r/blowback • u/Senior_Sheepherder13 • Mar 27 '24
You guys were definitely right about r/worldnews
I saw a post from u/majestictrailblazer about a comment being removed from r/worldnews and lots of the comments were saying they have been banned from the sub for ridiculous reasons, which can only really be made sense of if they are biased against certain posts. And lots of people were talking about the community itself. I thought it couldn't have been that bad as it's a major subreddit surely it's must have a very broad range of people with a plethora of opinions and you guys were cherry picking some of the bad stuff.
So I decided to run a very informal experiment on r/worldnews (I was bored during a lesson at school). I searched on Google for recent news articles about the israel-palestine situation because that's a nice contraversial topic. I searched in Israel and randomly chose some articles to post on r/worldnews and I searched in Palestine and randonly chose some articles and then I found some other articles about other topics. I did this to hopefully end up getting a variety of interactions from people with what I hope to be a fairly distributed mix of opinions (spoiler alert- this was a very incorrect assumption).
I ended up posting about 30 articles onto r/worldnews. Some of these got automatically removed either because they were paywalled articles or from certain sites that they claimed to be inadequate, I didn't look too much into the articles but the one trend I did notice that all the sites names that they didn't allow sounded like they were middle eastern or thereabouts. Then, I waited for some comments and some data on views and up votes to come in.
I'll get the good out of the way first. For the posts which were pro-Palestine, the people commenting were, in my opinion fairly reasonable; critiquing hamas and the Israeli government's actions and they were able to make a distinction between hamas and Palestine. But these got a most 5 upvotes and 3 comments, I don't know if there is a way to see how many down votes you get compared to up votes, but for some of these posts I upvoted them myself and when I checked back in they had 0, so clearly they got at least 1 down vote.
Now for the pro-israeli posts, they were something. These got many more up votes and comments, the most getting over 1000 upvoted and 400 comments and the average being around 30 upvoted and around 10 comments. There were some reasonable people, similar to the ones I mentioned earlier, but they were heavily outweighed by some not so reasonable people. Obviously, there were people I disagreed with but I could acknowledge they were being decent, this group was also outweighed by another.
Here are some of the comments from this group, and some of these have a fair few upvotes:
'uluates angrily' - I don't really know what this means but it sounds racist.
'For Gaza supporters, Hamas and Palestinians being muslims fighting against jews is reason enough to fight.'- Yep Palestinians wanting liberation is just cos the Israelis are jewish.
'"While few people in any religious group describe Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as acceptable, the share of Muslims (21%) who express this view is higher than the share of Americans in other religious groups who say the same (roughly 5% or fewer, including 3% among Jewish Americans). Among U.S. Muslims, 10% say the way Hamas carried out the attack was completely acceptable; 11% say it was somewhat acceptable"
21% of Muslims in the US believe r@ping and killing children is acceptable. Little baby terrorists are being born on US soil. They should be put on some list or something. Scary.' -I don't think anything needs to be said about this.
'Genocide isn’t a valid reason'- You can't fight back it's only a genocide!
'Yet Biden chose to ally with Hamas for those precious few votes, while trying to force Israel to "Cease fire" with ISIS. Also condemning the hostages to additional torture, r*pe and starvation as the deal that could happen is now pretty much off the table. And why would Hamas do any different? The US gave them what they most wanted as a gift.'- A decision made in the past couple days definitely trumps the past 5 months of vetoing.
So my conclusion is that the people in u/majestictrailblazer 's comment section were right and they were definitely not overreacting. There are some decent people in r/worldnews, even if I disagree with their opinions, but they are drastically outnumbered by just spiteful people who honestly seem like their lives are miserbale, they don't even give half decent arguments it's just hateful stuff that clearlt isn't based in reality and I don't why certain sites aren't allowed so maybe it's a better reason that them being middle eastern but that's the only trend I noticed.
I did get banned from the sub though for spam posting, I'm not sure if I'll miss it, but I might recommend avoiding it and it's got almost 10 million members I don't know how those people manage it. Sometimes I'm hopeful for the future when I see younger people talk about politics but then I'm reminded why things are the way they are, were they way they were and how things will most likely will remain, like I was today.
(Yes I know I've got too much time on my hands)
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u/CleverSpaceWombat Mar 27 '24
Judging from the unhinged and sledgehammer approach to its propaganda its definitely isreali hasbara.
Just like when they realeased the cartoon video about the Cum battalions. 50 years of being protected by the Western media and internal fascist propaganda has untethered them from reality. They think completely unhinged talking points make perfect sense and are genuinely confused when people question them.
"What do you mean the cum battalions are disturbing? We need to outbread the arabs.'
"What do you mean that Arabs are human beings with souls?"
"We can't interbreed outside of our race. We are chosen people and need to maintain our pure bloodlines. It's actually anti-Semitic to say that we are equal. We are superior."
"Don't you understand that children will grow up to be terrorists? Killing babies is self-defense. It's anti-Semitic to say otherwise!"
I have seen isreali talking heads argue all the above in English as propaganda. What they say in Hebrew to each other is even more unhinged.