For what it's worth, The Intercept has not been able to verify what this group is claiming.
>A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.
>The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group’s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted.
Who is the judge of “inflammatory” content? It’s just censorship plain and simple. Why not let the truth be told?
Edit: judging by the way the votes keep going up and down there's a yin to the gatekeepers of inflammatory content's yang. These are actions of a rogue state y'all.
There is a network of pro-Israel and even Israeli government affiliated corporations and NGOs that successfully lobby for extreme censorship and social restrictions, such as a ban on sharing and even viewing all Gaza war footage in Australia, and the numerous anti-boycott and anti-organization rules across government organizations in 30+ American states.
Even if it can't be confirmed as of yet, I have no doubt that they are working on or have actually achieved the connections to make this possible.
I often see posts in technical groups im in from people asking for help re-opening their hacked instagram or facebook accounts. Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to speed up the process for friends/family
Reminds me of the so-called “floating population,” a concept especially related to those living outside their “approved/official” province or municipality in China.
> Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.
Does anyone know if that’s a lot? I don’t know either way. I just have a gut feeling that compared to the number of posts made by bots on any political matter it barely matters.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be more efficient to counter with more bots going in the other direction with likes and posts.
You have to measure the effect by summing the reach of every removed post. Removing a post from n account with ten followers is not the same as removing one from an account with ten million followers.
Wouldn’t deleting posts of high-profile users be easily noticed and lead to Streisand effect? The article says it didn’t manage to verify the cited claims.
I'm just a random schmuck with no backchannel connections, but I get Twitter notifications several times a day about accounts being locked or suspended as a result of my report. The internet is awash with explicit antisemitism.
Perhaps because I’m not on a paid subscription, I either never hear from Twitter after a report or they reply along the lines of ”we found no issues with a photo of Hitler doing the Nazi salute in a thread concerning Jews”.
> Among a list of LinkedIn content that Iron Truth told its Telegram followers it had passed along to the company was a post demanding evidence for the beheaded baby claim, categorized by the project as “Terror/Fake.”
Just one instance of that is one too many in my books.
Is there a name for this tactic that people like you use? Where you think you can deflect attention from the disgusting atrocities of October 7 (atrocities which continue to this day as the perpetrators continue to torture hostages) by laser focusing on just one perhaps false claim made during the fog of war?
October 7 was a barbaric act of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping, involving men, women, children and babies. Women were forced to watch their children burned to death before themselves being burned alive. Men had fingers, toes, hands and feet removed before being shot in the head. I couldn't care less if the rumour of beheaded babies is false because there were enough atrocities at the same scale which have been confirmed. Shame on you for deflecting from this fact. Shame on you.
Not only that, but there is more than enough legitimately antisemitic or pro-terrorism content on these platforms for this to be fully legitimate reporting behavior.
It could be 100,000 posts and this would still be near meaningless without actual context on what is being reported. 1000 posts is a joke.
> they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers. …
I wonder if they see how the whole thing backfires. “Look how we conspire with our secret workers integrated into the larger media and tech companies…”
I suppose the idea was that it wouldn’t be made too public.
This should be looked at in light of the problems Israel faces.
Israel is in serious danger of losing US support.[1][2] Outside of the US, there is very little support for what Israel is doing.[3] In the US, support is bought and paid for with political contributions. “If there was no lobby pushing Congress in a particular direction in a really forceful way, the position of the US Congress on the war in Gaza would be fundamentally different.”[4] The social media effort is only a small part of this.
It's not just social media... I think at this point, every newspaper I've read has more or less started saying that Israel is seriously screwing up, and there is especially unanimity in saying that Netanyahu needs to go.
I'm not going to try to enumerate Israel's mistakes, but when you decide to invite a coterie of journalists to the hospital you destroyed to provide proof of your claims that it was actually a hive center of terrorist activity, and all of them come away basically saying "this evidence isn't good enough," then that should be a sign that it's not PR that's the problem of Israel, it's Israeli actions that are the problem that needs addressing.
And on a personal level, I'm ashamed that my government is giving such unconditional support to a country that is acting in that manner.
Americans really have the strangest views of Israeli politics. Bibi is about as moderate as you will find electable and maintain a gov’t there. All the alternates are worse.
I predict Congress will invite Bibi to a joint session of Congress to bolster support and let him trash a sitting Democratic President just like they did to Obama.
Then Bibi can visit Elon again and address any Trump talking points to the enjoyment of alt-nazis on X.
Israel owns our politicians and those who cross them are cut off and via AIPAC they run candidates to replace them.
Losing US support? In what circumstances? We are printing billions to send to Israel with zero oversight.
They launched a $100 million fund to oust “the squad“ & offered $20 million to people to run against them.
Now take a look over on Maui, in La Haina, where US citizens are still having to pay mortgages on the houses that were burned to the ground. Dust & Ash. Where are our aircraft carriers from the pacific fleet bringing infrastructure, supplies, Seabees, Army Corps of engineering and the best minds to rebuild OUR OWN GOD DAMNED communities?
Between AIPAC & DMFI they have hands on most politicians.
Look at the amount of money they’ve spent on Biden—-who proudly states his is a Zionist. Look at Blinken & his background—Google him and his family.
There is zero means to even cobble up a group of politicians to vote against anything regarding Israel.
39 US STATES have laws outlawing BDS or any boycott of Israel if you work for state funded positions. Why? Who funded those laws?
There is zero neutrality & how on earth does our American government portray themselves as diplomats or influencers towards Israel? Or earnest negotiators?
Between our secret military bases there and arms depots and unlimited funding for weapons & aid.
The American public is not aligned with that at all, but that doesn’t matter. PACS & Dark money controls this. Feeding the military industrial complex.
It will take other governments & international courts to change this. We’ll see what happens on Thursday & Friday.
The US has rendered the UN impotent with their security council vetoes.
AIPAC & DMFI should be regulated as foreign lobbyists.
Everything you’ve written is factual and if you wrote it about any other country there would be an outcry. Instead, writing this under your real name will get you fired and could genuinely destroy your life. Isn’t that a bit strange?
> Israel is in serious danger of losing US support
I don't see it happening. Israel has some kind of connection to the US that overrides pretty much anything that Israel does. If you look at any presidential address, Israel's flag is there. I don't think that is just because Israel is our partner. Israel must have something pretty important that we depend on.
Robert Maxwell was Epstein’s mistresses father. We know that Israel has the best in person intel, why would that be limited to the Middle East? Coupled with the long record of nuclear espionage by Israelis it’s not a stretch to think they have a pile of compromat on the NSC and related power groups in the US (Congress, judges, administrators)
They are throwing millions at US politicians left and right, they're not loosing the US support they're loosing the young generation that are on tiktok
>they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers.
And no one gets fired for working in secret for dubious, shady groups. No internal rules were broken, no laws were broken.
I wonder if this group also operates on HN. Two weeks ago I posted a ask HN post that was immediately removed. After seeing that, I concluded that I should drastically reduce my exposure to the media since I think It's just a tool to manipulate.
