, that ally is allowed to assassinate you without any
| objection of repercussions [4].
|
| This is also why Tiktok originally got banned in a bipartisan
| fashion: the Apartheid Defense League director Jonathon Goldblatt
| said (in leaked audio) "we have a Tiktok problem" [5] and weeks
| later it was banned. Tiktok simply suppresses pro-Palestinian
| speech less than other platforms.
|
| [1]: https://chomsky.info/consent01/
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0
|
| [3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-
| chief...
|
| [4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/16/israeli-forces-
| kil...
|
| [5]: https://x.com/Roots_Action/status/1767941861866348615
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| Hey this Chomsky guy seems pretty smart! Would be great to get
| him on mainstream media sometime.. hah
| rdtsc wrote:
| > It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark
| Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X".
|
| The government got so comfy it really got to be that easy:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...
| (Aug 27, 2024)
|
| > White House, "repeatedly pressured" Facebook for months to
| take down "certain COVID-19 content including humor and
| satire."
|
| > The officials "expressed a lot of frustration" when the
| company didn't agree, he said in the letter.
| tdeck wrote:
| Not a surprise. I remember last year seeing that posts to
| https://www.birdsofgaza.com/ were being blocked, and it's hard to
| think of a more innocuous way of speaking out.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| It's not only about suppression; it's about cultivating fear
| around expressing your opinions. There are groups actively
| working to have individuals fired for voicing support for
| Palestine.
|
| For instance, a woman wrote "Freedom for Palestine" in Gaelic
| on LinkedIn, prompting a group of Israelis in a WhatsApp chat
| to actively coordinate efforts to get her fired.
|
| The General Manager of Wix, Batsheva (Levine) Moshe, responded
| in a WhatsApp chat saying:
|
| "Hi yes we know. Being taken care of since it was published. I
| believe there will be an announcement soon regarding our
| reaction."
|
| Wix were orderd to pay EUR35K for unfair dismissal.
|
| ref(s):
|
| https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...
|
| https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...
| gryzzly wrote:
| do you feel like it is "Israel's war on Gaza"? Does that
| represent reality fully? Is that what children should be
| taught, that there is a demonic people that kills children? You
| don't see any problem with omitting the massacre of israeli
| civilians, the captured hostages and many thousands of rocket
| launches towards densely populated civilian communities? is
| that how we achieve peace in your view?
| shihab wrote:
| "Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by
| Israel...Meta removed over 90,000 posts to comply with TDRs
| submitted by the Israeli government in an average of 30
| seconds...All of the Israeli government's TDRs post-October 7th
| contain the exact same complaint text, according to the leaked
| information, regardless of the substance of the underlying
| content being challenged. Sources said that not a single Israeli
| TDR describes the exact nature of the content being reported"
| DAGdug wrote:
| Just want to call out that the head of the trust and
| safety/integrity division, Guy Rosen, is an Israeli citizen with
| a strong pro-Israel bias. He's also a person of questionable
| morals. From Wikipedia:
|
| " Guy Rosen and Roi Tiger founded Onavo in 2010. In October 2013,
| Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics
| platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make
| various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of
| WhatsApp. Since the acquisition, Onavo was frequently classified
| as being spyware, as the VPN was used to monetize application
| usage data collected within an allegedly privacy-focused
| environment."
|
| That Meta considered his questionable ethics a feature not a bug,
| and repeatedly promoted him, is very problematic.
| frob wrote:
| I was there during the onavo scandal. It was straight up
| spyware. They would regularly show graphs of snapchat usage vs
| messenger vs whatsapp and the snapchat data was explicitly
| attributed to onovo logs.
| mmooss wrote:
| It's a conspiracy theory. Plenty of Israeli citizens support
| Palestinian rights and are opposed to what their government is
| doing. The guilt by association leads to things like
| antisemitism and anti-Palestinian hate and all the rest.
| edanm wrote:
| In what way is this a conspiracy theory or guilt by
| association? I don't think it is. (Except maybe the statement
| that he's an Israel citizen, though I think in this context
| it's a legit statement to make.)
|
| The parent post explicitly makes two separate statements - 1.
| that he's an Israeli citizen, and 2. that he has questionable
| morals. I don't necessarily agree with the second statement,
| but it's explicitly not saying he's immoral because he's
| Israeli (guilt by association).
| DAGdug wrote:
| On 2, a few additional quotes from Wikipedia might help
| (they admittedly don't directly implicate Guy Rosen, though
| you'd have to be extremely charitable in assuming he wasn't
| party to these decisions):
|
| " Onavo, which allowed the company to read network traffic
| on a device prior to its being encrypted, thereby giving
| the company the ability "to measure detailed in-app
| activity" and to collect analytics on Snapchat app usage
| from devices on which Onavo was installed.[12] It did this
| by creating "fake digital certificates to impersonate
| trusted Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon analytics servers to
| redirect and decrypt secure traffic from those apps for
| Facebook's strategic analysis."[13] The program, which was
| named "Project Ghostbusters" in reference to Snapchat's
| ghost-shaped logo, was later expanded to include Amazon and
| YouTube"
|
| " On January 29, 2019, TechCrunch published a report
| detailing "Project Atlas"--an internal market research
| program employed by Facebook since 2016. It invited users
| between the ages of 13 and 35 to install the Facebook
| Research app--allegedly a rebranded version of Onavo
| Protect--on their device, to collect data on their app
| usage, web browsing history, web search history, location
| history, personal messages, photos, videos, emails, and
| Amazon order history. Participants received up to $20 per-
| month to participate in the program, which was promoted to
| teenagers via targeted advertising on Instagram and
| Snapchat. Facebook Research is administered by third-party
| beta testing services, including Applause and BetaBound,
| and requires users to install a Facebook root certificate
| on their phone. On iOS, this is prohibited by Apple's
| Enterprise Developer License Agreement, as the methods used
| are intended solely for use by a company's employees (for
| use cases such as internal software specific to their
| environment, and internal pre-release versions of apps)"
| edanm wrote:
| There are in general a lot of different companies doing
| things which some segment of the population considers
| immoral. Around HN, things having to do with privacy-
| violations are often frowned upon by a large percentage
| of the population here.
