I m not surprised a bit by this. Meta has again and again shown that they have no scruples and no moral compass. But it's surprising how little knowledge about it and reaction there is from its users, who are otherwise very very critical when "mainstream media" does propaganda on them. It's probably because FB takes a very low key approach with branding and tries to make itself transparent to its users.
icw_nru · 2h ago
I do want to mention one more thing. There are more leaks that will be shared in the coming days. Many of which are related to mass censorship, theft, fraud going on at Meta.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
kspacewalk2 · 25m ago
Can you tell us a bit about ICW? Does it have a website? Where does its funding come from? What is NRU?
reactordev · 2h ago
I don’t think it’s just Israel. I think more countries (cough cough) are doing this. Why would they all show up on Inauguration Day? Yeah…
I have no proof, only suspicion. You can easily skirt “The Algorithm” using VPNs and get vastly different content.
mandevil · 2h ago
From the article:
"Israel ranks 3rd in the most posts targeted by TDRs out of any country.
"On a per-capita basis, Israel ranks 1st in the most posts targeted by TDRs, and has 3 times more TDR targeted posts per-capita than the country with the 2nd most submissions.
"Its important to contextualize this with the fact that almost all governments reporting to Meta primarily censor citizens of their own countries. Israel is the exception as only 1.3% of its takedown requests are actually targeted towards Israeli’s (14th most targeted country).
"For reference, 63% of Malaysia TDRs target Malaysian content, and 95% of Brazil’s TDRs target Brazilian content"
(Back to me): They are saying that Israel is doing this at a huge scale and, very unusually, almost exclusively targeting people in other countries.
The leakers speculate that Israel is doing this at at scale that is poisoning Meta's ML filtering inputs, so that they are now, without direct Israeli involvement, Meta is carrying on their own censorship of other countries. Since Israel's active TDR's produced the vast bulk of recent terrorism related TDRs, the leakers think that almost all of the 38 million Facebook posts that were censored automatically by Facebook ML for terrorism reasons during the period since the Simchat Torah attacks were because of this poisoning, but here they are drawing more on inference than direct evidence.
I had not realized the scale of the program here, or that they were targeting external countries like this, so I (someone reasonably familiar with Facebook's moderation) learned something from reading this.
icw_nru · 2h ago
Many many countries are doing this, which is shown in figure 5. However, no other country comes close to the amount of censorship done by Israel. Additionally, most countries primarily do internal censorship. Again, Israel is the only country that is censoring other countries to this great extent. And almost all of it is related to the ongoing events.
wk_end · 2h ago
Why does Figure 5 only include those eight countries?
icw_nru · 2h ago
The report focused on the top 8 country governments who use the content enforcement system the most at Meta. The countries selected aren't random.
Fizzadar · 43s ago
[delayed]
djfobbz · 23m ago
This is just the tip of the iceberg...oh the irony!
Are we really shocked by this? It's screaming obvious but we still have many people whose head is buried deep in the sand.
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
rsoto2 · 59m ago
Ycombinator hosted an Israeli soldier AMA while he was in gaza terrorizing people, our industry is full of genocide-apologists.
xinuc · 27m ago
There are lots of them in this very site. That's why most posts about ongoing genocide voted down immediately.
This post is ranked very low, most likely it's getting lots of down vote.
nahuel0x · 43m ago
What Israel does in the digital space to cover his Gaza genocide is Goebbels for the 21st Century.
torium · 27m ago
Absolutely.
Furthermore I've started hearing people calling it "the Palestinian Holocaust" (I think it's entirely fitting). Israel has owned that word for very long as has used it as an asset that they milk. It's about time they lose ownership.
halflife · 11m ago
50% of all the Jews worldwide were wiped out by their own countrymen during the holocaust.
