I know I'm naive: I don't understand why US companies are so sensitive to respecting Israel. I don't know why our gov is so sensitive to this either. Israel - like all countries - deserves criticism, no? This can't purely be about respecting the billions spent on US weapons to defend Israel, right? I genuinely do not understand, because I think they'd happily buy from the military anyway.
From what I understand reading the article it's not about Meta respecting Israel, but Israel actively using the Meta rules to target criticism. This is also what I experienced as a moderator for interreligious dialogue. Certain groups were more aggressive in asserting their truth, not by using arguments, debate and dialogue, but using straw man tactics, meta communication and loopholes in the moderation rules to get their way.
Part of the answer is simply that a large fraction of the US government is Jewish. E.g. according to the White House, their staff (everything from stenographers and secretaries, to labor relations representatives and foreign policy experts) is 32% Jewish (2.4% of US population), 44% ethnic minority (about even with US), and 24% non-Jewish White (55% of US)
Nope. It’s eschatological Christians who back Israel. Has nothing to do with protecting Jews and everything to do with evangelical Christians’ end times prophecy. The world’s largest military has made decades of foreign policy decisions in accordance with these people’s doomsday fetish.
There's also a lot of wacky christian folklore that is very popular in evangelical America that has to do with Israel being involved in the "end days". Some nutjobs feel that a strong Israeli state will hasten the rapture or some nonsense like that. There are a good number of those folk in elected positions, but also the evangelical crowd is inordinately influential in US politics, so it weasels it's way into many different facets of policy making. It's just one aspect of a complex picture though.
The Israel lobby is incredibly powerful and well funded. They have a lot of money to throw around, much of which they throw at the US Government, which is consequently filled with their supporters. US companies know this and tread carefully.
They've weaponized anti-semitism against their detractors. And, who wants to be accused of racism? Even false accusations stain your reputation.
The irony is that it's probably one of the most racist countries I've ever seen in my entire life. They made a shrine to a terrorist (Baruch Goldstein). The president proudly called miscegenation "a tragedy". If you can imagine a white US president openly calling for whites and blacks to stop having babies - that's the level of racism this state's supporters endorse when weaponizing anti semitism.
> They made a shrine to a terrorist (Baruch Goldstein)
Not sure what you're talking about here. Baruch Goldstein has no "shrine"* and besides fringe groups in Israel he is generally not accepted. Compare that with the monthly salaries Palestinian terrorists receive from the PLO and their rockstar status in Palestinian society.
* he has a grave, Israeli law can't really prevent that. The Israeli government has ruined most of the site of his grave despite his family's appeals.
Indeed; it's possible to love a person or a country, and yet still grieve their faults and wish them to be better. I'd argue that's the only real way to love anyone or anything.
On the flip side, human nature being what it is, giving any person or set of people unconditional approval is creating conditions where evil can thrive.
An actual reason I have heard is that it is as important to have independent information on your allies than it is on your enemies. Even if it is only for better coordination.
It's a deep political tie with a complex past. Here's decent book on the subject: https://academic.oup.com/book/7112 The Wikipedia article on "Christian Zionism" may also shed some light.
Basically, boosting Israel makes politicians popular with big swaths of their electorate. Pissing those electorates off makes things tough on a corporation, so they generally try not to.
As a secular Jew in Western Europe, I've distanced myself from my religious community due to its insistence on tying my identity to Israel. Where I live, it's less taboo to critique Israel than in the U.S., but still tricky.
Advocates of Israel's right-wing politics have blurred the line between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism, an endeavor helped by actual anti-Semites. I've grown up with these supporters, but can't quite call them a "lobby" due to their loose organization and lesser influence here compared to the U.S.
Speaking out brings risks: being labeled a leftist extremist, clashing with fellow Jews, or unwittingly aiding anti-Semites. And that's if you are Jew.
This creates a pervasive, cautious silence that I imagine is even more stifling in countries with highly organized pro-Israel lobbying.
I was once "reported to ADL" for my anti-Semitism.
My horrid crime that made me literally Hitler?
