Facebook and Instagram have apparently been telling their
moderators to permit graphic posts of the Russian war on Ukraine.
But apparently when it comes to Palestinians being brutalized by
the Israeli government, well, that type of imagery,
those types of videos are not allowed.
Moderators must take those videos down, which demonstrates that there is in fact
a double standard in applying Facebook and Instagram's terms of service.
So, this has become a bit of a pattern with Meta,
which again owns both Facebook and Instagram.
After a series of Israeli airstrikes against the Gaza Strip earlier this month,
Palestinians understandably posted sometimes graphic videos and
images of the Israeli attacks.
And so this was their way of getting information out there about what they were
dealing with, what they were being victimized by.
And if all violent material is not allowed based on the terms of service for
Facebook and Instagram, that'd be fine, but
it isn't hard to find similar imagery in regard to Russia's war on Ukraine.
So, Meta told moderators to make sure that graphic posts of Ukrainian civilians
killed in Russian attacks were not deleted on at least seven different occasions.
This is according to reporting from The Intercept.
In March, for instance, Meta even temporarily allowed users to explicitly
call for the death of Russian soldiers,
which is speech that normally isn't allowed on the platform.
Meta's public facing Community Standards rulebook says,
we remove content that glorifies violence or celebrates the suffering or
humiliation of others because it may create an environment that discourages
participation, noting a vague exception for graphic content
with some limitations to help people raise awareness about these issues.
But again,
if you're a Palestinian trying to raise awareness about how you're brutalized,
well, it's very likely that you'll be censored on Facebook and Instagram.
Whereas if you are a Ukrainian, who's posting similar imagery to make a point
about what Russians are doing to Ukrainians,
that type of content will be allowed to stand.
Now, let's get into those exceptions.
Now, during the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, for instance, between August 5th and
August 15th, 7amleh, a civil society group that formally collaborates
with Meta on speech issues tallied nearly 90 deletions of content or
account suspensions relating to bombings on Meta platforms,
noting that reports of censored content are still coming in.
So, I've got more details for you, Cenk, but I just find it interesting that on
a day when there are two Facebook censorship stories.
One having to do with Hunter Biden's laptop stories and
the other having to do with Israel going after Palestinians,
there's no attention to what we're talking about right now.
Everything is about Hunter's laptop.
No one cares about what's happening to the Palestinians or
the clear double standard that Meta is implementing here with their censorship.
>> Well, good news for the right wing because if, they were constantly talking
about Facebook censorship, they should be livid over this.
This is gonna be exhibit A, I mean, why are you allowing the Ukrainians
to show the same footage that you're not allowing the Palestinians to show?
You got them, they're censoring the Palestinians, you got it 100% right,
right wing, go get them.
No one in the right wing has said a word about this,
nor will they ever quote me on it, write it down in stone.
No, right-winger will ever talk about this actual significant act of
censorship by Facebook because it doesn't match their interests, so
they'll conveniently ignore it.
And by the way, so will the rest of the media.
Here we go again.
Right wing media and corporate media actually agree all the time.
In fact, let's go to the core issue.
Should you show the dead that are in a war?
Overall, I think absolutely you should, so you know the horrors of war.
So, I think the correct policy, Facebook has two different policies,
one for Ukraine and one for seemingly everyone else, but certainly for Israel.
So, which one is correct?
The Ukraine policy is correct.
Show the pictures, so you know how terrible war is, so
we have less of it, right?
But when it comes to Israel, creating those horrible pictures of
dead Palestinian kids, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no way.
You're not allowed to show those.
So, this goes to my rule of thumb for you guys whenever they show
the pictures of dead kids, you know that the government and
the establishment wanna start a war with that country,
when they do not show the dead kids they do not want to help that country, okay?
So, when Bashar al-Assad did the chemical attack we showed the dead kids,
that they were real, the chemical attack was real,
the dead kids were real, but we showed them all over TV, bomb, you have to bomb,
you have to bomb, you have to bomb, right?
Yemen, there's hundreds of thousands of dead,
including tens of thousands at least of dead children,
never shown a single dead child either in mainstream media or
social media or right wing media because nobody wants to help Yemen and
the people bombing them are Saudi Arabia are allies, and they bomb them with what?
Weapons made in the USA.
So, we don't show those pictures.
So, understand how media is manipulating.
>> Yeah, exactly, and I think a lot of the anger and frustration people feel towards
these social media platforms and just kind of broadening it to more than Meta,
I think it's true of Twitter as well, is sure they've got their TOS.
We can all read it, I mean, if we want to.
It's obviously very wordy and lengthy, but nonetheless it's never applied evenly.
And so that leads to a lot of distrust towards those running the social media
platforms and everyone thinks they're targeted, but in this specific case,
the double standard is just very clear.
There's only one instance in which this type of terrible imagery is accepted,
and I agree with you.
I think it's important for people to understand the severity of war.
It's important for people to understand what it does to innocent human beings.
So I'm okay with the imagery being shared on social media.
I think there's an informative component to that.
But to have that double standard is a huge problem, and again,
it sows distrust towards the private social media companies.
And so I think there is a good case to be made about thinking of these
platforms as more of a public utility or finding ways to regulate it, so
these double standards don't exist.
I know that we're a long way from that ever happening as long as there's money in
politics and these platforms are able to fund politicians.
But nonetheless, it's an ongoing issue and to be completely frank, I'm
just exhausted from nonstop conversations about censorship on social media.
It's exhausting, and it's never ending, every single day, there's a new story.
It's the recycled story that never goes away.
And just for like the sake of my mental health, can we just fix it already?
I'm so sick of it.
>> Yeah, they're never going to fix it because it's all about the money, okay?
Everything in politics is about money.
There, I saw that there's all these like weirdo conspiracy theories.
People are turning frogs gay or something for inexplicable reasons,
so you could be Insta heart or whatever.
No, it's all just very simple, money, money, it's about the money.
And there's all these weirdo, racist and bigoted things like,
it's the Jews control everything and that's why, no, no.
Saudi Arabia rules with an iron fist here in America.
So, we never see the horrors of the war in Yemen.
Well, what's the common theme?
Those are allies that funnel money to our politicians.
Doesn't matter if you're Muslim or Jewish,
nothing matters other than the money, okay?
And so you'll see.
And by the way, we're against the Russian oligarch money,
we're on the side of the Ukrainians.
I think we're on the right side there accidentally.
[LAUGH] Okay, but we're on the right side.
So, you will see all the horrors of the war that Russia started in Ukraine and
you will never see the horrors of the wars we start or our allies start