Countries anger and provoke each others’ populations by pointing out the bad stuff, and defend against that by censoring or otherwise cracking down on dissent. Articles like this are just attacks against us in this process, true, but I think specific ones like this are still useful, when critically understood, to help us realize that not only the countries we don’t like use those authoritarian tricks, but more or less every one (and those countries that don’t are couped by one or another who does).

Nah we are basically immersed in a housing crisis, so no right to that. And every time an actual leftist party succeeds, our media basically unite against it while pretending to accept them. You can call it a “lesser evil”, but I would even doubt that, since China is probably talking about us the same way we talk about them.

I wouldn’t consider it an ideological thing, but more of a strategic decision by Xi et al.

My bad, the downvotes got me confused.

Many people are targeted around the world for their beliefs. That includes activists, journalists and other people who “haven’t done anything wrong”.

I wonder what the writings were, although I’m cautious on believing that they were antisemitic, since hating Jews and hating Israel have historically been opposing positions expressed by two widely different demographics, and now that division is clearer than ever.

The article gives me bad vibes… On the one hand, it (and linked articles) seems to present the implicit assumption that Israel = Zionism = Judaism, which is very clearly false but could be easily used to used to “prove” other statements, like this: “Israel = Judaism -> Criticism of Israel = Criticism of Judaism = antisemitism”. Same logic can be used for “anti-Zionism = antisemitism”.

Additionally, the article does not mention any criticism of Israel that would not be considered disinformation, leaving that question open. This, of course, is dangerous, as it leaves open the possibility that people who “only care about truth” (but do not unconditionally support Israel) support restrictive measures on X as suggested by the article while those measures are then effectively meant to silence criticism of Israel.

Finally, one linked article seems to support the idea that all footage from the warzone should be fact-checked before being published. While this would curb some (minority) false footage, it would dramatically reduce the exposure that the conflict can get, as well as potentially exposing its spread to censorship from many sources.

So, overall, I think this article is using a reasonable-sounding rhetoric to push forward centralized control of social media narratives. It’s not a problem that some information on the platform is false, but if the overall narrative is biased, that would really become a problem, and X already implemented community notes (which use a really innovative de-biasing algorithm) to fight that. I can only conclude that we should resist the call to introduce potential sources of systematic bias to counter ultimately “inoffensive” random bias, which would be a step towards true authoritarianism.

Indeed. Do you disagree on what I said?

Israel was basically created by the West, in land that belonged entirely to Palestine. Then, decades later, with Western help, Israel had conquered half of that land, and the UN just decided to enshrine the borders at the time. Now, some more decades later, Israel has expanded way beyond those “compromise” borders, thanks to even more Western help.

There is no “internal conflict” that the West needs to help ending. It was always the West, seeking to create an allied enclave in someone else’s land. Or, to build on your metaphor, this is a fight between the adults and the only child who was there from the start, because they want their own kid to play there instead.