|
| I don't always agree with these assessments, and I even
| less agree that this means you can point to people at
| various positions in these companies and call them
| "immoral".
|
| Some people will consistently hold the belief that anyone
| working at Facebook, or Google, or whatever, are immoral.
| Most will inconsistently hold that belief - if they're
| arguing against someone, they'll use this kind of
| reasoning, but not in general. I'm mostly against this
| line of thinking in general.
|
| Look - In some corners of HN, having worked with or
| served in the US military in any capacity is enough to
| make someone immoral. In some corners, working at a
| gambling company in any capacity makes you immoral. In
| some corners, being a doctor in any way related to
| performing abortions is immoral. In others, taking part
| in the capitalist system in any way is immoral. I doubt
| you or anyone agrees with all of these positions - so I
| think the general rule is that just being associated with
| something that some portion of people think is immoral is
| simply not enough to consider someone immoral.
|
| (There are of course things that almost everyone
| considers immoral, and being associated with them _could_
| be enough, though even that barometer is sometimes
| wrong.)
| DAGdug wrote:
| Yeah, there's no objective and universal barometer for
| what is or isn't immoral. I'm providing evidence (as
| opposed to pulling things out of thin air) for why it's
| reasonable for many, or even most, people in the western
| world to find Guy Rosen immoral. It's okay for
| individuals to not find this compelling.
| seydor wrote:
| Facebook's boss has repeatedly shown that he's an amoral
| hypocrite , most blatantly after Trumps election. I m not
| particularly sympathetic to palestinians but what's going on
| here. Its not just Israel, facebook has succumbed to
| authoritarian governments like Turkey in the past. The ubiquity
| of facebook and its monopolies are directly contradicting the
| spirit of democratic Constitutions worldwide. What's the point of
| guaranteeing freedom of expression when a single entity/person
| controls the attention of billions and billions of people.
|
| I think we need a rethink of freedom of press laws in the age of
| international monopolies.
| bawolff wrote:
| The missing part of this article: are the requests valid? Are
| they actually incitements to terrorism and violence or is it just
| a clamp down on criticism? The headline of the article implies
| the latter but the body does not provide any evidence for that.
|
| Like there is a war going on, a pretty nasty one at that. I would
| expect there to be quite a lot of incitement to violence related
| to that. I would expect the israeli government to be mostly
| concerned with incitements of violence against its citizens. In
| the context of this conflict i would expect such incitements to
| be mostly be made by the demographics cited in the article due to
| the nature of the conflict. The article seems like it could be
| entirely consistent with take downs being used appropriately. It
| needs more then this to prove its headline.
|
| Heck, from this post we dont even know relative numbers. How does
| this compare against take down requests from other groups?
| janalsncm wrote:
| If you have valid rules but in practice only enforce them
| against a single group, then in some sense you are asking the
| wrong question.
|
| In other words, for people who assume rule enforcement is
| supposed to be fair, they see unfair enforcement as hypocrisy.
| However, if you just see enforcement as another tool to wield
| against enemies, hypocrisy is irrelevant. What matters is
| power. It's my basketball, I make the rules.
| bawolff wrote:
| > If you have valid rules but in practice only enforce them
| against a single group
|
| I'd agree. Is there any evidence that that is happening here?
| The article reports on israeli take down requests but does
| not report on take down requests from other groups. Meta
| could very well be using the same rules against pro-israel
| groups, we just dont know because the leak didn't include
| that information.
| MasterIdiot wrote:
| anecdotally Meta has pretty lax moderation against anti-
| palestinian in Hebrew, allowing tons of extremely
| racist/violent speech.
| garbagewoman wrote:
| What would you define as "valid"
| bawolff wrote:
| I guess as "violating facebook terms of use". At some point i
| don't think what the standard is matters that much as long as
| its equally enforced against everyone.
|
| Generally though i do think its legit for facebook to take
| down posts advocating for violence and terrorism. Devil is in
| the details.
| elihu wrote:
| I would think that anyone advocating for or cheering the
| death of civilians would be valid reason for removal.
| Criticizing Israeli policy, being supportive of Palestinians
| in general, or contradicting Netanyahu's talking points: not
| a valid reason for removal.
| Teever wrote:
| How do you feel about posts supporting the bombing of
| Dresden, Tokyo, or the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima
| and Nagasaki?
| elihu wrote:
| The article does mention it, but I agree that the story is
| incomplete without a clearer idea (including examples) of what
| is being censored.
|
| > "A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report investigating Meta's
| moderation of pro-Palestine content post-October 7th found
| that, of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or suppressed
| on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved peaceful content in
| support of Palestine, while just one post was content in
| support of Israel."
| bawolff wrote:
| However that study is using a different data set afaik. There
| is no indication that the things being requested taken down
| by Israel are the same as those being studied by HRW.
|
| Its also really difficult to draw any conclusions from the
| HRW study due to selection bias issues. The sample was sent
| in by users instead of being chosen randomly from censored
| posts. Even assuming you agree with HRW's assesment that the
| posts were peaceful, there is no way to tell from the study
| if this represents the 0.00001% most "peaceful" of all
| censored posts or if its the average censored post, and i
| think that makes a big difference when evaluating this
| situation. The experimental design of the HRW study is just
| rather poor, and i think you could use such a design to come
| to basically any conclusion you want.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Are they actually incitements to terrorism and violence or
| is it just a clamp down on criticism?_
|
| The concept of stochastic terrorism allows unifying these.
|
| > _I would expect the israeli government to be mostly concerned
| with incitements of violence against its citizens._
|
| Public opinion is a strategic asset. Imagine if the electorate
| of their arms dealer turned against them.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Israel has an extensive defense industry, in some sense it
| has absorbed most of that country's economy. The role of the
| US is as a guarantor against the rest of the world.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Public opinion is a strategic asset. Imagine if the
| electorate of their arms dealer turned against them.
|
| I'm not saying there aren't other possible motivations.
| Indeed, i'm sure Israel would love all its PR problems to go
| away.