Less than 5% of Gaza was killed. Russia lost more than 10% of its population in WW2, would that be considered holocaust?
torium · 6m ago
If you wanna throw numbers at me you need to first clarify what percentage of innocent killing you find acceptable.
halflife · 5m ago
Well, what is your standard for holocaust?
alangibson · 5m ago
More whataboutism. Go find another thread. You are terrible at this.
kiwikan · 2h ago
will probably get flagged in a couple of hours as usual, HN censorship
freedomben · 19m ago
I disagree with the rampant flagging practices that many HNers engage in, but I do think it's worth noting that it's not always "censorship" as much as it is people pre-flagging topics that are likely to result in a contentious flamewar in the comment section. Of course plenty of stories are killed because they go against the narrative that a particular reader likes, so there definitely is some censorship, but it's a lot more nuanced than that IMHO.
icw_nru · 3h ago
We can answer any questions anyone has about this.
*EDIT: It looks at 30 minutes in this post got flagged. Likely brigaded by mass downvote bots.
Any mod can take a look?
myrmidon · 2h ago
Is there any info on the language distribution of the censored content (or was this about english content only)?
Are there random (or cherry picked) examples of censored content somewhere? Is anything known about the selection process (just keyword based? more sophisticated?).
This talks about the dangers of manipulating public opinion and poisoning future automatic classifications, but how effective were the 'Israelis specifically with that (on a spectrum from "censors everything that contains the words river+sea" to "picks censorship targets strategically in order to shift discourse/opinion in favor of Israel")?
icw_nru · 2h ago
The language of the posts is usually representative of the user country. E.g. USA=English, Egypt=Arabic.
However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.
Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
Look at the username you're replying to, then at the username who posted the article on HN, then at the username who submitted the content to Internet Archive.
pbiggar · 2h ago
I haven't had time to dig into the report, but this is utterly unsurprising given previous reports, and due to employee and former employee whistleblowers. See also:
I say this not in defence of the Israelis (ab)use of Meta's takedown system, nor in defence of the Israelis conduct towards Palestinians: this is low-quality, sensationalist work.
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
halflife · 51m ago
Agreed, as an Israeli Jew, them saying that Jews don’t work on Shabbat there shouldn’t be reports on the 7th, shows so much their lack of objectivity, ignorance and the will to connect random points together.
Do they think that the police in Israel don’t work on Saturday? Does the CIA stops working on sundays? If they tried to visit Tel Aviv on Saturday they would see how lovely it is.
icw_nru · 29m ago
This is not a speculation on the part of the whistleblowers or some unknown fact related to "Jews".
The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.
This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.
halflife · 18m ago
But that makes sense, as the OP said, oct 7th was a huge terror attack that was live-streamed and shared throughout all social media. Hamas filmed themselves on Facebook live doing horrific acts, and people shared and cheered. So obviously there would be an uptick of takedown requests.
Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?
myrmidon · 1h ago
This is harsh, but I agree with most of your points. The "blackmail" remark I find particularly damning: Threatening future leaks until Facebook stops "involvement with the Israeli government" is basically a self-admission that you put political success over journalistic integrity.
That turns you from a "legitimate" whistleblower (like Snowden) into an activist (at best) in my eyes.
torium · 17m ago
Weird that you choose to focus on the quality of the material. Surely the underlying fact that Israel is committing genocide is a lot more important?
wk_end · 1m ago
...is that weird?
Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
unix_fan · 12m ago
You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel
torium · 9m ago
> unix_fan
> You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel
That's a weird thing to say. I certainly don't agree and would like to hear the rationale of anyone who supports that view.
mrs6969 · 2h ago
This is a big deal. Great work!
bluecalm · 42m ago
Isn't it because Israel does propaganda at state level while pro-Palestinian groups do it via other channels?
On my FB wall Israel is losing. I see several pro-Palestinians posts every day and I am yet to see one pro Israel one.
Not a single one came from my friend or people in my groups. I am not interested in seeing neither side's propaganda.
