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Article - Gaza is Too Graphic For Community Standards

Article - Gaza is Too Graphic For Community Standards - Lemmy

On January 30, 2025, I uploaded a video to Instagram I filmed in Gaza showing a mother sitting beside the bodies of her children after an airstrike. She was not screaming. She was silent in a way that felt heavier than any sound. Within minutes, the post disappeared from both Instagram and Facebook. The notification read: “This content violates Community Standards on graphic violence.” There was no context in the message, no acknowledgment of where the video came from, and no distinction between documentation and harm. Only erasure. And then, silence. On social media platforms, freedom of expression is promised as a universal right wrapped in friendly interfaces and pastel-colored notifications. A story was removed for being “too graphic.” A post was restricted for “sensitive content.” A warning arrived seconds after I uploaded a video, before anyone could possibly have reported it. At first, I thought the problem was technical. A glitch. A temporary misunderstanding between my words and the machine reading them. That it would correct itself, but it never did. According to Human Rights Watch, Meta has systematically restricted Palestinian content across Instagram and Facebook, documenting over 1,050 cases of censorship across more than 60 countries. The report identifies recurring patterns including content removals, account suspensions, reduced visibility, restricted live features, and “shadow banning”—often without notification or meaningful appeal mechanisms. Social media, which once promised to amplify marginalized voices, becomes instead a system that quietly filters them out.

