this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.

He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.

In response, Meta restricted access to his account.

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[–] NoSpiritAnimal 103 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Meta was throttling pro-palestinian accounts on Threads. I couldn't post anything but pictures for 2 days.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Remember Instagram's auto translate "bug"?

[–] assa123 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

Instagram ‘Sincerely Apologizes’ For Inserting ‘Terrorist’ Into Palestinian Bio Translations

The "see translation" feature for user bios was auto-translating phrases that included "Palestinian" and “alhamdulillah” into "Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom."

[–] Baines 86 points 11 months ago (4 children)

80% of my phone screen covered in ads

shit website

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's mull for android. On ios you can use firefox focus, ddg, or brave

[–] steventhedev 29 points 11 months ago (7 children)

On Android, you can also use Firefox and install unlock origin. And dark reader. And whatever other extension you want.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

There’s a million ad blockers for iOS safari also.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Its 2023 my dude. Use nextdns on router if you have one or ublock origin addon with Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Any downsides? Potential incompatibilities I'd have to explain to others on network?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Probably 0.1% of websites might break but you can always whitelist them from the logs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Normally DNS is set on your router and handed out to all clients via DHCP. Only issue you might have is stuff not working because of blocked requests, my wife complained about that for a bit when I was using a pihole to block ads on my home network.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Shit website but the damage it can do to modern society is real.

[–] Mrkawfee 80 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

There is a wave of censorship and McCarthyist witch hunting against Pro Palestinian voices happening in the West. It is profoundly disturbing and shows how hollow the West's claims to championing personal liberty is.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is the sort of thing that freedom of speech is supposed to protect, but that idea has become so completely destroyed by Western people that I don't see any hope for people like that poor influencer.

He'll have to make his own website, or move to PixelFed or something.

[–] Cyberflunk 40 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

No government censored him, capitalism did

[–] Land_Strider 7 points 11 months ago

At what point will you be considering big corps=government in the U.S.? We all know big oil has tremendous lobby, we all have evidence the military industry that works for profit more than anything else is responsible for most American wars in the last several decades. We all know what manchild is ruining everything he touches and shakes hands with government officials. We all know that Facebook and Cambridge Analytica manipulation machine.

Corporates and capitalism might not directly do legislation or have the executive power, but the U.S. government at least is a for-profit organization for a long while now, and evidently profits are not made with showing oppressed people suffering when you are gaining shitloads of money by selling weapons/investing in the oppressor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

If freedom of speech can't protect you against corporate censorship then it's meaningless.

[–] hydrospanner 10 points 11 months ago

If freedom of speech can't protect you against corporate censorship then it's meaningless.

That's the biggest load of horse shit I've read today.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Any website owner has the right to decide if he wants to remove certain content on his website. That is not an infringement of free speech.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yeah, not in today's world where they are sock puppets for the government.

It doesn't matter because no one else can just infringe on your rights either. Rights are not about just protecting you from government, they're there to protect you from other people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

It is an infringement of free speech as a concept.

It is not an infringement of US law as the relevant protections are limited in scope to governmental actions.

Obviously US law and even more so the supreme court's interpretations of them are flawed, both on a moral level (big corps should also not be allowed to censor speech) and a logical level (censoring speech is free speech, corps are entitled to human rights).

[–] Mrkawfee 1 points 11 months ago

Except if you have a de facto monopoly on social media which is the digital equivalent of a public forum then you have the ability to effectively curtail free speech.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Right. This sucks, but it's not an infringement on free speech.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It falls into a place never envisioned by those writing the amendments. When you have defacto monopolization of the public media, or even a major portion of it under your control, then preventing commentary is functionally censorship equal to if the government outright banned it.

On the other end you have the desire to prevent harmful transmissions to the public space as well. Incitements to violence and propagation of blatant lies serves no good purpose.

Balancing the two has been the subject of countless lawsuits. The only justification I could see here, given the visual nature of Instagram, would be the potential for gore and violence content. Sometimes showing the ugly reality is needed to let people know the reality rather than a polished sanitized version. Instagram might not be the place for that though given the audience it has.

By comparison a tame subject, but the case involving George Carlin still holds some sway on matters of what's appropriate for public broadcast.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_v._Pacifica_Foundation

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

IDK how I feel about this. They age restricted his account because he was showing war and death. If this is happening disproportionately to people reporting one side of this conflicts, which I'm sure it is, then I understand, but on its own this restriction makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There's numerous examples given in the article by Mona Shtaya on how Palestinian posts and hashtags have repeatedly been filtered out of viewability on social media platforms going back years.

Meanwhile...

Shtaya explained that Israeli settlers used social platforms to incite violence against Palestinians in the West Bank earlier this year. “People on the ground are sometimes beaten, there were towns burned because of this incitement on the platforms,” she said.

Analysis from 7amleh found that an attack on the village of Hawara in the West Bank was precipitated by a deluge of violent content containing the Hebrew hashtag WipeOutHawara, The month before and after the attack, “80.2% of all (15,250) tweets about Hawara included negative content against the village and its residents via the Hebrew-language digital space.”

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

And this is par for the course with the big social media platforms.

Facebook literally spent years hosting incitements to genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar (despite being repeatedly alerted to it... it later deliberately impeded the ICC genocide investigation) and more recently has hosted incitement against the Tigrayans in Ethiopia.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

For those who want to know more. Heck, there's even published papers on the subject.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

Of course, can't have people facing reality and risking them not consuming content on your awful platform now can we, must capture attention spans at all costs and reality just ain't cutting it for them

[–] Cyberflunk 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)
  1. Setup a fediverse account anywhere that's not meta, x, or bluesky
  2. Publish your content
  3. Freedom.

It doesn't need to be mastodon, as a matter of fact, Mastodon is kind of a shitty place to publish long-form activity pub posts. Firefish, or WordPress with an activity pub plugin is absolutely perfect for this kind of thing.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Maybe he wants people to actually see it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Well apparently that's not happening anyway, so...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago
  1. Make absolutely no money and have minuscule audience

  2. Create your own instance Beacuse why not

  3. Crippled in debt due

7.???

  1. Profit.
[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

How is it that this article doesn't state why his accounts was suspended? What did Meta say the suspension was for?

[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because Meta has not given an explanation to him or anyone. Hence why the article says "His Twitter account is still suspended for unclear reasons. "

[–] Nudding 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What does twitter have to do with this?

[–] Omgarm 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It is also a social medium.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

I'm going to guess that X number of people reported the account in Y hours so it was temporarily banned until some third-world, minimum-wage worker had time to look at it.

[–] obinice 7 points 11 months ago

Capitalists gonna capitalist, no surprise there.

To think that a company like Facebook could care less about some dead family members would be a mistake. They only, at best, occasionally pretend to care to ensure they keep the money coming in.

[–] Squizzy 4 points 11 months ago

First of all I stand with Palestine here but I acknowledge the hardships that the Jewish people have faced.

That said, this conspiracy theories ,groups and prejudices that target Jewish people are going to have a field day with the likes of this. The whole control the media thing doesn't have to be some backroom dealings when you can just point to this type of thing as an example.

What is actually happening is Jewish people are far better represented in the higher strata of global business and they have huge lobbies around the world. You're just more likely to have people sympathetic to their plight in powerful positions.

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