Israel’s ‘Facebook law’ plans to control all Palestinian content online
The article does not provide evidence to back the title&#x27;s claim &quot;How Israel’s ‘Facebook Law’ Plans to Control All Palestinian Content Online.&quot;<p>- The article claims that takedown requests on 20,000 Palestinian items demonstrate an attempt to control all Palestinian content.<p>- The number of takedown requests is irrelevant without demonstrating the illegitimacy of the requests.<p>- Valid evidence would be showing a takedown request for a single post that an unbiased group wouldn&#x27;t interpret as inflammatory or harmful to security.<p>- It&#x27;s suspicious that the article doesn&#x27;t include a link to see the 20,000 posts. Or even one for that matter. Why wouldn&#x27;t they include that extremely relevant info?<p>- The source for the number 20,000 is this post =&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;7amleh.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;29&#x2F;the-palestinian-digital-rights-coalition-and-the-palestinian-human-rights-organizations-council-warn-against-passing-the-facebook-law-in-the-israeli-knesset-and-its-repercussions-on-palestinian-digital-rights" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;7amleh.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;12&#x2F;29&#x2F;the-palestinian-digital-rights...</a><p>- The post contains zero information on where that number came from.<p>- The article uses misleading language. It claims takedown requests &quot;grew exponentially&quot;, from 2,421 in 2016 to 20,000+ in 2020. An additional 18,000 requests over five years is not exponential growth.<p>- It attributes maliciousness to the increase in takedown requests:<p>-- Ignoring the fact that takedown requests have been increasing globally year after year. Twitter for example had 6,000 governmental takedown requests in 2015. In 2020 that number was 81,000! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transparency.twitter.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;removal-requests.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;transparency.twitter.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;removal-requests.html</a><p>-- Ignoring Palestinian population growth (which is indeed exponential by nature) of more than half a million. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldometers.info&#x2F;world-population&#x2F;state-of-palestine-population&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldometers.info&#x2F;world-population&#x2F;state-of-pale...</a><p>-- Ignoring the massive period of internet adoption during that time period. More than 1,000,000 new internet users! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetworldstats.com&#x2F;me&#x2F;il.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.internetworldstats.com&#x2F;me&#x2F;il.htm</a><p>- Israel is not even among the top ten countries that submitted the most takedown requests in 2021. Russia, Turkey, France, and Germany are. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comparitech.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vpn-privacy&#x2F;tech-giant-censorship&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comparitech.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vpn-privacy&#x2F;tech-giant-cens...</a><p>- In 2021 Israel had 7.68 million internet users and submitted 91 content removal requests per 100,000 users. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comparitech.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vpn-privacy&#x2F;tech-giant-censorship&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comparitech.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vpn-privacy&#x2F;tech-giant-cens...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;974318&#x2F;israel-number-of-internet-users&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;974318&#x2F;israel-number-of-...</a><p>- According to my math that is a total of 6,989 for ALL takedown requests, not just Palestinian content. Hardly the 20,000+ for Palestinian content alone that the article claims.<p>- Depending on where you draw the lines it&#x27;s hard to get a clear number of Palestinian social media users. Let&#x27;s take 2.7 million as an estimate as per <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datareportal.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;digital-2021-palestine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datareportal.com&#x2F;reports&#x2F;digital-2021-palestine</a>.<p>- Let&#x27;s pretend 20,000 is indeed the number of Israeli takedown requests of Palestinian posts.<p>- Let&#x27;s also pretend that none of those posts were incitements to violence.<p>- Let&#x27;s assume that each takedown request targeted a post of a unique Palestinian individual (highly unlikely, people&#x27;s posts tend to have a theme).<p>- That would mean that Israel tried to have a single post of less than 1% of Palestinian social media users taken down.<p>- If the average social media user posts twice a day across all their platforms that&#x27;s 730 posts in 2020. So even the &lt; 1% of users potentially affected only had .001 of their posts affected.<p>How on earth could anyone rational come to a conclusion that Israel plans to control all Palestinian content online?<p>---<p>That&#x27;s my concrete criticism.<p>In addition, the article is a terrible source. It seems that it wasn&#x27;t shared from the author&#x27;s main publication &quot;The Palestinian Chronicle&quot; to make it seem less biased. Here is the original <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palestinechronicle.com&#x2F;how-israels-facebook-law-plans-to-control-all-palestinian-content-online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palestinechronicle.com&#x2F;how-israels-facebook-law-...</a>.<p>Note the large logo signifying the platform of a single Palestinian state solution. No state for Jews anywhere in Palestine, not along any borders &#x27;67 or &#x27;48. What happens to the vast majority of Jews in Israel who have no other country that they can go to? Is there a larger incitement to violence?