|
| My point is, that if we assume for the sake of argument that
| Israel isn't doing anything sketchy, i would still expect the
| stuff in the article to be true. Therefor it is very bad
| evidence of Israel doing sketchy stuff, since the article
| contents would probably be true either way. My argument is
| not that Israel is pure of heart or anything, only that we
| should judge based on publicly available evidence, and the
| evidence in this article is extremely weak.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Presumably, every country in the world can ask US companies
| nicely to imprint their foreign policy on domestic
| moderation. Even I could ask; but why would Meta agree to
| do it?
| bawolff wrote:
| Presumably because violent content really does decrease
| the value of their site, and meta is in this to make $$$.
| Broadly speaking people don't like content inciting
| violence, and will go elsewhere if there is too much of
| it. Just look at what happened to twitter.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _of 1,050 posts HRW documented as taken-down or
| suppressed on Facebook or Instagram, 1,049 involved
| peaceful content_
|
| The issue is that we are not talking about posts which
| would normally be taken down by Facebook.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > The missing part of this article: are the requests valid?
|
| They are enforced with neither human nor AI review, so the
| reality is that we don't know. They are enforced by virtue of
| who submits them, with no question on whether they are valid or
| not.
|
| Having heard from friends the kind of censorship they face on
| the topic on Facebook and Instagram when discussing the topics
| at hand, I know of plenty of situations where people were
| censored without breaking any rules. They're a small sample of
| course.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Defending yourself from genocide is not terrorism
| reissbaker wrote:
| When do you think the supposed genocide started?
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| 1948
| reissbaker wrote:
| Interesting! And in this supposed 77 year long genocide,
| did the population size of Palestinians decrease?
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| Not a determining factor. Genocide is the commission of
| one of the five prohibited acts with the intent to
| destroy, in whole or in part, any national, ethnical,
| racial or religious group.
| reissbaker wrote:
| A bit hard to show "intent to destroy" if for 77 years of
| rule, they haven't actually done it, though. I mean, in
| what other "genocide" did the population _grow_ , year
| over year, for 77 years? Can you name a single one where
| the population grew for even five years of "genocide"?
| nashashmi wrote:
| [delayed]
| gryzzly wrote:
| right, if you, for example, wear uniform, and if you, for
| example, have not started the war and didnt cause the
| genocide by not wearing uniform, by using civilians as human
| shields, and by stealing the humanitarian aid and reselling
| it to poor displaced civilians, that you then cynically
| enlist to die for your cause, because there is no other
| source of cash to feed your families.
|
| you should also consider the sequence of events before using
| such grave accusations.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| I assume you're referring to the IDF, as they are the only
| member of this conflict who has been recorded using
| civilians as human shields systematically.
|
| The Israelis also actively prevent any aid from reaching
| gaza, including going so far as to attack and destroy the
| aid.
|
| Maybe YOU should think before spreading Zionist(read:
| terrorist) propaganda.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| > The Israelis also actively prevent any aid from
| reaching gaza
|
| Then why is there so much aid in gaza? Israel controls
| gazas borders. If they didnt want aid in gaza there
| wouldnt be any. I just dont see how you plan to convince
| anyone when the thigns you are claiming are so obviously
| untrue
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| I don't know how you can extrapolate "look how generous
| the Israelis are" from the undeniable fact that they are
| blocking aid and not nearly enough is let in.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The israelis are oppressing the shit out of the
| palestinians. But we cant have a conversation about that
| if youre gonna make shit up like "Israelis also actively
| prevent any aid from reaching gaza" which is just
| obviously not true. Be honest, and if youre going to lie
| at least make it believable.
| buyucu wrote:
| Israel is comitting mass murder and genocide. Meta is helping
| to cover it up.
| xp84 wrote:
| Edit: I'm deleting most of my post, to avoid politics part and
| only preserving my "point"
|
| Basically I'm saying: Nobody has a right to free wide
| distribution of their thoughts on social media anyway, and also,
| those who provide these free ad-supported platforms have many
| reasonable motivations to remove content -- including the belief
| that the speaker is wrong/spreading lies and propaganda. That
| doesn't 'silence' them any more than not letting them into my
| house silences them.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| It would be interesting to see a random sample of these posts.
| I know any sample they released would be groomed to make them
| look good, but it would be interesting if it were possible.
| basisword wrote:
| Fair enough, but the social media companies should be honest
| about it. Instead they brag hypocritically about free speech.
|
| I disagree with you though. These global social media platforms
| have an incredible amount of sway over our society. As long as
| they have that reach, they should not be allowed to distort and
| silence.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Judges have now ruled that suspected "expected beliefs" that are
| "otherwise lawful" is grounds for deportation, if those suspected
| thoughts are "antisemitic" (read- supportive of peace in
| Palestine).
|
| They are literally arresting and deporting people for suspected
| thoughts.
|
| Student visas are being denied based on social media posts.
|
| This is fascism.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > Judges have now ruled that suspected "expected beliefs" that
| are "otherwise lawful" is grounds for deportation, if those
| suspected thoughts are "antisemitic"
|
| Do you have a link to what you are referring to?
| spencerflem wrote:
| Quote from Marco Rubio (confirmed 99-0 in the Senate)
|
| "Rubio said that while Khalil's "past, current or expected
| beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise
| lawful," the provision allows the secretary of state alone to
| "personally determine" whether he should remain in the
| country." https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mahmoud-
| khalil-deported...
|
| The article is a day old, the judges just affirmed that Rubio
| is allowed to do this today
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Thanks for the information. FWIW, I think this is total
| bullshit and fascism, but your comments aren't telling the
| whole story.
|
| The most important thing to point out is that "the judges"
| in this case was actually a single immigration judge.
| Immigration judges belong to the executive branch, not the
| judiciary. I agree this law that says that the Secretary of
| State can essentially just deport anyone they want can't be
| squared with the constitutional rights of freedom of speech
| and due process. But that wasn't really this immigration
| judge's determination to make, i.e. questioning the
| constitutionality of the law that Rubio is using to deport
| Khalil. There is a separate case going on in federal court
| that should address that topic.
|
| This article has more info: https://archive.vn/D890d
| spencerflem wrote:
| In a different deportation case they just defied a
| supreme court ruling - https://www.theguardian.com/us-
| news/2025/apr/11/trump-deport...
