Comment by jmyeet

Unfortunately, Big Tech has been very effective in spreading a message that helps Israel maintain the plausible deniability that comes from a system like Lavender.

For at least 15 years we've had personalized newsfeeds in social media. For even longer we've had search engine ranking, which is also personalized. Whenever criticism is levelled against Meta or Twitter or Google or whoever for the results on that ranking, it's simply blamed on "the algorithm". That serves the same purpose: to provide moral cover for human actions.

We've seen the effects of direct human intervention in cases like Google Panda [1]. We also know that search engines and newsfeeds filter out and/or downrank objectionable content. That includes obvious categories (eg CSAM, anything else illegal) but it also includes value-based judgements on perfectly legitimate content (eg [2]).

Lavender is Israel saying "the algorithm" decided what to strike.

I want to put this in context. In ~20 years of the Vietnam War, 63 journalists were killed or lost )presumed dead) [3]. In the 6 months since October 7, at least 95 journalists have been killed in Gaza [4]. In the years prior there were still a large number killed [5], famously including an American citizen Shireen abu-Akleh [6].

None of this is an accident.

My point here is that anyone who blames "the algorithm" or deflects to some ML system is purposely deflecting responsibility from the human actions that led to that and for that to continue to exist.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Panda

[2]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_and...

[4]: https://cpj.org/2024/04/journalist-casualties-in-the-israel-...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_dur...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Shireen_Abu_Akleh