Meta has refuted accusations that it intentionally restricted Palestinian news coverage, explaining that balancing free speech with security concerns posed by Hamas, a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist organization, has been challenging. The company acknowledged the difficulty in navigating these concerns, particularly as Hamas is listed in Meta’s own regulations.
Palestinian News Engagement Drops Amid War
This drop in engagement is surprising, given that social media has become an important source of information for individuals looking to hear more voices from inside Gaza. Palestinian Al-Watan News, Palestine TV, and Wafa news agency’s Facebook accounts have been vital in keeping their millions of fans updated throughout the world.
With the permission of the Israeli army, foreign journalists have been able to visit Gaza since the war started.
Despite expectations that audience involvement would increase during wartime, research revealed that Palestinian news firms’ engagement fell 77% and Israeli news organizations’ engagement rose 37%.
Facebook owner Meta said any suggestion that they are trying to silence certain groups’ voices is “unequivocally false” and disputes the accusation.
With 5.8 million followers, Palestine TV’s journalists saw a 60% decline in the amount of people viewing their Facebook posts.
The journalist Tariq Ziad claims, “Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people.”
Journalists from Palestine are worried that their online work has been “shadow-banned,” or removed from social media without the user’s permission.
BBC researchers looked at 20 Israeli news outlets, including Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom, and Channel 13, and found that viewers engaged with war-related information on these channels increased by 37%.
Impact of Instagram’s Stricter Moderation on Palestinian Content
Instagram, another site controlled by Meta, reportedly ramped up its monitoring of comments from Palestinian users after October 2023, according to stolen records and internal messages. Meta says this change was made because of a “spike in hateful content” coming from the Palestinian territories.
A major concern is how these regulations will affect specific Palestinian users. One of the five current or former Meta workers who spoke with the BBC about the policies’ consequences shared leaked internal documents regarding the Instagram algorithm modification.
In response to Palestinian comments on Instagram posts, regulation became stricter, as stated in the documents. “Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive towards Palestinian people,” according to him.
Meta responded to these results by saying that it had been upfront about the “temporary product and policy measures” it had implemented in October 2023. The business acknowledged the difficulty of finding a middle ground between protecting free expression and the reality that Meta’s policies label Hamas as a dangerous organization, in addition to the fact that the group is sanctioned by the US.