No comments yet
lenerdenator · 2h ago
I'm not sure how effective it was; I've seen plenty of content related to Gaza on Meta platforms, and I'm located in the US.
It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
mandevil · 2h ago
The US was actually very low on Israel's targeting list: they came in at #18 on the list (0.7% of all TDR's submitted by Israel), lower than Israel itself (#14, 1.3%). I would speculate, given that previous reporting (the Facebook Files from Frances Haugen) has said that Facebook treats moderation in America differently from in other countries, that Israel is not focused on censoring US speech the same way because Meta would be more likely to object to their TDR's covering Americans.
wk_end · 1h ago
The nature of the censorship is that it isn't targeted at who's seeing posts, but rather at the posts themselves. So it's not necessarily the case that the Israelis are treating different countries differently; it could simply be that Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine are all producing the largest amount of content related to the war given their proximity, involvement, and interest in the conflict.
mandevil · 1h ago
The whole point of Facebook is that your friend network is going to be largely similar to you: that's how they can impute your interests from analyzing the interest of your friend network and then target ads for you. So what most Americans will see will be largely posts by other Americans. Immigrants from Algeria etc. will have overlapping interests and serve as node-points to move posts from one network to another, but still the majority of posts that an American will see, even on a controversial international topic like Israel/Palestine, will be from Americans, and thus largely outside of the Israeli censorship program.
Thus, my point is that your claim of personal experience as an American doesn't really have much bearing on the question of the scale of the censorship here. They are trying to bring to life censorship that is largely happening away from Americans, where Facebook historically doesn't exercise the same levels of care and respect for speech that they do with Americans (see Haugen's Facebook Files leaks).
I've also got to say that this article has apparently been flagged out twice already seems to be in line with the point of the original article. I know from experience that Facebook moderation discussions don't usually attract this level of flagging, so I'm pretty sure that this has to be related to Israel/Palestine, not Facebook.
wk_end · 1h ago
Have you used Facebook recently? 99% of my posts are from random meme pages and groups; one's own social networks produce very little of the content you see.
jordanb · 2h ago
> less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state
Explicit ethnostates are against law and norms.
lenerdenator · 2h ago
Then we've got a very, very long list of countries to act against.
Levitz · 43m ago
No in the west we don't.
Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Now it may be the case that Israel would rather leave that spot and remove itself from those norms, but given its history that'd be tantamount to suicide.
lenerdenator · 9m ago
> Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Most of the West is made up of nations that are, to at least some degree, ethnostates. If they aren't explicitly ethnostates, then they have large political blocs that grew out of ethnic groups. See: Sinn Fein, Bloc Québécois, Scottish National Party, Basque Nationalist Party, Republican Left of Catalonia, Plaid Cymru, and others.
Most of the above listed seek to exercise political power in a given region based on ethnicity. Some even have large delegations to regional or national legislative bodies. All are in countries generally identified as Western.
Even some of what you would define a country as, generally speaking, is somewhat influenced by ethnic factors like language and religion.
text0404 · 2h ago
alternatively, the US could just not dump billions of dollars in aid and weapons to those countries. social media companies could strengthen their content moderation systems against these kinds of state-sponsored attacks. no need to "act against" anyone.
lenerdenator · 1h ago
That would, again, mean not engaging with most countries on Earth, because most of them are, or have at least some qualities of, being ethnostates, religious states, or some other combination of putting one group above another in society based on immutable characteristics or characteristics of conscience.
If you're not Han in the PRC, they're going to try to "normalize" you in the direction of acting like you're Han. If you're not ethnic Russian, same with you in Russia. The only way to keep the former Yugoslavia from continuing to be a bloodbath was by essentially setting up ethnostates. And, yes, all of them use or have used violence to enforce these conditions.
jordanb · 1h ago
China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
lenerdenator · 21m ago
> China is not a "han ethnostate" de-facto or de-jure.
