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In France, Most Comments on Gaza Conflict Yanked From Mainstream News Sites
An anonymous reader writes with
an unpleasant statistic from France, quoting David Corchia, who heads a service employed by large French news organizations to sift through and moderate comments made on their sites. Quoting YNet News:
Corchia says that as an online moderator, generally 25% to 40% of comments are banned. Moderators are assigned with the task of filtering comments in accordance with France's legal system, including those that are racist, anti-Semitic or discriminatory. Regarding the war between the Israelis and Hamas, however, Corchia notes that some 95% of online comments made by French users are removed. "There are three times as many comments than normal, all linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," added Jeremie Mani, head of another moderation company Netino. "We see racist or anti-Semitic messages, very violent, that also take aim at politicians and the media, sometimes by giving journalists' contact details," he added. "This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments."
The problem with most of these comments is that they are vile and hate-filled toward not just a country, but an entire religion.
Europeans have laws against hate speech. That's why these comments are being deleted.
Personally, I'd leave these comments in place. It shows the hatred that is being fomented in many Islamic middle eastern countries. We should know what they really think and why.
I think deleting those comments is actually masking a terrible problem.
They are being forced to filter "illegal" eg hate/racist/defamatory comments.
The not-so-ironic thing is that a French media moderator is moderating comments on a conflict that is hate-based.
My personal opinion on the entire thing is "there will never be peace in the middle east", Not till those petrodollars run out. Like the thing that I find stupid is the sheer amount of waste Burj Khalifa (Dubai,UAE) and the Mile-high tower (Kingdom Tower,Jeddah, Saudi Arabia) are to their local economy. They build these enormous wealth-measuring buildings, but have none of the support infrastructure (The Burj, has all it's sewage, trucked out) for it to be functional. For the same price, they can build an entire city of smaller, efficient buildings, with all the support infrastructure to make Manhattan look like a dump.)
So all these conflicts in the middle east, are just proxy wars between the uneducated "have-not"'s. The entire Gaza thing is the middle eastern states playing a high-stakes form of chicken with Israel. Nobody wants to be caught funding the terrorists, but "looking a blind eye away" while things are allowed to happen, over and over again, it's getting old. I'd sooner believe Iran is building a peaceful nuclear plant, than there ever being peace between Israel and any of it's neighbors. At some point this is all going to boil over and the "holy land" gets nuked by someone playing the "if I can't have it, you can't have it either" card.
It's not a very moral attidude, but it's a very human one. I'm sorry if your species disappoints you. (I wish it didnt' regularly disappoint me.)
People tend to care more about a friend's daughter's puppy being rescued from a well than they do about 100.000 people they've never heard of being tortured to death. It's not exactly moral, but it's the way people think. They can empathize with the friend and the daughter, and even with the puppy more than they can with the "larger number than I can picture" number of strangers they've never met.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.