"Palestinian" is a different category than "Hamas" (even though there is overlap). "Israeli" is a different category than "Jew" (even though there is overlap). The BBC is refusing to report what is happening. Instead, they are telling us what they want us to think. When someone tells you who they are, a good default is to believe them.
I highly recommend this video if you'd like to get up to speed on many of the new and sophisticated ways your government is trying to regulate how you communicate with your fellow citizens. Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have been intensely covering the "censorship industrial complex" for years. This is merely the latest chapter of a disturbing series of stories they have broken.
Greg Lukianoff explains that censorship, no matter how well intended it is, drives conversation into the shadows, where it festers. It isolates viewpoints away from the mainstream, detached from any interaction with opposing views, where participants experience a false consensus. Where their reach on important topics exceeds their grasp. Those who advocate for censorship to cure "bad" ideas, always makes the situation worse by emboldening the "bad" ideas. This is one of the ideas why censorship never works.
[C]ensorship on one platform may lead to an increase in the amount of similar content on other platforms. This is the unintended consequence of heavy-handed moderation policies.
Social media censorship creates new ecosystems that are ripe for group polarization. As Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein explains in an essay on group polarization: “People who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion [with each other], to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm.”
For a vivid portrayal of how exclusion makes polarization, paranoia, and radicalism far worse, we highly recommend Andrew Callaghan’s documentary This Place Rules, which highlights some of the protests and personalities that played large or small roles in the run-up to, and day of, the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Callaghan has a grave warning about how badly attempts to censor can backfire: “When you take someone who talks about a deep state conspiracy to silence him and his followers and then you silence him and his followers it only really adds to his credibility,” he says in the film. When you’re dealing with people who believe there’s a conspiracy to shut them up, do absolutely nothing that looks anything like a conspiracy to shut them up.
Simply put, censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse.
Scott Barry Kaufman republishes Theodore Roosevelt's challenge to those whose sense of achievement is based only on sitting on the sidelines and taking potshots.
Adolescents in the U.S. are severely distressed, increasingly suicidal. Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt weigh in on causation: "The sudden switch from play-based childhood to phone-based childhood is—we believe—the leading candidate for being the major cause of the international collapse of adolescent mental health.8 The evidence of causation is particularly strong for girls. In fact, nobody has yet put forth an alternative theory—one that can explain why the same thing happened at the same time in so many countries. Jean Twenge recently considered thirteen such theories that have been proposed to explain trends in the U.S., and she showed that they don’t even work in the U.S., let alone internationally."
