I see the investigation separates anti-zionism from anti-semitism. Perhaps one could have separated anti-judaism (critique against the religion) from anti-semitism too?
For example criticizing metzitzah b’peh (direct oral suctioning) or mentioning that Jesus according to Talmud is boiling in feces in hell could be considered anti-judaism but not anti-semitism.
Ironically, after posting the part 1 leaks, I ran into several censorship efforts directed towards me (both direct and indirect).
I had my Reddit account shadow banned (still in effect) and my hackernews account on a "filtered mode" (they think my posts are too promotional and repetitive).
This story was immediately filtered after I initially posted it this morning.
Another thing to mention, is that for the first couple of hours after posting the part 1 story, I had the post locked several times, and have had several newly created HN accounts making some not so nice comments directed towards us as opposed to focusing on the story at hand.
Also my post was down ranked to the third page of HN, despite having way more engagement (comments and upvotes) then 95% of the posts on the first page of HN.
So if anyone knows a better way to make these posts without getting banned/filtered, or knows another place that would be interested let me know. I would like to continue posting on HackerNews, but if I have to message the mods every time I make the post, it would be extremely painful. Thanks to Dan, for once again coming to save the day.
Part 3 leaks will probably be either next week or the week after. We are currently collaborating with a news organization to get the story out there first.
Finally, I can answer any questions anyone has about this story.
> So if anyone knows a better way to make these posts without getting banned/filtered
The problem seems to be that HN has the very same incentives to manipulate social discourse as these other platforms do and by all accounts seems to be doing it or explicitly allowing it to happen "organically" via flagging.
>" Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters. "
>Can anyone help on this?
>Without fail, every single time it gets removed instantly.
Hello, yes, I can help! You see, dark pattern algorithms found that polarization, infuriation, etc maximizes engagement maximizes profit. Reddit specializes in the deletion / banning meta, which is yet another form of engagement maximization. Are you not frustrated? Are you not so compelled to return to reddit, to finally succeed with your post, to drink that precious updoot milkshake? --- A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
I emailed the moderator and asked them why this post was constantly getting flagged and locked.
Here is their reply (quote):
"Looks like user vouches outweighed user flags, at least for now."
I am not familiar with how hackernews works, but this is what ChatGPT returned on this:
"""
On Hacker News, not all users have the ability to vouch for others. Typically, vouching is restricted to users who have achieved a certain level of trust or reputation within the community. This means that only established users, often those with a higher karma score or a longer history of positive contributions, can vouch for others.
If you find that you cannot vouch for someone, it may be because you haven't met the necessary criteria set by Hacker News. The platform aims to maintain the quality of endorsements, ensuring that only credible users can influence the reputation of others. If you're looking to vouch in the future, focusing on contributing positively to discussions and building your karma can help you reach that level.
"""
This is not a speculation on the part of the whistleblowers or some unknown fact related to "Jews".
The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.
This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.
But that makes sense, as the OP said, oct 7th was a huge terror attack that was live-streamed and shared throughout all social media. Hamas filmed themselves on Facebook live doing horrific acts, and people shared and cheered. So obviously there would be an uptick of takedown requests.
Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?
I do want to mention one more thing. There are more leaks that will be shared in the coming days. Many of which are related to mass censorship, theft, fraud going on at Meta.
This is just one leak related to censorship and Israel. There are still more.
ICW was created with the purpose of exposing corruption related to government and anything tech related. We focus on high quality investigative work. By quality, I mean actually running experiments and going beyond surface level analysis. While everyone has their own biases/leanings, we try to separate our investigations from our opinions (which we do provide in a clearly labeled separate section, usually called "Discussions").
As you can see from our post timelines, I spend months doing this kind of investigative work. And it takes 100+ hours to do a proper investigation, let alone write the actual report.
You can check out our previous investigations here:
The Youtube Algorithm and Manufacturing Consent (https://archive.org/details/youtube-icw)
- We collected the worlds largest Youtube recommendation dataset using a custom built watch bot. We concluded that almost all Youtube users are 1-click away from far-right radicalizing videos.
What can we learn from the Andrew Tate data breach (https://archive.org/details/tate_data_breach/)
- We looked at the leaks of Andrew Tate's school and calculated through simulations exactly how much money he was making from the project, and allude to what this may mean for his taxes. We also run a state-of-the-art analysis into what kind of posts people make there, as well as survey the user demographics.
We do not currently have a website. And have had $0 funding so far. So entirely out of pocket. From the beginning we opened donations via BTC and ETH, but didn't receive anything yet.