If you're worried about specific examples, you should email the mods (dang, that is), at hn@ycombinator.com and ask what's going on. I've found dang to be super responsive and thoughtful in his replies when I've had an occasion to ask something about HN's operation.
That's a silly conclusion to those events. HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than israel/palestine.
> HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than Israel/palestine
This does not preclude the effective operation of an astroturfing operation. I would be absolutely shocked if the site were not a target of such a campaign given its reputed influence.
I don't see any Ask HNs on @sigma5's profile. I don't know if flagged or dead posts show up in the profile, but I guess I figured they did (especially if you have showdead on, like I do). It would be a different story if the post were somehow removed entirely, not just downvoted or made dead.
Many of us are in the tech industry. Has anyone seen this sort of thing happen? Or is this something we wouldn't be aware of since it's usually on the "content moderation" side of the house? (I haven't ever worked in social media, so not really familiar with content moderation other than removing the occasional dick pic)
Edit:
> Most of them are product managers, software developers. … They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.
If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history. He ordered the government to no longer contact the social media companies unless something is found to be illegal. This applied to government agencies but does not apply to these groups that might be organized or funded by a foreign government.
I remember browsing through the Twitter Files and finding nothing interesting in them.
Yes, all social media have open channels with law enforcement. That's because social media have legal obligations and when someone comes to a moderator claiming to be a law enforcement officer working on a kidnapping or preventing a terrorist attack and needing time-sensitive help to save lives, you don't want the moderator to have to guess whether that's a real emergency or a hoax.
It's... not a secret. If you live in a democracy, you can quickly find out the name of these channels, they have websites.
Source: I've been part of a moderation team. Not on something that large, though.
> If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history.
I've been part of a moderation team in a (much) smaller context. Most people want to do good work, but in the end, we're all human, so of course anybody could be influenced, especially in such volatile situations.
How far people are actually influenced and in which direction... that's anybody's guess.
only one data point, but fwiw when I worked for Google I found some actively toxic youtube content w/upwards of 500k views that was telling children to off themselves, and despite using my employee back-channel connections the most I was able to get was an eventual "I'm not allowed to do anything about this" from a YouTube moderator, though it seemed to be for technical reasons (all the nasty content was in annotations, which apparently weren't wired into the moderation pipeline). There definitely wasn't a red button for me to hit as an employee to get it taken down.
I used to help run a Facebook page that shared a variety of content. We'd post political things sometimes and we'd get a few angry messages, that was normal.
One incident stands out because we received far more messages than I'd ever seen, it was the time we posted a news story about Netanyahu blaming a Palestinian for the Holocaust. We got several messages about what horrible lying racists we were, that was common to all the messages, but they had one main difference. About half the messages claimed Netanyahu never said what he said. The other half claimed he did say it, but he was right.
Yes, of course. Content management is the expected standard when dealing with crowdsourced content. This includes any data coming from social media. This is subject to essentially private, subjective concerns.
Even if you look into it from the outside you see it happen. This isn't a new phenomenon, it really took off steam around 2014 or 2015. Then when Trump was elected it hit another level.
It was clearly shown in the Twitter files that there are many relations deep into social media companies and that is very likely true for every larger platform.
It would be surprising if there weren't backchannels, because they have become relevant, sadly.
It’s notable that suddenly there’s push back against DEI initiatives, anti-racism and “decolonize” language the moment it was used to criticize Israel.
No, Many criticized these initiatives for years because they are a bundle of bad ideas. And it was predictable that these ideas would also be used to criticise Israel as the alleged oppressor.
It was a predictable as its failings to alleviate prejudice in any form. It is because of the bad ideas, not political allegiance.
I think there's a big difference between the opinion of most of the people in tech and those at the very top (CEOs and VCs). I see wide support for Palestinians with pretty much everyone, but the VCs are almost universally, militantly, Zionist. It's a huge issue that those funding the industry and those working in it (and consuming it) hold such extremely different opinions on an issue as serious as genocide.
Hard not to see these recent stories about backchannel deplatforming and social media accounts getting accidentally-ed and not recall the warnings that this behavior won't stop with just the people/views you prefer not to see. It was all great fun when "election deniers" and lab leak "conspiracy" theorists were getting ban hammered right and left. But now we're where you were told we'd get, and the righteous defenders of establishment narrative have you in the crosshairs.
In the long run, anyone who thinks for themselves will eventually be on the "wrong side" of an issue, and the people who copy the leaders, even when the leaders change, remain "right" through all of them. See also: the huge number of brilliant intellectuals burnt to death by the Church because they applied the principle of making up their own minds about stuff to religion. That means, if there is a policy of "burning" people who are "wrong," it will eventually catch every free thinker.
>I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
Some commenters here ask, "is this guy lying," but I can't help but wonder... was there any correlation between him flagging the post and Facebook's internal misinformation police taking it down on their own? They take down a lot of content every day. It would be pretty funny if the whole crusade was made up of people who could find doomed posts a few minutes before the moderation system does, and so think they're the ones taking things down.
Anyone who has ever posted a "I need help" here on HN and gotten support has also used "backchannels".
An actual concern would be if this "backchannel" turned out to be messaging an insider who acts outside of policy. We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least, but I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
> We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least
That former twitter employee was found guilty of acting as an agent of a foreign government. So far the Israeli lobby has a free pass to meddle in without triggering the same treatment. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-twitter-employee-found...
> I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
The sheer volume of pro-palestine, pro-hamas (those are not the same), pro-islam and anti-jewish sentiment[0] I am bombarded with on Tiktok tells me that either:
* there is no moderation
* There is absurdly overwhelming pro-terrorism and racist sentiment
* The bot/spam farms are in full war mode.
I find it hard to believe that content is being moderated with any pro-israel bias on tiktok.
Ask the pro Palestinian content creators about how many posts get smothered with zero traction, how many get infractions and how many replace the word Israel with invented words to not be blocked by TikTok’s algorithm. How many now have backup accounts because they are threatened with removal.
> Iron Truth members have flagged thousands of posts for removal, from clearly racist or false content to posts that are merely sympathetic to Palestinians.
(emphasis added)
If you aren't connected enough to get Google to fix your email, your business is disrupted. It's unfair but life moves on. Maybe next time you don't use Gmail.
The stakes are much higher here in an actual war / genocide. People are starving, dying, having their homes stolen, etc. and this is an attempt to deny them a voice.
Also FTA:
> I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
American companies should not engage in propaganda for a foreign country. I find it reprehensible that foreign nationals from a nation currently engaged in conflict are deliberately working together to push a foreign agenda on the people of the entire world.
This is way, way different than not being able to use Google apps for business.
I think it would be safer to remove all political posts from social media (both sides) as policy. There is a massive propaganda war on both sides and all it does is amplify sentiment, create further division, hurt more people and compromise security over time.