Disagreement if a tag should be named "jews" or "judaism" on the Politics Stack Exchange site. I made an off-hand comment that I renamed the tag from "jews" to "judaism" and the very first response was that I had been "reported to the ADL" (whether they actually did: who knows? Probably not).
That such an incredibly boring, banal, and benign disagreement exploded in accusations of anti-Semitism so quickly has made me rather distrustful of these accusations in general unless I can verify things. Anti-Semitism is real, but so are narcissistic people abusing it to "win the argument". If you need to defend yourself with "but I'm not anti-Semitic!" then you've already kind of lost the argument, right?
It's less about your Jewish identity tied to Israel and more about you and your identity not tied to the country you live. It's two sides of the same coin and the argument is much older than Israel. Your loyalty will be always questioned it's just that now it has more "Israeli flavor".
Different people, same idea. Things didn't change much since the Dreyfus affair.
> Where I live, it's less taboo to critique Israel than in the U.S., but still tricky.
Is it really so hard to "critique" Israel? I see daily calls for Israel to be abolished one way or the other (either violently with the help of Iran or with a Palestinian return). You can hear these opinions from politicians, on the news and social media, campuses and schools.
You might be labeled as a leftist as you said because this is generally a leftist stance, that's fair no? If I held a rightwing view I will probably be labeled as a right winger.
Most Israelis I know think twice before they identify as Israelis in certain parts of Europe, they don't want a random cab driver to start lecturing them about apartheid (or do something worse).
So I'm really intrigued why you think its such a taboo thing to criticize Israel or even openly call for its destruction.
- A lot of the US senators have dual citizenship, US/Israelis.
- Strong lobby in both political parties.
- Boomers with their Judeo-Christians “values”.
- Israel intelligence agencies controlling/influencing ADL, ADL pressuring three letter agencies in US to further influence big tech.
- The usual tactics of infiltration into big corps especially ones that can influence public opinions, you can read a little about Roy Bollock case
>The ADL operates as a private intelligence agency, sending spies, infiltrators, disruptors, and agents provocateurs into the camps — both Jewish and non-Jewish — of those who disagree with its view of Jewish interests. Also like an intelligence agency, it maintains a huge database containing personal information on politicians, writers, dissidents, activists, publishers, bloggers, and even unaffiliated private citizens so that — should any of these people “get out of line,” in the opinion of the ADL — they can be threatened, “exposed,” blackmailed, and thus silenced with maximum effectiveness. [1]
- And especially for Facebook with their shady business, they live on selling the users data to advertisers, the company won’t do anything to cut that money flow, take a look at twitter in the same case how ADL managed to cut around 60% of ads companies, it’s mostly about money and influence.
It sucks that so many people will say that the US involvement in the middle east was mainly about oil but that logic never gets applied to israel's (illegal) expansion and the implicit US support for it. There is SO much oil there. Oh well, I guess it's more fun to blame the evangelicals and ignore the insane profit motive.
The Western world has a 2000+ years long history of antisemitism (starting back in the Hellenistic era when the Mediterranean polytheist majority was not amused by Jewish minority strict monotheism, and vice versa). Every criticism of Israel must be viewed in that light, because 95% of it is just the endlessly rehashed antisemitism.
Moderation really varies a lot depending both on the language and the group being criticized.
For example on twitch, Spanish streamers[1] say a lot of things that would get an English streamer canceled and/or banned for saying it. And for other languages I'm sure the gap is even bigger.
The same with the group being criticized. Criticism against Russians is not moderated the same way as criticism against Jewish people.
To be clear I'm not in favor of hate speech, I'm just pointing out that moderation isn't 100% equal.
[1] I mean the language of the stream, not the nationality of the streamer
> Criticism against Russians is not moderated the same way as criticism against Jewish people.
People are not criticizing ethnic Russians. They are criticizing citizens of the Russian state, which includes people who aren’t ethnically Russian but doesn’t include people who are ethnically Russian in e.g. Ukraine. It’s arguable how much responsibility Russian citizens have for the present situation but it’s more than zero.
