IsraelHamas

Decimated neighborhoods. Injured children. Terrorized festivalgoers running for their lives. Since the brutal war between Israel and Hamas began nearly three months ago, Maddy Miller, a 17-year-old high school senior in Dallas, Texas, has been trying to make sense of the horrific scenes unfolding daily on her phone. "I'll just open TikTok or Instagram and it's like, 'here's a clip from inside Israel or inside Palestine,'" Miller said. "Sometimes I just need to sit down for like 10 minutes and actually figure out what's…

Meta's own independent oversight board has issued some harsh criticism over the manner in which Meta's various platforms handled posts around the Israel-Hamas conflict. The board urged Meta to preserve removed posts that might contain evidence of human rights violations…

Meta Platforms' Oversight Board said on Tuesday that the social media company erred in removing two videos depicting hostages and injured people in the Israel-Hamas conflict, saying the videos were valuable to understanding human suffering in the war.Since Hamas' attack in Israel on October 7, social media platforms have seen renewed scrutiny over their content moderation practices due to a surge in misinformation and accusations that the companies have promoted certain viewpoints about the conflict.Elevate Your Tech…

Meta's Oversight Board has published its decision for its first-ever expedited review, which only took 12 days instead of weeks, focusing on content surrounding the Israel-Hamas war. The Board overturned the company's original decision to remove two pieces of content from both sides of the conflict. Since it supported Meta's subsequent move to restore the posts on Facebook and Instagram, no further action is expected from the company. However, the Board's review cast a spotlight on how Meta's reliance on automated tools…

As the war between Israel and Hamas drags on, many on both sides have taken to social media to gather information and air their outrage. The impulse to do so is understandable: Political activism on social media provides people with an emotional outlet and gives them a sense that they can do something. The war is awful, and following it generates a sharp psychological need to get involved and do something.In the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center have been studying the ethics of…

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressed Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, on Thursday for information about its moderation of Palestinian content amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.  Dozens of human rights and civil society organizations have raised concerns about Meta’s “reported suppression, filtering, and mistranslation of Palestine-related content over the past two months,” Warren noted in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Amidst the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, a…

Steven Spielberg has broken his silence on the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. In a statement shared by the USC Shoah Foundation, which was founded by Spielberg in 1994, the Oscar-winning filmmaker said, “I never imagined I would see such unspeakable barbarity against Jews in my lifetime.” His comments come as the organization continues its initiative to collect testimonies from survivors of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and Holocaust survivors and witnesses. “The team at the USC…

Google searches of 2023: Your Google search history for 2023 has arrived. Well, actually, the world's. On Monday, the California-based tech giant released its “Year in Search,” a roundup of 2023's top global queries, ranging from unforgettable pop culture moments (hello, Barbenheimer ), to the loss of beloved figures and tragic news carrying worldwide repercussions.The ongoing Israel-Hamas war topped news trends in 2023, per Google's global data, followed by queries related to the Titanic-bound submersible that imploded…

ByteDance's TikTok has been facing a tough time over its handling of Israel-Hamas war content and related hate speech, but it is now stepping up with some new initiatives. On the moderation side, the social platform is rolling out new comment filtering tools, with the most notable one being "Comment Care Mode," which supposedly automatically filters comments that are deemed similar to the creator's previously reported or deleted ones. Another new feature helps nix comments made by accounts that are not in the creator's…

More than 60 days into the war, it’s hard to pinpoint a single moment that stands out. The coverage has been a series of moments. Many horrifying, sad, scary and unpredictable. Every day reporters on the ground — I’ve been in Israel covering the conflict for Fox News since it started on the morning of October 7 — are faced with an unmanageable amount of information and are tasked with sifting through the noise to decide what is important and what facts are critical to the broader story. I wrestle with the…