The press are bad enough at coming up with verified claims from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
Of course our current American social media dictators are pretty lax on doing anything positive for society as a whole while it benefits them.
I have found a lot of pro-Palestinian YouTube videos are put behind warnings pages unnecessarily - the preventing them from going viral.
Here is a great example, this Chris Hayes of MSNBC news segment on the MSNBC YouTube channel where he is incredibly critical of what Israeli leaders are saying:
Here is probably the best example, here is an official IDF video that shows clearly dead bodies and there is no YouTube content warning, just a warning that the IDF put in their video - thus allowing this video to still go viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta7ScT67vQ0
This is extremely concerning and hints at a potential intentional organized suppression of information that is calling out the horrors that are being committed in Gaza.
It has been going on for decades, openly discussed among pro-palestine activists in the US since the early days of social media. One of the first and most reliable "mainstream" users of reddit was israel posting "idf thirst traps" though that nomenclature didn't exist for it back then.
I was a mod of a few semi-popular subs back then and we'd get bombarded by requests to remove comments critical of israel in those threads. A few times messaged by state employees under their real names making their case for a pro-israel mod stance. This was like circa 2008-2011, real ron paul le bacon atheism obama days.
Actually, the fact that Gazans are far better off than Syrians and other Arabs in other conflicts is rarely discussed. Israel is required to destroy Hamas in Gaza as the US was required to destroy Germany and Japan. But Israel has been using hi-tech weaponry rarely discussed even on HN, a tech website.
For example, Iron Sting, a mortar guided by both GPS and laser is used even at night so that when a Hamas terrorist emerges from tunnels, they are immediately blown up. This helps to preserve Gazan civilian lives but not discussed in the media.
I was asked to sign in to watch that video, since it has a content warning. Is that something that happens to other news broadcasts dealing with war footage?
Usually yes, anything that has “on the ground” footage or even b-roll of soldiers conducting maneuvers often comes with content warnings. Even on broadcast news.
Three days ago a number of accounts with massive followings were suspended from Twitter; @zei_squirrel, @AlanRMacLeod, @kenklipperstein, and @TrueAnonPod. They were later reinstated and Twitter claimed its algorithms had misidentified them as spam accounts. Strange how that so frequently happens to pro-Palestinian accounts, but never to Zionist accounts. Clearly, there are well-organized and well-funded (and possbly even state-sponsored) "flagging campaigns" working to remove as much pro-Palestinian content as possible.
whats interesting is that zionists often feel the opposite occurs and its hilarious to watch, as someone’s whose algorithm surfaces content from multiple sides of this conflict based on my friends being on multiple sides of this conflict
every side is saying “but you never see it happening to them!”
“why is nobody discussing this! I know, it’s because they are secretly wishing for our annihilation!”
like get a therapist lol. algorithm driven echo chambers going to echo.
You can see this happen out in the open when Paul Graham (or anyone else) posts statistics about who's been killed, raw footage... he's immediately swarmed by people, some major players in the industry, accusing him of "antisemitism", which it most definitely is not.
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.
From my understanding their numbers have been fairly accurate throughout the years, do you have any specific examples of prior extreme discrepancies? (Because from what I followed, even the US believes those numbers to be accurate, but I would be happy to be corrected)
If this "Iron Truth" is a smoke screen to remove any information that is true and sympathetic to Palestinians through mis-categorizing and mis-labeling and that is not hateful then it is a system of oppression and must be stopped.
If you look at the original article what they're looking for is a mix of false information but also things rebuking false things stated by the IDF. Such as the 40 beheaded babies. That's not false information, it was a lie spread by the IDF.
Of course they are. Anyone who's seen that documentary about Israel meddling in UK politics know that these people have a lot of power that isn't just military.
Eh, meddling in foreign politics is just the name of the game of a globalist world. Not really the panacea of a sin I think you're making it out to be.
The mere existence of intelligence agencies is proof, sending aid to others is also proof (which we know gets intercepted all the time), having military bases or consulates, even more.
If all of the above, and more including the recession of all foreign aid would make me believe its a sin again, doubled with strong isolationist thinking and very strict border control.
People can make documentaries all they want, it doesn't matter, they're crying about things their country does all day, every day, and probably even better than those they're accusing. They just don't want egg on their face. I definitely don't really feel bad for hypocrites.
“We have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,”
If this is confirmed it's bad news, and not just for the Palestinian cause. 'They all work together as part of a cabal' in one of the big anti-semitic tropes. This will harm the cause of Jews everywhere, not just Israeli Jews.
I am surprised that reporting on Twitter works. I've gotten positive action on 150+ very vile posts in the past month. Not posts which go against my views, but posts which clearly violate all TOS and social mores. Call me a Karen, but I report hate speech no matter whom it is directed at. Twitter and Reddit are the only sites which take action.
You can post "Hitler was right, too bad he failed at killing all of the Jews" on Threads, Instagram and Facebook with no punishment. You can post it on Twitter, and it will stay there until somebody reports it, but then that account will be locked until they delete the content. Instagram and Threads will say "We received your report" then never give an update. Facebook will do the same, then eventually either say they reviewed the content and it did not violate community standards, or that the are too busy to review the content.
> If this is true, if Israel was really in cahoots to censor anything pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli, I wish they would do a better job. I would pay $100/month to each of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get a Palestine/Israel-free feed.
Just add mute words in Twitter for Israel, Palestine and a few variants and you can ignore what is going on really easily. I did this for Elon and Musk and it made the platform much more bearable for me.
> Without exaggeration, 99% of all suggested content I get on each of these three platforms is pro-palestinian.
Well, unfortunately social media doesn't stop wars, otherwise it would have stopped by now based on likes and retweets. I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
> I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
The politicians want you to think that, but they are beholden to public opinion and follow the herd. There's a reason that powerful actors spend many resources on manipulating social media.
Your glib, sarcastic, bombastic, inappropriate remark aside, the point is that NOBODY is being censored. Claims of censorship are an age old tactic by groups of all sides to get attention.
Ah, sorry, didn't realize that! He probably only does The Intercept Brazil.
But he is the founder, and you can see his dna in that publication. Same ludicrous ideas and assumptions.
Flags don't come from moderators but from users with enough karma.
I suspect your were downvoted and flagged because you aren't really engaging with the content of the article and dismissing claims made in the article without evidence in a way that doesn't contribute to productive discussion.
"If Palestinians had accepted being killed and colonized, they would have had a state since 1948. Since they weren't okay with that, we will keep killing them and steal their home and land to build illegal settlements".
You can't post like this here. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
This is dang disgusting as it proves that backchannels really are at work here. There are comments denying Palestinians the right to live but they never get dang attention. HN moderation is declining fast.
Tell us what they said or ban me too. You want to make an example, so give the actual example.
Thank you to the reply who told me that you can turn on "showdead" in your profile and then see the removed comment that warranted banning the account and gloating about it.
