- The article claims that takedown requests on 20,000 Palestinian items demonstrate an attempt to control all Palestinian content.
- The number of takedown requests is irrelevant without demonstrating the illegitimacy of the requests.
- Valid evidence would be showing a takedown request for a single post that an unbiased group wouldn't interpret as inflammatory or harmful to security.
- It's suspicious that the article doesn't include a link to see the 20,000 posts. Or even one for that matter. Why wouldn't they include that extremely relevant info?
- The source for the number 20,000 is this post => https://7amleh.org/2021/12/29/the-palestinian-digital-rights...
- The post contains zero information on where that number came from.
- The article uses misleading language. It claims takedown requests "grew exponentially", from 2,421 in 2016 to 20,000+ in 2020. An additional 18,000 requests over five years is not exponential growth.
- It attributes maliciousness to the increase in takedown requests:
-- Ignoring the fact that takedown requests have been increasing globally year after year. Twitter for example had 6,000 governmental takedown requests in 2015. In 2020 that number was 81,000! https://transparency.twitter.com/en/removal-requests.html
-- Ignoring Palestinian population growth (which is indeed exponential by nature) of more than half a million. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-pale...
-- Ignoring the massive period of internet adoption during that time period. More than 1,000,000 new internet users! https://www.internetworldstats.com/me/il.htm
- Israel is not even among the top ten countries that submitted the most takedown requests in 2021. Russia, Turkey, France, and Germany are. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens...
- In 2021 Israel had 7.68 million internet users and submitted 91 content removal requests per 100,000 users. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/tech-giant-cens... https://www.statista.com/statistics/974318/israel-number-of-...
- According to my math that is a total of 6,989 for ALL takedown requests, not just Palestinian content. Hardly the 20,000+ for Palestinian content alone that the article claims.
- Depending on where you draw the lines it's hard to get a clear number of Palestinian social media users. Let's take 2.7 million as an estimate as per https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-palestine.
- Let's pretend 20,000 is indeed the number of Israeli takedown requests of Palestinian posts.
- Let's also pretend that none of those posts were incitements to violence.
- Let's assume that each takedown request targeted a post of a unique Palestinian individual (highly unlikely, people's posts tend to have a theme).
- That would mean that Israel tried to have a single post of less than 1% of Palestinian social media users taken down.
- If the average social media user posts twice a day across all their platforms that's 730 posts in 2020. So even the < 1% of users potentially affected only had .001 of their posts affected.
How on earth could anyone rational come to a conclusion that Israel plans to control all Palestinian content online?
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That's my concrete criticism.
In addition, the article is a terrible source. It seems that it wasn't shared from the author's main publication "The Palestinian Chronicle" to make it seem less biased. Here is the original https://www.palestinechronicle.com/how-israels-facebook-law-....
Note the large logo signifying the platform of a single Palestinian state solution. No state for Jews anywhere in Palestine, not along any borders '67 or '48. What happens to the vast majority of Jews in Israel who have no other country that they can go to? Is there a larger incitement to violence?
The article makes it like it's just a law aimed at Palestinians when it is a much broader issue and actually opposed by rightwing parties. The title is so insincere as to be sickening.
How it will be used by rightwing parties when it passes is really the only thing that matters.
Lets return to your argument when the law as proposed is struck down and the Palestinian people are not in danger of having their plight further censored and ignored by the world at large.