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Facebook Censorship

Facebook Report: Censorship Violated Palestinian Rights (theintercept.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Facebook and Instagram's speech policies harmed fundamental human rights of Palestinian users during a conflagration that saw heavy Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip last May, according to a study commissioned by the social media sites' parent company Meta. From a report: "Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred," says the long-awaited report, which was obtained by The Intercept in advance of its publication. Commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility, or BSR, the report focuses on the company's censorship practices and allegations of bias during bouts of violence against Palestinian people by Israeli forces last spring.

Following protests over the forcible eviction of Palestinian families from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli police cracked down on protesters in Israel and the West Bank, and launched military airstrikes against Gaza that injured thousands of Palestinians, killing 256, including 66 children, according to the United Nations. Many Palestinians attempting to document and protest the violence using Facebook and Instagram found their posts spontaneously disappeared without recourse, a phenomenon the BSR inquiry attempts to explain. Last month, over a dozen civil society and human rights groups wrote an open letter protesting Meta's delay in releasing the report, which the company had originally pledged to release in the "first quarter" of the year. While BSR credits Meta for taking steps to improve its policies, it further blames "a lack of oversight at Meta that allowed content policy errors with significant consequences to occur."
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Facebook Report: Censorship Violated Palestinian Rights More

Facebook Report: Censorship Violated Palestinian Rights

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  • Days of rage are protected speech too! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    So does this mean insta/face/meta are casting themselves in the role of universal speech carrier or something? Or is this going to be a carve-out just for this bunch of people? What's their play here?

    On another note, if your data is important to you, don't give it to giant advertising companies for safe-keeping.

    • So does this mean insta/face/meta are casting themselves in the role of universal speech carrier or something? Or is this going to be a carve-out just for this bunch of people? What's their play here?

      What should be their play?

      As a social platform people are going to express views, including controversial ones. And at some point you're going to have to moderate even if it is simply for clearly illegal content like child porn and death threats.

      So one way or another they're going to need to come up with a "fair" moderation policy. I don't know what it should be and it sounds like an extraordinarily difficult task. But contracting external groups to review your actions seems to be one of the better ways to

  • Meta commissioned a study about its censorship Palestinians? Then I'm sure we'll be seeing the study about their censorship of Americans in a successful effort to limit the dissemination of truthful information at odds with the opinion-shaping narrative of the American state during the COVID pandemic.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Was it during COVID, or was it during elections? I'm sure it'll be convenient to point at one or the other when making excuses and pretend they're unrelated, though all of it was explicitly political and benefited only one faction.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Then I'm sure we'll be seeing the study about their censorship of Americans in a successful effort to limit the dissemination of truthful information at odds with the opinion-shaping narrative of the American state during the COVID pandemic.

      Not a problem. As there is no such "truthful" information, nothing was suppressed. If you actually complain about lies being suppressed then you have a point. But that does not sound quite as noble and does not push the victim-narrative quite as well, now does it?

    • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by YetAnotherDrew ( 664604 )

      Slashdotter downvoted as troll for having what's deemed "political lie" by partisan mods.

      Slashdot: News for nerds who adhere to liberal orthodoxy!

  • Funny... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I thought that when Facebook censors posts, we're supposed to celebrate their right to allow or not allow any content they like since they're a private company.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I thought that when Facebook censors posts, we're supposed to celebrate their right to allow or not allow any content they like since they're a private company.

      There is a difference between helping a settler colonial state prettifying it's ethnic cleansing and removing posts that claim that eating horse suppositories and washing them down with bleach is going to cure a viral infection.

  • Given a deep analysis of the confluence of interconnected, politically-charged topics raised in TFA, I've come to the conclusion that there isn't a comment to make here making any kind of point that won't result in a mod and flame war.

    Maybe we should censor this study/article instead in the interests of civic stability.
  • ...Facebook won't be using BSR to write their reports.

    Mmm... Facebook has become very adept at "accidentally" censoring stuff that would upset powerful people & institutions.

  • Zuckerberg is Jewish.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/... [timesofisrael.com]

    His personal beliefs on the Israel/Palestine conflict are irrelevant, but by mere fact he practices Judaism it doesn't give good optics in this situation. Fact checking and censoring these posts will be seen as a bias.

    • Forget fact checks, and forget Judaism, censoring anything critical of Zionism [jewishvoiceforpeace.org] is the problem. Conflating Jewishness and Zionism is the problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by t0qer ( 230538 )

        You're right. Won't argue there. A lot of people do conflate the two. Anecdotal but yet most Jewish people I know are for Zionism. My wife's family is Russian Jew, and they're completely for it, even though they originally never even came from the Israel.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mishehu ( 712452 )

        The problem is that so many people, even some Jews, don't understand even how everything connects. Judaism is the religious practice of the Jewish people. One can be Jewish without observing Judaism (see: Albert Einstein), since we are best described as an ethnoreligious group (a concept that long predates the modern pseudoscientific racial classifications). Zionism is, in its most basic form, the concept of supporting Jewish self-determination in our ancestral homeland. It in of itself does not call f

        • Because people often hate the Jews.