A dominant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the belief that Jewish people have undue influence over the media, banking, and politics. Based on this conspiracy theory, certain groups and activists discuss the "Jewish Question" and offer different proposals to address it. In the early 21st century, white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis have used the initialism JQ in order to refer to the Jewish question.
I want to challenge you from the other side on this. Americans should not be self-satisfied with the rudimentary level of free speech they have from the first amendment. In practice people are afraid to express good faith disagreement with the ruling ideology in fear of being socially ostracized and losing their job.
Free speech is an interesting topic, it's not an absolute good and the full version is not actually desirable.
I would argue free speech is much more preferred as a citizen of one of these countries as too many are walking around convinced their understanding of facts is truth when it is in truth not.
Free speech is a necessity learned from the past horrors of fascism.
Fascism is literally being empowered today by unrestricted free speech in Western societies - something Western "liberal" politicians are constantly shouting from the rooftops. Nazism took root in the Weimar Republic essentially unmolested. The Germans censor Holocaust denial today. And you're telling me the lesson learned from all this is the virtue of free speech?
That doesn't really fit with my experience in Canada, especially given that Canadian law has robust freedom of expression provisions in the charter of rights and freedoms.
I don't want to start a shouting match and have to prove my case for every country but this is from Wikipedia.
"Hate speech, obscenity, and defamation are common categories of restricted speech in Canada. During the 1970 October Crisis, the War Measures Act was used to limit speech from the militant political opposition."
> The concept of free speech as a value that is good in and of itself is something that barely exists outside of the USA.
That's demonstrably false; rights like free speech are enshrined in societies all over the world. Other countries don't have a First Amendment, but they have free speech, free press, etc.
don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well what was meant. We are talking about free speech _absolutism_, an extremist viewpoint with the most traction in the United States.
So your argument is "other countries don't care about free speech, America should be more like other countries? This is a bizarre take, I was with you up until the last word.
Saying Israel set this up is quite misleading. This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
This is a grassroots organization doing this and in fact its funding and support mostly comes from Americans, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the Israeli-American Council.
Your rhetorical point about Alex Jones is contradicted within your own post. Alex Jones does not receive grant funding from the US government, but this group does receive a portion of its funding from the Israeli government.
James Bamford has written at least 3 good articles about Israeli government influence of US civil society (social media) and elections (the leak of the DNC hack materials), all in the last year or so, at The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/authors/james-bamford/
And until extremely recently, the IDF and associated arms of the state have been engaging in even more deceptive actions, such as creating sock-puppet accounts to bolster support for government policy, targeting Israelis themselves: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-admits-psychological-warfa...
It's impossible to be certain of anything related to these highly unaccountable and secret operations, but the "grain" of truth runs very much in the direction of Israeli state interference, with quite wide scope -- but effectiveness unknown.
> This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
Who gives a damn about affiliation? What matters is the material effect on the world, and it's hard to find a more notorious propaganda movement in the world than hasbara
And it's important to not make such claims lightly. But organised crowdsourcing of public discussion is happening in the open under the guise of "counter dangerous trends online" or "making sure Israel is presented fairly and accurately". Any propagandist can use similar justifications for what is bordering on censorship.
The sad fact is this will be used by anti-semites, but that's precisely why the State of Israel (Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, intelligence or others) should NOT engage in it.
Archived: http://web.archive.org/web/20240110185343/https://theinterce...
For what it's worth, The Intercept has not been able to verify what this group is claiming.
>A SMALL GROUP of volunteers from Israel’s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn’t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project’s founder told The Intercept.
>The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group’s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted.
Who is the judge of “inflammatory” content? It’s just censorship plain and simple. Why not let the truth be told?
Edit: judging by the way the votes keep going up and down there's a yin to the gatekeepers of inflammatory content's yang. These are actions of a rogue state y'all.
>Why not let the truth be told?
Telling the truth is going to always be against someone's interest. If that someone can control the medium, he will do it.
There is a network of pro-Israel and even Israeli government affiliated corporations and NGOs that successfully lobby for extreme censorship and social restrictions, such as a ban on sharing and even viewing all Gaza war footage in Australia, and the numerous anti-boycott and anti-organization rules across government organizations in 30+ American states.
Even if it can't be confirmed as of yet, I have no doubt that they are working on or have actually achieved the connections to make this possible.
Although this is in the grand scheme of things hard to verify. Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation?
> Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation?
People who don't agree with what their coworkers are doing and want to be whistleblowers.
Getting those people to reach out to you is a huge part of investigative journalism.
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>Who is going to admit to that? To a news organisation?
Stranger things have been admitted to news organizations.
At the same time, people do make stuff up on the internet. I don't think its fair to treat unverified rumour as fact.
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I thought this was common knowledge?
I often see posts in technical groups im in from people asking for help re-opening their hacked instagram or facebook accounts. Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to speed up the process for friends/family
> Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to speed up the process for friends/family
You can also sleep with those employees to speed it up [1].
[1]: https://www.dailydot.com/irl/kittylixo-onlyfans-instagram-em...
Ah, god bless cloud feudalism and nepotism...
Reminds me of the so-called “floating population,” a concept especially related to those living outside their “approved/official” province or municipality in China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_population
> cloud feudalism
nice
Correct. I did exactly that for my friend.
> Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.
Does anyone know if that’s a lot? I don’t know either way. I just have a gut feeling that compared to the number of posts made by bots on any political matter it barely matters.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be more efficient to counter with more bots going in the other direction with likes and posts.
My experience is that it’s a drop in the bucket.
But, there’s a power law distribution for virality, so removing the top 1000 most viral posts might still be impactful.
You have to measure the effect by summing the reach of every removed post. Removing a post from n account with ten followers is not the same as removing one from an account with ten million followers.
Wouldn’t deleting posts of high-profile users be easily noticed and lead to Streisand effect? The article says it didn’t manage to verify the cited claims.
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Deleting 1000 of my posts: inconsequential. Deleting 1000 of Musk's posts: inconceivable.
I'm just a random schmuck with no backchannel connections, but I get Twitter notifications several times a day about accounts being locked or suspended as a result of my report. The internet is awash with explicit antisemitism.
Perhaps because I’m not on a paid subscription, I either never hear from Twitter after a report or they reply along the lines of ”we found no issues with a photo of Hitler doing the Nazi salute in a thread concerning Jews”.
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> Among a list of LinkedIn content that Iron Truth told its Telegram followers it had passed along to the company was a post demanding evidence for the beheaded baby claim, categorized by the project as “Terror/Fake.”
Just one instance of that is one too many in my books.
https://www.declassifieduk.org/beheaded-babies-how-uk-media-...
Is there a name for this tactic that people like you use? Where you think you can deflect attention from the disgusting atrocities of October 7 (atrocities which continue to this day as the perpetrators continue to torture hostages) by laser focusing on just one perhaps false claim made during the fog of war?
October 7 was a barbaric act of murder, torture, rape and kidnapping, involving men, women, children and babies. Women were forced to watch their children burned to death before themselves being burned alive. Men had fingers, toes, hands and feet removed before being shot in the head. I couldn't care less if the rumour of beheaded babies is false because there were enough atrocities at the same scale which have been confirmed. Shame on you for deflecting from this fact. Shame on you.
