Comment by GrumpySloth
1 year ago
> 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.
Yeah, but the reposts of it would be from lower-reach follower accounts that would also potentially be vulnerable to deletion if they spread
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”.
I flag most posts that I disagree with, don't understand, or simply don't like, and the success rate is hit-or-miss, but not in any kind of logical way, which just inspires me to cast as wide a net as possible. I call it stochastic decluttering.
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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.
Nearly every single thing you have just listed as "things that happened on Oct 7" have ALREADY been debunked and shown by INDEPENDENT JOURNALISTS to be a lie.
Mutilation. False. Burnings (except by Israeli tank shells and Hellfire missiles). False. Beheaded babies (the one thing you did admit to). False.
You just PROVED the entire raison d'etre of the article, and of the poster you responded to.
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Even if the October 7th attacks had been worse than the rumours, does anyone really think that justifies killing thousands of innocent people including women and children, displacing over a million, destroying hospitals and cutting off water and food supply?
When there is a school shooting, should it be punished by a massive bombing campaign on the town where the perpetrator lives?
These atrocities are just plane wrong, no matter the motivation. Pointing out the crimes of Israel is not the same as supporting violence by Hamas. Both sides are in the wrong for their treatment of innocent civilians, however Israel is entirely to blame for their illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
It's called "intellectual honesty". It's not a tactic, it's more like a strategy.
One crime doesn't justify or deflect from another. Simple as that. And to exploit the victims of the Hamas attacks to commit ethnic cleansing is not honoring them, it's really just exploiting them for jingoistic purposes, and to dehumanize all Palestinians. We've seen so much of that we won't forget for decades.
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.
I dont think Israel is that interested in legitimate anti semitism. Orban ran an election campaign centered aroud an anti semitic trope and he gets along with Israel just fine, for instance.
Their primary target is anti-racist criticism of the state, the apartheid, the war and the genocide. All labeled as anti semitism despite being fundamentally antiracist and running counter to a racist Israeli narrative.
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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.
You have to multiply the post count by their reach. If it is a strong exponent power law the top 1000 may be the vast majority of what people see on the topic, but they may apply greater scrutiny in removing posts with high reach too.
I suspect that we're closer to 1,000 per second.