Meta and Lavender
A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group as a suspected militant. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it?
Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy").
One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect.
Why is Meta doing this? Why is Meta so happy to share metadata about group membership with Israel – a run-around the idea of a "private" social network – and to be complicit in the genocide?
Let's look at their leadership, in particular the three most senior leaders who have close ties to Israel.
Their Chief Information Security Officer, Guy Rosen, is their most senior policy decision maker. He is Israeli, lives in Tel Aviv, and was in the Israeli military in Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is the Israeli NSA and is the department that built and runs Lavender. Insiders tell me that Rosen is the person most associated with the anti-"anti-zionism" policies, and is also responsible for the suppression of Palestinian content.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO has also been a significant supporter of Israel's propaganda. Zuckerberg gave $125k to Zaka, one of the groups that created and continues to spread much of the original Oct 7 false atrocity propaganda, including the discredited "Oct 7 mass rape" hoax.
