/r/EnoughCommieSpam Rules:

I see many left liberal social media profiles I follow, which otherwise don’t post any geopolitical content (LGBTQIA+ activists, feminist pages, artists, left liberal acquaintances) regularly share content about Gaza, but never about Ukraine. Don’t misunderstand me, my problem is not that they draw attention to the suffering of the people of Gaza, my problem is that they don’t do the same in the case of Ukraine (or any other people under attack for that matter), and I can’t wrap my head around why that is, since the war in Ukraine has a much greater impact on the fate of the West than the war in Gaza.

Can it be because people view the Israel-Palestine conflict as a “white supremacist” side vs an “oppressed people of colour” side, while the war in Ukraine has “two white sides”?

Or can it be because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back and was a propaganda tool already during the Cold War?

Or maybe coordinated Russian and Iranian trolls online make sure that content about the Gaza conflict is favoured by the algorithm, pushing content about Ukraine to the side?

What do you think?

From this excellent “Lies All the Way Down – Combating 2024 Election Disinformation” report by Public Knowledge (https://publicknowledge.org/lies-all-the-way-down/):

Dominant Platforms Have Lowered Their Own Defenses

The new risks of generative artificial intelligence are compounded by trends within the tech industry since the 2020 and 2022 elections. Tech companies have been leaning away from content moderation and from taking responsibility for the content on their platforms through changes in staffing, cutting out independent research, and changing internal policies..

X (the platform formerly known as Twitter), Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all took steps to cut down their content moderation departments. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, X Corp. has moved to cut 30% of its trust and safety staff and 80% of its safety engineers going into 2024. Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have gone down similar paths with significant cuts to their workforce, including major cuts to the content moderation teams. Meta’s cuts also directly gutted their ability to pursue strong and principled content moderation, letting many of its policy staffers go. Current and former Meta trust and safety employees have raised concerns that these cuts will hamstring the company’s ability to respond to political disinformation and foreign influence campaigns and could make Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp dangerous places for disinformation to fester and grow. Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google and YouTube) cut policy experts and regulators, leaving only one person responsible for misinformation and disinformation worldwide. They furthered the issue by laying off at least a third of the employees at Jigsaw, leaving the subsidiary that develops tools to combat disinformation with a “skeleton crew.”

In addition to gutting content moderation teams and tools, platforms have denied independent researchers access to study their practices and outcomes. These independent audits of social media platforms have been critical to understanding the impacts and developing new tools to protect our elections and civil discourse. Meta and X have both moved to curtail access, with Meta pulling its support from Facebook’s CrowdTangle, a social media analysis tool, and X taking down its Premium API, including its Search and Account Activity API, making it extremely cost-prohibitive for smaller research institutions or researchers without institutional backing to study these platforms.

Some platforms have also softened their own policies related to election disinformation. For example, in June of 2023 YouTube stopped taking down videos that claimed the 2020 elections had “widespread fraud, error, or glitches,” committing to open “debate of political ideas, even those…based on disproven assumptions.” In August, X reversed course from 2019 and decided to allow cause-driven and political ads back onto its platform, and in December, Meta announced that claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen” are no longer of concern and do not violate its policies.

Other Participants in a Complex and Interconnected Battlefield

Several platforms have accompanied these changes in content moderation policy with algorithmic changes – or actual business strategies – that deemphasize reputable news. Threads has communicated that it “will not amplify” news in an effort to make the nascent platform less toxic than Twitter. Instagram will not place “political content,” including content “potentially related to things like laws, elections or social topics” on its recommendation surfaces. X removed headlines from the key images representing news stories, ostensibly to “improve aesthetics” but probably to keep users from clicking off the platform. Traffic referrals to the top global news sites have “collapsed” over the past year, deteriorating both our current information environment and, due to the related declines in publisher ad revenue, the prospects for our future one. The solution to disinformation cannot be zero information; such a vacuum just leaves the space for false narratives to fester.

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of an orchestrated effort by some policymakers to equate government collaboration with platforms – even on the most fundamental pillars of democracy, like ensuring accurate information about when and where to vote – with censorship and suppression of conservative political viewpoints. We talked more about this in a recent blog post and it will come under scrutiny in oral arguments in a Supreme Court case this week.

Lastly, as some analysts have pointed out, the greatest disinformation threat in 2024 may be politicians themselves. Particularly since the twin 2020 topics of COVID-19 and the U.S. presidential election, academic researchers have repeatedly pointed to political elites as the greatest source of networked disinformation.

Please tell me that the whole Project 2025 thing is just fearmongering and nothing big. I don’t want Ukraine to lose. I don’t want climate change to destroy us. I want to keep LGBTQ+ and minority rights. Please help me.

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1gksvx7/comment/lvof01w/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I knew this subreddit could be a bit shit when it comes to politics, but I never knew it was this bad.

And it most definitely will.

Despite not being an American, I’m very, very scared about his Project 2025. It’ll destroy our solutions to climate change and roll back people’s rights.

Friggen tankies got what they wanted, let’s watch them explain how the material conditions didn’t manifest here lol

They aren’t

Some wild shit imo

Whenever there are incidents of police brutality or police misbehaving in Western countries, scream about how "all cops are bastards" and how police are inherently oppressive and evil, despite majority of people in western countries being able to protest against the government without being arrested.

However as soon as its a communist or Islamic country, where police are well known for arresting political opposition and beating anti government protesters every time they show up, tankies are always the first to defend them with bullshit like claiming protesters are "anti revolutionaries" and that the communist government needs to arrest them to prevent being overthrown. Literally using the same logic as the fascists they claim to hate so much.

Western police having to put down a violent riot that was originally an anti government protest that was completely allowed until it turned violent is somehow super authoritarian and fascists, but communists and Islamic countries beating, arresting, and killing protesters is somehow fine by their logic.

I truly don't understand their logic, they are defending the most abhorrent authoritarian regimes they can find, while demonizing western countries with functional democratic systems, while claiming to be against oppressive authoritarian governments.

So as an African American and a person who’s wanting to go in law enforcement, I’m kinda tired of white communist and white far leftist saying that abolishing prisons and abolishing the police is the way to help the black community when it’s not.

I’m tired of people telling me that I’m opressed when I’m not or when folks tell me I’m the oppressor of becoming an officer.

I’m just sick of these privileged idealists able to sit in a nice comfort room and advocating for things that would do more harm than good.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mWnm6YNCexg&pp=ygUJbm9qIHJhbnRz Really good video and channel in general.