{"id":1437584,"date":"2024-01-10T18:26:07","date_gmt":"2024-01-10T18:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=455624"},"modified":"2024-01-10T18:26:07","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T18:26:07","slug":"israeli-group-claims-its-using-big-tech-back-channels-to-censor-inflammatory-wartime-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/01\/10\/israeli-group-claims-its-using-big-tech-back-channels-to-censor-inflammatory-wartime-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Israeli Group Claims It\u2019s Using Big Tech Back Channels to Censor \u201cInflammatory\u201d Wartime Content"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A small group<\/span> of volunteers from Israel\u2019s tech sector is working tirelessly to remove content it says doesn\u2019t belong on platforms like Facebook and TikTok, tapping personal connections at those and other Big Tech companies to have posts deleted outside official channels, the project\u2019s founder told The Intercept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project\u2019s moniker, \u201cIron Truth,\u201d echoes the Israeli military\u2019s vaunted Iron Dome rocket interception system. The brainchild of Dani Kaganovitch, a Tel Aviv-based software engineer at Google, Iron Truth claims its tech industry back channels have led to the removal of roughly 1,000 posts tagged by its members as false, antisemitic, or \u201cpro-terrorist\u201d across platforms such as X, YouTube, and TikTok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview, Kaganovitch said he launched the project after the October 7 Hamas attack, when he saw a Facebook video that cast doubt on alleged Hamas atrocities. \u201cIt had some elements of disinformation,\u201d he told The Intercept. \u201cThe person who made the video said there were no beheaded babies, no women were raped, 200 bodies is a fake. As I saw this video, I was very pissed off. I copied the URL of the video and sent it to a team in [Facebook parent company] Meta, some Israelis that work for Meta, and I told them that this video needs to be removed and actually they removed it after a few days.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Billed as both a fight against falsehood and a \u201cfight for public opinion,\u201d according to a post announcing the project on Kaganovitch\u2019s LinkedIn profile<\/a>, Iron Truth vividly illustrates the perils and pitfalls of terms like \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d in wartime, as well as the mission creep they enable. The project\u2019s public face is a Telegram bot<\/a> that crowdsources reports of \u201cinflammatory\u201d posts, which Iron Truth\u2019s organizers then forward to sympathetic insiders. \u201cWe have direct channels with Israelis who work in the big companies,\u201d Kaganovitch said in an October 13 message to the Iron Truth Telegram group. \u201cThere are compassionate ones who take care of a quick removal.\u201d The Intercept used Telegram\u2019s built-in translation feature to review the Hebrew-language chat transcripts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Iron Truth vividly illustrates the perils and pitfalls of terms like \u201cmisinformation\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d in wartime.<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So far, nearly 2,000 participants have flagged a wide variety of posts for removal, from content that\u2019s clearly racist or false to posts that are merely critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians, according to chat logs reviewed by The Intercept. \u201cIn the U.S. there is free speech,\u201d Kaganovitch explained. \u201cAnyone can say anything with disinformation. This is very dangerous, we can see now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe interests of a fact checking or counter-disinformation group working in the context of a war belongs to one belligerent or another. Their job is to look out for the interests of their side,\u201d explained Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council\u2019s Digital Forensic Research Lab. \u201cThey’re not trying to ensure an open, secure, accessible online space for all, free from disinformation. They’re trying to target and remove information and disinformation that they see as harmful or dangerous to Israelis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Iron Truth appears to have frequently conflated criticism or even mere discussion of Israeli state violence with misinformation or antisemitism, Kaganovitch says his views on this are evolving. \u201cIn the beginning of the war, it was anger, most of the reporting was anger,\u201d he told The Intercept. \u201cAnti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anything related to this was received as fake, even if it was not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Intercept was unable to independently confirm that sympathetic workers at Big Tech firms are responding to the group\u2019s complaints or verify that the group was behind the removal of the content it has taken credit for having deleted. Iron Truth\u2019s founder declined to share the names of its \u201cinsiders,\u201d stating that they did not want to discuss their respective back channels with the press. In general, \u201cthey are not from the policy team but they have connections to the policy team,\u201d Kaganovitch told The Intercept, referring to the personnel at social media firms who set rules for permissible speech. “Most of them are product managers, software developers. \u2026 They work with the policy teams with an internal set of tools to forward links and explanations about why they need to be removed.