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1,000 posts is absolutely nothing. If that's all they removed then I don't get why this article even exists.
Not only that, but there is more than enough legitimately antisemitic or pro-terrorism content on these platforms for this to be fully legitimate reporting behavior.
It could be 100,000 posts and this would still be near meaningless without actual context on what is being reported. 1000 posts is a joke.
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My thoughts exactly. TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook (Reddit as well) probably add more than 1000 posts each on this topic every hour.
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> they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers. …
I wonder if they see how the whole thing backfires. “Look how we conspire with our secret workers integrated into the larger media and tech companies…”
I suppose the idea was that it wouldn’t be made too public.
This should be looked at in light of the problems Israel faces. Israel is in serious danger of losing US support.[1][2] Outside of the US, there is very little support for what Israel is doing.[3] In the US, support is bought and paid for with political contributions. “If there was no lobby pushing Congress in a particular direction in a really forceful way, the position of the US Congress on the war in Gaza would be fundamentally different.”[4] The social media effort is only a small part of this.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us-public-support-israel-drops...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/31/us/politics/us-israel-ham...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/12/united-nations...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/10/congress-mem...
It's not just social media... I think at this point, every newspaper I've read has more or less started saying that Israel is seriously screwing up, and there is especially unanimity in saying that Netanyahu needs to go.
I'm not going to try to enumerate Israel's mistakes, but when you decide to invite a coterie of journalists to the hospital you destroyed to provide proof of your claims that it was actually a hive center of terrorist activity, and all of them come away basically saying "this evidence isn't good enough," then that should be a sign that it's not PR that's the problem of Israel, it's Israeli actions that are the problem that needs addressing.
And on a personal level, I'm ashamed that my government is giving such unconditional support to a country that is acting in that manner.
Sorry, which hospital are you referring to?
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Americans really have the strangest views of Israeli politics. Bibi is about as moderate as you will find electable and maintain a gov’t there. All the alternates are worse.
I predict Congress will invite Bibi to a joint session of Congress to bolster support and let him trash a sitting Democratic President just like they did to Obama.
Then Bibi can visit Elon again and address any Trump talking points to the enjoyment of alt-nazis on X.
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Israel owns our politicians and those who cross them are cut off and via AIPAC they run candidates to replace them.
Losing US support? In what circumstances? We are printing billions to send to Israel with zero oversight.
They launched a $100 million fund to oust “the squad“ & offered $20 million to people to run against them.
Now take a look over on Maui, in La Haina, where US citizens are still having to pay mortgages on the houses that were burned to the ground. Dust & Ash. Where are our aircraft carriers from the pacific fleet bringing infrastructure, supplies, Seabees, Army Corps of engineering and the best minds to rebuild OUR OWN GOD DAMNED communities?
Between AIPAC & DMFI they have hands on most politicians.
Look at the amount of money they’ve spent on Biden—-who proudly states his is a Zionist. Look at Blinken & his background—Google him and his family.
There is zero means to even cobble up a group of politicians to vote against anything regarding Israel.
39 US STATES have laws outlawing BDS or any boycott of Israel if you work for state funded positions. Why? Who funded those laws?
There is zero neutrality & how on earth does our American government portray themselves as diplomats or influencers towards Israel? Or earnest negotiators?
Between our secret military bases there and arms depots and unlimited funding for weapons & aid.
The American public is not aligned with that at all, but that doesn’t matter. PACS & Dark money controls this. Feeding the military industrial complex.
It will take other governments & international courts to change this. We’ll see what happens on Thursday & Friday.
The US has rendered the UN impotent with their security council vetoes.
AIPAC & DMFI should be regulated as foreign lobbyists.
Everything you’ve written is factual and if you wrote it about any other country there would be an outcry. Instead, writing this under your real name will get you fired and could genuinely destroy your life. Isn’t that a bit strange?
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> Israel is in serious danger of losing US support
I don't see it happening. Israel has some kind of connection to the US that overrides pretty much anything that Israel does. If you look at any presidential address, Israel's flag is there. I don't think that is just because Israel is our partner. Israel must have something pretty important that we depend on.
Hopefully it’ll get just too much to stomach (although that point should have been reached a long time ago).
Robert Maxwell was Epstein’s mistresses father. We know that Israel has the best in person intel, why would that be limited to the Middle East? Coupled with the long record of nuclear espionage by Israelis it’s not a stretch to think they have a pile of compromat on the NSC and related power groups in the US (Congress, judges, administrators)
They are throwing millions at US politicians left and right, they're not loosing the US support they're loosing the young generation that are on tiktok
Good! They should be in serious danger of losing US support!
>they have connections to the policy team,” Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers.
And no one gets fired for working in secret for dubious, shady groups. No internal rules were broken, no laws were broken.
I wonder if this group also operates on HN. Two weeks ago I posted a ask HN post that was immediately removed. After seeing that, I concluded that I should drastically reduce my exposure to the media since I think It's just a tool to manipulate.
If you're worried about specific examples, you should email the mods (dang, that is), at hn@ycombinator.com and ask what's going on. I've found dang to be super responsive and thoughtful in his replies when I've had an occasion to ask something about HN's operation.
That's a silly conclusion to those events. HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than israel/palestine.
> HN basically has a policy of flagging anything involving politics, including things much less controversial than Israel/palestine
This does not preclude the effective operation of an astroturfing operation. I would be absolutely shocked if the site were not a target of such a campaign given its reputed influence.
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I don't see any Ask HNs on @sigma5's profile. I don't know if flagged or dead posts show up in the profile, but I guess I figured they did (especially if you have showdead on, like I do). It would be a different story if the post were somehow removed entirely, not just downvoted or made dead.
I've seen plenty of "pro israeli" threads get flagged immediately.
It's just a divisive topic.
What was it about?
Many of us are in the tech industry. Has anyone seen this sort of thing happen? Or is this something we wouldn't be aware of since it's usually on the "content moderation" side of the house? (I haven't ever worked in social media, so not really familiar with content moderation other than removing the occasional dick pic)
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> Most of them are product managers, software developers. … They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.
If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history. He ordered the government to no longer contact the social media companies unless something is found to be illegal. This applied to government agencies but does not apply to these groups that might be organized or funded by a foreign government.
I remember browsing through the Twitter Files and finding nothing interesting in them.
Yes, all social media have open channels with law enforcement. That's because social media have legal obligations and when someone comes to a moderator claiming to be a law enforcement officer working on a kidnapping or preventing a terrorist attack and needing time-sensitive help to save lives, you don't want the moderator to have to guess whether that's a real emergency or a hoax.
It's... not a secret. If you live in a democracy, you can quickly find out the name of these channels, they have websites.
Source: I've been part of a moderation team. Not on something that large, though.