I am NRU (alias) the lead investigator with a background in AI. I am currently driving the entire investigation for these projects. I occasionally collaborate with Drop Site News and BBC for some of the work we do.
There are several indications that this is a single person “organization”, and not a true research organization. And that’s okay if the research is actually factual and grounded, but the misrepresentation can be a bit off-putting to some, and many of the methodologies seem flawed for the conclusions drawn. There is a distinct lack of actual scientific rigor that seems to be brushed over with language like “state of the art” and “world’s largest” without any evidence those statements are actually true.
I would recommend considering these findings to be moderate to highly unreliable and entirely unverified due to the lack of scientific rigor. Effectively, it is best to consider this as potential political propaganda, which doesn’t indicate any sort of nefariousness, only that it may be motivated by an agenda to prove something rather than independent analysis.
Human rights watch's report covers more individual examples.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
This leak aims at looking at the bigger picture across all of Meta's 3 billion users.
Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that as counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed. But anyone familiar with how ML models work knows that false positives / false negatives exists.
Its the degree to which the ML models primarily censor almost any content related to Israel/Palestine, the systemic nature of targeting specific countries, such as Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, and the fact that per-capita, Israel is the country that most abuses the content enforcement system (3x more than any other country).
> Of course, Meta can chose examples of actually violating posts removed and show that are counter proof, or even posts that are violating that are not yet removed
No, meta don't need to prove anything to anyone.
It's you who alleges that the content should have stayed up, so what's your evidence?
You're telling me I need to go and read a HRW pdf instead? Okay where is that?
Unfortunately links to individual posts can't be accessed as the posts themselves are removed. The HRW report is excellent as they documented this individual cases and recorded them.
Okay well you don't have any proof, any in general, I would consider it a good use of tax shekels to reduce the number of pro-hamas posts on social media. So until you can dig up any proof, I'm considering this whole post to be a nothing burger
Did you look at the article? This investigation directly corroborates existing reports from third parties like Human Rights Watch. There is even an intake form directly from the Israeli government calling for the censorship posts of posts at Meta. We even posted their phone and fax number in case anyone is interested in having a friendly chat with them.
All data collected is directly from Meta, and the whisteblowers themselves are open to sharing this data with any authority or court willing to look into this. Everything is well documented. Where and how the data was obtained is also documented as well.
All 1049 posts were peaceful?
The pdf mentions this was mostly after October 7th, a terrorist (as in, meant to induce fear by targeting civilians) attack which was live streamed on Facebook and posted repeatedly during that day.
I’m surprised the Israelis are so capable with intelligence, yet bungled this so much that not one post they pointed out was violent?
I’m happy to stand corrected, but when someone shows a perfect record in a data review I’m naturally suspicious.
EDIT: I’m confusing the linked PDF and HRW’s report. But I still have doubts about HRW’s numbers.
In this case it's being alleged that sending a thousand false takedown requests which were then acted on would not be a bungling, but rather a success.
Many many countries are doing this, which is shown in figure 5. However, no other country comes close to the amount of censorship done by Israel. Additionally, most countries primarily do internal censorship. Again, Israel is the only country that is censoring other countries to this great extent. And almost all of it is related to the ongoing events.
Just some friendly advice, this sort of blurring of the lines between Jews and the government of Israel is not effective at changing minds. Obviously the two are not entirely separate and cannot be, but reasonable people can love Jewish people (or be Jewish themselves!) and criticize the government of Israel. Doing the latter doesn't negate the former. If you ever want to have a fruitful conversation with somebody, understanding this distinction is a pre-requisite
Not saying I agree with it but if it's true censored people who have concrete evidence it's happening probably are going to continuously shout it from the rooftops until they feel their neighbors are sufficiently aware.
Is there any info on the language distribution of the censored content (or was this about english content only)?
Are there random (or cherry picked) examples of censored content somewhere? Is anything known about the selection process (just keyword based? more sophisticated?).
This talks about the dangers of manipulating public opinion and poisoning future automatic classifications, but how effective were the 'Israelis specifically with that (on a spectrum from "censors everything that contains the words river+sea" to "picks censorship targets strategically in order to shift discourse/opinion in favor of Israel")?
The language of the posts is usually representative of the user country. E.g. USA=English, Egypt=Arabic.
However, on aggregate, the majority of posts taken down are from middle eastern countries, and are mostly arabic language.
Please see "random/cherry picked" examples from human rights watches report mentioned in the bottom of the article.
To quote: "Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report,
1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise
unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel."
Look at the username you're replying to, then at the username who posted the article on HN, then at the username who submitted the content to Internet Archive.
We can answer any questions anyone may have.