Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tuna-piano 3560 days ago
For more information on this "digital intifada", the documentaries from vice are pretty good: https://news.vice.com/video/palestinian-social-media-uprisin...
1 comments

The phrase "digital intifada" induces an eye-roll nearly as severe as it's cousin "digital holocaust."

Comparing the deaths of massive numbers of civilians to Facebook posts is tone-deaf at best.

Intifada literally means tremor or shaking, and in context it means "to shake off" or "uprising"

It's a real concept with reasonable meaning- digital revolution, digital uprising, etc. Not necessarily related to the first and second initfadas, the historical events.

In this case it means uprising. The choice to use that particular word, especially in English, deliberately links current acts of free speech to two previous brutal civil wars.

This is neither a real event nor a reasonable use of terms. It is an abuse of terminology to engender in the reader a particular set of emotions, which leads to a desired set of actions.

In politics, language matters.