          • Maybe they're just afraid they'll treat them like they treated their relatives, the Midianites.

          • It can both both, either or neither. Just because you do not agree with Israeli policy it does not make you someone whom hates Jewish people. Some have done despicable things to others in the name of Israel, everyone should be treated as individuals according to their behavior on both sides.

        • Does anybody, besides perhaps what remains of the Native American population, call into question modern day Americans' right to self-determination upon the land controlled by the United States of America?

          You're awfully quick to put the natives aside. Some of them are still here, and still in fact being oppressed by the American government — which has violated literally every treaty it signed with the people who were here before, and continues to violate them whenever it's convenient. Which sounds familiar, doesn't it?

          There can be no official peace between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs until we are accepted as belonging to the region.

          Your behavior can't ever be accepted as long as you're trying to exterminate the Palestinians. Returning to the pre-'67 borders would be a good start. Ceasing illegal settlement would help, too.

          Jerusalem may be where your faith was constructed, but it wasn't where your people were from — it was just where you wrote a book justifying your keeping it after having taken it. It changed hands many times. Who was there first seems to be besides the point, but it wasn't Jews anyway.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by mishehu ( 712452 )

            You're awfully quick to put the natives aside. Some of them are still here, and still in fact being oppressed by the American government — which has violated literally every treaty it signed with the people who were here before, and continues to violate them whenever it's convenient. Which sounds familiar, doesn't it?

            Oh, silly me, I didn't realize that this whole /. post was about Native Americans. Please forgive my forgetfulness to write a dissertation for you about the plight of the Native Americans. And they're a remnant of what they used to be mostly due to a pandemic that wiped out something like 90% of the population of natives across the continent, AS WELL as the racism they faced and still face.

            I did, however, notice that you feigned offense about the Native Americans in order to avoid addressing the question

            • Goy-splain much, eh? I can infer from your response that you aren't Jewish. And yet you have the audacity to think that you can "learn" me about my own people?

              Appeal to authority. Wank wank, flonk flonk. You bought the propaganda and now you're reselling it.

            • Obviously from what you write there is only one side to this and in your mind you are correct. Just like every arguments there are two sides and the answer is usually somewhere in the middle. You say facts are facts but state none, I want you to give me a compelling argument as to why either side finds it OK to kill children, either side. (HINT - because they killed ours is not an acceptable answer in 2022)

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by mishehu ( 712452 )

                False premise. I'm only aware of one side of the conflict celebrating the killing of minors. We didn't pass candy around on the streets when children in Gaza were victims. But the Palestinian side HAS done this. And I'm not even suggesting that all Palestinians agree to celebrate our murders, especially those of our minors, but enough of them do (it's in no way a minority that condone it). I can only suspect that those Palestinians find it ok to kill Jewish kids because they don't view us as fellow hum

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mishehu ( 712452 )
            I should also note that we, as Israeli Jews, are extremely horrible at exterminating people, because not only has the Israeli Arab population increased significantly since 1948, but so has the Palestinian Arab population. Worst. genocide. ever.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          why does the modern state of Israel always have people questioning its right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people
          because its a racist bigoted idea based on primitive middle eastern beliefs, its no more a valid proposition than having a country explicitly for black people or white people or blue eyes or green eyes.

        • How do you feel about native Americans in the USA then?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mishehu ( 712452 )

            There's a long history of horrible treatment and outright abuse/massacres of the N.A.'s, which is ironic to me in in many ways because even Lewis & Clark's expedition left pretty convincing evidence that members of the expedition were doinking female N.A.'s on their trek left and right - mercury that was used to try to cure syphilis. But the experiences and the history of the N.A.'s is not a parallel to the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's not even close. For one thing, the Jews retu

      • Forget fact checks, and forget Judaism, censoring is the problem.

        ftfy

    • Quite a few American Jews have no use for the actions of Israel in Palestine https://www.pewresearch.org/fa... [pewresearch.org] so trying to predict Zuck's views based solely off the fact that he's Jewish is a hard sell.

      In fact, aside for Orthodox Jews (of which Zuckerburg is not) a majority of American Jews disapprove of Israeli actions in Palestine.

  • I didn't know the Palestinians had these rights (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alkurta ( 1417115 ) on Thursday September 22, 2022 @11:13AM (#62904569)
    "adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination" This is pretty ironic given the fact that Palestinians don't possess these rights within the Palestinian territories. It is especially ironic since homosexual Palestinians get "non-discriminated" off the tops of buildings onto the ground below.

    • Re:I didn't know the Palestinians had these rights (Score:4, Interesting)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Thursday September 22, 2022 @11:19AM (#62904589)

      They possess those rights, but those rights are being violated by their rulers. The US was founded on the basis that all human beings are endowed with certain unalienable rights. That's what made the Declaration of Independence legit. If humans had no such intrinsic rights, we had no right to break away from Britain.

      • You are correct. I should have said "I didn't know Palestinians were free to express their rights in the Palestinian territories".

