• Mrkawfee@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      35
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      11 months ago

      I know right? Who would have thought centralised social media owned by surveillance capitalist billionaires could do this?

        • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          11 months ago

          Because that will enable people to see and interact with the things their users post without themselves being under their control.

        • JustSomePerson@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          7
          ·
          11 months ago

          Because we are not censorship happy pieces of shit. We judge every statement for what it is, rather than applying guilt by association in three steps.

          Most people who want to block Meta from the fediverse want to do it because they want to block people’s opinions and statements from reaching them. They want the fediverse to be a “safe space” (a term which thankfully has lost most of its momentum in the last few years) where no dissenting or nuanced opinion is welcome. Somehow you’re trying to turn Meta’s similar behavior into an argument against them, even though it’s an example of both organizations doing similar things (prohibiting unwanted opinions).

          • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            9
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            No, sane members here just don’t want to see pro-corporate horseshit, bots and Meta’s psyop motherfuckers trying to shape opinions here with their corporate agenda like they already do on their own platform. If users themselves want to attempt this sort of thing, that’s on them and we can deal with that. Meta is guilty preemptively, and we should not treat them as if they aren’t. This is just yet more proof. The fact that Meta does this is not an “opinion.” It’s a fact. The type of agenda they’re pushing, whoever they’re pro or against is irrelevant. It’s the attempt to push that matters.

            And we already ban tons of content here. Try posting some pro-Nazi stuff, for instance, and see what happens. There are a whole host of actions and topics that are explicitly prohibited just in the lemmy.world ToS. Trying to claim that there’s no censorship on this instance or in the Fediverse as a whole is such a monumentally stupid fucking statement that no one can take anything else you said seriously.

            Go shill for your megacorporation somewhere else.

            • JustSomePerson@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              arrow-down
              2
              ·
              11 months ago

              I am not claiming that there’s no censorship in the fediverse. I’m claiming that there is censorship, meaning that the fact that Meta also uses censorship is no argument against them. You censor people you call nazis, they censor people who think three generations of occupation in Palestine is a bad thing. Both have problems. This piece of news about Meta censorship is not an argument against federation.

              • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                edit-2
                11 months ago

                This piece of news is more proof (as if we didn’t already have enough) that Meta specifically is an entity that cannot be trusted to act in good faith, and therefore integrating with them is a risk we should not take. In case you cannot understand this concept, remember that instances that are generally accepted as harmful due to their content, behavior, or just who operates them are already defederated with most/all other major instances, for good reason. This is no different. Except for one detail: We already have decades of experience with Meta/Facebook and their evil, monopolistic, and user hostile behavior. They are a known quantity to us.

                You were the one who tried to narrow the goalposts to make the argument specifically only about censorship. All of Meta’s bad behavior is valid cause for concern. Institutionalized politically motivated censorship is just one aspect of it. What we do and don’t allow on our own particular instances has no bearing on it. Trying to bleat “both sides bad” is not a valid argument in this case.

                • JustSomePerson@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  arrow-down
                  2
                  ·
                  11 months ago

                  trusted to act in good faith

                  You are not acting in good faith when you are arguing that your members should be blocked from communicating with anybody on Meta servers, because of guilt by association. What you don’t allow on your particular instances has great bearing, because it shows that you are no different from them, other than in which opinions you consider to be worthy of suppressing.

            • chitak166@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              11 months ago

              Go shill for your megacorporation somewhere else.

              Why do all of you people reply like this as though you’re objectively correct?

  • Steve@communick.news
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      11 months ago

      What percent of facebook users would document their content and report their removal to HRW? 1000 reporting to HRW because their comments got removed from facebook seems funny. I certainly wouldn’t think to report technology@lemmy.world’s mods to a human rights organization if they removed this comment or banned me for posting something pro-palestine on another community.

    • morrowind@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      11 months ago

      Those are just the documented ones. They don’t exactly have access to meta’s modlogs

      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        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.

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      11 months ago

      It’s not enough to prove a pattern of behavior, but it’s enough to call out as a disturbing trend.

      • Steve@communick.news
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Is it? We’d need to know a lot more about how often this happens to other random groups to determine that.

        • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          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.

    • eclectic_electron@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • BlueBockser@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        11 months ago

        The fact that you’re being downvoted for calling for a more thorough and objective investigation really says it all.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    11 months ago

    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!

  • AlecSadler@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • Cyber Yuki@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    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” 🙄

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      11 months ago

      It’s hard to claim either way - for example my bubble is also mostly pro-palestinian. Suspiciously missing pro-isreaeli side actually.

      But that doesn’t mean it’s what the algorithm serves on average. No one outside some teams in Meta actually knows, any outside attempt to analyze it would expose you to the same bubble-creating mechanism