I say this not in defence of the Israelis (ab)use of Meta's takedown system, nor in defence of the Israelis conduct towards Palestinians: this is low-quality, sensationalist work.

ICW claims to be an "organization of independent journalists", but typos and grammatical errors are rampant, which I wouldn't expect from actual professional writers - unless the term "journalist" is being abused here.

Along those lines, serious journalists would not attempt to blackmail a multibillion dollar company like this:

> The motivation behind these leaks is the following: Stop all involvement with the Israeli government and their current genocide in Gaza. Until then, more leaks will be dropped. With each leak exposing a different aspect of corruption from censorship, to AI, to financial crimes.

The actual contents of the "leaks" aren't really new - the Israeli government has been making sweeping takedown requests to Meta to suppress material related to the war in Gaza. This was already well-known - see, for instance, HRW's report on this from 2023, itself cited in this report.

What makes this sensationalist is the conspiratorial thinking that follows and is embedded throughout.

There's certainly something interesting and dystopian about how Meta uses machine learning to extrapolate from successful human-verified takedown requests to begin automating acceptance of takedown requests, and how this creates, as an inevitable consequence, a kind of "censorship machine". But this is framed (without evidence) as a kind of "data poisoning" conspiracy - the Israeli intelligence agencies and perhaps Meta in tandem working to deliberately ensure this censorship is automated. When, of course, even if Meta wasn't using machine learning to automate this process, the Israeli agencies would almost certainly still be issuing these sweeping requests. And, conversely, with or without the Israeli takedown requests, there's no doubt Meta would be using ML to automate the takedown process at their scale. No conspiracy is necessary - the authors might do well to read Manufacturing Consent.

Even more absurdly, they "hypothesis [sic]" that "Israeli government [sic] must have insiders at Meta’s integrity organization in the form of individual contributor engineers who advised the Israeli cyberunit on how to abuse the content moderation system."; no evidence is presented for this claim.

Silly accusations and inferences like this are strewn throughout the paper, such as when it expresses shock that the Israeli government uses a form letter to submit the takedown requests.

It also veers outright into "10/7 Truther" territory:

> Throughout this reporting dataset, we see massive drops in reports on every 7th day. This of course corresponds to Shabbat or Saturday, the day which Jews refrain from work activities. However, October 7 2023 is also on Shabbat, so it's interesting to see that on this day of rest, and facing an overwhelming attack: 1. Both the IDF cyberunit division and Israeli attorney’s office were prepared and collaborating on that day to message Meta out of all organizations. 2. The IDF cyberunit division already had developed a new strategy of censoring countries that are not even involved in the attack like Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan.

The obvious explanation for this is that it's precisely because they were "facing an overwhelming attack" that the Israelis were working on the weekend. It's not surprising in the slightest that they had emergency procedures, either.

The HRW report had its own issues, but it was at least a serious attempt by serious people to understand the scale of the Israeli operation. By comparison, this is amateur work by amateurs.

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halflife 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed, as an Israeli Jew, them saying that Jews don’t work on Shabbat there shouldn’t be reports on the 7th, shows so much their lack of objectivity, ignorance and the will to connect random points together.

Do they think that the police in Israel don’t work on Saturday? Does the CIA stops working on sundays? If they tried to visit Tel Aviv on Saturday they would see how lovely it is.

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icw_nru 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is not a speculation on the part of the whistleblowers or some unknown fact related to "Jews".

The data recorded shows this in figure 9, regardless of ones opinion on whether Israeli's take this holiday off or not.

This trend is consistent prior to Oct7, during the initial first couple of weeks of the conflict, and beyond. On Saturdays, there are zero to very few takedown requests related to other days.

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halflife 4 days ago | parent [-]

But that makes sense, as the OP said, oct 7th was a huge terror attack that was live-streamed and shared throughout all social media. Hamas filmed themselves on Facebook live doing horrific acts, and people shared and cheered. So obviously there would be an uptick of takedown requests.

Do you have any trend correlating terror attack in Israel and takedown requests?

	▲	icw_nru 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes starting from page 16 and 18, we dive exactly into what you ask. How takedown requests trend pre, during, and post October 7. Let me know if you have any further questions.

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torium 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Weird that you choose to focus on the quality of the material. Surely the underlying fact that Israel is committing genocide is a lot more important?

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wk_end 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

...is that weird?

Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.

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torium 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Is the implication that everything anti-Israel - regardless of its merit or truth - should be upvoted and praised, or at least never in any way criticized? That, to me, feels a lot weirder.

You don't understand that in the face of genocide people cling on to anything? Some times even, yes even! gasp, if the article has typos?

	▲	wk_end 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		The issue with the typos or grammatical errors aren't the typos per se - it's that it strongly implies that their claims of being "independent journalists" is misleading or dishonest. At which point, a critical reader might ask themselves 1) why are they being dishonest about their identity; and 2) what else might they be being dishonest about? Obviously, none of this matters if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, only its political purpose (not even how effective it is at achieving that). But if you don't actually care about the contents of the work, why are you even discussing it?

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unix_fan 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel

	▲	torium 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> unix_fan > You can continue to do terrible things as a company, just as long as you don’t do it with Israel That's a weird thing to say. I certainly don't agree and would like to hear the rationale of anyone who supports that view.

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myrmidon 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is harsh, but I agree with most of your points. The "blackmail" remark I find particularly damning: Threatening future leaks until Facebook stops "involvement with the Israeli government" is basically a self-admission that you put political success over journalistic integrity.

That turns you from a "legitimate" whistleblower (like Snowden) into an activist (at best) in my eyes.

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ath92 4 days ago | parent [-]

Just out of curiosity, what do you believe Snowden intended by leaking what he leaked? From your comment it almost reads as if you think the publication was the point, not that those implicated by the leaks should be made to change their ways?

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myrmidon 4 days ago | parent [-]

Snowden himself says that he saw a surveillance state being built and the people responsible lying about it under oat in front of democratic representatives (see James Clapper).

In his words, he wanted the American public to know about what was going on, and to get a say.

But when you say "I'll stop publishing once my political goals are achieved", you are openly admitting that:

1) You publishing this informations causes harm

2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals

3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).

That, to me, is the difference between "whistleblowing" and "blackmail".

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ath92 3 days ago | parent [-]

> 1) You publishing this informations causes harm

…Harm to a company supporting genocide

> 2) You are using that harm to achieve your political goals

Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing

> 3) You can live with the actual information/leaks staying hidden once the (possibly only tangentially related) goals are achieved (which indicates that the whole thing was primarily about achieving your political goals, not about getting out the information).

Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine.

	▲	myrmidon 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Stopping once Meta stops the censorship would cause people to learn about what’s happening in Gaza, which I’m guessing is more important to the authors than exposing Meta’s censorship machine. This is exactly my point. This framing makes it clear that the leaks are not about publishing information that the leakers believe is vital to get out-- it is about leveraging the resulting fallout. > Snowden was also achieving political goals with his publishing It is perfectly fine, expected even, for a whistleblowers ethical/political goals to align with them blowing the whistle (duh). But If you, at the first opportunity, turn around unprompted (!!) and go "I'll stop publishing immediately if you just do what I want" then you're not actually a whistleblower past that point in my eyes. Does not mean that you are automatically wrong, or a "bad guy" or even acting unethically-- but you do give up significant moral high ground by doing this regardless.