|
| Didn't realize that the judge in the linked one was an
| immigration judge and not a judiciary judge thanks for
| the clarification
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That other deportation case you link to here is even more
| bizarrely evil to me. At least in the other examples the
| administration is making the case that they should have
| the power to deport these people under law (not like I
| agree with that interpretation, but they are at least
| trying to make an argument).
|
| In this other case, the administration flat out
| _admitted_ they made a mistake and that he shouldn 't
| have been deported. So they ship him to this notorious
| prison and then just do an "oopsies, our bad, he's gone
| now." Not only do I not see how the administration's
| stance is defensible, why would you even _want_ to defend
| it, especially if you actually agreed with their overall
| stance of wanting to increase deportations of "bad
| guys". The administration said outright he is _not_ a bad
| guy!
|
| I simply can't understand it outside of a "the cruelty is
| the point" framework, but even in that framework the
| cruelty is normally directed at "bad guys". Now folks are
| OK with cruelty to random people that was the result of
| an admitted error. WTF happened to our country?
| spencerflem wrote:
| completely agreed. its nice to find someone else worried
| about this on hacker news
| rdtsc wrote:
| > the provision allows the secretary of state alone to
| "personally determine" whether he should remain in the
| country
|
| That's how it always worked? This idea that someone is
| entitled to a student visa is just odd, and I am speaking
| as someone who had a variety of different visas, including
| two student visas. You're really at the whim of the state
| department. It just takes getting notice, a minor
| infraction, not submitting a renewal on time, or lying on a
| form and you're done. Lawyers may helps there is some way
| to appeal but it's an incredible uphill battle.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Just for context, that judge is an immigration judge, ie a
| Department of State employee. Immigration judges are not part
| of the judicial branch (despite the job title) and can't make
| precedent or interpret law. They are basically a rubber stamp
| for whatever policy the Secretary of State is pushing.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > grounds for deportation,
|
| Sadly but nobody is entitled to student visas. They never were.
| It's mostly at the whim of the state department and they may
| revoke it for a variety of reasons. Minor misdemeanors or
| getting caught with DUI would also lead to losing a visa. It's
| really a "walk on eggshells" kind of situation. Yeah, in some
| cases appealing and finding a lawyer may help but it's huge
| uphill battle.
| iddan wrote:
| Calling for the annihilation of the Jewish people is not being
| supportive of peace in Palestine. These students are not
| innocent.
| herf wrote:
| This is a _really_ hard problem. Just consider that there are
| ~150 Muslims for every Jew worldwide. In the USA it 's the
| reverse - 2:1 in favor of Jews, concentrated in particular
| geographic areas.
|
| Imagine what it means to get ranking right here - if you let just
| 1% of the international population into the USA ranking system,
| you have a majority in favor of Palestine, and of course these
| ideas will spread in communities without a lot of people who can
| represent Jewish history. It's clear to me _why_ this happens,
| but fixing in an algorithmic but fair way is also extremely
| difficult.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| I think there's an erroneous implicit assumption in your
| reasoning, namely that to be Zionist is equivalent to be
| Jewish, and to be anti-zionist is to be Muslim (otherwise, why
| would you be talking about Jew:Muslim ratios). The fact of the
| matter is that not every Zionist* is Jewish (in fact, the vast
| majority of Zionists are christian), and vice versa not every
| Jewish person is a Zionist (Jewish voice for peace, the ultra
| orthodox, etc).
|
| But even beyond that, I think engaging in censorship to hide an
| ethnic cleansing is an affront to humanity.
|
| * Here, I'm taking Zionism to mean to be in support of the way
| Israel has formed and continued to form in the past 77 or so
| years. I am aware that there are many different interpretations
| of Zionism (to illustrate the breadth; Noam Chomsky considered
| himself a Zionist), but this particular interpretation is the
| one that is relevant to this conversation.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| "According to internal communications reviewed by Drop Site, as
| recently as March, Cutler actively instructed employees of the
| company to search for and review content mentioning Ghassan
| Kanafani, an Arab novelist considered to be a pioneer of
| Palestinian literature."
|
| So this person is actively thinking about a Palestinian
| revolutionary that was assassinated by Mossad over half a century
| ago, and is using their position to push for internal censorship
| of him accordingly.
|
| Imagine if a Palestinian employee at Meta suggested censoring
| mentions of past members of Haganah.
| morkalork wrote:
| Was anyone else confused reading the title? At first pass I was
| asking myself "metadata from what?" then figured out oh not
| metadata, data from Meta.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| And then Zuckerberg says he's all about free speech, even mocking
| Europe as not being free-speech enough
| impossiblefork wrote:
| He's not wrong though, that Europe isn't free-speech enough. I
| don't care about the hypocrisy, because free speech is so good
| and so beneficial that I don't care if the proponent is iffy.
| jmpman wrote:
| Yesterday, my high school son was sitting on the couch. Asked him
| what he was doing... "social studies on the partitioning of
| Palestine in 1948". More spicy a topic that I was expecting.
| Intrigued, I asked ChatGPT a few questions about the religious
| populations of modern Israel throughout the centuries. Got some
| interesting results and asked it for some clarification on the
| political sensitivity of this topic. It agreed it would be
| challenged by many. Anyway, decided to share it with my son, and
| texted it to him on his iPhone from my iPhone. Normally that
| would be sent via iMessage, fully end to end encrypted, and yet
| this time, when I was sending potentially politically charged
| views on israel, it was sent as SMS!! Now, I'm not much of a
| conspiracy theorist, but... that got me questioning why, on any
| of the thousands of messages I've sent my son, this specific one
| wasn't sent encrypted. Hmm
| t0lo wrote:
| Izr revieves almost 50% of the worlds startup funding for cyber
| security in any given year. Think about what they do with this.
| Philpax wrote:
| You may be interested in seeing what Tal Broda, an executive at
| OpenAI, posted at the start of the war:
| https://x.com/StopZionistHate/status/1735471349278052584
| switch007 wrote:
| Isn't another wild thing here that Apple chooses whether to
| send it encrypted or not? Sorry, haven't used an iPhone with
| iMessage, not sure how it works.
|
| Try Signal instead perhaps?
| mlindner wrote:
| SMS messages get sent when you're outside of data network.
