Palestinian and pro-Palestinian users are censored on Instagram and Facebook and parent company Meta does not do enough to remedy this. This is what Meta’s own supervisory board, the Meta Oversight Board, says.
The supervisory council said in an interview with Nieuwsuur that ‘Meta places messages lower, so that their reach decreases’. Since the start of the war between Hamas and Israel in October last year, several users have noticed that their messages about Palestinians are receiving less and less reach.
Following these reports, the human rights organization Human Rights Watch concluded that Instagram and Facebook suppress pro-Palestinian expressions, NRC wrote in December. Meta apologized and promised improvement. Yet the Meta Oversight Board believes that the company is doing too little. The council notes that a clear policy is lacking and that Meta is not transparent enough. “As a result, users do not know where they stand,” Nighat Dad, council member of the Meta Oversight Board, told Nieuwsuur.
The council also criticizes the lack of knowledge of Meta employees about the Arabic language and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example, in the spring of 2021, an employee added the term ‘Al-Aqsa’ to a list of dangerous organizations and people. The employee assumed that it was a Palestinian terrorist organization. However, users referred to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which was then stormed by Israeli police.
The Supervisory Board also finds the existence of the aforementioned list problematic. Posts mentioning the names on the list will be automatically deleted. Meta’s algorithm does not distinguish between messages that speak positively about these people and organizations and neutral messages, such as news items. Meta has not yet responded to Nieuwsuur’s questions.
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