Similarly while it’s fine to criticize Israelis for the actions of Israel, it’s not fine to criticize Jewish people in general for it.
> Similarly while it’s fine to criticize Israelis for the actions of Israel, it’s not fine to criticize Jewish people in general for it.
I agree, kind of, but let's also please realize that it's similar to criticizing US citizens for the actions of the US state. I wouldn't criticize the average American for the actions of the CIA or for the war in Afghanistan, because the average American might or might not agree with those actions.
In other words, I think it's correct to criticize the country, but incorrect to criticize specific people unless they are personally doing bad things.
So the journalist makes a documentary about how Facebook censors people, and a day later he gets censored, I think that just makes his documentary stronger!
Also, when the internet will ever learn, if you try to censor something you will just give it more exposure, I personally would never know about this documentary but now I will watch it.
Not that it justifies the deletion, I wonder how a state sponsored propaganda outlet came to be regarded well among global audiences. It would be interesting to read up on what they have done to garner that image.
Al Jazeera is really reliable, much more than American media companies. People should first do research on this, before they start spreading those BS ideas.
Since 9/11 Americans can't trust anything with an "arabic background", they are constantly bombarded by the media, so they can't ever discover that the middle east is much more than a place with oil or "weapons of mass destruction".
Al Jazeera hires top journalists, they are well-funded. They are just very concerned when talking about Qatar, which in a geopolitical sense, doesn't matter, all other news are typically very unbiased.
Only a few news outlets from Europe are similar in quality.
Americans rarely want to see the truth anyways, so they stick with those republican/democrat-leaning media outlets, eating Mc Donalds, going bankrupt on a hospital emergency and believing in the American dream: you need to be asleep to believe on it.
> They are just very concerned when talking about Qatar,
Doesn't seem like the sign of a good news org if you can't say a word of criticism about the country you're headquartered at. Makes me wonder what else is rotten in there, how can we know the rules of the country aren't dictating a bunch of other stuff to the news?
News should be as independent as possible.
Allegedly Al Jazeera English is much more reasonable and balanced than Arabic Al Jazeera. Unfortunately that's a claim that basically relies on trust - i.e. an Arabic speaker with cultural knowledge willing to be unbiased in their analysis. I suspect it is true though, Qatar is not a pleasant country and certainly not a democracy.
I am assuming that this is American bias talking? Plenty of other cultures are more trusting of government than the US’s is.
The main State-sponsored media outlet in my country is considered to be of a pretty high quality. It has some international recognition.
I’d say a fair chunk of those that actually care about media outlet trustworthiness (and aren’t just sharing whatever articles come their way barring a few outlets that are in their person blocklist) are aware of the nuances of AJ’s authority and trustworthiness. The reality is that they have built this reputation by doing heaps and heaps of good reporting, not even in spite of being state-sponsored, but really because of it. There are certain topics that you shouldn’t listen to AJ regarding. Otherwise? They do a good job.
Well, I did write state sponsored propaganda outlet, not state sponsored media outlet as I think the journalistic freedom an organisation like BBC gets is different. They can criticise policies of UK government, something Al Jazeera can't.
I would argue that they just have more polish to their presentation rather than having more integrity, and the coverage in local language is quite different from the one in English
They are pretty much the equivalent to the BBC or CNN: a lot of it is alright, but they are still tools for their own gov propaganda.
Because they are different govs, with different agendas, each of them see the propaganda of others as evil, but it's still all very much propaganda.
Remember CNN diffused many bits on how WMD were in Irak to justify the war the UN voted against. The USA went to war anyway, and we learned there were no WMD.
Al Jazeera does the same, but for their side.
It is, nevertheless, quite qualitative content for many topics, and give you another points of on the world events than our own medias outlet.
I am sorry, but they aren't. This is just false equivalence, you can just go read BBC's coverage of UK politics and you will see criticism of their government
> I wonder how a state sponsored propaganda outlet came to be regarded well among global audiences.