| jmpman wrote:
| Or when the phone detects questionable content and decides
| to? I was sitting on my couch, next to my son when I sent the
| message. We were both connected to the WiFi. Sure, I've had
| messages sent via SMS before, typically when I'm on a plane
| and just lose 5G connectivity - but never on my couch before.
| Just seemed like a strange coincidence which made me realize
| that could be a viable attack pattern against a population.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| One off test, but for this guy, with large BSky and Twitter
| accounts, made the same pro-UA post on both, the post on Twitter
| was suppressed for about 12 hours, until it was spammed by hate
| bots, and _then_ was made widely visible. The BSky post had lots
| of responses, starting from the moment of posting, almost wholly
| pro-UA.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...
|
| On the face of it, Twitter itself is suppressing in line with
| Donald/Elon's agenda, and running hate/love bots.
|
| Also saw another BSky poster showing a horrific anti-immigration
| post on Twitter getting spammed by love-bots.
| sfx77 wrote:
| "Israeli Campaign" is it really that weird for someone to ask to
| take down posts calling for their annihilation?
| khaledh wrote:
| The posts are not calling for Israel's annihilation. They call
| for stopping the genocide. The posts merely document what
| Israel is doing in Gaza, since Israel doesn't allow independent
| journalists to verify and show the world the carnage it's
| causing to the people of Gaza.
| xbmcuser wrote:
| This is the same reason they want to buy TikTok and banned it had
| nothing to do with Chinese influence it was that the censoring of
| pro Palestinian content was not being done like in western
| platforms and Israel and Israel bought US politicians did not
| like it.
| botanical wrote:
| If Apartheid South Africa could last just a little bit longer,
| they would still be an apartheid state like Israel is today.
|
| Western media is just as complicit in this genocide as the
| fascists in charge of the Israeli government. And media are self-
| censoring which is reprehensible.
|
| The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West Bank)
| wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land stolen on a
| daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as subhuman animals.
| YZF wrote:
| Palestinian violence predates the 1967 and 1948. Also Gaza
| wasn't occupied since Israel left it in 2005.
|
| Here's is one example from 1954 when Israel did not control
| Gaza or the West Bank:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%27ale_Akrabim_massacre
|
| "The Ma'ale Akrabim massacre, known in English as the Scorpions
| Pass Massacre, was an attack on an Israeli passenger bus,
| carried out on 17 March 1954, in the middle of the day. Eleven
| passengers were shot dead by the attackers who ambushed and
| boarded the bus. One passenger died 32 years later of his
| injuries, in a state of paralysis and partial consciousness.
| Four passengers survived, two of whom had been injured by the
| gunmen."
|
| Palestinians are largely in the reality they're in due to the
| violence.
| defrost wrote:
| Can you remind us whether this bus attack in which 11 people
| died came before or after the 1948-1949 Plan Dalet during
| which over 500 Arab villages were destroyed or depopulated by
| military forces under the direction of later first prime
| minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion? The
| plan's tactics involved laying siege to Palestinian Arab
| villages, bombing neighbourhoods of cities, forced expulsion
| of their inhabitants, and setting fields and houses on fire
| and detonating TNT in the rubble to prevent any return.
| Zionist military units possessed detailed lists of
| neighborhoods and villages to be destroyed and their Arab
| inhabitants expelled. This strategy is subject to
| controversy, with some historians characterizing it as
| defensive, while others assert that it was an integral part
| of a planned strategy for the expulsion, sometimes called an
| ethnic cleansing, of the area's native inhabitants.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet
|
| Israelis and Palestinians are largely in the reality they're
| in due to the violence.
| YZF wrote:
| Why are we moving the goal posts?
|
| Parent claims the violence is simply due to:
|
| "The idea of Hamas wouldn't exist if Gaza (and the West
| Bank) wasn't occupied by land, air and sea; their land
| stolen on a daily basis, and Palestinian people treated as
| subhuman animals."
|
| This is not true. And this is what I'm addressing in my
| reply.
|
| We can litigate 1948 as well. Plenty of Palestinian
| violence pre-1948. Their refusal to accept the UN's
| partition plan (which was a lot more generous than the two
| state solution people are talking about today).
|
| EDIT: Also I hope you're not trying to say that Israel's
| actions during the war in 1948 (even if we accept they were
| in the wrong, which I do not) justify boarding a bus and
| slaughtering civilians 6 years later.
|
| Your last statement I guess is true but not helpful. Plenty
| of violence to go around.
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| All military actions made by oppressed peoples is
| legitimate resistance and your framing of Palestinians as
| instigators is troubling.
| gryzzly wrote:
| not wearing uniform, attacking civilians, capturing
| hostages and holding your own civilian population hostage
| by violently taking over the commercial distribution of
| free humanitarian aid can not be called legitimate in any
| way
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| You're right, Hamas should focus on uniform
| production(they wear uniform bandanas BTW, watch their
| videos) while Gaza has a higher proportion of destroyed
| buildings than Germany in ww2. You certainly got your
| priorities straight.
| YZF wrote:
| They have other problems that are higher priority
| apparently: "A 22-year-old Palestinian man was tortured
| and killed by Hamas militants after he criticized the
| group publicly and participated in rare anti-Hamas
| protests in Gaza, his family said.
|
| Uday Rabie was taken last week by dozens of armed
| fighters with Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam
| Brigades, in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City,
| his brother Hassan Rabie told CNN on Tuesday." -
| https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/middleeast/uday-rabie-
| palesti...
|
| And by the way, while they do have uniform, they don't
| wear them when they fight. Only for celebrations like
| their marching of civilian hostages. Gaza also has a
| higher proportion of structures used for military
| purposes (like all of them?) then Germany in WW2. There
| have been cities in Germany during WW-II that have been
| completely destroyed - we can pick that as a comparison.
| Picking entire Germany vs a tiny area is not reasonable.
| int_19h wrote:
| Not massacring civilians by the hundreds would be a good
| start.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The problem with this framing is that it will never lead
| to the palestinians accomplishing their goals. As long as
| they continue to commit terrorism against israel israel
| will continue to oppress them and annex their land until
| the genocide becomes a reality and all the palestinians
| are dead or in a diaspora. No one will stop israel as
| long as they can credibly make a security argument. You
| may claim the same is true in a non violent plan but it
| is 100% guaranteed on the current path. So sure, the
| resistance is legitimate, that doesnt mean it is helpful
| to their cause though.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful
| forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people
| is seen as pro-Hamas, even if I shout at the top of my voice that
| I don't care for the armed factions and political jockeying of
| either side.
