Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manager of Hate Speech Policy.

According to reports reviewed by Sada Social, Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Prior to that, she served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit. In her new role, Mindel will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.

Sada Social views this appointment as a highly concerning indicator for the future of digital freedoms for Palestinians. The center warns of the serious implications that Mindel’s military background may have on TikTok’s moderation practices, especially regarding Palestinian reports of incitement, bias, and the silencing of their narrative. Assigning someone affiliated with an army currently under international investigation for genocide in Gaza to lead hate speech policy only entrenches existing biases and undermines the principles of fairness and digital justice.

Sada Social’s 2024 Digital Index revealed that 27% of all digital violations targeting Palestinian content occurred on TikTok. According to TikTok’s own transparency report for the second half of 2024, the platform complied with 94% of the Israeli government’s content removal requests, all while imposing strict censorship on Palestinian content. This included the deletion of videos with clear journalistic value, and the targeting of accounts belonging to journalists, media outlets, activists, and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Sada Social also underscores that TikTok has failed to undertake any meaningful internal review of its policies, even after the South African government submitted video evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—footage that was published on TikTok and depicted Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mocking victims, and writing messages on bombs before they were dropped on Gaza. Instead of responding to these disturbing violations, TikTok has continued its partnerships with a political and military regime currently under international investigation.

Press Release| Sada Social Denounces TikTok’s Appointment of Former Israeli Army Instructor as Hate Speech Policy Manager

Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manag...

^sada.social

Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manager of Hate Speech Policy.

According to reports reviewed by Sada Social, Mindel previously worked with the U.S. State Department under Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Prior to that, she served as an instructor in the Israeli army’s Spokesperson’s Unit. In her new role, Mindel will be tasked with formulating TikTok’s hate speech policies, shaping relevant legislative and regulatory frameworks, and monitoring trends—particularly those related to antisemitic content.

Sada Social views this appointment as a highly concerning indicator for the future of digital freedoms for Palestinians. The center warns of the serious implications that Mindel’s military background may have on TikTok’s moderation practices, especially regarding Palestinian reports of incitement, bias, and the silencing of their narrative. Assigning someone affiliated with an army currently under international investigation for genocide in Gaza to lead hate speech policy only entrenches existing biases and undermines the principles of fairness and digital justice.

Sada Social’s 2024 Digital Index revealed that 27% of all digital violations targeting Palestinian content occurred on TikTok. According to TikTok’s own transparency report for the second half of 2024, the platform complied with 94% of the Israeli government’s content removal requests, all while imposing strict censorship on Palestinian content. This included the deletion of videos with clear journalistic value, and the targeting of accounts belonging to journalists, media outlets, activists, and supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Sada Social also underscores that TikTok has failed to undertake any meaningful internal review of its policies, even after the South African government submitted video evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—footage that was published on TikTok and depicted Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mocking victims, and writing messages on bombs before they were dropped on Gaza. Instead of responding to these disturbing violations, TikTok has continued its partnerships with a political and military regime currently under international investigation.

Press Release| Sada Social Denounces TikTok’s Appointment of Former Israeli Army Instructor as Hate Speech Policy Manager

Sada Social Center expresses its deep concern and strong condemnation regarding TikTok’s appointment of Erica Mindel—a former instructor in the Israeli army’s Armored Corps—as the platform’s new Manag...

^sada.social

This is a wiki post that anyone can edit, just click 'Edit' in bottom-right of this post.

Related discussion: socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/…

Current custodian: Petites Singularités (P.S.)

Community staff:

• @how: P.S. Representative, Hosting provider, forum admin, sysadmin
• @nightpool: Forum admin, sysadmin
• @weex: Forum moderator
• (@angus@pfefferle: Forum admins, but only for testing AP integrations)

Responsibilities:

• Responsible handover.
• Responsible shutdown, if no handover is possible.

Requests:

• In case of shutdown host forum archive as static website (via export tool?). @aschrijver
• In case of shutdown receive an archive of my posts. @eprodrom

Community team volunteers

These people have volunteered and consider roles in a rebooted SocialHub community:

• @strypey
• @lullis
• @Hanse00
• @melvincarvalho

Potential financial contributors to rebooted community:

• @dmoonfire
• @melvincarvalho

Responsibilities:

• Sketch community plan(s) as proposals for P.S. custodianship handover.