Speaking personally, as an ex-journalist I found their English-language coverage generally to be pretty well-balanced and well reported - so that's probably why. And I came to them with a pretty sceptical eye. I've heard that their arabic language stories are rather different - but I don't have a way of checking that for myself.
Wow I have heard so much that Al Jazeera is pretty reliable, never did I realise until I read your comment that they are owned by Qatari monarchy. Qatar, the country everyone was practically calling us to boycott in the 2022 World Cup. Not suitable to hold the World Cup but suitable for us to get news from apparently. They do generally seem to have a high quality of journalism though so I am suprised at how they maintain at least a decent amount of integrity.
At the end of the day it's really just a matter of which state propaganda outlet you distrust the least, by which metric they seem to score pretty well. Beyond obvious biases one would expect to see, I also find them a little UK-influenced but otherwise I struggle to find a better state sponsored propaganda outlet.
If I had to guess, it's because they have actual reporters on the ground getting shot at and killed, unlike many other media outlets who count on heresay and statements.
You realize that all media/press is backed by something, right?
Do you prefer click-baity ridden press looking for ad revenue instead? Or media as a business
where they avoid reporting anything controversial that would hurt their business/image/relationships/backers.
So funny to see *unbiased HN users take up pitchfork in support of a literally Monarchy(House of Thani) + State(Qatar) owned propaganda machine news outlet which constantly writes in favour of their Middle East Masters and silently prefers not to tell the truth in their reporting.
Here's their front page. https://www.aljazeera.com Since you say they "constantly write in favour of Quatar, it shouldn't be hard for your find examples.
Certainly there's very negative coverage of Quatar's many faults, but that's not the same as constantly pushing a positive agenda. In other areas the reporting seems sound.
This makes me think that the reason I was thrown out of Facebook is because I followed some Palestinian pages there. Not because I necessarily a supporter of the whole "Palestinian cause", because I think the whole thing is honestly a mess perpetrated by forces with ulterior motives on both sides. But I like to keep informed.
I never got an explanation from fb at the time, but now when I try to log in it states a reason: I have broken community rules regarding "dangerous people and organizations". Which is really a laughable accusation regarding me, a convinced pacifist since 50 years back. But I'm honestly concerned that this might have further implications for me. Who else gets to know that I'm considered associated with "dangerous persons or organizations"?
Anyway, we are as a society still grappling for how to deal with the sudden and immense power over public opinion generation as well peoples most private lives that social media companies have acquired lately. I don't have a complete solution, but this is untenable.
I'm not defending the deletion, but couldn't the acts on the show have violated TOS in a variety of ways? Creating fake pages and conducting any kind of experiment secretly probably violate the terms in some kind of way.
Still wrong to target the host, but I could see how they could justify it.
Readit News
Sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36119693
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I live in a post religious society and it's easy to forget that these things still matter for the rest of the planet.
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They've weaponized anti-semitism against their detractors. And, who wants to be accused of racism? Even false accusations stain your reputation.
The irony is that it's probably one of the most racist countries I've ever seen in my entire life. They made a shrine to a terrorist (Baruch Goldstein). The president proudly called miscegenation "a tragedy". If you can imagine a white US president openly calling for whites and blacks to stop having babies - that's the level of racism this state's supporters endorse when weaponizing anti semitism.
Not sure what you're talking about here. Baruch Goldstein has no "shrine"* and besides fringe groups in Israel he is generally not accepted. Compare that with the monthly salaries Palestinian terrorists receive from the PLO and their rockstar status in Palestinian society.
* he has a grave, Israeli law can't really prevent that. The Israeli government has ruined most of the site of his grave despite his family's appeals.
On the flip side, human nature being what it is, giving any person or set of people unconditional approval is creating conditions where evil can thrive.
Maybe go look up Jonathan Pollard. If Israel is our close friend, why would they need to spy on us?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard
https://www.military.com/history/jonathan-pollard-was-one-of...
The same reason why the US spies on the Bundeskanzler.
An actual reason I have heard is that it is as important to have independent information on your allies than it is on your enemies. Even if it is only for better coordination.