|
| I will expect to be downvoted to hell for this.
| edanm wrote:
| > Our minds have been so colonized or beaten down by powerful
| forces that _any_ support of the plight of the Palestine people
| is seen as pro-Hamas,
|
| What makes you say that? Plenty of people express support for
| the Palestinian people, including plenty of governments and
| heads of state, etc.
|
| I personally think that being pro-Palestine means you should be
| anti-Hamas, since they are a brutal dictatorship that's
| plundered its people's resources to engage in a war with Israel
| that has destroyed their lives.
|
| The main worrying thing is when someone is _not_ pro-
| Palestinian, they 're either pro-Hamas or anti-Israel.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| I agree with the last two paras, with the following addendum.
| I'm also pro-Israeli people, but I find their leadership (and
| the settlers) the same as Hamas. No different.
|
| As for the first para, I have very close friends who have
| been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are a
| university student in the US today and said exactly what I
| have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-
| sympathizer. I have been downvoted to hell on reddit and
| elsewhere for putting it as mildly as I did here.
| simion314 wrote:
| Reddit is full of paid trolls that will pile in huge number
| to kill any discussion that is percived against Israel, you
| can\t talk about the latest war crimes Israel is doing
| without a number of accounts piling on you, accusing you of
| fascism, racis, that you do not know history, that the
| articles are false and no childrens were murdered, if they
| were some children killed then for sure some terrorists
| were hidding there with the children etc. It is actually
| impossible to talk about this topic on reddit, I can shit
| on Putin and Ruzzians all day so it is clear Israel has
| more money invested in their cyber army then the Zeds.
| edanm wrote:
| Out of curiosity - how do you know they are paid trolls
| and not just people with those views on this issue?
|
| Personally, I don't use Reddit much, but this is
| definitely not the sense I get from seeing reading e.g.
| Twitter, in which there are plenty of extremely anti-
| Israel voices.
|
| Remember - we're all seeing our own personal echo chamber
| of content.
| simion314 wrote:
| I assume people that are not paid have a bit of shame and
| they are also lazy and not work hard to justify why
| killing children is OK and also jump instantly a topic is
| posted, and also try to shut me up with accusation of
| being an anti-semite.
|
| There is also an easy but not perfect way to check, you
| look at the account age and post history. If you check a
| normal user account like mine you will see it ha many
| years long, that I post say on average 3 comments a day,
| some days nothing and maybe soem days more. That I also
| have low activity and different sections like Star trek,
| or some video game I was into at that time, or soem TV
| show, With paid accounts they are all very new, they all
| post on the same topic like defending Ruzzia or Israel,
| they are very active only on this topic.
|
| Also there is known that Ruzzia and Israel have paid
| cyber worriors so for sure they have scripts that will
| alert when something about their regime is posted and
| they worriors will pop up and repeat their propaganda to
| excuse the war crimes.
| edanm wrote:
| > I assume people that are not paid have a bit of shame
| and they are also lazy and not work hard to justify why
| killing children is OK
|
| In other words, you assume that people that disagree with
| you must be bots or paid trolls? That certainly explains
| why you think Reddit is full of them :)
|
| I will often write stuff that you would probably consider
| pro-Israeli. I'm not a troll and don't get paid for it.
| Do you simply dismiss anything I say because you assume
| I'm either a bot or a "Israeli paid cyber warrior"? That
| makes you wrong, and makes you unable to ever learn new
| things or new perspectives.
|
| (I'm not disputing, btw, that there are a lot of trolls.
| From my perspective, 90% of people posting anything about
| the conflict, including some major accounts, are
| absolutely trolls - they have no skin in the game and
| little real knowledge of the situation, and simply want
| to post provocative things, whether pro or anti, to get
| engagement.)
| simion314 wrote:
| I give you a lot of clues on how to detect a bot I did
| not said that all people that disagree with me ar bots,
| for example I disagree with lot of MAGA uninformed people
| and they are not bots, I can see they are behaving like
| regular people.
|
| Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old,
| do you only post about Israel? do you comments appear
| super fast in response to my comments like it was
| triggered by alarms? If those are yes then you are a bot,
| can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone
| doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
| edanm wrote:
| > I give you a lot of clues on how to detect a bot I did
| not said that all people that disagree with me ar bots,
|
| You're putting a bunch of barriers between hearing
| someone else's opinion and accepting it as valid.
|
| > Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days
| old, do you only post about Israel?
|
| In my case, no and no.
|
| > do you comments appear super fast in response to my
| comments like it was triggered by alarms?
|
| I do what plenty of other HN users do - I use a 3rd party
| service that notifies me when someone replies to any of
| my posts.
|
| > can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone
| doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
|
| Which is exactly the problem with your approach. You can
| write off anyone, including me, as "well they are
| actually being paid". How can I prove that I'm not?
|
| Also, most Israelis between the ages of 18-21 are doing
| their mandatory military service, that in itself isn't a
| reason not to listen to them.
|
| Btw, military service is not unpaid; IDF soldiers receive
| a salary, though it's much lower than almost any market
| wage.
| simion314 wrote:
| >I do what plenty of other HN users do - I use a 3rd
| party service that notifies me when someone replies to
| any of my posts.
|
| But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about
| Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something
| bad about Israel?
|
| OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel killing
| civilian including children a war crime. Also explain why
| the recent war crime of killing red cross members (again)
| is not a war crime . The assholes denied it until video
| evidence was shown. (very , very shitty behaviour, the
| same like Ruzzian bots claiming the Azerbaijan airplane
| was downed by birds and still denying until today that it
| was Ruzzia).
|
| This is other clue to detect a paid bot, denies evidence
| until their Mistry pof Invazions confirm it with a spin
| why it was not them or it was a excusable .
| edanm wrote:
| > But do you get notified when I chat with Bob about
| Israel? Or get a notification when someone says something
| bad about Israel?
