It is about Tech platforms deciding to side with Israel and silencing palestinians in social media. We have had plenty of discussions here about social media censorship (especially during covid and trump era). This is a valid discussion as well as it is about human rights.

If we can talk and about Indian and Nigerian, or Chinese censorship against the Uyghurs and the Tiananmen square masacre, then we can talk about Israeli censorship war against the Palestinians as well.

Also Computer Ethics is part of the Computer Science curriculum in most colleges, and part of technology. We are not going to solve this conflict here, but we should know where censorship in tech is being used to suppress the voice of a whole population. I was born in a communist country (Albania), and censorship in media was used to suppress the voice of the people in order to prop up a brutal regime.

"In addition to using social media to incriminate Palestinians, Israel has also used it to muzzle us. In 2016, Israel’s then-Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked boasted that, in the previous four-month period, Facebook had complied with 95% of Israel’s requests to remove Palestinian content on the vague basis of “incitement.” A year later, Israel tried to push the “Facebook Bill” through the Knesset, legislation which would force Facebook to remove any content designated as “incitement.” "

If you continue to post religious/racial/whatever flamewar comments to HN, we will ban you. You've done it repeatedly and it is not what this site is for—quite the opposite. No more of this please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: also, please stop creating multiple accounts.

Edit 2: actually, you've been breaking the site guidelines enough that I've banned your account. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645941.

> If your post calls for destroying Israel, then it deserves to be removed.

There are tons of posts from Americans talking about wiping various countries off the map. Should those posts also be removed? Should those users be banned?

Yes.

If they are racially motivated, and shows hatred towards a whole ethinicity and people, yes, the posts should be removed and the users banned after repeat violations.

Sounds like you've set a system up full of semantic issues. For example, saying "Death to Israel" is in pretty clear violation of this rule.

But what about "Turn Iraq into a glass parking lot"? Someone could argue that they aren't targeting a "whole ethnicity" because Iraq is simply one of many Arab/Muslim-majority nations - and not even in the top 3 most populous Arab countries. After all, the person didn't say "Kill every Muslim" nor did they say "Bomb all Muslim countries" -- they just stated one of MANY countries that happens to be majority Muslim.

No I am not one of those.

If somebody says Turn Iraq into a glass parking lot, they should be banned after repeat violations, and their post should be removed.

So you're saying that the posts should be removed not because of what they say but because of their motives. And who decides what are the posts motives? You, of course.

Israel is running a slow-motion ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, practices apartheid, and violates international law by building settlements on occupied territories... but you say that the reason Palestinians hate Israelis is because of their race? Yeah, sure.

Race is a very important component on Paletinians hating Jews.

You are uninformed in this matter.

You can find rampant anti-Jewish sentiment in Quran and Hadith, and they are widely circulated in social media.

You maybe living in the West where such posts are not circulated, but they exist outside of your sphere.

There are two narratives. One in English- where they are the victims, and they need saving. Another one in Arabic, where they call for genocide of the Jewish people regularly.

And these were brought into my attention by my friends speaking Arabic.

Just because this narrative exists outside your focus and periphery, does not mean it does not exist.

You did more than anyone else to turn this thread into a flamewar hell. Moreover, this isn't the only time recently that you've broken the site guidelines with flamewar comments and attacking other users (e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27590644).

If it were just the one thread, I'd let you off with a warning, but this is egregious (and it seems you've done this with other accounts in the past, too). Therefore I've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Edit: just in case anyone is worried about it: when we ban accounts in politically contentious threads, it's not because we secretly disagree with the politics of the banned account. Our goal is simply to enforce the site guidelines and prevent HN from turning into a flamewar hell, the end state of which would be scorched earth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). The history of moderation comments here—not that anyone would want to slog through it—contains plenty of examples of HN users getting banned from every possible political angle.

> Race is a very important component on Paletinians hating Jews.

This is an entirely irrelevant, even ridiculous, argument, given the present situation. Which is that there is a very concrete and justified reason for Palestinians to hate Israel, and that's because Israel is oppressing them in a way that no people would ever tolerate and that would be classified and prosecuted as a crime if the perpetrators were any others than the West's darlings.

By the way, a friend of mine is a Palestinian from the West Bank who was subject to Israeli persecution, and had in the end to flee elsewhere. She is Christian, as has been her family since time immemorial. I can assure you she heartily hates Israel nonetheless. (10% of Palestinians were Christians, that's something Israel prefers to gloss over, since any empathy from the Christian west is dangerous).

You want to talk about the atavic, religious hatred that Palestinians harbour for Jews? Cool, then remove all the actual, justifiable reasons for that hatred and after that, if there's any left, we can talk about it.

You've entirely ignored the thrust of the parents argument.

I'd also point out that from the perspective of a secular westerner, even if one group is calling for the genocide of the other regularly; is the other group, which is actually committing genocide regularly, able to be held up as morally superior in any way? Is that group (Israeli Zionists) actually worth defending at all?

You have to remember that for the vast majority of the world, neither religious viewpoint holds much weight; only the globally agreed common ethics.

Is it not okay to ask for a partial reconstruction? Israel occupies land that is internationally recognised as not being Israel's. Demanding restitution, even occupation to enforce a peace. They're all extremely difficult ideas if you're Israeli, but perhaps required to start to put a broken situation right.

There’s objective collective punishment of Palestinians. That’s a simple fact. I don’t see “this is political” dismissal when people post about other controversial topics, such as Uyghurs and China.

Example posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26401715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26217821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23739567

Seems more like Israel is believed to be above criticism and there are active campaigns to silence that criticism.

It's literally in the title: "social media"

The post is about technology, but obviously you don’t agree with the subject matter, as evident by your dismissal of it as being “woke liberal”.

That’s a pretty hypocritical statement.

Of course social media is technology. But so are brick houses, scissors, and trousers.

This post does not belong in this site because it is more political than related to technology.

Just notice the tone in the article. It screams "politically charged post".

It has very little or nothing to do with technology.

I did not dismiss it for being "woke liberal". I dismissed it because it moves away from the ethics of journalist being objective and seeing nuance. They don't in this case.

And social media is decades old. This post is nowhere near about being a post about technology.

Is telephone directory fraud a post about tech? Telephone is a tech.

In that same way the post rides on reporting on tech but is really a political piece.

The owner (daughter of Eric Schmidt) is probably trying to score brownie points by making Israel the villain. Because they are an easy target and no one minds.

Remember the people who killed Jamal Khasoggi? They came by airplane (also a technology) and coordinated with satphones and cellphones (also technology). That news is not Rest of World material.

Social media is decades old, and if there's any censorship going on, it is comparable to newspaper sensorship and tech is not central (newspapers use computers and internet, so are they tech?).

And since this is controversial, this should not be in HN.

You got woke liberals defending Hamas nowadays. I wouldn't be surprised.