@Gardenia @deuza42 @daliarezk @gomli @gazaverified Solène, a few points:
1. This isn’t about you, it’s about our friends in Gaza.
2. Our friends in Gaza are adults like us who can make their own decisions about things like whether they show their faces or share their photos on Mastodon, just like we do.
3. We can inform our friends in Gaza about privacy issues but we cannot tell them to do anything. We are not their parents. And they are not children. That’s a very paternalistic and, dare I say, colonial view.
4. By making it appear that they shouldn’t be sharing any photos of themselves, etc., there’s a very real danger of getting them to auto-erase themselves online while Israel is already trying to do that. There is a balance here that I believe you are missing. Their survival also depends on making genuine connections with people in the outside world. Your constant attempts to get them to stop sharing photos of their lives and experiences is pushing them to use AI-generated images, for example, which is making their accounts look like scammers. They are starting to make their accounts and posts look inauthentic, and helping contribute to their erasure. Which is what the Zionists want.
5. Our friends in Palestine have been living their entire lives under surveillance and know the risks better than we do. Privacy is about threat models. It’s an area I know a thing or two about myself having worked for a third of my life in it. Your efforts, while well meaning, are having a negative effect. Not least of all on our tiny team of volunteers whose limited time is spent dealing with your constant displeasure instead of helping our friends in Gaza.
Personally, I will be muting you as I do not have the time to function as your personal support department. We will also make it very clear that no one has the right to dictate how our Palestinian friends use Mastodon or the fediverse and that any advice is just that: advice.
And for anyone from the West reading this, please be careful not paternalise our friends in Gaza.
We do not know better than they do and we do not have the right to dictate a separate set of rules for them. We can advise them of existing rules and norms if violating them can have a negative impact on them and their accounts and we can try and help if they are persecuted for who they are but we do not get to tell them how to use Mastodon or the fediverse any more than we get to tell anyone from the West.
Gaza Verified simply verifies, via video calls where one of our volunteers from Gaza is present, that they are Palestinian from Gaza. And, if their account is limited or suspended for who they are, we will advocate in their behalf or help them move to a server that isn’t complicit in genocide. That’s it. That’s all we can do with a tiny team of volunteers. Verification is not a character reference. We are not their parents. And it is not our job, or anyone else’s, to tell them how they should be using Mastodon or the fediverse.
CC @fedipourgaza @fabio @casey @joynewacc @aseelfromgz @rania40
#GazaVerified #private #public #paternalism #Gaza #Palestine #mastodon #fediverse