|
| No. I'm not trying to prove myself to you - I'm sure that
| _someone_ is actively monitoring mentions of Israel,
| though I doubt the Israeli government particularly cares
| what happens on HN - it 's fairly niche.
|
| I do sometimes search for mentions of Israel in HN
| search, sometimes including comments, but I don't do it
| that often.
|
| > OK, let me know why I am mistaken to name Israel
| killing civilian including children a war crime.
|
| I think any decent person mourns innocent people being
| killed, on either side. I personally also mourn for non-
| civilians being killed - it's not like Israeli soldiers
| trying to defend their country are people that should be
| killed, and it's not like most Hamas militants who (in
| their mind) are defending themselves from a foreign
| occupier deserve death either. I have far less sympathy
| for the leaders who know better.
|
| But to your question - killing civilian, both morally and
| in a legal sense, is not in general a war crime unless
| those civilians were directly targeted, or unless their
| targeting was disproportionate to valid military aims.
|
| Whatever you may think of Israel, Hamas has custom-
| designed their war to make it extremely difficult to
| rescue Israeli hostages, and extremely difficult to get
| to Hamas, without killing civilians. Btw, the more "evil"
| you think Israel is, the more evil and cynical this makes
| Hamas - since they knowingly protect themselves with the
| lives of the civilians under their care.
|
| So Israel killing civilians is not, in itself, proof of a
| war crime. It's a sad fact of reality that civilians die
| in war. Especially ones in which one side is exploiting
| their civilians to save themselves.
|
| That all said, there is no doubt that many war crimes
| have been committed. Some are documented and Israel has
| investigated them and taken steps to stop the people
| committing them. Some are swept under the rug. I imagine
| many are never reported. I don't think Israel is
| especially moral or especially immoral - this is just
| true of any war.
|
| > Also explain why the recent war crime of killing red
| cross members (again) is not a war crime .
|
| I don't have all the facts and neither do you. From what
| we've seen so far - it definitely seems like a war crime.
| I reserve judgement because I have some faith in the IDF
| - you rush to condemn Israel for the opposite reason, I
| imagine. I've also seen _many_ stories turn out to be far
| more complicated after investigation than any immediate,
| attention-grabbing headline would suggest.
|
| In any case, I think this should be investigated and, if
| it was a war crime, for the perpetrators to be
| prosecuted.
| simion314 wrote:
| Ok, you are very balanced in your opinion. My issue is
| whit extremists from all sides, I can't complain on
| reddit about Israel crimes without getting accused of
| supporting Hamas, or nazis or stuff like that.
|
| What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit like
| 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red cross 2
| pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and deny the
| news is real,video appears so deny the video is real,
| then they claim that for sure there must have been some
| weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
|
| Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning up
| Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem comercial
| crap there? Genocide does not always mean killings.
| edanm wrote:
| > My issue is whit extremists from all sides, I can't
| complain on reddit about Israel crimes without getting
| accused of supporting Hamas, or nazis or stuff like that.
|
| I have an issue with extremists too.
|
| > What I see from pro-Israel gov accounts is bullshit
| like 1 we have video of war crimes, like killing red
| cross 2 pro Israel bots(I told you the clues ) come and
| deny the news is real,video appears so deny the video is
| real, then they claim that for sure there must have been
| some weapons or Hamas leader hiding there.
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of bots/trolls/whatever. There
| are also a lot of genuine people who are pro-Israelis who
| will reflexively just not believe any video or reporting
| at first. It's unfortunately true that there have been
| many cases of bias against Israel and misreporting; but
| it's also true (and frankly undeniable) that war crimes
| have been committed by Israel.
|
| This goes the other way - lots of pro-Palestine (or just
| anti-Israel) people will just answer any statement made
| by Israel with "Zionists always lie" or various memes to
| that effect.
|
| I wish I were as confident as you that these are all
| bots; I think my (far more pessimistic) belief is true
| though, that many of these are real people just posting
| reflexively without thinking anything through.
|
| > Also what is your opinion on Trump and Israel cleaning
| up Gaza of Palestinians and making building soem
| comercial crap there? Genocide does not always mean
| killings.
|
| First, genocide does mean killing, or at least acting to
| make a population disappear via other means. And for the
| record, I completely disagree with categorizing the Gaza
| war as a genocide. It's a horrible war, but not at all a
| genocide, by any definition that any real person uses.
|
| Their plan could be ethnic cleansing, depending on
| whether the eventual plan is to _forcibly_ remove Gazans
| from Gaza, or whether it 's to _allow_ Gazans to leave on
| a voluntary basis. Of course, I don 't think there's any
| way for Gazans who choose now to be doing it voluntarily
| - since Israel has destroyed much of the physical
| infrastructure of Gaza, and the war is still raging.
|
| Needless to say (or maybe not needless nowadays), I'm
| against ethnic cleansing. I think the morally correct
| thing is for Israel to allow any Gazan that wants to
| leave for the duration of the war to do so, but make real
| assurances that they will be allowed to come back at the
| end of the war. That way the war could truly be against
| Hamas, and not against the Gazan population that is
| living through hell right now.
|
| This is what happens in every other conflict btw - the
| world urges the combatants to allow civilians to flee and
| they become refugees, hopefully returning one day to
| their home.
|
| Other than that, I think that long term, Hamas must be
| removed from power, and unfortunately given the current
| reality, no one is going to do that except for Israel.
| Until Hamas loses power, the Gazan population will
| continue to suffer, and Israel will continue to be
| attacked, as Hamas has made clear. I don't know who could
| plausibly rule afterwards, probably the PA, and of course
| I support an eventual two-state solution to the conflict.
| simion314 wrote:
| Thanks for your time, I wish there was a reddit/forum
| where I could have a discussion like this without the
| extremism killing my will to discuss.
| t0lo wrote:
| I don't use it too much, but I really recommend checking
| out the worldnews subreddit. Each story surrounding the
| me conflict is heavily curated, and the headline is
| chosen to minimise israeli culpability and direct
| discussion to other aspects. The comments are also overly
| vague and misdirecting, often focusing on different
| points and instantly tying in different issues which take
| a whole chain to address unpack, and then reorient
| towards the original discussion, even if having the guise
| of helpful discussion. You'll recognise it right away if
| you know what you're looking for.
