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The flour massacre…
Al-Rashid humanitarian aid incident
On 29 February 2024, in what has been characterized as a massacre by some sources, 117 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured; the circumstances are disputed. This incident, which has been referred to as the Flour Massacre in media, took place when Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who were attempting to get food from aid trucks on Al-Rashid street at the Al-Nabulsi roundabout to the west of Gaza City. The United Nations reported “a large number of gunshot wounds” among injured victims treated at al-Shifa hospital.
Yeah, when news was first coming out the reports were of Nabulsi Square, so I went to look that up but made a typo… instead of Google just correcting the typo with one letter - sending me to the relevant Al Jazeera article about the Nabulsi Square killings (as it was initially called) - I got a result for Tiananmen Square:
Even if it gets corrected to ‘Naval Square’, Tiananmen is still the first thing to come up. You can type any spelling variation of Nabulsi in and it’ll show you Tiananmen. Naval and Nabsli/Nabulsi is closer to the Nisour Square Massacre than anything - committed by US mercernaries in Iraq, but it doesn’t get suggested.
I know it’s probably not hardcoded to prefer Tiananmen, but it does show how algorithms reproduce already existing biases because ‘Xi Pooh Tiananmen’ rhetoric is so mind numbingly popular.