Options being considered (brainstorm your own):

• Social.coop as new custodian (status: concrete)
• W3C SocialCG dev portal (status: idea)

Transition helpers

• @aschrijver: advocacy, comms (like this wiki).
• @j12t: approach people at FediCon.

SocialHub developer community: Reboot or Shutdown?

(Originally posted in response to @how’s announced ultimatum wrt the future of SocialHub.) Unless a community team steps up, SocialHub will cease to be ..

^SocialHub

State of the Bird July 2025

The State of the Bird is a recap of what has been happening in the project.

You can find the previous posts via the #state-of-the-bird tag.

Before that, we used to do these quarterly as an interactive live stream and you can find the playlist with all of those videos at YouTube.

Retrospective

Our last State of the Bird was July 10th 2025 and can be found here.

Things have picked up a bit since last month, but are still a bit low due to the summer in the northern hemisphere.

Metrics

We have a number of metrics we keep an eye on which you can see below.

Contibutors

Our number of contributors has dropped a bit this month. But nothing to get worried about yet.

If you're interested in contributing you can find some documentation here including no coding ways to contribute.

[chart type="bar" backgroundColors="#db3a83,#e76a2a,#4cdc8b" title="Contibutors" xAxisTitle="Time Frame" ]2025-02 | 2025-03 | 2025-04 | 2025-05 | 2025-06 | 2025-07Developers | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2Crazy Patch Writers | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0Casual | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0[/chart]

Review Requests

Review requests are what we call our code reviews and this is a look at how many were open and closed each month.

We've started to develop a bit of a backlog here, so if you're interested please take a look! Any reviews are appreciated and looking at them is a great way to learn the code base as well.

[chart type="bar" backgroundColors="#db3a83,#e76a2a" title="Review Requests" xAxisTitle="Time Frame" ]2025-02 | 2025-03 | 2025-04 | 2025-05 | 2025-06 | 2025-07Open | 72 | 78 | 44 | 26 | 20 | 42Closed | 72 | 82 | 43 | 22 | 25 | 39[/chart]

Issues

This is a look at the number of issues that were opened in our issue tracker as well as how many were closed by month.

[chart type="bar" backgroundColors="#db3a83,#e76a2a" title="Issues" xAxisTitle="Time Frame" ]2025-02 | 2025-03 | 2025-04 | 2025-05 | 2025-06 | 2025-07Open | 30 | 41 | 16 | 6 | 11 | 11Closed | 18 | 18 | 6 | 5 | 10 | 3[/chart]

Commits

This is a break down of commits to each project per month. In most cases a review request is just a single commit, but this chart helps to see what projects are being worked on.

[chart type="bar" backgroundColors="#ed207b,#9eb83b,#0088cc,#b3b5b4,#8c6238,#231f20,#f1592a,#ffea61,#bf1e2e,#0088cc,#57e389,#7f007f" title="Commits" xAxisTitle="Time Frame" ]2025-02 | 2025-03 | 2025-04 | 2025-05 | 2025-06 | 2025-07Pidgin 3 | 22 | 27 | 28 | 15 | 10 | 25 |Pidgin 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 |GPlugin | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 4 |HASL | 5 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 2 |Birb | 1 | 6 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 1 |Xeme | 5 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |Ibis | 10 | 27 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 0 |Hiya | 0 | 15 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |Myna | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |Seagull | 23 | 8 | 0 | 0 | 13 | 3 |Traversity | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |retro-purple | 0 | 0 | 0 | 38 | 48 | 0 |[/chart]

Infrastructure

Not much new here, but we're looking at serving our static sites out of our S3 compatible storage which should free up a bunch of resources in our Kubernetes cluster.

Pidgin 3

Retrospective

Not a whole lot happened with Pidgin 3 this month as we had our focus on other projects.

Updates

• Updated to ibis-0.14.0
• Re-enabled links .in Pidgin.Message
• Added a test to make sure the Flatpak dependencies have been updated
• Added support to automatically restore conversations when the application is started
• Replaced the Purple.Plugin data type with GPlugin.Plugin
• Added Purple.ConversationManager.get_all_for_account
• Removed a bunch of unused and unnecessary preferences code
• Delete conversations from the database when the user leaves them
• Implement the /me command in IRCv3
• Move the input widget from Gtk.TextView to GtkSource.View
• Added Purple.ScheduledTask and Purple.Scheduler
• Told g-ir-scanner to skip some symbols that need to be replaced
• Deleted the Purple.GdkPixbuf APi
• Removed Purple.ProtocolContacts.search_async and Purple.ProtocolContacts.search_finish
• Use the presence message of a contact as the subtitle for direct messages
• Removed Purple.CircularBuffer

Releases

None

Future Plans

• Add persistence to the scheduler.
• Add persistence to the contact manager, this needs to be done so we can fix some issues with direct messages being restored correctly.
• Gary has started an out of tree protocol plugin to help figure out how the voice and video API will work.

