Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta is facing accusations of censoring pro-Palestinian content, according to a report on Sunday, Jan. 5. The allegations came from news outlets like the BBC and a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
HRW said that it found more than 1,000 cases of what it called suppression of pro-Palestinian content shortly after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
The organization said that the suppression of content has been “systemic and global,” and started before Hamas’ terrorist attack.
A separate BBC report in December 2024, found the Facebook pages of 20 “prominent” Palestinian-based news outlets saw their engagement drop by nearly 80% shortly before and a year after the Oct. 7 attack, while engagement for Israel’s 20 largest news outlets grew by nearly 40%.
The BBC report includes leaked documents from current and former Meta employees who say the company launched a crackdown on Palestinian users’ comments after Hamas’ terrorist attack.
Meta confirmed the crackdown but said the measures were necessary to respond to a “spike in hateful content” coming out of Palestinian regions.
The social media company said the policy changes at the start of the war have since been rescinded.
Meta argued it wrestled with freedom of speech and the fact that Hamas is a designated terrorist organization. The tech giant noted that pages posting exclusively about the war in Gaza were the most likely to see engagement take a hit.
“We acknowledge mistakes, but any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false,” a Meta spokesperson told the BBC.
One of the Palestinian photojournalists in Gaza told the BBC, “In spite of the challenges, the risk and the content bans… We must continue sharing Palestinian content.”
