Billionaire corporation Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – has received two massive blows to its reputation this week. Because on 18 December, two separate reports showed how the company has helped to manufacture consent for Israel’s genocide in Gaza by systematically targeting and silencing Palestinian voices.
On one hand, BBC News Arabic carried out a “comprehensive analysis of Facebook data” and revealed that “Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience” since October 2023. It also saw “leaked documents showing that Instagram” made its algorithm “more aggressive” in that month to increase its “moderation of Palestinian user comments”.
On the other hand, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (7amleh) released a report on how Meta has systematically “erased and suppressed” Palestinian voices since October 2023. Within a year, “out of 1551 censorship-related digital rights violations documented through the Palestine Observatory of Digital Rights Violations (7or), 69% of those violations were reported to have occurred on Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram”.
Palestinian engagement slashed, Israeli engagement increased
BBC News Arabic analysed “engagement data on the Facebook pages of 20 prominent Palestinian-based news organisations”, comparing the year up to 7 October 2023 with the year that followed. Engagement, it explained, means things like the “comments, reactions and shares” that posts receive. And it pointed out that it would be normal for engagement to increase “during a period of war”.
The results presented a stark picture of bias. Because while the engagement of the Palestinian organisations plummeted by a whopping 77%, “data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organisations” showed an increase in engagement of about 37%. “The same analysis on Facebook pages for 30 prominent Arabic-language news sources” outside Palestine also showed a surge in engagement. So it was just Palestinian engagement that fell significantly, while engagement outside Palestine grew. Clear as day.
This difference matters all the more because social media has stepped in to fill the vacuum that Israel has created with its tight control of which journalists can enter Gaza during its genocidal campaign there. It also matters because media workers are risking their lives in occupied Gaza to document what’s happening there. Since October 2023, Israeli occupation forces have reportedly murdered 196 media workers. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says that, of the journalists who were killed in 2024, “Israel is responsible for two-thirds of those deaths and yet continues to act with total impunity”.
In December 2023, Human Rights Watch had already spoken of “systemic online censorship” at Meta, with the corporation “silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media”.
Meta ‘complicit in injustice via its collective silencing of Palestinian voices’
7amleh, meanwhile, explained in its report that:
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, particularly during critical moments of conflict
Via “testimonies from Palestinian journalists, influencers, and media organizations who are active users of Meta platforms”, the group documented “the systematic censorship and digital rights violations that they have experienced”.
For example, Meta lowered its “automated moderation system’s confidence threshold for content by “users in Palestinian territories” to 25%, down from 80% previously”. This led to “the removal of significantly more content”. And as 7amleh stressed:
This is a disproportionate and discriminatory measure. Palestinian journalists, influencers, and media organizations faced severe restrictions that limited the reach of their content and affected their ability to share vital information, organize, or advocate for their rights.
It added:
The disproportionate over-moderation measures implemented by Meta had a wide-reaching impact in silencing Palestinian voices collectively. Meta’s policies not only suppressed Palestinian voices but also allowed rampant hate speech and incitement against Palestinians. The company’s AI-driven systems exhibited bias, such as flagging Palestinian content as harmful while failing to act against incitement to violence in Hebrew.
Meta’s policies, it asserted, forced Palestinians to face “discrimination, economic deprivation, and psychological harm”. And as it emphasised:
The silencing of Palestinian journalists and human rights defenders strips them of their ability to inform the world about the realities on the ground, turning Meta’s platforms into accomplices of suppression
It also “led to a widespread erosion of trust in Meta’s platforms”, the group argued. As it concluded:
Meta’s actions have profound real-world consequences, and its role in dehumanizing Palestinians and silencing their stories makes it complicit in perpetuating injustice
Meta has shown once and for all – it is part of the descent into dystopia
The billionaire corporation has, of course, denied showing bias in its silencing of content. But the evidence speaks for itself. Meta has sided with settler-colonial genocide and the imperialist project that has armed, funded, and supported it.
As civil society network APC (the Association for Progressive Communications) said in October:
Over one year into the war on Gaza, we continue to see escalations in human rights violations through the use of technology, including artificial intelligence (AI). Tech companies have been facilitating Israel’s atrocities against civilians through censorship, surveillance, cyber attacks, disruption of services, mis/disinformation and weaponisation of communication technologies, enjoying full impunity and a shocking lack of accountability.
We now know more clearly than ever which are the forces that are happy with our descent into dystopia and which aren’t. And if we’re going to stop that trend, we need to unite behind the forces that aren’t.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.