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

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1210 points jbegley | 3 comments | 11 Apr 25 16:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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aucisson_masque ◴[11 Apr 25 18:25 UTC] No.43656830[source]▶
I like to think we are in a better place than russia for instance with all its propaganda and jailed journalists, but then i see these kind of article come over and over....

Most of the people in the 'free world' goes on mainstream media, like facebook to get their news. These companies are enticed to 'suck up' to the government because at the end they are business, they need to be in good term with ruling class.

you end up with most media complying with the official story pushed by government and friends, and most people believing that because no one has the time to fact check everything.

One could argue that the difference with russia is that someone can actually look for real information, but even in russia people have access to vpn to bypass the censorship.

Another difference would be that you are allowed to express your opinion, whereas in russia you would be put to jail, that's true but only in a very limited way. Since everyone goes on mainstream media and they enforce the government narrative, you can't speak there. you are merely allowed to speak out in your little corner out of reach to anyone, and even then since most people believe the government propaganda, your arguments won't be heard at all.

The more i think about it, the less difference i see.

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NoTeslaThrow ◴[11 Apr 25 18:38 UTC] No.43656968[source]▶
Indeed. The editorial boards of these newsrooms are often staffed with people who attended the same schools and classes as those running the country. The social circles of the two worlds are extremely closely linked.

Of course, this means that the reporting isn't very good at addressing its blind spots–i.e., most of the news in the country, let alone the world, that isn't relevant to the ivy league coastal elites. And I say this as a member of that same class. Most of the political perspectives in my life are completely unrepresented in the opinion columns, which generally tend to pander upwards rather than downwards.

I don't tend to put much weight in freedom of the press so long as that press is floating on the cream of society and asking the government permission to report on what they're doing.

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shihab ◴[11 Apr 25 19:04 UTC] No.43657296[source]▶
And here is an article on Raffi berg, BBC’s Middle East editor:

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bbc-civil-war-gaza-israel-bia...

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YZF ◴[12 Apr 25 04:57 UTC] No.43661482[source]▶
And here is an analysis of BBC's anti-Israeli bias: https://asserson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-r...

And from the BBC itself: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2d4egk17l2o "Questions still remain for BBC after damaging Gaza documentary"

https://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/skcfkb1iyx "From bias to blunders: The BBC’s anti-Israel shift since October 7"

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1. quails8mydog ◴[13 Apr 25 20:50 UTC] No.43675757{3}[source]▶
I read the 1st third (it's really long) and while the data analysis is interesting, the conclusions say a lot more about the biases of the author(s) than those of the BBC. Fundamentally you can't use sympathy as a measure of bias without first establishing a baseline for how sympathetic the views and/or groups of people are. The report mentions that Palestinians might be more sympathetic because they're the ones being blown up, but then discards this by pointing out that the BBC is supposed to "ensure broadly comparable treatment of the Palestinian and the Israeli viewpoints" without acknowledging that maybe they do and one viewpoint is more sympathetic than the other. The least sympathetic group according to the report is Hamas, so according to it's logic they're the group the BBC is most biased against. Not a reasonable conclusion. There's plenty of other indicators that this report started with a conclusion then tried to gather data to support it, but I've already spent more time on this comment than the report deserves.
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2. YZF ◴[13 Apr 25 21:29 UTC] No.43675996[source]▶
Thanks for giving it a read though.

I think it's an interesting question of how we measure bias.

For me, as an Israeli (who hasn't lived there for decades), who has some first hand knowledge of the situation, much of the reporting appears to be extremely biased. I know there are claims from the other side the bias goes in the other direction. What's the ground truth? I think using AI to crunch the large amount of data is a decent first order approximation.

Ofcourse bias depends on ideology. For some people if a Palestinian guns down an Israeli in a Tel-Aviv bar simply reporting this fact is biased towards Israel. And I mean, from their position that is understandable. And indeed we can see some media outlets that would not report these events at all, which I would consider an anti-Israeli bias.

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3. quails8mydog ◴[16 Apr 25 22:02 UTC] No.43710880[source]▶
I agree that it's an interesting question, that's why I spent so much of my free time reading it.

I'd also agree that using AI for sentiment analysis could be a good approach, I'm not an expert in the area, but I believe this is one of the things AI is best at. But it needs an extra step to translate that into bias. Establishing a sympathy baseline is my initial idea, but I haven't tested it and maybe there's something better.

Whether something is biased is less about how any given individual(s) feel about what's been said and more about if the different viewpoints are presented honestly. Though it can get really difficult to identify except in the most extreme cases. As you say, it's not just what's said where the bias occurs, but also in the choice of what not to say.