The Online Safety Act, sold as child protection, now hides Gaza’s pain, silences dissent and spreads censorship.

I agree with the premise, but it’s more than a bit of irony that this is coming from Al Jazeera.

Hey could you elaborate please?

A news channel created by the state of Qatar and initially staffed by ex BBC presenters who were paid massive amounts to attempt to astroturf over their human rights abuses and corruption.

Edit: forgot to add, Qatar also imposes censorship on journalism and uses Al Jazeera to push their “truth”. Hence the irony.

Totally fair. I personally think Al Jazeera has been a positive force, spreading the word on the Gaza Genocide, the Sudanese massacres & conflict, and their unapologetic leftism. And the Qatar government hosted peace talks between Israel and Palestinian groups. I have never heard that BBC presenter thing though.

OK yeah but every major “news” channel is like this.

For example, the NYTimes regularly publishes disinformation and pro-genocide propaganda.

Claims that AJ is exceptionally bad are often motivated by imperialism, islamophobia, zionism, etc.

Well, until now almost all articles I read in AJ are well contrastable, less biased as much other western media.

I don’t think I ever said they were particularly bad… just stating facts here. The opinion that “every major news channel is like this” however is troubling. All news channels have their influences, you just have to identify what they are and adjust critical thinking accordingly.

OK yeah but every major “news” channel is like this

That’s literally “whataboutism”.

Ignoring real censorship in the UK because the originating nation of the news source also has censorship… is whataboutism.

Not at all. I agree with the premise as I said so there was no whataboutism in there. I merely pointed out that a news source from a nation that allows nothing even vaguely approaching what the UK has, to be ironic.

Lay
link
fedilink
11d

Al Jazeera was at the forefront of the Jihadist campaign against Iraq and Syria, consistently referring to ISIS members as revolutionary forces fighting against these two governments, even though almost everyone else recognized them to be terrorists at the time. Although the tone of their narrative has changed over the past six years or so, this does not change what their motives were.

@Jentu@lemmy.ml
link
fedilink
1
edit-2
1d

Would you make this same comment if it were coming from literally any other major source seeing as censorship is widespread in major news networks? Or is it just veiled racism?

@khannie@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
9
edit-2
1d

What an absolute load of nonsense. I have spent a decent amount of time in Qatar. I watched what were effectively slaves working away to build stadiums and hotels. It is a fair statement to point out the irony of a place with very strong censorship criticise censorship.

If the BBC lauded a foreign country for the equivalent of bloody Sunday I would point that out too so honestly just jog on.

Edit: just to reiterate, I agreed with the premise up front. It’s not a bad article. That doesn’t take away from a censorship heavy regime criticising censorship through their mouthpiece and I fully acknowledge that AJ is generally decent so no, it’s not racism.

@Jentu@lemmy.ml
link
fedilink
-4
edit-2
17h

I agreed with the premise up front. It’s not a bad article. That doesn’t take away from a censorship heavy regime criticising censorship through their mouthpiece and I fully acknowledge that AJ is generally decent so no, it’s not racism.

“I swear, I’m not talking about crime just because I passed a random person of color. Being anti crime is a total rational thought to bring up, and I just find the topic interesting and worth talking about at this particular moment is all. That person we passed was actually a really chill dude, and the fact that I said that makes me not a racist”

Elkcloner
link
fedilink
11d

deleted by creator

Create a post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

  • 0 users online
  • 108 users / day
  • 435 users / week
  • 1.32K users / month
  • 4.54K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 4.39K Posts
  • 111K Comments
  • Modlog