As always, you can view the burn down chart for our next release here.

Pidgin 2

We're still planning on doing a 2.15.0 release, but we haven't moved forward on this at all this month.

Retrospective

We need to finish up the build environment packages so we can upgrade GTK on windows and get that all into the installer. We also need to remember to update the spell checking dictionaries as we haven't done that in awhile.

Releases

None

Future Plans

Just the same as what was mentioned above.

GPlugin

GPlugin is our GObject based plugin library that is used in Pidgin 3.

Retrospective

Some maintenance was done, including work on moving from using GList to GListModel.

• Fixed some Since tags
• Removed the clang-format config file
• Added GPlugin.Manager.find_plugins_with_id

Releases

None

Future Plans

We're going to continue moving forward with the GlibList -> Gio.ListModel changes and eventually have GPlugin.Manager implement Gio.ListModel.

HASL

HASL is the Hassle-free Authentication and Security Layer library. It implements SASL in a modern and easy use way compared to the existing libraries.

Retrospective

• Fixed the GIR generation on Windows
• Added some missing Since tags

Releases

None

Future Plans

We have been in the progress of implementing the SCRAM Mechanisms which will be included in the next release.

Birb

Birb is a library of GLib utilities that we use across all of our projects.

Retrospective

• Added some missing Since tags

Releases

None

Xeme

Xeme is our XMPP integration library. It is the basis for both the Link Local Messaging (Bonjour) and XMPP protocols in Pidgin 3. It is still early in development and has not yet had a release.

Retrospective

• Make sure our enumerations are being exposed

Releases

None

Future Plans

Everything! Seriously though, we're looking to get back to this in the near future.

Ibis

Ibis is our IRCv3 integration library. It has seen a lot of active development as it is used in the IRCv3 protocol plugin in Pidgin 3.

We are nearing known feature completion on it and expect to do a 1.0 release in the near future.

Retrospective

No notable changes

Releases

None

Future Plans

Continue working through the open issues and watching new IRCv3 specifications for things we should be including.

Hiya

Hiya is a new client abstraction library for mDNS. It was created to help make implementation of the Link Local Messaging protocol easier as we would have to abstract out the different platform implementations and by putting it in a library that abstraction can be used by other projects.

Hiya has not yet had a release.

Myna

Myna is a new integration library for Matrix. It is still extremely early in development.

Seagull

Seagull is a new library we created to make working with SQLite feel more like a GLIB/GNOME library and force usage of prepared statements with named parameters and other similar things.

Retrospective

• Added helpers for handling booleans
• Added Statemnt.column_date_time

Releases

None

Future Plans

We have a few features to fill out yet and a few ideas that need a bit more time in the oven.

More specific details can be found in our open issues.

Traversity

Traversity is a new library for traversing NATs. There are many different ways to traverse a NAT and the goal of Traversity is to hide that from developers who just need to traverse a NAT.

It is still early in development and has not yet had an official release.

retro-prpl

retro-prpl is a new repository we've created on GitHub. This repository contains all of the abandoned protocols that have ever lived in our code base and is meant to make them easier to study and for people to use with services like Retro AIM Server and NINA.

Retrospective

We've wrapped up just about all the development here and are just waiting for Pidgin 2.15.0 before releasing.

Releases

None

Future Plans

Right now we didn't add any support for protocol specific emojis because we completely forgot about them. Anyways we're looking at creating a custom emoji theme that will include everything for these retro protocols.

Closing

We hope you all are enjoying the new format and if you have any questions of comments please leave them below!

Discuss this on our forum.

