Jan. 5, 2025
Two boys help their wounded little brother at Al Aqsa hospital following an Israeli air strike on Al Bureije refugee camp, in Deir Al Balah town, central Gaza Strip, on January 4, 2025. Photo by Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE
Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing increased scrutiny and attention over its censorship of pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli content as the war goes on from human rights groups to news outlets like the BBC.The accusations against the company in the last month include a Human Rights Watch report on Meta's alleged content suppression, a BBC report that Facebook allegedly restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach audiences, and testimonies of shadow-banning of Palestinian pages gathered by the Human rights group 7amleh.
HRW said it documented 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content that had been posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses, in just a month after Hamas's October 7 attack.
"Of the 1,050 cases reviewed for this report, 1,049 involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed, while one case involved removal of content in support of Israel," HRW said in its report, calling the ongoing censorship "systemic and global" and noted that it began well before October 2023.
Meanwhile, the BBC reported that its reporters viewed leaked internal documents showing that Instagram allegedly increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after the October 7 attacks. The company told the BBC that the implication it is deliberately suppressing Palestinians is "unequivocally false."
Still, the BBC compiled engagement data from the Facebook pages of 20 prominent Palestinian-based news organizations in the year ahead of the October 7 attack and the year following it, showing that engagement plummeted 77% for Palestinian news sources even as the world's attention to Palestinian issues has grown.
Engagement for Israel's 20 largest news organizations grew by 37%, the BBC analysis showed. Current and former employees alleged to the news broadcaster that changes were even made to the Facebook and Instagram algorithms to toughen moderation.
"Over the years, Meta's content moderation policies have demonstrated a troubling and consistent pattern of suppressing Palestinian voices while allowing harmful and inflammatory content targeting Palestinians to remain," 7amleh said in its report.
Amma Khandakji, a journalist and content creator, said in the 7amleh report that content she posted on Instagram has faced repeated deletion since the events of Shiekh Jarrah in 2021. Ali Obaidat, editor-in-chief of Palgraph, said his account first faced deletion in 2017 amid gate clashes in Jerusalem. And Ramallah News owner Muhammad Ghanem said its pages have been restricted by Meta, among other news firms.
Meta's actions have also stoked the ire of Iran, with voices in Tehran pointing to "hypocrisy" with how Facebook removed posts relating to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while allowing Iranian citizens to call for the death of Ayatollah Khamenei over internal turmoil in the country surrounding its chastity and hijab laws.
But users have also complained that posts calling for the death of Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu have been removed by Facebook for inciting violence. Meta did not return multiple requests for comment about any perceived "double standards" with its policies.
Last month, Meta released its adversarial threat report for the third quarter of 2024 in which it revealed it had taken action to remove 48 Facebook accounts and two Instagram accounts, linked to Iran for calling for Israeli athletes to be banned from the Paris Olympics.
Another 15 accounts on Facebook and six accounts on Instagram tied to Lebanon's Hezbollah were removed for posting content in Hebrew that criticized Israel's dependence on U.S. support and the humanitarian conditions caused by Israel's war.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies -- an American think tank that takes pro-Israel stances, has heralded Meta for "dismantling" what it called "Iranian and Hezbollah influence operations targeting Israel."
And Meta does occasionally issue policies publicly allowing for some pro-Palestinian content. For example, in September, Meta's Oversight Board-an independent body that helps advise the company -- ruled that the phrase "From the River to the Sea," viewed by some as anti-Semitic hate speech, should not necessarily lead to content removal.
"While it can be understood by some as encouraging and legitimizing antisemitism and the violent elimination of Israel and its people, it is also often used as a political call for solidarity, equal rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people, and to end the war in Gaza," the Oversight Board ruled. "Given this fact, and as these cases show, the standalone phrase cannot be understood as a call to violence."
The Oversight Board similarly ruled in March that using the term "shaheed," an Arabic honorific, to refer to individuals designated under the company's Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy "disproportionately restricts free expression" and "is unnecessary."
And in its advice to Meta in its first ruling after the October 2023 attack, the Oversight Board acknowledged that the company has "a responsibility to preserve evidence of potential human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law."
Still, as noted by The Intercept, Jordana Cutler, a former senior Israeli government official serves as Meta's Israel policy chief and allegedly pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine -- a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel's ongoing war in Gaza.
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