Israeli Group Claims It’s Using Big Tech Back Channels to Censor “Inflammatory” Wartime Content (theintercept.com)

submitted 10 months ago by Philo@sh.itjust.works to c/world@lemmy.world

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[-] Rottcodd@lemmy.world 28 points 10 months ago

...Iron Truth volunteers conflating Palestinian advocacy with material support for Hamas...

So Iron Truth lies.

How unsurprisingly Orwellian...

[-] nekandro@lemmy.ml 25 points 10 months ago

Censorship at a global scale to cover up a genocide. Classic.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 20 points 10 months ago

I’ve never seen a country lose support quicker than during this war so they’re apparently doing a real shitty job censoring content.

[-] Siegfried@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

Where I live, not a single newsoutlet will talk against israel. Everybody wears pins and have flags on their desks as support for a country that has zero influence over our culture. But I cant find a single person that doesnt think of them as assholes

[-] nix@merv.news 3 points 10 months ago

What country? Germany?

[-] Siegfried@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

Argentina... I doubt there isnt a big number of Germans supporting israel

[-] DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 11 points 10 months ago

The sheer level of obliviousness it takes to call yourself "Iron" anything as a Jewish group supporting a genocide is astounding.

What's next, the Storm Squad?

[-] samokosik@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 10 months ago

Hence why Lemmy is great. Hence why FOSS programs such as signal are perfect and should be used primarily.

[-] Philo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

Lemmy is FOSS, so is Mastodon. Are you telling me that censorship through heavy-handed moderation can't happen on those platforms?

[-] samokosik@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 10 months ago

It can happen, it’s just more difficult to do so.

[-] modifier@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago

Muldoon added that Google “encourages employees to use their time and skills to volunteer for causes they care about.”

This is a great brush off but as a general statement is so broad it could come back to bite them in a big way.

[-] stoly@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

I mean Google did that like 10+ years ago and pretty famously made that go away.

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 3 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The brainchild of Dani Kaganovitch, a Tel Aviv-based software engineer at Google, Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or “pro-terrorist” across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.

While content moderation trigger-happiness around mere mentions of designated terror organizations has led to undue censorship of Palestinian and other Middle Eastern users, Big Tech policies on misinformation are, on paper, much more conservative.

“It’s really hard to identify disinformation,” Kaganovitch acknowledged in an interview, conceding that what’s considered a conspiracy today might be corroborated tomorrow, and pointing to a recent Haaretz report that an Israel Defense Forces helicopter may have inadvertently killed Israelis on October 7 in the course of firing at Hamas.

Even the words “Israel lied” were suggested to Iron Truth volunteers on the grounds that they could be used in “false posts.” On October 16, two days after an Israeli airstrike killed 70 Palestinians evacuating from northern Gaza, one Telegram group member shared a TikTok containing imagery of one of the bombed convoys.

Links to similar allegations of Israeli war crimes from figures such as popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker; Colombian President Gustavo Petro; psychologist Gabor Maté; and a variety of obscure, ordinary social media users have received the same treatment.

Chat transcripts show many Iron Truth volunteers conflating Palestinian advocacy with material support for Hamas or characterizing news coverage as “misinformation” or “disinformation,” perennially vague terms whose meaning is further diluted in times of war and crisis.

The original article contains 3,856 words, the summary contains 258 words. Saved 93%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[-] Philo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago

It seems you have never been to certain lemmy.ml communities where any posts against current SJW flavors of the week will be removed by moderators.

this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024

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