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Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, claims Human Rights Watch.
(www.theguardian.com)
I'm shocked I tell you... Shocked!!!
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
425 points (93.5% liked)
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I know right? Who would have thought centralised social media owned by surveillance capitalist billionaires could do this?
And we want to allow them to integrate with the Fediverse why, exactly?
Because that will enable people to see and interact with the things their users post without themselves being under their control.
Because the fediverse is for everyone, even people you don't like.
It's not the people I'm concerned with, it's the objectively evil social media megacorporation.
the organization documented and reviewed more than a thousand reported instances of Meta removing content and suspending or permanently banning accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
Does 1000 seem small for an intentional, global, censorship campaign? That seems very small to me. That seems like a rounding error on a days worth of reported posts.
Most of this entire report is patently ridiculous. They asked people who follow HRW’s social media to please send them instances of censorship on social media, get about 1,500 random examples from a self-selecting population, then publish a big expose about it.
There’s no intensive comparative analysis (statistical or otherwise) to other topics discussed, other viewpoints discussed, or at other times in the past. They allege, for example, that some people didn’t have an option to request a review of the takedown- is that standard policy? Does it happen in other cases? Is it a bug? They don’t seem to want to look into it further, they just allude to some sense of nebulous wrongdoing then move on to the next assertion. Rinse and repeat.
The one part of the report actually grounded in reality (and a discussion that should be had) is how to handle content that runs afoul of standards against positive portrayal of terrorist organizations with political wings like the PFLP and Hamas. It’s an interesting challenge on where to draw the line on what to allow- but cherry picking a couple thousand taken down posts doesn’t make that discussion any more productive in any way.
Those are just the documented ones. They don't exactly have access to meta's modlogs
We have access to Lemmy.ml’s modlogs. I wonder how many pro-Palestinian posts have been deleted? I bet it’s more than zero… and Facebook probably handles more posts per second than lemmy.ml handles in a full day.
It's not enough to prove a pattern of behavior, but it's enough to call out as a disturbing trend.
Is it? We'd need to know a lot more about how often this happens to other random groups to determine that.
Facebook has a history of extreme status quo bias on issues like this. A statistical analysis should be the next priority. However a trend is still a trend, even if it's unintentional.
Indeed. It would be interesting to run the same analysis for censorship of pro Israel content and compare the differences between the two, though the data would likely still be noisy and inconclusive.
The fact that you're being downvoted for calling for a more thorough and objective investigation really says it all.
Boycott Meta.
Note for those enlightened centrists in here who want Facebook/Meta to federate with us and for everyone in here to merely "wait and see" 🙄
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta has engaged in a “systemic and global” censorship of pro-Palestinian content since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war on 7 October, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The company exhibited “six key patterns of undue censorship” of content in support of Palestine and Palestinians, including the taking down of posts, stories and comments; disabling accounts; restricting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts; and “shadow banning”, where the visibility and reach of a person’s material is significantly reduced, according to HRW.
Examples it cites include content originating from more than 60 countries, mostly in English, and all in “peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways”.
In a statement to the Guardian, Meta acknowledged it makes errors that are “frustrating” for people, but said that “the implication that we deliberately and systemically suppress a particular voice is false.
Meta said it was the only company in the world to have publicly released human rights due diligence on issues related to Israel and Palestine .
Last week Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator for Massachusetts, wrote to Meta’s co-founder and chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, demanding information following hundreds of reports from Instagram users dating back to October that their content was demoted or removed, and their accounts subjected to shadow banning.
The original article contains 568 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Makes sense. I removed on FB from time to time and most of my posts get 20-30 engagements from close friends.
Anything pro-Palestine gets maybe 1, at best.
Internet before mid-2010s: The Internet is breaking down barriers of nations, enabling everyone to freely communicate with each other, even outright plan uprisings against authorities (Arab Spring)! There are hardly any limits to what we can discuss, if you have an idea, you can publish it right now and maybe change the world with it!
Internet now: Social media companies make sure, through their algorithms and moderation decisions, that the Overton window is exactly where they decide, nowhere else. They are under constant and evolving pressure to censor more of this, censor less of that, with no end in sight to not getting it "right" in someone's opinion.
I hope the fediverse succeeds in maybe restoring the old vision of the Internet.