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1210 points jbegley | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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jmyeet ◴[] No.43657496[source]
The role of the media (including social media) is to move in lockstep with US domestic and foreign policy. This has been known for some time [1]. It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X". It's about a series of filters that decides who is in the media and who has their thumb on the algorithmic scales, as per the famous Noam Chomsky Andrew Marr interview [2] ("What I'm saying is if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting").

Noam Chomsky is a national treasure.

When a former Netanyahu adviser and Israeli embassy staffer seemingly has the power to suppress pro-Palestinian speech on Meta platforms [3], nobody should be surprised.

If you're a US citizen who is a journalist critical of a key US ally, that ally is allowed to assassinate you without any objection of repercussions [4].

This is also why Tiktok originally got banned in a bipartisan fashion: the Apartheid Defense League director Jonathon Goldblatt said (in leaked audio) "we have a Tiktok problem" [5] and weeks later it was banned. Tiktok simply suppresses pro-Palestinian speech less than other platforms.

[1]: https://chomsky.info/consent01/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvGmBSHFuj0

[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/metas-israel-policy-chief...

[4]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/16/israeli-forces-kil...

[5]: https://x.com/Roots_Action/status/1767941861866348615

replies(2): >>43657954 #>>43660708 #
1. rdtsc ◴[] No.43660708[source]
> It's never as simple as the White House calling up Mark Zuckerberg and saying "hey, silence X".

The government got so comfy it really got to be that easy:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh... (Aug 27, 2024)

> White House, “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to take down “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire.”

> The officials “expressed a lot of frustration” when the company didn’t agree, he said in the letter.