Tell that to the Uyghurs they were re-educating.
> Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
They should go back to that then, but at the heart of it, you'd still have a mostly Jewish populace. Kind of like how the state that Hamas or Fatah would like to establish would be mostly Palestinian Arab.
> Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
Most of the countries in the world are ultimately ethnostates or have political factions and geography seriously impacted by ethnic groupings. Don't believe me? Go suggest to about any European or Asian group that some other ethnic group get majority control of their land, resources, and government. They'll be reluctant at best.
whatshisface · 1h ago
PRC, Russia, Serbia... Isn't that a list of US current opponents on the world stage? If I was Israeli I would be hoping my country did not go down this path (and of course I say hoping because I wouldn't have the ability to prevent it.)
notavalleyman · 2h ago
Where in the linked pdf is any evidence that the reported content was actually innocent?
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
icw_nru · 2h ago
Human rights watch's report covers more individual examples.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.
Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.
Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
notavalleyman · 2h ago
> Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that are counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed
No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.
It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?
You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
Unfortunately links to individual posts can't be accessed as the posts themselves are removed. The HRW report is excellent as they documented this individual cases and recorded them.
notavalleyman · 2h ago
Okay well you don't have any proof, any in general, I would consider it a good use of tax shekels to reduce the number of pro-hamas posts on social media. So until you can dig up any proof, I'm considering this whole post to be a nothing burger
icw_nru · 2h ago
Did you look at the article? This investigation directly corroborates existing reports from third parties like Human Rights Watch. There is even an intake form directly from the Israeli government calling for the censorship posts of posts at Meta. We even posted their phone and fax number in case anyone is interested in having a friendly chat with them.
All data collected is directly from Meta, and the whisteblowers themselves are open to sharing this data with any authority or court willing to look into this. Everything is well documented. Where and how the data was obtained is also documented as well.
Or alternatively, you can wait for the next leak.
No comments yet
alangibson · 11m ago
Wow, is almost like you're committed to obfuscation what Israel is doing. Couldn't possibly be that tho...
All 1049 posts were peaceful?
The pdf mentions this was mostly after October 7th, a terrorist (as in, meant to induce fear by targeting civilians) attack which was live streamed on Facebook and posted repeatedly during that day.
I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?
I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.
EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.
whatshisface · 2h ago
In this case it's being alleged that sending a thousand false takedown requests which were then acted on would not be a bungling, but rather a success.
alangibson · 14m ago
In the words of the ancient Spartans: If
rsoto2 · 1h ago
Israel is not the target of a terrorist group. It is a terrorist state subjugating a trapped population to forced starvation and hunger. It's a second holocaust live streamed to your phone and you still think they are acting rationally.
Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
Would you say that this list is incorrect? Or that any attack on civilians in Israel is justified and thus not a terrorist attack?
alangibson · 8m ago
This is whataboutism. Either address the parent comment or go away.
halflife · 6m ago
How is this whataboutism? He said that Israel is not a target of terror attacks. In response I provided a list of terror attacks against Israel, this is exactly on topic
rsoto2 · 33m ago
Is killing a child terrorism? Because israel has killed over 18000 in the last few years.
halflife · 29m ago
You didn’t answer my question
rsoto2 · 34m ago
Do you think Israel was created through peace or through zionist bombing attacks?
Do you think only the brown bombers should be labelled terrorists?
You sound racist and like you're ok enabling the killing of children. As a doctor Tarek Loubani reported today "I've been to many wars, it has never felt like the war is against children"
halflife · 23m ago
Before the state of Israel, Jewish groups were bombing British mandate offices. Not civilians, and definitely not on purpose.
But I’m trying to understand your logic. Attacking innocent civilians is legitimate if your goal is to establish a state?
And BTW, you don’t know me personally, ad hominem attacks just weaken your argument
cogman10 · 28m ago
No, you see, it's not terror when the bomb falls from a jet fighter or a drone /s.
monocasa · 15m ago
Or when it's biological warfare on civilians for the purpose of depopulation either apparently.
