Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta

Why is the word Israeli removed from the title? and Meta added? Seems like quite a politically-important modification

Edit: ok you guys, all your responses have convinced me that I misread the room, and I'm going to reverse the title edit now.

-- original reply: --

I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title, in keeping with standard moderation practice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Titles have by far the biggest impact on discussion quality, so this is a big deal. Especially when the topic is divisive.

The current title (11:36 AM PST) is:

"Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram"

@dang IDK if this matters, nor when the title was changed (from submission, to now). Just an FYI.

I think in this instance the perpetrator is central to the story/article

The entire endeavor was orchestrated by Israel - that’s kinda the point here. Meta didn’t act on its own, as the edited title would imply.

I know, but for HN purposes, the point I made about titles is the higher-order bit.

Threads like this, at best, waver on the edge of a hell pit. If it plummets in, the discussion won't stay on HN's front page anyhow. Title de-baiting is a way to support having a discussion that doesn't completely suck, to the extent that this is doable.

speaking as someone who gets a lot of their posts flagged (to the annoyance of dang), a less-inflammatory headline can be less satisfying but a post that isn't flagged will get a lot more traffic than one that is flagged

Btw there's a lot more information about the moderation on this post here, if you or anyone want to read about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657264.

We can't control which words people are super-reactive to in titles; we can only empirically observe what they are and try to dampen the effect, with the hope of making a thoughtful discussion at least a little more likely.

At this point, is it feasible to implement user-submitted or generated tags for submissions that can subsequently be concealed?

Our focus is shifting towards the news aspect rather than the hacking aspect, which is the primary reason for my presence here.

There are fluctuations, such as a swing towards current affairs stories during turbulent times, but the basic mix has been stable for years and the baseline isn't likely to change. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 for how far back this question goes...

Not that it helps, necessarily, but the people who have the opposite preference to yours are complaining loudly about how much they feel the current affairs stories are being suppressed on HN.

Re tags: I've always resisted the idea of adding it to the core HN site, but I do think we can do more to support alternate front-ends to HN. With any luck, we can publish the next version of the API this year, which should make that a lot easier.

I this case you have completely changed the meaning of the title though. It sounds Like Meta did this of their own initiative which is a very different message.

I don't read it that way, FWIW.

I think some of you are overly focusing on the title instead of the overall effect of the moderator interventions here, which is that the article gets more attention and the story more coverage. In that sense, I'd think it would be in you guys' interest to take yes for an answer, much as zzzeek has here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43657317.

Its meta's website. Its entirely in their control as to how they respond to a takedown request.

The problematic point here is that Facebook is more than willing to obliterate certain topics and political views when requested, not which ones or by whom orders in particular.

FWIW I support this. It's more relevant to HN to talk about Meta, the big tech company, doing something wrong than a nation, regardless of where you stand on this issue.

It's unfortunate that turning off flags for a story empowers the people who want to use this site for ideological battle. "dang made an exception once for <my pet topic>, so the guidelines forever more don't apply to it!" There were several variants of this sentiment expressed on the tomhow welcome thread.

I am not sure that linking to one post that agrees with your decision to provide your own title for the article (in contradiction to one of HN’s core rules no less) in order to intentionally steer discussion away from the subject of the article is that compelling of a way to convince people that your editorial decision here was correct. It certainly does nothing to address a valid concern about the precedent that this sets.

Rather than taking on the task of manually editing headlines to be more sympathetic to Israel perhaps the site could implement a filter that disallows the word from being used in titles or posts altogether? If that is the aim, it would save you time having to answer questions about it.

Least favorite anecdote: Reddit. After an introduction, a friend said, “Why are you on the front page like a new person?” I am auto-subscribed to the front page content channels when I want to be in my subscriptions. However, I miss relevant content because others overwhelm the front pages.

I appreciate your response and the work you continue on the front ends. I obtain political news content from other sources, so my cumulative content feed contains a significant amount of duplicate content.

> in contradiction to one of HN’s core rules no less

There's no contradiction. The rule is "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

Nor is there any attempt to steer discussion away from the subject of the article. That would have been a hapless attempt, had it existed, since the thread is filled with such discussion.

