by SAM BIDDLE & ALICE SPERI
Internal memos show Meta deemed attacks on Ukrainian civilians “newsworthy” — prompting claims of a double standard among Palestine advocates.
After a series of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.
Not all the billions of users on Meta’s platforms, however, run into these issues when documenting the bombing of their neighborhoods.
Previously unreported policy language obtained by The Intercept shows that this year the company repeatedly instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Like other American internet companies, Meta responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.
No such carveouts were ever made for Palestinian victims of Israeli state violence —nor do the materials show such latitude provided for any other suffering population.
“This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation and the Palestinian narrative,” said Mona Shtaya, an adviser with 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, a civil society group that formally collaborates with Meta on speech issues. During the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, between August 5 and August 15, 7amleh tallied nearly 90 deletions of content or account suspensions relating to bombings on Meta platforms, noting that reports of censored content are still coming in.
Marwa Fatafta, Middle East North Africa policy manager for Access Now, an international digital rights group, said, “Their censorship works almost like clockwork — whenever violence escalates on the ground, their takedown of Palestinian content soars.”
Instances of censored Palestinian content reviewed by The Intercept include the August 5 removal of a post mourning the death of Alaa Qaddoum, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in an Israeli missile strike, as well as an Instagram video showing Gazans pulling bodies from beneath rubble. Both posts were removed with a notice claiming that the imagery “goes against our guidelines on violence or dangerous organizations” — a reference to Meta’s company policy against violent content or information related to its vast roster of banned people and groups.
Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin told The Intercept that these two posts were removed according to the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, pointing to the company’s policy of censoring content promoting federally designated terrorist groups. Sackin did not respond to a follow-up question about how an image of a 5-year-old girl and a man buried in rubble promoted terrorism.
Palestinians in Gaza who post about Israeli assaults said their posts don’t contain political messages or indicate any affiliation with terror groups. “I’m just posting pure news about what’s happening,” said Issam Adwan, a Gaza-based freelance journalist. “I’m not even using a very biased Palestinian news language: I’m describing the Israeli planes as Israeli planes, I’m not saying that I’m a supporter of Hamas or things like these.”
Rights advocates told The Intercept that the exemptions made for the Russia-Ukraine war are the latest example of a double standard between Meta’s treatment of Western markets and the rest of the world — evidence of special treatment of the Ukrainian cause on Meta’s part since the beginning of the war and something that can be seen with media coverage of the war more broadly.
Though the majority of users on social platforms owned by Meta live outside the United States, critics charge that the company’s censorship policies, which affect billions worldwide, tidily align with U.S. foreign policy interests. Rights advocates emphasized the political nature of these moderation decisions. “Meta was capable to take very strict measures to protect Ukrainians amid the Russian invasion because it had the political will,” said Shtaya, “but we Palestinians haven’t witnessed anything of these measures.”
By taking its cues from U.S. government policy — including cribbing U.S. counterterrorism blacklists — Meta can end up censoring entirely nonviolent statements of support or sympathy for Palestinians, according to a 2021 statement by Human Rights Watch. “This is a pretty clear example of where that’s happening,” Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine director, told The Intercept of the most recent takedowns. While Human Rights Watch’s accounting of recent Gaza censorship was still ongoing, Shakir said what he’d seen already indicated that Meta was once again censoring Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech, including the documentation of human rights abuses.
It’s unclear which specific facet of Meta’s byzantine global censorship system was responsible for the spate of censorship of Gaza posts in August; many posters received no meaningful information as to why their posts were deleted. The Meta spokesperson declined to provide an accounting of which other policies were used. Past takedowns of Palestinian content have cited not only the Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy but also company prohibitions against depictions of graphic violence, hate symbols, and hate speech. As is the case with Meta’s other content policies, the Violent and Graphic Content prohibition can at times swallow up posts that are clearly sharing the reality of global crises rather than glorifying them — something the company has taken unprecedented steps to prevent in Ukraine.
The Intercept for more