Instagram and Facebook censor Palestinians

• Roel van Niekerk

  editor-reporter Nieuwsuur

• Fleur Damen

  editor-reporter Nieuwsuur

Instagram and Facebook censor Palestinian and pro-Palestinian users and don’t do enough to fix that. This is what the Meta Oversight Board, the supervisory board of parent company Meta, said in conversation with News hour.

Since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel, (pro-)Palestinian users of Instagram and Facebook in particular have reported an inexplicable decrease in the visibility of their posts when they concern the Palestinians. Meta denies that phenomenon, too shadowbanning mentioned, exists.

But the supervisory board has a different opinion. “We’ve seen Meta downgrade posts to reduce reach,” says Nighat Dad, who has been on the board since its inception.

Dad adds: “What we think is most important: Meta has no clear policy about it, and transparency is completely lacking. As a result, users don’t know where they stand.”

The supervisory board is also critical of Meta’s lack of knowledge of Arabic and the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, Instagram’s automatic translation recently added the word “terrorist” to users who described themselves as Palestinian in their Instagram description. According to Meta that was a mistake.

But this mistake is not an isolated incident, the council emphasizes. In the spring of 2021, an employee added the term “Al-Aqsa” to Meta’s list of dangerous people and organizations. The list is intended to quickly detect and remove messages that glorify terrorism. The employee thought the term referred to a Palestinian terrorist organization, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade.

Users widely used the term to refer to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of the holiest sites in Islam. That’s when the Israeli police entered. “We have asked the company several times in recent years to invest in employees who speak Arabic and understand the conflict,” says Dad. “They should take our recommendations seriously and implement them.”

The supervisory board believes that this list of dangerous people and organizations is problematic in any case. Based on the list, which is not public, Meta automatically removes messages that mention people and organizations on the list. But that automated moderation is poor at distinguishing between neutral messages and messages that glorify terrorism, Dad says.

As a result, Palestinian journalists cannot, for example, post news items about Hamas without fearing restrictions on their account. The supervisory board is concerned about this. “People in the war zone are censored based on bad policy. That is a problem,” says Dad.

The supervisory board is not alone in the criticism. Last week, Meta employees published an open letter in which they accuse the company of “censoring Muslim and Palestinian employees and users” and having invested too little to combat this for years.

Meta previously closed the Facebook account of renowned Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza. He didn’t hear why. After media reported about it, the company restored his account.

Meta did not respond to repeated questions from News hour on limiting the visibility of messages about the Palestinian territories. In an earlier response to Human Rights Watch research documenting instances of censorship, the company said its moderation policy is “designed to give everyone a voice while keeping our platforms safe.”