        • You are correct. I should have said "I didn't know Palestinians were free to express their rights in the Palestinian territories".

          They are not free to express all of their rights in the Palestinian territories.

          That doesn't mean we should further infringe those rights outside the Palestinian territories.

      • LOL, might makes right. We had the MIGHT to break away from England, so we fucking did it.

        Everything else is just shit we made up. Might makes right. It's always been that way and nothing has changed.

        Unalienable rights...yeah until they are alienated. That holds up as long as enough people are backing you up. Clearly, it does not hold up where the political apparatus does not support it.

        So clearly, those rights are very alienable.

        • We had the MIGHT to break away from England, so we fucking did it.

          Not by ourselves, we didn't. We got considerable financial backing from France, and reinforcements. Not just infantry, but the French Navy came over and fought and won The Battle of the Chesapeake [wikipedia.org], trapping General Cornwallis at Yorktown and making the seige that ended the war possible. Ironically, Cornwallis had gone to Yorktown because he knew that the British Navy could always supply, support and if needed evacuate him.

          • Also, political power counts as might. We clearly had enough might, of all kinds, to leave English rule. Might makes right.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by No Longer an AC ( 4611353 )

      That's pure propaganda pushed by Israelis and pro-Israelis to demonize Palestinians and Muslims in general. Daesh (ISIS) threw gay people off of rooftops and while gay rights do suffer all over the Middle East, you're ignoring the big problem with rights for Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They don't have any. Besides, Israel keeps bombing buildings in Gaza into rubble so there aren't many buildings to throw people off of.

      Israel routinely murders Palestinians incl

      • I also shouldn't have to say that I'm NOT defending Palestinian terrorists either. What hope do regular Palestinians have for ever being free? The vast majority can't even get citizenship in Israel which is working to ethnically cleanse their country.

        I should have previewed better, but I'm sick of arguing with far-right extremists who spread hateful propaganda. The biggest difference in Hamas and the IDF is who funds them and which one actually has power and the financial backing of the United States.

      • Palestine is just a puppet state. Of who? Ask who keeps giving them missiles. They are using the Palestinians for their own goals.

        • You win the Internet! And it's the propaganda from that puppeteer that is ultimately being blocked by Facebook.

        • Palestine is just a puppet state. Of who? Ask who keeps giving them missiles. They are using the Palestinians for their own goals.

          Israel is just a puppet state. Of who? Ask who keeps giving them money. They are using the Israelis for their own goals.

          We The People of the USA are funding a slow-moving extermination in order to get missile defense and citizen spying technology. Literally.

          • We The People of the USA are funding a slow-moving extermination in order to get missile defense and citizen spying technology. Literally.

            There is no doubt the missile defense is great and we want missile defense, but I don't think the US changed funding strategies since iron dome was created.

    • They don't ALL get tossed off the buildings. Not even a majority. Just many.

    • Most Palestinians are anti-Hamas, and most Israelis also don't support their government's treatment of Palestinians. Both peoples are oppressed, though clearly one is doing more oppressing than the other since they're managing to oppress a whole other people instead.

      And of course, the two groups are actually intimately genetically related. Midianites redux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The point about human rights is that no matter how awful the individual is, no matter what they have done or what they believe, those rights remain.

      Nobody deserves to be killed. The right to life is one of the most fundamental human rights.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • > BSR agrees the policy is systemically biased: “Legal designations of terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim, and thus Meta’s DOI policy and the list are more likely to impact Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users, both based upon Meta’s interpretation of legal obligations, and in error.”

    That's right folks... It's unfair that most terrorist organizations around the world happen to be M

    • Sorry for the typo. Buddists -> Buddhists

    • BSR agrees the policy is systemically biased: âoeLegal designations of terrorist organizations around the world have a disproportionate focus on individuals and organizations that have identified as Muslim

      That's right folks... It's unfair that most terrorist organizations around the world happen to be Muslim.

      Found the guy who doesn't know what disproportionate means. If 75% of the terrorists are Muslim (made up number) and you spend 90% of the time and effort hunting them (also made up number) then you're going to be neglecting the other 25% (computed from made up number) of terrorists.

      Right now in the USA you're in dramatically more danger from right-wing white guy terrorists than from Muslims, but we still pretend that Muslims are our biggest danger. 9/11 made that easy, and the deliberate and systematic dumb

  • Meta's actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact ... on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred

    Facebook and Instagram are just two websites. What about the other million, whose policies aren't dictated by Meta? Were Palestinian users unable to access them?

    One of the reasons I

  • Kiwifarms is on an extreme... but I would argue it does not matter...

    THIS STORY RIGHT HERE...

    deplatforming unpopular opinions is dangerous.... Who gets to decide what is dangerous? Did deplatforming kiwifarms really reduce an exigent threat against individuals? Unlikely. Mainstream news continues to report on school shootings even though the reporting has been linked to additional shootings. Kiwifarms would argue the are not anti-trans but simply concerned for children.

    Is it all bullshit? Yes, it is ALL bul

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