الرقابة في ميتا: تصنيف المحتوى عن الحرب في غزة على أنه "إباحي"، مراقبة الموظفين، وحظر انتقاد الصهيونية على منصاتها

Meta’s banning of pro-Palestine content has impacted Palestinian organizations and news accounts for years, and the technology conglomerate has renewed its suppression in the wake of Israel’s genocide on Gaza.  A 51-page report from Human Rights Watch last October indicates it to be an issue of systemic censorship. 

On Oct. 15, AJ+ released an investigative documentary looking at Meta’s policies of censorship and anti-Palestine bias, revealing the company's “deep ties” to Israel and its enforcement of such draconian policies on its own employees. 

AJ+’s Dena Takruri interviews Meta workers including Omar, who was fired for trying to address censorship issues like content disappearing, being removed, or hidden. Omar also noticed that many user reports pertaining to censorship of their pro-Palestine content were closed without being addressed, indicating that Meta employees were not following procedure. 

One of the accounts experiencing such censorship was Motaz Azaiza’s. Omar found that Azaiza’s posts were being flagged as pornographic content, and thus, limiting his reach. 

“Marking images and videos of injured and dead children as pornographic… I find that [deeply] offensive,” says Omar in the documentary. 

Meta claimed that Omar had a personal relationship with Azaiza, but neither knew each other. Reuters reported that Andy Stone, Meta’s spokesperson, said that Omar had violated “data access policies.”

“If [they’re] going to make up a reason, make it sound a little bit more believable,” Omar tells Takruri. “But I guess they couldn’t write ‘being too Palestinian’ as a reason.”

Takruri also spoke with Saima Akhter, who said she was let go from Meta for pro-Palestine advocacy. Akhter had written and circulated an internal letter to Meta’s leadership including concerns of several employees on social media censorship policies. She told that 450 employees signed the letter but that leadership found out about it and kicked her off systems and put her under investigation for two months. This incident revealed that Meta was surveilling its employees. 

Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content went beyond obscuring such content but rather actively banning it. On June 9, Meta’s policy was updated to ban content derogatory to Zionists with the company citing the term Zionist as a “proxy for hate speech” toward “Jewish or Israeli people.” Meta’s new policy enables the removal of content targeting Zionists with “dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence.”

Examples of content violating Meta’s updated standards include: 

• Claims about running the world or controlling the media;
• Dehumanizing comparisons, such as comparisons to pigs, filth, or vermin;
• Calls for physical harm;
• Denials of existence;
• Mocking for having a disease.

The policy update also notes that the “suspension or removal of the account posting the violations” will remain Meta’s practice. 

American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), 7amleh - The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, Jewish Voice for Peace and others shared concerns in a statement published on July 11, citing Meta’s failure to protect Palestinians from hate speech in the past and noting restrictions on freedom of expression:

“This policy update runs the risk of severely restricting freedom of expression and stifling legitimate political criticism of Zionists and Zionism by inaccurately equating it with antisemitism.”

The undersigned organizations maintain that Meta executives have succumbed “to external pressure from stakeholders who are pushing them to adopt the discredited IHRA definition for antisemitism,” identifying the weaponization of the “fight against antisemitism” as a vehicle used to erase and censor the Palestinian struggle.  

The released statement also points out the strategic timing of this policy update, arguing that the change in policy is a mechanism to “block any attempt to stop the ongoing genocidal war in Gaza.” 

Meta’s policy institutes a new standard that, unless mitigated, proposes the conflation of followers of a colonial ideology with a protected class—a conflation that has resulted in outrage from Palestinian and Jewish users alike.

Marwa Fatafta, the MENA Policy and Advocacy Director for Access Now and Policy Analyst at Al-Shabaka, tweeted:

“While Palestinians are being annihilated by Israel, Meta decides to protect “Zionists” on its platforms under the guise of [combating] hate speech online. The fig leaf of neutrality has finally fallen. There is no more pretense about where Meta stands on the ongoing genocide.”

Some Jewish social media users interrogated the policy decision, criticizing the implications of synonymizing “Zionist” and “Jew”:   

“Question : if ‘Zionist’ = Jew, are non-Jewish Zionists now Jewish? Follow up question: Are anti-Zionist Jews no longer Jewish now?”

Following Meta’s decision to ban content critical of Zionists, other platforms have reportedly continued to censor and ban Palestinian users; for example, Microsoft faced criticism for “banning Palestinians for life from using Skype if they call relatives in Gaza.” 

Whether or not Meta’s new regulations will result in concrete media policy change at other companies remains to be seen. However, as the genocide continues and Palestinian journalists risk being systematically targeted and killed for broadcasting the truth, one less platform of dissent will exist for pro-Palestine users across the globe.