Meta (formerly Facebook) is culpable in the Rohingya genocide. United Nations determined that the platform played a significant role by spreading hate speech and inciting violence. Culpability stems from the amplification of inflammatory content, inadequate content moderation in local languages, and failure to act on warnings from civil society.
Overwatch is culpable for genocide in the same way Meta is culpable. Overwatch has enabled violence by failing to moderate hateful speech and action. Overwatch allows players to have the Israel flag as a profile picture, all while there is no Palestinian flag even present in the game. The closest is the Jordan flag. There should be every country flag, or no flags at all. By picking and choosing, one is inciting racism.
Furthermore, the Ukraine flag is free. Is this because Ukraine has a majority caucasian population? Such inaction is sending the message that Overwatch supports the IDF and bigotry.
CALL TO ACTION: remove IDF supporting flag
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Totally agree that having the IDF flag but not the Palestinian flag is indicating implicit support for the genocide.
Especially when everyone I see using the flag is either waiting for comment on it so they can accuse you of anti-Semitism, or to comment that Palestine would put me to death over my LGBTQ icon/banner. I’ve even seen people saying “free israel” in chat the second games load. And sure enough, IDF flag.
In the first month or two after the October 7th attacks, I assumed they were going through internal processes to approve the addition of a Palestinian flag, or releasing a statement about hate speech in their games. It’s been 2 and a half years. It’s not coming.
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The amount of hate speech and violent rhetoric has been disgusting, they need to have 0 tolerance against the racism and zionists who have been completely rampant. Absolutely disgusting, they have been found numerous times to be complicit in genocide and I agree that they need to remove the flag completely from the game as it is a symbol of genocide.
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I agree, personally me seeing the IDF flag makes me report the user for having it where I explain it’s a genocidal flag. But seeing them on my team makes me not even wanna try to play. It makes no sense to have the IDF flag and not the Palestinian flag in game unless Blizzard’s official stance, and the stance of the OW dev team is that they support the genocide and starvation of Palestinians.
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