1y ago

A bombing in Gaza killed an influencer's family—Instagram responded by suspending his account

www.dailydot.com A bombing in Gaza killed an influencer's family—Instagram responded by suspending his account

Motaz Azaiza, a photograph on Instagram documenting the war in Palestine, had his account suspended, despite having over 3 million followers.

In a video on Oct. 13, Instagram influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza shared footage of the rubble of an apartment, the site of an Israeli bombardment that killed 15 of his family members.

He turns the camera on himself first, visibly upset, and then shows the scene—the ruin of the building, a bloodstain, a neighbor carrying a child’s body draped with a shroud.

In response, Meta restricted access to his account.

74 comments

Meta was throttling pro-palestinian accounts on Threads. I couldn't post anything but pictures for 2 days.
- Remember Instagram's auto translate "bug"?
  
  what was it?

80% of my phone screen covered in ads
shit website
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
- There's mull for android. On ios you can use firefox focus, ddg, or brave
  
  On Android, you can also use Firefox and install unlock origin. And dark reader. And whatever other extension you want.
  
  There’s a million ad blockers for iOS safari also.
- Its 2023 my dude. Use nextdns on router if you have one or ublock origin addon with Firefox.
  
  neztdns?
  
  Any downsides? Potential incompatibilities I'd have to explain to others on network?
- Shit website but the damage it can do to modern society is real.

There is a wave of censorship and McCarthyist witch hunting against Pro Palestinian voices happening in the West. It is profoundly disturbing and shows how hollow the West's claims to championing personal liberty is.
- This is the sort of thing that freedom of speech is supposed to protect, but that idea has become so completely destroyed by Western people that I don't see any hope for people like that poor influencer.
  He'll have to make his own website, or move to PixelFed or something.
  
  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
  No government censored him, capitalism did

It's almost like social media companies are pushing biased narratives...

Wow look at all these big horrible corporations that everyone knows are horrible siding with modern day nazism. And all of this could have been avoided if they gave these fucking companies china consequences the instant they started misbehaving instead of doing fucking nothing.
- if they gave these fucking companies china consequences
  Post a photo of the Tiananmen Square massacre and see what happens.
  
  Are you actually saying something here or are you just being sinophobic?

IDK how I feel about this. They age restricted his account because he was showing war and death. If this is happening disproportionately to people reporting one side of this conflicts, which I'm sure it is, then I understand, but on its own this restriction makes sense.
- There's numerous examples given in the article by Mona Shtaya on how Palestinian posts and hashtags have repeatedly been filtered out of viewability on social media platforms going back years.
  Meanwhile...
  Shtaya explained that Israeli settlers used social platforms to incite violence against Palestinians in the West Bank earlier this year. “People on the ground are sometimes beaten, there were towns burned because of this incitement on the platforms,” she said.
  Analysis from 7amleh found that an attack on the village of Hawara in the West Bank was precipitated by a deluge of violent content containing the Hebrew hashtag WipeOutHawara, The month before and after the attack, “80.2% of all (15,250) tweets about Hawara included negative content against the village and its residents via the Hebrew-language digital space.”
  
  And this is par for the course with the big social media platforms.
  Facebook literally spent years hosting incitements to genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar (despite being repeatedly alerted to it... it later deliberately impeded the ICC genocide investigation) and more recently has hosted incitement against the Tigrayans in Ethiopia.

Of course, can't have people facing reality and risking them not consuming content on your awful platform now can we, must capture attention spans at all costs and reality just ain't cutting it for them

Setup a fediverse account anywhere that's not meta, x, or bluesky
Publish your content
Freedom.
It doesn't need to be mastodon, as a matter of fact, Mastodon is kind of a shitty place to publish long-form activity pub posts. Firefish, or WordPress with an activity pub plugin is absolutely perfect for this kind of thing.
- Maybe he wants people to actually see it.
  
  Well apparently that's not happening anyway, so...
- Make absolutely no money and have minuscule audience
  Create your own instance Beacuse why not
  Crippled in debt due
  7.???
  Profit.

How is it that this article doesn't state why his accounts was suspended? What did Meta say the suspension was for?
- Because Meta has not given an explanation to him or anyone. Hence why the article says "His Twitter account is still suspended for unclear reasons. "
  
  What does twitter have to do with this?
- I'm going to guess that X number of people reported the account in Y hours so it was temporarily banned until some third-world, minimum-wage worker had time to look at it.

Capitalists gonna capitalist, no surprise there.
To think that a company like Facebook could care less about some dead family members would be a mistake. They only, at best, occasionally pretend to care to ensure they keep the money coming in.

First of all I stand with Palestine here but I acknowledge the hardships that the Jewish people have faced.
That said, this conspiracy theories ,groups and prejudices that target Jewish people are going to have a field day with the likes of this. The whole control the media thing doesn't have to be some backroom dealings when you can just point to this type of thing as an example.
What is actually happening is Jewish people are far better represented in the higher strata of global business and they have huge lobbies around the world. You're just more likely to have people sympathetic to their plight in powerful positions.

74 comments