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> If you look at the extensive reporting done by racket.news around the Twitter Files and Facebook Files, you can learn about the direct back channels many government agencies had to directly report thousands of people to be banned or shadow banned. A federal court judge concluded that it was the biggest violation of free speech in modern history.
There was no such thing in the Twitter files.
I've been part of a moderation team in a (much) smaller context. Most people want to do good work, but in the end, we're all human, so of course anybody could be influenced, especially in such volatile situations.
How far people are actually influenced and in which direction... that's anybody's guess.
What if there is pressure from bosses, from outsiders, socially. What if they say, 'are you supporting terrorists?'
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It’s cognitive dissonance to believe that politicians can be bought and social media companies or their content moderation teams/employees cannot.
only one data point, but fwiw when I worked for Google I found some actively toxic youtube content w/upwards of 500k views that was telling children to off themselves, and despite using my employee back-channel connections the most I was able to get was an eventual "I'm not allowed to do anything about this" from a YouTube moderator, though it seemed to be for technical reasons (all the nasty content was in annotations, which apparently weren't wired into the moderation pipeline). There definitely wasn't a red button for me to hit as an employee to get it taken down.
That seems 4chan levels of vile.
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I used to help run a Facebook page that shared a variety of content. We'd post political things sometimes and we'd get a few angry messages, that was normal.
One incident stands out because we received far more messages than I'd ever seen, it was the time we posted a news story about Netanyahu blaming a Palestinian for the Holocaust. We got several messages about what horrible lying racists we were, that was common to all the messages, but they had one main difference. About half the messages claimed Netanyahu never said what he said. The other half claimed he did say it, but he was right.
> Has anyone seen this sort of thing happen?
Yes, of course. Content management is the expected standard when dealing with crowdsourced content. This includes any data coming from social media. This is subject to essentially private, subjective concerns.
Even if you look into it from the outside you see it happen. This isn't a new phenomenon, it really took off steam around 2014 or 2015. Then when Trump was elected it hit another level.
It was clearly shown in the Twitter files that there are many relations deep into social media companies and that is very likely true for every larger platform.
It would be surprising if there weren't backchannels, because they have become relevant, sadly.
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It’s notable that suddenly there’s push back against DEI initiatives, anti-racism and “decolonize” language the moment it was used to criticize Israel.
No, Many criticized these initiatives for years because they are a bundle of bad ideas. And it was predictable that these ideas would also be used to criticise Israel as the alleged oppressor.
It was a predictable as its failings to alleviate prejudice in any form. It is because of the bad ideas, not political allegiance.
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If the discussion here is indicative then it's very clear in which direction the tech world is biased on this issue.
I think there's a big difference between the opinion of most of the people in tech and those at the very top (CEOs and VCs). I see wide support for Palestinians with pretty much everyone, but the VCs are almost universally, militantly, Zionist. It's a huge issue that those funding the industry and those working in it (and consuming it) hold such extremely different opinions on an issue as serious as genocide.
In my anecdotal point of view, it's the opposite. Pro-israel content is being censored and Palestinian content is dominant.
I find this article failed to verify this claim at all.
I can find nothing elsewhere about 'iron truth'. It seems to be a creation by this website.
Then I goto their main page right now.
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/11/dnc-biden-israel-palesti...
Also multiple entries of 'Israel's war on Gaza'
Which is simply not factually correct. The palestinians are the ones who declared war and invaded Israel. Israel is in a defensive war.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-intercept/
I would say they being far left and low factuality seems to have been proven here.
Weird... Things are starting to smell a lot like 2020, again...
Hard not to see these recent stories about backchannel deplatforming and social media accounts getting accidentally-ed and not recall the warnings that this behavior won't stop with just the people/views you prefer not to see. It was all great fun when "election deniers" and lab leak "conspiracy" theorists were getting ban hammered right and left. But now we're where you were told we'd get, and the righteous defenders of establishment narrative have you in the crosshairs.
In the long run, anyone who thinks for themselves will eventually be on the "wrong side" of an issue, and the people who copy the leaders, even when the leaders change, remain "right" through all of them. See also: the huge number of brilliant intellectuals burnt to death by the Church because they applied the principle of making up their own minds about stuff to religion. That means, if there is a policy of "burning" people who are "wrong," it will eventually catch every free thinker.
Seems related to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38930084
Why they don't go to the next level and inject their own propaganda into social networks, like it's coming from others?
>I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
Some commenters here ask, "is this guy lying," but I can't help but wonder... was there any correlation between him flagging the post and Facebook's internal misinformation police taking it down on their own? They take down a lot of content every day. It would be pretty funny if the whole crusade was made up of people who could find doomed posts a few minutes before the moderation system does, and so think they're the ones taking things down.
this is still technology I presume?
https://www.jpost.com/Features/In-Thespotlight/Want-to-help-...
Anyone who has ever posted a "I need help" here on HN and gotten support has also used "backchannels".
An actual concern would be if this "backchannel" turned out to be messaging an insider who acts outside of policy. We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least, but I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
> We know the Saudis and other state backed groups had insiders in Twitter at least
That former twitter employee was found guilty of acting as an agent of a foreign government. So far the Israeli lobby has a free pass to meddle in without triggering the same treatment. See https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-twitter-employee-found...
> I'm much less inclined to believe there are any pro-israel insiders in say, TikTok.
The sheer volume of pro-palestine, pro-hamas (those are not the same), pro-islam and anti-jewish sentiment[0] I am bombarded with on Tiktok tells me that either:
* there is no moderation
* There is absurdly overwhelming pro-terrorism and racist sentiment
* The bot/spam farms are in full war mode.
I find it hard to believe that content is being moderated with any pro-israel bias on tiktok.
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/JBC8EL3
Ask the pro Palestinian content creators about how many posts get smothered with zero traction, how many get infractions and how many replace the word Israel with invented words to not be blocked by TikTok’s algorithm. How many now have backup accounts because they are threatened with removal.
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FTA:
> Iron Truth members have flagged thousands of posts for removal, from clearly racist or false content to posts that are merely sympathetic to Palestinians.
(emphasis added)
If you aren't connected enough to get Google to fix your email, your business is disrupted. It's unfair but life moves on. Maybe next time you don't use Gmail.
The stakes are much higher here in an actual war / genocide. People are starving, dying, having their homes stolen, etc. and this is an attempt to deny them a voice.
Also FTA:
> I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.”
American companies should not engage in propaganda for a foreign country. I find it reprehensible that foreign nationals from a nation currently engaged in conflict are deliberately working together to push a foreign agenda on the people of the entire world.
This is way, way different than not being able to use Google apps for business.
I think it would be safer to remove all political posts from social media (both sides) as policy. There is a massive propaganda war on both sides and all it does is amplify sentiment, create further division, hurt more people and compromise security over time.
The press are bad enough at coming up with verified claims from the right people. Social media is 1000x worse.
Of course our current American social media dictators are pretty lax on doing anything positive for society as a whole while it benefits them.