Basically, boosting Israel makes politicians popular with big swaths of their electorate. Pissing those electorates off makes things tough on a corporation, so they generally try not to.
As a secular Jew in Western Europe, I've distanced myself from my religious community due to its insistence on tying my identity to Israel. Where I live, it's less taboo to critique Israel than in the U.S., but still tricky.
Advocates of Israel's right-wing politics have blurred the line between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism, an endeavor helped by actual anti-Semites. I've grown up with these supporters, but can't quite call them a "lobby" due to their loose organization and lesser influence here compared to the U.S.
Speaking out brings risks: being labeled a leftist extremist, clashing with fellow Jews, or unwittingly aiding anti-Semites. And that's if you are Jew.
This creates a pervasive, cautious silence that I imagine is even more stifling in countries with highly organized pro-Israel lobbying.
My horrid crime that made me literally Hitler?
Disagreement if a tag should be named "jews" or "judaism" on the Politics Stack Exchange site. I made an off-hand comment that I renamed the tag from "jews" to "judaism" and the very first response was that I had been "reported to the ADL" (whether they actually did: who knows? Probably not).
That such an incredibly boring, banal, and benign disagreement exploded in accusations of anti-Semitism so quickly has made me rather distrustful of these accusations in general unless I can verify things. Anti-Semitism is real, but so are narcissistic people abusing it to "win the argument". If you need to defend yourself with "but I'm not anti-Semitic!" then you've already kind of lost the argument, right?
Is it really so hard to "critique" Israel? I see daily calls for Israel to be abolished one way or the other (either violently with the help of Iran or with a Palestinian return). You can hear these opinions from politicians, on the news and social media, campuses and schools.
You might be labeled as a leftist as you said because this is generally a leftist stance, that's fair no? If I held a rightwing view I will probably be labeled as a right winger. Most Israelis I know think twice before they identify as Israelis in certain parts of Europe, they don't want a random cab driver to start lecturing them about apartheid (or do something worse). So I'm really intrigued why you think its such a taboo thing to criticize Israel or even openly call for its destruction.
- Strong lobby in both political parties.
- Boomers with their Judeo-Christians “values”.
- Israel intelligence agencies controlling/influencing ADL, ADL pressuring three letter agencies in US to further influence big tech.
- The usual tactics of infiltration into big corps especially ones that can influence public opinions, you can read a little about Roy Bollock case
>The ADL operates as a private intelligence agency, sending spies, infiltrators, disruptors, and agents provocateurs into the camps — both Jewish and non-Jewish — of those who disagree with its view of Jewish interests. Also like an intelligence agency, it maintains a huge database containing personal information on politicians, writers, dissidents, activists, publishers, bloggers, and even unaffiliated private citizens so that — should any of these people “get out of line,” in the opinion of the ADL — they can be threatened, “exposed,” blackmailed, and thus silenced with maximum effectiveness. [1]
- And especially for Facebook with their shady business, they live on selling the users data to advertisers, the company won’t do anything to cut that money flow, take a look at twitter in the same case how ADL managed to cut around 60% of ads companies, it’s mostly about money and influence.
[1] redice.tv/news/the-adl-and-domestic-spying-roy-bullock-case-revisited
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
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For example on twitch, Spanish streamers[1] say a lot of things that would get an English streamer canceled and/or banned for saying it. And for other languages I'm sure the gap is even bigger.
The same with the group being criticized. Criticism against Russians is not moderated the same way as criticism against Jewish people.
To be clear I'm not in favor of hate speech, I'm just pointing out that moderation isn't 100% equal.
[1] I mean the language of the stream, not the nationality of the streamer
People are not criticizing ethnic Russians. They are criticizing citizens of the Russian state, which includes people who aren’t ethnically Russian but doesn’t include people who are ethnically Russian in e.g. Ukraine. It’s arguable how much responsibility Russian citizens have for the present situation but it’s more than zero.
Similarly while it’s fine to criticize Israelis for the actions of Israel, it’s not fine to criticize Jewish people in general for it.
