Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims
Meta censors pro-Palestinian views on a global scale, report claims
Rights group says Facebook and Instagram routinely engage in ‘six key patterns of undue censorship’ of content supporting Palestine
This certainly increases my support for defederating Threads.
Not to be rude, but how was it not already at max? I feel like there's some kind of shared amnesia around here, as if Meta hasn't proven to the world hundreds of times over how terrible they are. It is genuinely baffling to see so many people act like they aren't a tumor on the internet and the world in general.
For the unaware:
Facebook’s systems promoted violence against Rohingya
“In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.
This is in the context of:
The Rohingya genocide is a series of ongoing persecutions and killings of the Muslim Rohingya people by the military of Myanmar. The genocide has consisted of two phases[2][3] to date: the first was a military crackdown that occurred from October 2016 to January 2017, and the second has been occurring since August 2017.[4] The crisis forced over a million Rohingya to flee to other countries.
Remember when Facebook unethically ran experiments to see if they could make people sad? We should have hanged the board of directors then.
I somehow hadn’t heard about that. Though I’m also not surprised.
I read this article when it was written in 2014, and it was the thing that made me delete my account. I was completely disgusted. I remember telling a friend about it the same day I read it, and they didn’t believe me, thought I was peddling a conspiracy theory, to the point that I had to find the article again to be sure I hadn’t imagined it. As far as I know, there were no consequences and no one was held accountable.
I wish facebook a very go out of business forever and for its execs a very long jail
This has been going on long before Oct 7:
https://theintercept.com/2021/05/14/facebook-israel-zionist-moderation/
I created an instagram account two weeks ago. Everything was fine until I liked a pro-Palestine comment. Suddenly my account was suspended. No other possible reason, and this has happened to multiple people. The government and tech are trying to control social media and the populace. All these changes to twitter (I won't ever call it "X"), reddit - this is all intentional, ahead of the US election. Soon, they'll be requiring personal I.D. to use any social media - you will not be allowed any privacy or anonymity online.
Palestine bad, homie
careful what you post/like
I still see a fuck tonne of them, and annoyingly, a bunch which conflate Israel and Ukraine. So I guess pro-Palestinian Russian propaganda is allowed through just fine.
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!