I can fully grant the list as accurate and even undercounting the number of attacks that have happened.
It, frankly, pales in comparison to the number of civilians the IDF has killed and is currently killing. No amount of terrorist attacks can justify starving a population or dropping bombs on the tents of refuges.
Like, I'm sorry, but an attack in 2024 that injures 20 people and an attack in 2023 that kills 1000 is simply not comparable. There are literally 1000s dying weekly right now in gaza. The IDF is daily shooting starving children that go to the Israel's ran aid sites.
Israel does not have the right to commit genocide.
halflife · 22m ago
The OP said that Israel is not a target of terror attacks.
albumen · 10m ago
Yes, very good, OP's wrong and you're right.
Now, if you'd address the 8,000,000lb elephant in the room that would be great.
cogman10 · 12m ago
Sure, I don't agree with that assessment, but I get where it comes from.
I find the "what-about"ism somewhat tiring at this point. What Israel is currently doing is unconscionable.
This is really not unlike trying to criticize the war crimes committed during the Warsaw uprising or the actions of John Brown. Were they wrong? Yes. Were they understandable? Absolutely. Bringing them up whenever someone brings up the actions of the Nazis or the slave owners is what's problematic. It tries to strip away the humanity of people that are being slaughtered in order to justify the slaughtering.
halflife · 8m ago
I pointed out the error in his post, everybody else is “what-about”ing at me in response.
rsoto2 · 1h ago
self determination, through-violence*
parineum · 2h ago
This was my takeaway as well.
The pdf says there's a 95% accept rate on their takedown requests. They use that as evidence of censorship but, to me, that looks like evidence of judicious requests that meta agrees with.
Without data on what was taken down, there's no way to explain the difference. There's no reason not to make the entire dataset public (anonymized if you'd like but, since the content is implied to be benign, what's the harm in not?) and show some examples.
The implication that, because Israel submits the most requests that they must be acting in bad faith makes sense only of all countries had an equal amount of content generated that they'd like filtered. It's very easy for me to believe that Israel would have more content directed towards it that violated the Meta TOS.
mapotofu · 4m ago
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
I have no proof, only suspicion. You can easily skirt “The Algorithm” using VPNs and get vastly different content.
"Israel ranks 3rd in the most posts targeted by TDRs out of any country.
"On a per-capita basis, Israel ranks 1st in the most posts targeted by TDRs, and has 3 times more TDR targeted posts per-capita than the country with the 2nd most submissions.
"Its important to contextualize this with the fact that almost all governments reporting to Meta primarily censor citizens of their own countries. Israel is the exception as only 1.3% of its takedown requests are actually targeted towards Israeli’s (14th most targeted country).
"For reference, 63% of Malaysia TDRs target Malaysian content, and 95% of Brazil’s TDRs target Brazilian content"
(Back to me): They are saying that Israel is doing this at a huge scale and, very unusually, almost exclusively targeting people in other countries.
The leakers speculate that Israel is doing this at at scale that is poisoning Meta's ML filtering inputs, so that they are now, without direct Israeli involvement, Meta is carrying on their own censorship of other countries. Since Israel's active TDR's produced the vast bulk of recent terrorism related TDRs, the leakers think that almost all of the 38 million Facebook posts that were censored automatically by Facebook ML for terrorism reasons during the period since the Simchat Torah attacks were because of this poisoning, but here they are drawing more on inference than direct evidence.
I had not realized the scale of the program here, or that they were targeting external countries like this, so I (someone reasonably familiar with Facebook's moderation) learned something from reading this.
https://mronline.org/2022/07/14/meet-the-ex-cia-agents-decid...
Israel have claimed the title to start worlds first live stream genocide. It took them long time to get to where they are and know they will be forgiven.