I'm not following the argument here, but turning off the flags on a given story doesn't turn HN into a free-for-all on a topic (on the contrary, we don't want too much repetition of any topic), and certainly the guidelines continue to apply as much as anymore. More, in fact ("Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

> Nor is there any attempt to steer discussion away from the subject of the article.

> I did those title edits to (marginally) reduce the flamebait effect of the title

Your goal was to “reduce the flamebait effect” without having any impact on the discussion? Those two sentiments are contradictory.

> That would have been a hapless attempt

No argument there, it actually makes the whole endeavor of manually inventing an Israel-friendly title to substitute a neutral and factually accurate one even stranger.

The goal here appears to be to make it seem as though a campaign to remove pro-Palestinian content simply happened on its own, which only works if the title that you wrote successfully dissuades people from reading the article. It looks like all this choice accomplished, though, was raising some eyebrows where you’ve now had to post several times to defend it, with little to no impact on the quality of the discussion of the topic. That being said, the fact that it was a half measure doesn’t provide adequate cover for the obvious intent in this particular editorial choice.

So again, why even bother with the half measures? If any mention of Israel lowers any topic below the community standards for discussion, you can simply outright ban mentions of Israel and any Israel-adjacent topics rather than manually intervening to write bespoke, more positive headlines for the country to suit any mention.

I totally understand the contention around this topic but you're altering the keypoint of what the article is about. Why remove one country name and keep the other? The article is not about Meta, but how their platform is being manipulated by one country against the other. Your edit shows a strong evidence you're not taking a partisan position and have a preference. I am not sure you should be editing contenious posts when you don't hold a partisan position. Your edit is in the same realm as what the post is talking about. I understand moderation is tricky, but this goes way beyond moderation.

> this goes way beyond moderation

I'm sorry, but that's not true—quite the opposite.

If you guys had any idea how next-to-impossible it is to host substantive discussions about a topic like this, you should recognize that you're getting what you want (frontpage attention for this story) instead of complaining about a secondary detail (the title edit).

A title edit like that is not making a statement about the underlying story, and certainly not trying to suppress any aspect of it. The article is one click away for people to read and make up their own minds about. This thread is filled with comments about the detail that I took out of the title; no one is missing it.

Rather, what I did was bog standard HN moderation, the sort of thing we've done thousands of times on hundreds of topics over 15+ years, purely for the purpose of supporting a substantive discussion of the article that you (I don't mean you personally, but the set of commenters who have been complaining about this) want to be discussed in the first place. From my point of view, that amounts to demanding 100% instead of saying yes to the 90% that you're getting in this case. That's not a realistic assessment of the tradeoffs with a thread like this.

Edit: I'm sorry if that sounded tetchy—I certainly understand the feeling you're expressing and why it feels that way.

I certainly did. I saw this late and read the comments before reading the article, which I often do to save myself time if it turns out there's some glaring evidentiary or logical hole in a politically themed news story. I took the headline at face value and got 3/4 of the way down the page before discovering the direct involvement of a state actor. I absolutely expected to read a story about Meta execs doing this exclusively on their own initiative.

Posting this not to argue about your decision but to describe the impression I formed from reading the title.

Of course I wanted to have an impact on the discussion: I wanted to nudge it in a more thoughtful, less hellish direction.

That's not steering away from the subject of the article—it's steering toward it.

Ok, I hear you and have reverted the title.

I'll try to explain myself better. What triggered my response was that the edit is not different from NYT/CNN publishing an article titled '20 people died when a building collapsed on their head' instead of '<entity> launched a missile on a civilian building'. What's the criteria we are using here to keep or remove '<entity>'? The article involves 3 entities and dropping anyone of them changes the narattive.

I have been hanging out on HN since 2009 and I truely appreciate your dedication to keep this site civil and it definitely is one of the very few that did not degenerate over time. That's the main reason why HN is in my bookmark bar. I appologize if my comment triggered you, and I totally understand where you are coming from as well. If it was my decision, I would keep politics out of HN as I never saw anything fruitful come out of these posts and stresses out moderators as they have to police the thread and find themselves in the way of fire.

Thank you for your efforts to preserve the qualities of one of the few bastions of organic discussion on the Internet.