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A Cautionary Tale of Open Source Social Technologies

Posted by kdawson on from the careful-what-you-let-go-viral dept.

eweekhickins writes "The 'country' drop-down menu on one organization's donations pages omits Israel as a country and includes 'Palestine.' Among other things, this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages; it also presents the risk of a PR nightmare for the organization. This EWeek story cautions that while basic Web 2.0 technologies combined with open source can be incredibly powerful and productive, they can also lead to disastrous results for an organization that isn't paying close enough attention."

2 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Overreacting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If my reading of the article is right, it goes something like this:

    There's a Ruby API that lists countries and regions. One of these is "Palestinian Territory -- Occupied". Someone decided to shorten this to "Palestine".

    Meanwhile, someone at Facebook decided that a certain list of countries contains high risk of credit card fraud. One of those countries is Israel. So they won't take your credit card if you live there, probably because they've run into fraudsters operating in that country and they don't want to risk it. Just like they won't take a credit card from Nigeria, to name one.

    So, someone sees this and concludes the worst. The Facebook application is anti-semitic. Overreact much?

    Honestly, I think people are a bit too touchy about Israel/Palestine. Sure, it's a touchy subject, but a simple set of unrelated mistakes and people assume you're part of a vast conspiracy to destroy their nation? I think we as a society owe it to ourselves to be more careful about such accusations, and not simply react.

  2. Article shows bias by nwetters · · Score: 5, Informative

    From TFA:

    I pointed out that this isn't just any omission and addition. When you omit Israel and add Palestine (which is not even recognized as a country by the United Nations) to a country drop-down menu, you seem to be making a very loaded political statement.

    Israel was omitted because of fraud from that country, which seems like a good reason. Palestine was probably included in the list because it is recognised by the UN, and is included in ISO 3166-1. If you were to delete Palestine from the list, it would certainly be a very loaded political statement, but its inclusion is not.