What was that app they had in the 2000s? You used to install it into your computer and had some sort of megaphone icon in the app tray and would alert you whenever anyone was talking about Israel online.
Well, that's because the premise of actions or policies being "right" or "wrong" is very simplistic.
Both sides are active in the PR front, you think those "free palestine" rallies organize themselves?
I think that is probably an exaggeration. I don't see a lot of reason to believe they have the most advanced machine and I don't buy that their PR machine exists to ameliorate ethical lapses. PR/Propaganda is power and all regimes want power.
I've seen incredible amounts of (justfied) anti-Israeli action press, so I don't particularly believe they have a wildly successful PR machine either.
China, the US, and Russia are all clearly advanced. Facebook alone got significant press for weighing in substantially on elections across the world. Twitter, before Elon, was used to coordinate against despotic regimes all over the world. Hollywood alone has incredible soft and hard power.
NSO group's Pegasus, and their selling software to despotic regimes so that they can find and torture/murder/scare journalists is much more telling of Israel's ethical core, as is their bombing of associated press offices.
Seeking power is not mens rea, directly harming those who would report your misdeeds is.
> “This level of organization only exists on one side of the conflict,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a former cyber policy adviser to the Defense Department who studies disinformation and propaganda campaigns as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It exists for pro-Israel voices, and it exists because there are government ministries in Israel that support these tools and encourage their use.”
> Brooking and other experts said they aren’t aware of any similar tools for Palestinian supporters.
Because most of the Muslim world shares false propaganda against them, and they are billions of people against ~10 million?
Why does tech used have any effect on what is true? If you don't fear the truth, you should be happy that the minority has the tools to get more data out.
Israelis on TikTok and Israeli leadership make the best case against Zionism. They’re openly racist and genocidal. As someone who’s not religious it’s clear the Palestinians have the moral high ground by a long shot.
dang, is there any way to pre-emptively/proactively block the apps mentioned in this article and ones like it from parsing content on HN? I have no reason to believe that they’re being used here, but it would be nice to know that content posted here is not being targeted by coordinated inauthentic behavior.
I think these apps just post links to the content they target for mass flagging. Individual users still use their personal accounts to access the content. I don't think there would be anything distinctive about the traffic other than a lot of it originating in Israel.
Perhaps you’re correct. If the apps allow you to input/select content for parsing, then the admins/mods can do some tests/dryruns to see what is happening on the backend and block it, and nothing of value would be lost as far as HN and its guidelines are concerned. HN doesn’t allow bots or novelty accounts, and this kind of posting behavior as mentioned in OP is actively moderated against for breaking the guidelines of HN, so it doesn’t hurt to ask. The sites mentioned in OP may also have a way to request to not be used on domains that you own, as well.
This is a terrible article. There are grassroots advocacy apps, and software for a wide variety of issues. Singling out Israel turns this into a hit piece and it doesn't belong on hacker news
We're just lucky it's still attached to a human being. When online political discourse is dominated by millions of AI bots that appear indistinguishable from a human, that could be horrific.
It seems like it. Every article I post that seems even remotely supportive of Israel is immediately flagged.
It's possible pro-Palestine stories are also flagged, but whenever I see an article on the crisis that gains any traction, the headline is invariable anti-Israel.
They've been doing this for decades.
What was that app they had in the 2000s? You used to install it into your computer and had some sort of megaphone icon in the app tray and would alert you whenever anyone was talking about Israel online.
----
Found it. It was called megaphone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaphone_desktop_tool
Related :
The pro-Israel information war - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38941719
Why does a country that is apparently doing nothing wrong have the most advanced PR and propaganda machine in the world?
Well, that's because the premise of actions or policies being "right" or "wrong" is very simplistic. Both sides are active in the PR front, you think those "free palestine" rallies organize themselves?
I think that is probably an exaggeration. I don't see a lot of reason to believe they have the most advanced machine and I don't buy that their PR machine exists to ameliorate ethical lapses. PR/Propaganda is power and all regimes want power.
I've seen incredible amounts of (justfied) anti-Israeli action press, so I don't particularly believe they have a wildly successful PR machine either.
China, the US, and Russia are all clearly advanced. Facebook alone got significant press for weighing in substantially on elections across the world. Twitter, before Elon, was used to coordinate against despotic regimes all over the world. Hollywood alone has incredible soft and hard power.
NSO group's Pegasus, and their selling software to despotic regimes so that they can find and torture/murder/scare journalists is much more telling of Israel's ethical core, as is their bombing of associated press offices.
Seeking power is not mens rea, directly harming those who would report your misdeeds is.
> Hollywood has.. hard power
Um, what??
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[flagged]
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> “This level of organization only exists on one side of the conflict,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a former cyber policy adviser to the Defense Department who studies disinformation and propaganda campaigns as a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “It exists for pro-Israel voices, and it exists because there are government ministries in Israel that support these tools and encourage their use.”
> Brooking and other experts said they aren’t aware of any similar tools for Palestinian supporters.
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Because most of the Muslim world shares false propaganda against them, and they are billions of people against ~10 million?
Why does tech used have any effect on what is true? If you don't fear the truth, you should be happy that the minority has the tools to get more data out.
Israelis on TikTok and Israeli leadership make the best case against Zionism. They’re openly racist and genocidal. As someone who’s not religious it’s clear the Palestinians have the moral high ground by a long shot.
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dang, is there any way to pre-emptively/proactively block the apps mentioned in this article and ones like it from parsing content on HN? I have no reason to believe that they’re being used here, but it would be nice to know that content posted here is not being targeted by coordinated inauthentic behavior.
I think these apps just post links to the content they target for mass flagging. Individual users still use their personal accounts to access the content. I don't think there would be anything distinctive about the traffic other than a lot of it originating in Israel.
Perhaps you’re correct. If the apps allow you to input/select content for parsing, then the admins/mods can do some tests/dryruns to see what is happening on the backend and block it, and nothing of value would be lost as far as HN and its guidelines are concerned. HN doesn’t allow bots or novelty accounts, and this kind of posting behavior as mentioned in OP is actively moderated against for breaking the guidelines of HN, so it doesn’t hurt to ask. The sites mentioned in OP may also have a way to request to not be used on domains that you own, as well.
Ah, I was wondering why the comments on r/worldnews read like propaganda.
I think it's more that /r/worldnews has removed any critical voices long ago.
I don't even remember when I was myself banned. It's a very 'shaped' subreddit, and not just on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Do you think the moderator account u/Maxwellhill on r/worldnews belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell? (The one that hasn’t posted since her arrest in 2019)
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4460492/ghislaine-maxwell-reddi...
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That subreddit has been a forum for nation-state trolls for a long time.
This is a terrible article. There are grassroots advocacy apps, and software for a wide variety of issues. Singling out Israel turns this into a hit piece and it doesn't belong on hacker news
We're just lucky it's still attached to a human being. When online political discourse is dominated by millions of AI bots that appear indistinguishable from a human, that could be horrific.
[flagged]
It seems like it. Every article I post that seems even remotely supportive of Israel is immediately flagged.
It's possible pro-Palestine stories are also flagged, but whenever I see an article on the crisis that gains any traction, the headline is invariable anti-Israel.
Not sure what's going on here.
Look again
I'm pleasantly surprised.
I can live with that - no more politics on HN.
2 replies →