geneva_convenience 1d ago

The Ugly Exigencies of Genocide - Steve Salaita

https://lemmy.ml/post/48541395

The Ugly Exigencies of Genocide - Steve Salaita - Lemmy

I have a strange memory that until now I never felt able to share. I was around eleven or twelve. Something like that. A kid, but not a small one. I was in the kitchen of our small house in Bluefield, Virginia, and my parents were arguing. It wasn’t a traumatic argument. It was rather silly and I recall feeling that way at the time. They weren’t arguing about money, infidelity, or addiction. They were arguing about Fiddler on the Roof. Our kitchen was a small open space with counters and appliances along one side and a table on the other. We were at the table. My father was reading the paper. My mother glanced at the open page. “Look,” she said, pointing at an advertisement. “They’re doing Fiddler on the Roof in Roanoke.” Roanoke was the closest town of any significance, about an hour-and-forty-minutes away. We went there for the two-story mall, glamorous restaurants like Chi-Chi’s, and various shows and concerts. (My friends and I waited in vain for Michael Jackson to turn up.) My father grunted. “I should take the kids,” my mother continued. “We’re not spending any money on that garbage.” My mother looked annoyed, although I can’t imagine that she expected her husband to be enthusiastic about theater. Before she could respond, my father went on a tirade about how he’ll support that Zionist bullshit over his dead body. He rarely did that sort of thing; it’s possible that Palestine was in the news, perhaps in the very paper he had been reading. “It has nothing to do with Israel,” my mother screamed. “It’s a play.” So began the routine in which they would bicker like the lead characters in an odd-couple comedy. “The hell it doesn’t.” “Are you crazy? I don’t remember the argument lasting long. My mom eventually relented, probably because it spared her a high culture experience that sounded better in theory than practice. She refused to concede the point to my dad, though: Fiddler on the Roof had nothing to do with Israel and he was just being closed-minded. I agree with her on both counts: the play takes place in Eastern Europe before 1948 and my dad was certainly being closed-minded. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong. A better formulation would have been “the play shouldn’t have anything to do with Israel,” but as Arabs we had long ago observed that if you play out the string, or let the string play out on its own, then these supposedly apolitical cultural productions always end up justifying Israel, as do their producers. In other words, despite his crude theoretical approach, my old man saw something that nobody seemed to see except for his enemies: amid Zionism, there is no such thing as a neutral expression of Jewish culture. My dad somehow embodied the attitude of many Arab Americans I knew in young adulthood and beyond. We were a bit flabbergasted by and sometimes uneasy with the constant references to Jewish customs in U.S. pop culture. Those references seemed to come out of nowhere in movies, TV shows, music videos, and so forth. A mazel tov here. A hora there. The audience’s understanding of Judaism was no doubt superficial, but the idea of Jewish humanity was perfectly legible. And Jewish humanity was inextricably attached to the existence of Israel. This was understood. This was made to be understood. Meanwhile, Arabs and Muslims were showing up in pop culture as bloodthirsty maniacs. At best, we were depicted as incompetent brutes. We noticed the difference. Everyone did. You couldn’t miss it. But the difference actually bothered us. The idea of our humanity was an existential threat to Western civilization. There was this thing that happened among my Arab American peers. The inevitable Jewish reference or storyline would appear in the TV show or movie we were watching. We would give each other a sideways glance, maybe roll our eyes. Here we go again. Always furtively. We knew what kind of trouble awaited if the reaction were explicit, even when nobody else was around. We knew that merely acknowledging our feelings would make us awful people, exactly what the dominant society said we were. Diverse representation is wonderful in theory, but in practice it often conveys the imperatives of power in multicultural disguise and reinforces the same hierarchies it purports to undermine. The most insidious of these representations are highly politicized in ways that feign banality. (Oh, how sweet! A magical Black sidekick with no interest in structural inequality! Wow, how touching! A servant who’s part of the family!) Pointing out the tacit politics in these feel-good stories is generally considered rude. Did we hate Jews? Maybe some of us did, though I doubt it. We didn’t speak of hatred. I certainly didn’t hate Jews. I still don’t. I have plenty of hatred in my heart, but it’s balanced by a love which is distributed according to an oppressor/oppressed binary. Identity factors into the equation only to the degree that it clarifies the distribution. Hating or liking Jews has little to do with the moments of tension I describe. We perceived an implicit politics at play even if we didn’t understand the structures of our perception. And we knew that the politics had something to do with Israel. We weren’t being paranoid. All those ritual inclusions, those benign interjections of ethnic flavor, helped to reify Zionism whether or not that was their purpose. We weren’t rolling our eyes at an impartial form of cultural representation. We were in awe of the subtle but unmistakable attempt to engineer our own obsolescence. We feel the same way when Zionists accuse us of “antisemitism” simply for refusing to disappear. Because of a relentless sense of precarity, we inhabited a world of sighs, side-eyes, and half-smiles. We didn’t feel like celebrating Jewish culture. That reluctance wasn’t a visceral symptom of racial hostility; it was a remonstration that could be articulated only through an oblique and coded semiotics. It was also perhaps a lament that we were strangers to pop culture, both as subjects and consumers. We were too foreign, too dangerous, to ever be presented as banal. Our role was to produce spectacular violence. Our oppressors, it seemed to us, were fully realized, and it didn’t escape our notice that their self-realization came at our expense. It was completely obvious and at the same time perplexing and inexplicable. I don’t want to argue that our reluctance was justifiable. Instead, I want to argue that the reluctance was rational—not only rational, but rational according to a calculus derived without our participation. We were told repeatedly that the very idea of Jewish peoplehood is contingent on Israel’s existence and were nevertheless given the responsibility of separating the two phenomena. We earnestly performed this responsibility but never made much headway because Zionists kept punishing us for daring to suggest that Jewishness could survive decolonization. Unless one has been subject to it, then I don’t think it’s possible to imagine the relentlessness and intensity of Zionist efforts to eradicate any trace of Palestine in pop culture, politics, arts, and education. These efforts didn’t happen solely through phony accusations of antisemitism. They had an insidious social component, as well. The ability to tell stories or to flood programming with humanizing gestures made it easier to sell the idea of Israel as a spiritual counterpart to the United States. Arabs and Muslims had no such advantage. Our provenance needed to remain foreign for the relationship between Israel and the United States to make any sense. The notion that Jew-hatred is the only explanation for criticism of Israel would have gone nowhere without the cultural capital accumulated through disproportionate visibility. The sad irony of antisemitism is that in the past few decades it has harmed Palestinians more than anyone else.