Meta should not ban “From the river to the sea”
Stuff reports:
Meta’s company-funded oversight body ruled Wednesday that the social media giant shouldn’t automatically take down posts using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” a decades-old rallying cry for Palestinian nationalism that has reignited a national debate about the boundaries of acceptable speech.
Meta’s Oversight Board, an independent collection of academics, experts and lawyers who oversee thorny content decisions on the platform, said posts they examined using the phrase didn’t violate the company’s rules against hate speech, inciting violence or praising dangerous organisations.
“While [the phrase] can be understood by some as encouraging and legitimising antisemitism and the violent elimination of Israel and its people, it is also often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, and to end the war in Gaza,” the board said in its ruling.
I believe the majority of people who use this do seek for Israel to be destroyed, as the slogan implies. I regard any person who uses it very poorly.
But this doesn’t mean Meta should ban use of it. It is not a direct incitement to genocide. It is not saying “Kill all the Jews” even if the likely end result of the slogan would be a mass killing or exodus of Jews from the region. The threshold for stopping speech should be high.
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