\u201d While companies like Meta routinely engage with various civil society groups and NGOs to discuss and remove content, these discussions are typically run through their official content policy teams, not rank-and-file employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Iron Truth Telegram account regularly credits these supposed insiders. \u201cThanks to the TikTok Israel team who fight for us and for the truth,\u201d read an October 28 post on the group\u2019s Telegram channel. \u201cWe work closely with Facebook, today we spoke with more senior managers,\u201d according to another post on October 17. Soon after a Telegram chat member complained that something they\u2019d posted to LinkedIn had attracted \u201cinflammatory commenters,\u201d the Iron Truth account replied, \u201cKudos to the social network LinkedIn who recruited a special team and have so far removed 60% of the content we reported on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Kaganovitch said the project has allies outside Israel\u2019s Silicon Valley annexes as well. Iron Truth\u2019s organizers met with the director of a controversial Israeli government cyber unit, he said, and its core team of more than 50 volunteers and 10 programmers includes a former member of the Israeli Parliament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Eventually our main goal is to get the tech companies to differentiate between freedom of speech and posts that their only goal is to harm Israel and to interfere with the relationship between Israel and Palestine to make the war even worse,” Inbar Bezek, the former Knesset member working with Iron Truth, told The Intercept in a WhatsApp message.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAcross our products, we have policies in place to mitigate abuse, prevent harmful content and help keep users safe. We enforce them consistently and without bias,\u201d Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon told The Intercept. \u201cIf a user or employee believes they\u2019ve found content that violates these policies, we encourage them to report it through the dedicated online channels.\u201d Muldoon added that Google \u201cencourages employees to use their time and skills to volunteer for causes they care about.\u201d In interviews with The Intercept, Kaganovitch emphasized that he works on Iron Truth only in his free time, and said the project is entirely distinct from his day job at Google.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels pushed back on the notion that Iron Truth was able to get content taken down outside the platform\u2019s official processes, but declined to comment on Iron Truth’s underlying claim of a back channel to company employees. \u201cMultiple pieces of content this group claims to have gotten removed from Facebook and Instagram are still live and visible today because they don\u2019t violate our policies,\u201d Daniels told The Intercept in an emailed statement. \u201cThe idea that we remove content based on someone\u2019s personal beliefs, religion, or ethnicity is simply inaccurate.\u201d Daniels added, \u201cWe receive feedback about potentially violating content from a variety of people, including employees, and we encourage anyone who sees this type of content to report it so we can investigate and take action according to our policies,\u201d noting that Meta employees have access to internal content reporting tools, but that this system can only be used to remove posts that violate the company\u2019s public Community Standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Neither TikTok nor LinkedIn responded to questions about Iron Truth. X could not be reached for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"GAZA\n
A Palestinian woman cries in the garden of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital after it was hit in Gaza City, Gaza, on Oct. 18, 2023.Photo by Mustafa Hassona\/Anadolu via Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

\u201cKeep Bombing!\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Though confusion and recrimination are natural byproducts of any armed conflict, Iron Truth has routinely used the fog of war as evidence of anti-Israeli disinformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the start of the project in the week after Hamas\u2019s attack, for example, Iron Truth volunteers were encouraged to find and report posts expressing skepticism about claims of the mass decapitation of babies in an Israeli kibbutz. They quickly surfaced posts casting doubt on reports of \u201c40 beheaded babies\u201d during the Hamas attack, tagging them \u201cfake news\u201d and \u201cdisinformation\u201d and sending them to platforms for removal. Among a list of LinkedIn content that Iron Truth told its Telegram followers it had passed along to the company was a post demanding evidence for the beheaded baby claim, categorized by the project as \u201cTerror\/Fake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the skepticism they were attacking proved warranted. While many of Hamas\u2019s atrocities against Israelis on October 7 are indisputable, the Israeli government itself ultimately said it couldn\u2019t verify<\/a> the horrific claim about beheaded babies<\/a>. Similarly, Iron Truth\u2019s early efforts to take down \u201cdisinformation\u201d about Israel bombing hospitals now contrast with weeks of well-documented airstrikes against multiple hospitals and the deaths of hundreds of doctors<\/a> from Israeli bombs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On October 16, Iron Truth shared a list of Facebook and Instagram posts it claimed responsibility for removing, writing on Telegram, \u201cSignificant things reported today and deleted. Good job! Keep bombing! \"\ud83d\udcaa\"\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While most of the links no longer work, several are still active. One is a video of grievously wounded Palestinians in a hospital, including young children, with a caption accusing Israel of crimes against humanity. Another is a video from Mohamed El-Attar, a Canadian social media personality who posts under the name \u201cThat Muslim Guy.\u201d In the post, shared the day after the Hamas attack, El-Attar argued the October 7 assault was not an act of terror, but of armed resistance to Israeli occupation. While this statement is no doubt inflammatory to many, particularly in Israel, Meta is supposed to allow for this sort of discussion, according to internal policy guidance previously reported by The Intercept. The internal language<\/a>, which detailed the company\u2019s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, lists this sentence among examples of permitted speech: \u201cThe IRA were pushed towards violence by the brutal practices of the British government in Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n