Matrix.org

Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications

^matrix.org

Stamattina… colazione doppia? …O forse, piuttosto, stasera, visto che come al solito mi sono infognata sulle mie robe magiche per tutta la giornata, non riuscendo a cacciare fuori nemmeno un attimo per scrivere? Beh, comunque stiano davvero le cose, mentre io ormai non ho più il tempo di fare niente… specialmente il gaming… è interessante […]

octospacc.altervista.org/2025/…

minioctt

2025-08-02 20:55:47

giochi incomprabili oggi svenduti grazie alle lagne delle signore (GOG e Freedom To Buy Games)

Stamattina… colazione doppia? …O forse, piuttosto, stasera, visto che come al solito mi sono infognata sulle mie robe magiche per tutta la giornata, non riuscendo a cacciare fuori nemmeno un attimo per scrivere? Beh, comunque stiano davvero le cose, mentre io ormai non ho più il tempo di fare niente… specialmente il gaming… è interessante venire a sapere che GOG sta regalando, da oggi (2 agosto) fino a domani (3 agosto) incluso, una dozzina di giochini della sempreverde categoria de “qualcuno pensi ai bambiiini!!!“… 🤯

Ovviamente, la cosa non è senza motivo… Non è perché qualcuno si è svegliato la mattina e ha deciso di regalare giochi… bensì è perché, forse chiunque a questo punto lo avrà almeno sentito, i processori di pagamenti (la MasterVISA Mafia, insomma) si sono svegliati la mattina e — a dire il vero, sotto pressione del tipo di gente tanto ben delineata da quella citazione ormai idiomatica di cui sopra — hanno deciso di iniziare a rifiutare tutti i pagamenti per videogiochi espliciti, da tutte le varie piattaforme per PC… da Steam, fino addirittura ad Itch. I gooner, mi duole ammetterlo, ne sanno forse più di me sulla questione, che io attualmente non ci sto capendo una mezza mazza, perché è successa assieme ad altre schifezze mondiali dello stesso calibro, che però sono tipo scollegate… ma in ogni caso, apriti cielo. 👅

Non è il caso di parlare della questione in sé al momento, perché è un fatto lungo — se non per ricordarvi che ve l’avevo detto più e più volte che è il caso di mandare a quel paese una volta e per tutte queste corporazioni della smerdaglia, ennesimi gatekeeper digitali, e di adottare una buona volta le criptovalute; poiché, pur essendo a mia volta una puritana che odia qualsiasi cosa abbia vagamente a che fare col sesso, sono comunque assolutamente per la libertà, di mercato e non — ma ecco, il bundle al prezzo di soli zero euro mi interessa, perché sono comunque giochi gratis senza DRM e…

Vabbè, mi sono già scocciata di far finta: riscatto comunque tutti i giochi, perché sono pur sempre un’accumulatrice seriale, ma l’unico di cui mi frega qualcosa a primo impatto è Postal 2, essendo tutti gli altri solo palesemente porno; più un paio di cui invece non si capisce nulla senza cercare informazioni altrove (“indie slop”, li chiamerei io per far arrabbiare molta gente)… Si, la pornografia mi fa venire il disgusto, ma il gore simulato (di livello postale e non) me lo guardo tranquillamente pure mentre mangio; ahivoi, sono fatta così. (E chissà se, in queste quasi 24 altre ore rimanenti, si aggiungeranno altri giochi, come il footer della pagina invita… in caso, spero siano riscattabili pure quelli.) 😤

E quindi, quasi stava per sfuggirmi… GOG che c’entra? Banalmente, vista tutta la situazione, GOG ha deciso nel suo piccolo di fare, con il supporto volontario di vari publisher di giochi presenti sulla piattaforma, questa protesta simbolica, sperando di spargere ulteriormente la voce sulla questione, con questa trovata di marketing simpatica. E cazzarola se ci sono riusciti, visto che persino io, che odio malamente i gooner, sto ricondividendo l’iniziativa… FreedomToBuy.Games! 🔥

• items.gog.com/freedomtobuy/ind…
• gog.com/en/game/freedom_to_buy…
• noisypixel.net/gog-freedom-to-…
• t.me/AnarchoGardening/2482
• t.me/gamingtalker/23371
• t.me/hornyposting/21308

#censorship #censura #gaming #gatekeepers #GOG #mafia #videogames

GOG’s Freedom to Buy Campaign Gives Away Controversial Games for Free to Protest Censorship

GOG has launched a new initiative titled Freedom to Buy, aimed at raising awareness around the constantly growing issue of game censorship and delistings.

^{Orpheus Joshua (Noisy Pixel)}