Hi everyone,
We are aware of a Gaza Verified member who has made multiple other accounts and is sending what appear to be automated direct messages.
We have spoken to him and asked him to delete these accounts and stop the automated messages by end of today and to confirm that he understands that this behaviour damages the reputation of the hundreds of other Palestinians on Gaza Verified and Gaza Verified itself and to promise not to do so in the future.
We apologise if you’ve been contacted in this way. Our verification verifies that someone is a Palestinian from Gaza. It is not a character reference (we can no more vouch for the character of every Palestinian than we can for the character of every USian). However, we have rules clearly set in our guide (gaza-verified.org/guide) and these are there to protect the accounts of our friends from Gaza from being reported and thus limited/suspended.
So, please, if you need to mute or block an account, do so. If you’re a server admin and you notice mass automated messages, you’re well within your rights to limit or suspend an account but if it’s not automated, please contact us so we can talk to them and explain why what they’re doing isn’t in their long term interests. Many of you already do and I thank you for it.
Please also realise that there are hundreds of Palestinians who are Gaza verified and they are all suffering through genocide and many are watching their families starve or die due to lack of access to modern medicine (again, because Israel has bombed all the hospitals and doesn’t let aid through as part of its ongoing genocide).
In many Western countries, our governments are directly complicit and, many times, profiting from Israel’s genocide.
Whatever you do, please don’t judge the entirety of something by the actions of a few and please try and keep things – namely Internet etiquette and genocide – in perspective and ask yourselves what you would do if you were in their shoes.
Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkangaza-verified.org
Lina 🍉om Sham
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Your words touched my heart. As a Palestinian from Gaza, I know how painful it is to see one person’s actions overshadow the suffering and voices of so many others.
We don’t ask anyone to ignore harmful behavior. We only ask that you don’t let one person’s actions make you turn away from Palestinian families desperately trying to survive.
Behind every account is a human being, a family, and a story of loss, fear, and hope.
Thank you for seeing us as people, not just accounts on a screen💔
AsarSameer🍉
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •You are amazing, Aral
Thank you for standing with us ❤️
Your support means everything to us.
And to those trying to sabotage the aid in Gaza:
We are suffering in tents. People are helping us for FREE, out of humanity.
Please STOP. Don’t take away our only hope.
Have mercy on our children 🙏 #Gaza
AnneH
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Mateusz 🏳️🌈
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •No.
It should be possible to tell by looking at the profile if the account is a bot or a real person. Having a portal that “verifies” massively is a strong smell of a cheap propaganda campaign. IMHO Gaza Verified should just cease to exist.
I don’t trust any account I ever saw that links to this site. All of them I saw so far posted generic content indicating a bot or a paid organized campaign.
If you’re a real person: just stop using this kind of misleading “verification”.
Aral Balkan
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Just to update you all, this is the reply we just got.
Apologies again for any messages you might have received in the past couple of days.
#GazaVerified #Gaza #Palestine #fediverse #mastodon
Layan🍉ayoub🇵🇸
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •nicole mikołajczyk
in reply to Aral Balkan • • •Aral Balkan
in reply to nicole mikołajczyk • • •