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TikTok has an office in Tel-Aviv.
They all do.
Lots of open positions https://careers.tiktok.com/m/position?keywords=content%20mod... If you really need an insider, you can probably just recruit someone who's already working there, but getting someone new in is also unlikely to be difficult.
I have found a lot of pro-Palestinian YouTube videos are put behind warnings pages unnecessarily - the preventing them from going viral.
Here is a great example, this Chris Hayes of MSNBC news segment on the MSNBC YouTube channel where he is incredibly critical of what Israeli leaders are saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WTHVseqZdw
Notice the warning says:
"The following content may contain graphic or violent imagery"
There are no such warnings on the official MSNBC website on this video, thus it is specific to YouTube: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/chris-hayes-the-war-in-...
I've seen this happen on another video, one calling on the games industry to be supportive of the Palestinian struggle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDB_wYdn5f4
You can find a ton of videos on YouTube with similar content or worse that the Chris Hayes's video that is critical of Israel, but they are allowed: https://www.youtube.com/@msnbc/search?query=israel
Here is probably the best example, here is an official IDF video that shows clearly dead bodies and there is no YouTube content warning, just a warning that the IDF put in their video - thus allowing this video to still go viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta7ScT67vQ0
This is extremely concerning and hints at a potential intentional organized suppression of information that is calling out the horrors that are being committed in Gaza.
It has been going on for decades, openly discussed among pro-palestine activists in the US since the early days of social media. One of the first and most reliable "mainstream" users of reddit was israel posting "idf thirst traps" though that nomenclature didn't exist for it back then.
I was a mod of a few semi-popular subs back then and we'd get bombarded by requests to remove comments critical of israel in those threads. A few times messaged by state employees under their real names making their case for a pro-israel mod stance. This was like circa 2008-2011, real ron paul le bacon atheism obama days.
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This is extremely well known and the tooling has been in place and optimized for years.
Usually it is aimed at “correct” targets so nobody cares.
It's literally been in the headlines off basically any news outlets for the last few months.
Actually, the fact that Gazans are far better off than Syrians and other Arabs in other conflicts is rarely discussed. Israel is required to destroy Hamas in Gaza as the US was required to destroy Germany and Japan. But Israel has been using hi-tech weaponry rarely discussed even on HN, a tech website. For example, Iron Sting, a mortar guided by both GPS and laser is used even at night so that when a Hamas terrorist emerges from tunnels, they are immediately blown up. This helps to preserve Gazan civilian lives but not discussed in the media.
Iron Sting Mortar | How it Works | Israel Gaza https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UueA6HIA0Pg
Rarely mentioned by the media is that Hamas builds command and control centers under hospitals intentionally putting civilians in harms way.
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Youtube has a long running partnership with the ADL, an influential zionist organisation in America.
Here's an article from 2008, from the Jersualem Post.
https://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-News/ADL-YouTube-l...
I was asked to sign in to watch that video, since it has a content warning. Is that something that happens to other news broadcasts dealing with war footage?
Mostly no, a ton of these videos have graphic content, but do not have the critical aspects of Chris Hayes' video: https://www.youtube.com/@msnbc/search?query=israel
Usually yes, anything that has “on the ground” footage or even b-roll of soldiers conducting maneuvers often comes with content warnings. Even on broadcast news.
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Three days ago a number of accounts with massive followings were suspended from Twitter; @zei_squirrel, @AlanRMacLeod, @kenklipperstein, and @TrueAnonPod. They were later reinstated and Twitter claimed its algorithms had misidentified them as spam accounts. Strange how that so frequently happens to pro-Palestinian accounts, but never to Zionist accounts. Clearly, there are well-organized and well-funded (and possbly even state-sponsored) "flagging campaigns" working to remove as much pro-Palestinian content as possible.
whats interesting is that zionists often feel the opposite occurs and its hilarious to watch, as someone’s whose algorithm surfaces content from multiple sides of this conflict based on my friends being on multiple sides of this conflict
every side is saying “but you never see it happening to them!”
“why is nobody discussing this! I know, it’s because they are secretly wishing for our annihilation!”
like get a therapist lol. algorithm driven echo chambers going to echo.
You can see this happen out in the open when Paul Graham (or anyone else) posts statistics about who's been killed, raw footage... he's immediately swarmed by people, some major players in the industry, accusing him of "antisemitism", which it most definitely is not.
paulg was among those specifically targeted by high-profile pro-idf groups as part of the "information wars" in this latest conflict.
https://nitter.net/paulg/status/1733146138226614465 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1733146138226614465
It was certainly interesting to see Paul Graham, famous for his skepticism of China's COVID numbers, immediately embrace the Gaza Ministry of Health's death toll, without understanding how they themselves generate it.
From my understanding their numbers have been fairly accurate throughout the years, do you have any specific examples of prior extreme discrepancies? (Because from what I followed, even the US believes those numbers to be accurate, but I would be happy to be corrected)
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-officials-have-gro...
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...is there any reason to doubt these figures? Is there any reason to suspect that Hamas is any less trustworthy than the Israeli government is?
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If this "Iron Truth" is a smoke screen to remove any information that is true and sympathetic to Palestinians through mis-categorizing and mis-labeling and that is not hateful then it is a system of oppression and must be stopped.
Ok, now what if it is about removing false information?
Do you support it now?
If you look at the original article what they're looking for is a mix of false information but also things rebuking false things stated by the IDF. Such as the 40 beheaded babies. That's not false information, it was a lie spread by the IDF.
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Of course they are. Anyone who's seen that documentary about Israel meddling in UK politics know that these people have a lot of power that isn't just military.
"The Labour Files" is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiODoWurA64
Eh, meddling in foreign politics is just the name of the game of a globalist world. Not really the panacea of a sin I think you're making it out to be.
The mere existence of intelligence agencies is proof, sending aid to others is also proof (which we know gets intercepted all the time), having military bases or consulates, even more.
If all of the above, and more including the recession of all foreign aid would make me believe its a sin again, doubled with strong isolationist thinking and very strict border control.
People can make documentaries all they want, it doesn't matter, they're crying about things their country does all day, every day, and probably even better than those they're accusing. They just don't want egg on their face. I definitely don't really feel bad for hypocrites.
“We have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,”
If this is confirmed it's bad news, and not just for the Palestinian cause. 'They all work together as part of a cabal' in one of the big anti-semitic tropes. This will harm the cause of Jews everywhere, not just Israeli Jews.
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How can you report content on the platform without visiting the site? Are you using Dataminr or some other tool used by government agencies?
It can be that I do not go there voluntarily but if I end up there them I'm going to report racist and genocidal content presented there.
I am surprised that reporting on Twitter works. I've gotten positive action on 150+ very vile posts in the past month. Not posts which go against my views, but posts which clearly violate all TOS and social mores. Call me a Karen, but I report hate speech no matter whom it is directed at. Twitter and Reddit are the only sites which take action.