I agree, kind of, but let's also please realize that it's similar to criticizing US citizens for the actions of the US state. I wouldn't criticize the average American for the actions of the CIA or for the war in Afghanistan, because the average American might or might not agree with those actions.
In other words, I think it's correct to criticize the country, but incorrect to criticize specific people unless they are personally doing bad things.
Some do, and are rarely denounced for that. Alas.
Also, when the internet will ever learn, if you try to censor something you will just give it more exposure, I personally would never know about this documentary but now I will watch it.
Since 9/11 Americans can't trust anything with an "arabic background", they are constantly bombarded by the media, so they can't ever discover that the middle east is much more than a place with oil or "weapons of mass destruction".
Al Jazeera hires top journalists, they are well-funded. They are just very concerned when talking about Qatar, which in a geopolitical sense, doesn't matter, all other news are typically very unbiased.
Only a few news outlets from Europe are similar in quality.
Americans rarely want to see the truth anyways, so they stick with those republican/democrat-leaning media outlets, eating Mc Donalds, going bankrupt on a hospital emergency and believing in the American dream: you need to be asleep to believe on it.
Doesn't seem like the sign of a good news org if you can't say a word of criticism about the country you're headquartered at. Makes me wonder what else is rotten in there, how can we know the rules of the country aren't dictating a bunch of other stuff to the news? News should be as independent as possible.
The main State-sponsored media outlet in my country is considered to be of a pretty high quality. It has some international recognition.
I’d say a fair chunk of those that actually care about media outlet trustworthiness (and aren’t just sharing whatever articles come their way barring a few outlets that are in their person blocklist) are aware of the nuances of AJ’s authority and trustworthiness. The reality is that they have built this reputation by doing heaps and heaps of good reporting, not even in spite of being state-sponsored, but really because of it. There are certain topics that you shouldn’t listen to AJ regarding. Otherwise? They do a good job.
I would argue that they just have more polish to their presentation rather than having more integrity, and the coverage in local language is quite different from the one in English
Because they are different govs, with different agendas, each of them see the propaganda of others as evil, but it's still all very much propaganda.
Remember CNN diffused many bits on how WMD were in Irak to justify the war the UN voted against. The USA went to war anyway, and we learned there were no WMD.
Al Jazeera does the same, but for their side.
It is, nevertheless, quite qualitative content for many topics, and give you another points of on the world events than our own medias outlet.
I am sorry, but they aren't. This is just false equivalence, you can just go read BBC's coverage of UK politics and you will see criticism of their government
Speaking personally, as an ex-journalist I found their English-language coverage generally to be pretty well-balanced and well reported - so that's probably why. And I came to them with a pretty sceptical eye. I've heard that their arabic language stories are rather different - but I don't have a way of checking that for myself.
You realize that all media/press is backed by something, right?
Do you prefer click-baity ridden press looking for ad revenue instead? Or media as a business where they avoid reporting anything controversial that would hurt their business/image/relationships/backers.
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Just because it doesn't adopt you worldview doesn't mean its a propaganda outlet.
Certainly there's very negative coverage of Quatar's many faults, but that's not the same as constantly pushing a positive agenda. In other areas the reporting seems sound.
A starter for you https://www.aljazeera.com/search/quatar?sort=date
I'm also willing to bet that when it gets manually reviewed it will be reinstated.
I never got an explanation from fb at the time, but now when I try to log in it states a reason: I have broken community rules regarding "dangerous people and organizations". Which is really a laughable accusation regarding me, a convinced pacifist since 50 years back. But I'm honestly concerned that this might have further implications for me. Who else gets to know that I'm considered associated with "dangerous persons or organizations"?
Anyway, we are as a society still grappling for how to deal with the sudden and immense power over public opinion generation as well peoples most private lives that social media companies have acquired lately. I don't have a complete solution, but this is untenable.
They have known this for a while they do nothing about it.
Should Coca-Cola and its followers also be banned?
Who decides where the line of "dangerous" is drawn?
Still wrong to target the host, but I could see how they could justify it.