It's crazy to think but is true, they have normalized killing of Palestinians.
This post is ranked very low, most likely it's getting lots of down vote.
Furthermore I've started hearing people calling it "the Palestinian Holocaust" (I think it's entirely fitting). Israel has owned that word for very long as has used it as an asset that they milk. It's about time they lose ownership.
*EDIT: It looks at 30 minutes in this post got flagged. Likely brigaded by mass downvote bots.
Any mod can take a look?
Are there random (or cherry picked) examples of censored content somewhere? Is anything known about the selection process (just keyword based? more sophisticated?).
This talks about the dangers of manipulating public opinion and poisoning future automatic classifications, but how effective were the 'Israelis specifically with that (on a spectrum from "censors everything that contains the words river+sea" to "picks censorship targets strategically in order to shift discourse/opinion in favor of Israel")?
However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.
Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
- From 7amleh: Erased and Suppressed: Palestinian Testimonies of Meta's Censorship: https://7amleh.org/post/erased-and-suppressed-palestinian-te...
- AJ+ documentary "Inside Israel's Influence on Meta": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12btf2Oq820
ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.
Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:
> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.
The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.
What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.
There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.
Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.
Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.
It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:
> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.
The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.
The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.
Do they think that the police in Israel don’t work on Saturday? Does the CIA stops working on sundays? If they tried to visit Tel Aviv on Saturday they would see how lovely it is.
The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.
This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.
Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?
That turns you from a "legitimate" whistleblower (like Snowden) into an activist (at best) in my eyes.
Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.
> You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel
That's a weird thing to say. I certainly don't agree and would like to hear the rationale of anyone who supports that view.
On my FB wall Israel is losing. I see several pro-Palestinians posts every day and I am yet to see one pro Israel one.
Not a single one came from my friend or people in my groups. I am not interested in seeing neither side's propaganda.
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It's also worth noting that there are two very different groups of people sharing information about what's happening in Gaza:
1) People internationally who would like to see international laws enforced against Israel (and, likely, Hamas) given their conduct on October 7th, 2023 and later
2) People who have a real problem with the existence of Israel on a basis that have far less to do with international law and norms and far more to do with its nature as a Jewish state.
This makes it harder to moderate content about what's happening in the region to everyone's satisfaction.
Thus, my point is that your claim of personal experience as an American doesn't really have much bearing on the question of the scale of the censorship here. They are trying to bring to life censorship that is largely happening away from Americans, where Facebook historically doesn't exercise the same levels of care and respect for speech that they do with Americans (see Haugen's Facebook Files leaks).
I've also got to say that this article has apparently been flagged out twice already seems to be in line with the point of the original article. I know from experience that Facebook moderation discussions don't usually attract this level of flagging, so I'm pretty sure that this has to be related to Israel/Palestine, not Facebook.
Explicit ethnostates are against law and norms.
Israel can either be aligned with the western sphere of influence or not, but belonging to it has some requirements and not being an ethnostate is definitely one of them.
Now it may be the case that Israel would rather leave that spot and remove itself from those norms, but given its history that'd be tantamount to suicide.
Most of the West is made up of nations that are, to at least some degree, ethnostates. If they aren't explicitly ethnostates, then they have large political blocs that grew out of ethnic groups. See: Sinn Fein, Bloc Québécois, Scottish National Party, Basque Nationalist Party, Republican Left of Catalonia, Plaid Cymru, and others.
Most of the above listed seek to exercise political power in a given region based on ethnicity. Some even have large delegations to regional or national legislative bodies. All are in countries generally identified as Western.
Even some of what you would define a country as, generally speaking, is somewhat influenced by ethnic factors like language and religion.
If you're not Han in the PRC, they're going to try to "normalize" you in the direction of acting like you're Han. If you're not ethnic Russian, same with you in Russia. The only way to keep the former Yugoslavia from continuing to be a bloodbath was by essentially setting up ethnostates. And, yes, all of them use or have used violence to enforce these conditions.
Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
Tell that to the Uyghurs they were re-educating.
> Israel wasn't even an explicitly declared ethnostate between 2009 and 2017.
They should go back to that then, but at the heart of it, you'd still have a mostly Jewish populace. Kind of like how the state that Hamas or Fatah would like to establish would be mostly Palestinian Arab.
> Additionaly, regardless of how China runs its affairs the truth is that ethnostates are highly Anti-American. It's fundamentally contradictory to our way of life. However China chooses to run its own affairs, the United States should not be providing such enormous amounts of support to a state that is run so contrarily to our own values as we do for Israel.
Most of the countries in the world are ultimately ethnostates or have political factions and geography seriously impacted by ethnic groupings. Don't believe me? Go suggest to about any European or Asian group that some other ethnic group get majority control of their land, resources, and government. They'll be reluctant at best.
If the content which Israel reported to meta was truly pro-terror, then surely there's no problem here - a nation who is the target of a terrorist group, can spend their taxes reducing pro-terror group content online. It's only a problem if, as the report alleges, the content was not pro-terror, but that's not actually evidenced anywhere
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.
Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.
Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.
It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?
You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
Unfortunately links to individual posts can't be accessed as the posts themselves are removed. The HRW report is excellent as they documented this individual cases and recorded them.
All data collected is directly from Meta, and the whisteblowers themselves are open to sharing this data with any authority or court willing to look into this. Everything is well documented. Where and how the data was obtained is also documented as well.
Or alternatively, you can wait for the next leak.
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check "illustrative examples" section.
I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?
I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.
EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.
Oppressed people have the right to violence just because they're brown doesn't make them "terrorists," that's actually quite the racist worldview.
Would you say that this list is incorrect? Or that any attack on civilians in Israel is justified and thus not a terrorist attack?
You sound racist and like you're ok enabling the killing of children. As a doctor Tarek Loubani reported today "I've been to many wars, it has never felt like the war is against children"
And BTW, you don’t know me personally, ad hominem attacks just weaken your argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread
It, frankly, pales in comparison to the number of civilians the IDF has killed and is currently killing. No amount of terrorist attacks can justify starving a population or dropping bombs on the tents of refuges.
Like, I'm sorry, but an attack in 2024 that injures 20 people and an attack in 2023 that kills 1000 is simply not comparable. There are literally 1000s dying weekly right now in gaza. The IDF is daily shooting starving children that go to the Israel's ran aid sites.
Israel does not have the right to commit genocide.
Now, if you'd address the 8,000,000lb elephant in the room that would be great.
I find the "what-about"ism somewhat tiring at this point. What Israel is currently doing is unconscionable.
This is really not unlike trying to criticize the war crimes committed during the Warsaw uprising or the actions of John Brown. Were they wrong? Yes. Were they understandable? Absolutely. Bringing them up whenever someone brings up the actions of the Nazis or the slave owners is what's problematic. It tries to strip away the humanity of people that are being slaughtered in order to justify the slaughtering.
The pdf says there's a 95% accept rate on their takedown requests. They use that as evidence of censorship but, to me, that looks like evidence of judicious requests that meta agrees with.
Without data on what was taken down, there's no way to explain the difference. There's no reason not to make the entire dataset public (anonymized if you'd like but, since the content is implied to be benign, what's the harm in not?) and show some examples.
The implication that, because Israel submits the most requests that they must be acting in bad faith makes sense only of all countries had an equal amount of content generated that they'd like filtered. It's very easy for me to believe that Israel would have more content directed towards it that violated the Meta TOS.
@dang and team
I think the community would be interested to know the activity around this post, including moderation efforts. I’ve been doing cursory refreshes and seeing what I would consider “brigading”, but I could just be paranoid.
Anyone else have the same questions? I’ll be emailing later and encourage others to do the same.