You can post "Hitler was right, too bad he failed at killing all of the Jews" on Threads, Instagram and Facebook with no punishment. You can post it on Twitter, and it will stay there until somebody reports it, but then that account will be locked until they delete the content. Instagram and Threads will say "We received your report" then never give an update. Facebook will do the same, then eventually either say they reviewed the content and it did not violate community standards, or that the are too busy to review the content.
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> If this is true, if Israel was really in cahoots to censor anything pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli, I wish they would do a better job. I would pay $100/month to each of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to get a Palestine/Israel-free feed.
Just add mute words in Twitter for Israel, Palestine and a few variants and you can ignore what is going on really easily. I did this for Elon and Musk and it made the platform much more bearable for me.
> Without exaggeration, 99% of all suggested content I get on each of these three platforms is pro-palestinian.
Well, unfortunately social media doesn't stop wars, otherwise it would have stopped by now based on likes and retweets. I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
> I think a lot of people think it does, but social media has little affect on politicians.
The politicians want you to think that, but they are beholden to public opinion and follow the herd. There's a reason that powerful actors spend many resources on manipulating social media.
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Your glib, sarcastic, bombastic, inappropriate remark aside, the point is that NOBODY is being censored. Claims of censorship are an age old tactic by groups of all sides to get attention.
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Calling a defensive war genocide is a demonization of Israel
(rockets targeted at civilians are continously being fired from inside the Gaza Strip)
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Russian propaganda such as what? Do you have any specific examples?
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Huh? Greenwald left The Intercept in a big huff when they pushed back on his attempts to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intercept#Resignation_of_G...
Ah, sorry, didn't realize that! He probably only does The Intercept Brazil. But he is the founder, and you can see his dna in that publication. Same ludicrous ideas and assumptions.
They're not removing propaganda only, they are also censoring pro Palestinian views in order to better enable their own propaganda.
Do not see how this shadow group of techies forcing their views on the world can be seen as a good thing.
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The article refers to posts simply sympathetic to the Palestinians. Are they trash too?
Flags don't come from moderators but from users with enough karma.
I suspect your were downvoted and flagged because you aren't really engaging with the content of the article and dismissing claims made in the article without evidence in a way that doesn't contribute to productive discussion.
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"If Palestinians had accepted being killed and colonized, they would have had a state since 1948. Since they weren't okay with that, we will keep killing them and steal their home and land to build illegal settlements".
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You can't post like this here. I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
That was fast! Are you notified on keywords or just happened by? It seems like an LLM assistant could make this task much easier.
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This is dang disgusting as it proves that backchannels really are at work here. There are comments denying Palestinians the right to live but they never get dang attention. HN moderation is declining fast.
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Tell us what they said or ban me too. You want to make an example, so give the actual example.
Thank you to the reply who told me that you can turn on "showdead" in your profile and then see the removed comment that warranted banning the account and gloating about it.
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I thought I was on Hacker News, not 4Chan!
From Wikipedia:
A dominant anti-Semitic conspiracy theory is the belief that Jewish people have undue influence over the media, banking, and politics. Based on this conspiracy theory, certain groups and activists discuss the "Jewish Question" and offer different proposals to address it. In the early 21st century, white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis have used the initialism JQ in order to refer to the Jewish question.
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I want to challenge you from the other side on this. Americans should not be self-satisfied with the rudimentary level of free speech they have from the first amendment. In practice people are afraid to express good faith disagreement with the ruling ideology in fear of being socially ostracized and losing their job.
Free speech is an interesting topic, it's not an absolute good and the full version is not actually desirable.
I would argue free speech is much more preferred as a citizen of one of these countries as too many are walking around convinced their understanding of facts is truth when it is in truth not.
Free speech is a necessity learned from the past horrors of fascism.
Fascism is literally being empowered today by unrestricted free speech in Western societies - something Western "liberal" politicians are constantly shouting from the rooftops. Nazism took root in the Weimar Republic essentially unmolested. The Germans censor Holocaust denial today. And you're telling me the lesson learned from all this is the virtue of free speech?
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That doesn't really fit with my experience in Canada, especially given that Canadian law has robust freedom of expression provisions in the charter of rights and freedoms.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
I don't want to start a shouting match and have to prove my case for every country but this is from Wikipedia.
"Hate speech, obscenity, and defamation are common categories of restricted speech in Canada. During the 1970 October Crisis, the War Measures Act was used to limit speech from the militant political opposition."
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> The concept of free speech as a value that is good in and of itself is something that barely exists outside of the USA.
That's demonstrably false; rights like free speech are enshrined in societies all over the world. Other countries don't have a First Amendment, but they have free speech, free press, etc.
don't be disingenuous. You know perfectly well what was meant. We are talking about free speech _absolutism_, an extremist viewpoint with the most traction in the United States.
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So your argument is "other countries don't care about free speech, America should be more like other countries? This is a bizarre take, I was with you up until the last word.
No, I am firmly in the free-speech camp. Which is why 'truth' is in quotes...
Maybe they're afraid to be honest about which they prefer?
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Sounds like the Twitter Files. Better Censor this comment.
Israel set up troll farms years ago to attack, debate, downvote and report opposing content. It's the front channel.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/inside-israels-millio...
Saying Israel set this up is quite misleading. This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
This is a grassroots organization doing this and in fact its funding and support mostly comes from Americans, such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and the Israeli-American Council.
Your rhetorical point about Alex Jones is contradicted within your own post. Alex Jones does not receive grant funding from the US government, but this group does receive a portion of its funding from the Israeli government.
James Bamford has written at least 3 good articles about Israeli government influence of US civil society (social media) and elections (the leak of the DNC hack materials), all in the last year or so, at The Nation: https://www.thenation.com/authors/james-bamford/
And until extremely recently, the IDF and associated arms of the state have been engaging in even more deceptive actions, such as creating sock-puppet accounts to bolster support for government policy, targeting Israelis themselves: https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-admits-psychological-warfa...
It's impossible to be certain of anything related to these highly unaccountable and secret operations, but the "grain" of truth runs very much in the direction of Israeli state interference, with quite wide scope -- but effectiveness unknown.
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> This group is no more affiliated with Israel than Alex Jones is affiliated with the U.S.
Who gives a damn about affiliation? What matters is the material effect on the world, and it's hard to find a more notorious propaganda movement in the world than hasbara
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This is extremely concerning if true.
Your source is not reliable for any information regarding any topic, but is especially unreliable for topics involving Jews or Israel.
act.il was a pretty well known effort, there are multiple sources that describe the same thing and it wasn't exactly a secret.
Then see the wikipedia page on that or on Hasbara fellowships.
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And it's important to not make such claims lightly. But organised crowdsourcing of public discussion is happening in the open under the guise of "counter dangerous trends online" or "making sure Israel is presented fairly and accurately". Any propagandist can use similar justifications for what is bordering on censorship.
The sad fact is this will be used by anti-semites, but that's precisely why the State of Israel (Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, intelligence or others) should NOT engage in it.