|
| The most common comments used to drown out actual
| criticism of israel and how to address its actions are
| actually the "aren't you glad we didn't vote for biden
| because he was bad for palestine" type. They will often
| be 4-5 of the top comments. Similar tactics are sadly
| used when discussing the crimes of the attack by
| emphasising the vileness of the acts in detail (despite
| both groups having plenty, and the world knowing both)
| and twisting the knife to make it too painful for people
| to engage with the discussion to exhaust them.
|
| Let us not forget Israel has had a citizen driven
| hasbarah app which gives citizens "goals" (pre pasted
| propaganda messaged they are expected to post on their
| accounts) every morning to carry out online for over 7
| years (reported by haaretz)
| https://youtu.be/iYzVOlcENZ4?si=IrN3FALmKVvIYkNJ I
| imagine it is much more discreet and efficient now.
| edanm wrote:
| > I'm also pro-Israeli people, but I find their leadership
| (and the settlers) the same as Hamas. No different.
|
| I agree with the sentiment, but I wouldn't go quite so far,
| neither in the goals nor the tactics. Also, "Israeli
| leadership" is a pretty broad term - there are specific
| very bad actors, but the most extremist actors are largely
| a minority (with, unfortunately, far more political power
| than their minority support should give them).
|
| Hamas is bad - current Israeli leadership is bad. But there
| are degrees of badness and I don't think it's correct to
| equate them.
|
| It's also, tactically speaking, a pretty bad way to discuss
| these things, as most on the pro-Israel side will not
| really be receptive to arguments made from people who
| equate the two. Assuming your goal is to actually persuade
| people on the pro-Israeli side.
|
| > As for the first para, I have very close friends who have
| been harassed for expressing support for plight. If you are
| a university student in the US today and said exactly what
| I have said, you can be found guilty as a terrorist-
| sympathizer.
|
| That's pretty awful that that's the case. What can I say?
| I'm against it. Both in the broader sense of supporting
| free speech, and in the specific case here in which
| statements in support of the Palestinian people are
| obviously totally fine (and, IMO, the only moral stance).
| mlindner wrote:
| That's because the Palestine protests are full of people who
| actually are pro-Hamas, and not only that but often rabidly
| antisemite on top of that. Your side linked the two together
| for whatever reason.
| sriram_malhar wrote:
| Wut?
| liorsbg wrote:
| I just re-read the article, and there's no evidence of wrong
| doing. There's a bunch of circumstantial stuff that people are
| choosing to feed into their narrative.
|
| Facebook has some rules and community guidelines, the Israeli
| government recognized some posts that violate those and asked for
| them to be taken down, and Facebook complied in accordance to
| their own rules.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Nothing illeagal. Just dirty.
| edanm wrote:
| The article doesn't even prove that anything is dirty. It's
| just carefully insinuating that these takedown requests are
| wrong, without actually showing any proof of this.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Manipulating the free flow of speech is inherently wrong.
| They are demonstrably censoring pro Palestine content
| without any regard at all to pro Israel content, or even
| pro Israel content that incites or calls for violence
| edanm wrote:
| > Manipulating the free flow of speech is inherently
| wrong.
|
| That is an absurd statement.
|
| Almost every platform has mechanisms for taking down
| content, for good reason. Is asking to take down
| copyrighted content "inherently wrong"? Is asking to take
| down illegal content like child pornography "inherently
| wrong"?
|
| What about someone publishing the name and address of a
| pro-Palestinian activist and saying "let's get together
| and kill him"? Would taking down _that_ be wrong?
|
| Without knowing the actual content that was asked to be
| removed, we can't judge whether it made sense or not.
|
| > They are demonstrably censoring pro Palestine content
| without any regard at all to pro Israel content, or even
| pro Israel content that incites or calls for violence
|
| Is this demonstrated in the article? I might have missed
| it but I didn't see any comparison to how pro-Israel
| content is handled.
| jgil wrote:
| Having a system of rules does not mean that the system is
| inherently well-designed or well-intentioned.
| mlindner wrote:
| The problem is the pro-Palestine movement irrecoverably linked
| themselves to Hamas, a terrorist organization, it's made
| supporting Palestine a toxic position to hold for anyone of any
| significance.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Actually it's the other way around. Fascists in Israel and the
| US worked very hard to make it so that anyone seen to be
| sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians is seen as pro
| Hamas, or pro terrorist.
|
| Apparently there are some that even say the Palestinian flag
| itself is a "terrorist flag" and anyone flying it is also a
| terrorist.
| reissbaker wrote:
| Ah, fascists did the linking? So then you -- presumably not a
| fascist -- denounce Hamas?
| t0lo wrote:
| Actually the Israeli government (Netenyahu) funded Hamas as a
| way to destabilise the Palestinian authority and conflate
| palestinianism with terrorism (EU Policy chief Joesep Borrell
| has stated this on record
| https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-funded-hamas-
| claims-e...)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just because a bunch of war criminals keep saying it, it
| doesn't make it true.
| aristofun wrote:
| Why shouldn't _any_ radical propaganda (unfortunately this is the
| case with most of pro-palestine content, even if for
| understandable or good reasons) be removed?
| sfx77 wrote:
| This is John Spencer the chair or urban warfare studies at West
| Point Academy. The most prestigious military academy in the
| world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25xaPTsmGGE
| isaacremuant wrote:
| If this appals or surprises you but then you call others
| conspiracy theorists when they're disseminating things that don't
| align with your mainstream political views, you need to learn
| from it and stop playing the game.
| overu589 wrote:
| Or there truly are conspiracies against our natural destinies,
| we are merely ignorant and incompetent in identifying what they
| might be.
|
| Covering own asses is natural enough. War crimes and crimes
| against humanity are serious concerns with serious
| considerations, yet what if we cannot ourselves be trusted by
| the very nature of our self lies?
| 486sx33 wrote:
| This is total BS. Release the hostages , screw you Hamas and your
| misinformation campaigns! The holy land belongs to Israel
| sfx77 wrote:
| Globalize the enchilada !
| hammeiam wrote:
| Related: https://www.engadget.com/ex-meta-engineer-sues-company-
| claim...
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