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this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Politics
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In mid-October, people began to notice that if one’s Instagram bio said “Palestinian” in English alongside the Palestinian flag emoji and “Praise be to god” in Arabic, the app translated the text to “Terrorist.” Meta released a public apology.
Holy shit, Zuck!
I would bet a watermelon this was translated by some kind of AI.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Over the past three months, on banners and T-shirts and balloons and social media posts, one piece of imagery has emerged around the world in protests against the Israel-Hamas war: the watermelon.
From New York and Tel Aviv to Dubai and Belgrade, the fruit has become a symbol of solidarity, drawing together activists who don’t speak the same language or belong to the same culture but share a common cause.
In Ramallah in 1980, the military shut down a gallery run by three artists because they showed political art and works in the colors of the Palestinian flag — red, green, black and white.
“There are stories of young men who defiantly walked the streets with slices of the fruit, risking arrest from Israeli soldiers,” Jerusalem-born author Mahdi Sabbagh wrote.
In response, Zazim, an activist group of Arab and Jewish Israelis, plastered taxis in Tel Aviv with large watermelon stickers that read: “This is not a Palestinian flag.”
While “shadow banning,” or the limited visibility of certain posts, can be difficult to discern, advocacy and nonprofit organizations studying digital rights in the Middle East say they have tracked stark biases, especially on the Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Saved 84% of original text.
For anyone who uses these summaries, I think the rest of the Ramallah story is important to include. The following are the next few sentences after that one:
The trio was later summoned by an Israeli officer. According to artist and exhibit organizer Sliman Mansour, an Israeli officer told him, “It is forbidden to organize an exhibition without permission from the military, and secondly, it is forbidden to paint in the colors of the Palestinian flag.” The officer mentioned a watermelon as one example of art that would violate the army’s rules, Mansour told The Associated Press last week.
In protest, people began to wave the fruit in public.
Also, the paragraph that starts: “in response” directly follows these two sentences. Without them, I interpreted the bumper stickers as a way for people to reject the watermelon as symbolism.
A year ago, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir banned Palestinian flags in public places. This effort was met with fervent opposition.
Oh come on... it's only been a few years since I learned of the American social connotation for watermelons, and now they're changing it already?