We now have the proof that Meta is censoring Palestinian content

Meta is routinely cutting out discourse on genocide and other issues regarding Palestine. (logo)

This should come as no surprise, but at least we now have solid data…

Reposted from Council Estate Media, December 19, 2024

Social media censorship leads to genocide. That’s as seemingly hyperbolic a statement as it gets and yet it’s more or less true.

Okay, so social media censorship might not be the direct cause of genocide, but it, along with corporate media misinformation, created an environment where Israel thought it could get away with genocide. This makes the censors and propagandists accomplices like Radio Rwanda.

We should all be vehemently opposed to any laws demanding social media censorship because it’s not about protecting you, but about protecting the establishment when they’re doing terrible things.

The latest censorship to be exposed has come from Meta platforms, primarily Facebook. Those of us who use Meta platforms are well aware they are a minefield, with posts often getting removed for no reason. Facebook’s punishments can be draconian, such as 18-month visibility reductions that can kill a page. How can it be right that Facebook decides that followers of a page don’t get to see its content? Why should they overrule your choice of which content you see?

You know that Facebook must be bad when even the BBC is criticizing it for censoring pro-Palestinian content. While the BBC’s report is welcome, it’s perhaps motivated by the fact another report has just dropped, exposing the BBC’s own censorship around Palestine. Obviously, the totally neutral BBC wants to pretend it’s above than that sort of thing. I mean if the BBC is criticizing other organizations for their censorship, it must be innocent, right?

Regardless of its motivation, the BBC has done some good work here. As I and many other writers have pointed out, it’s virtually impossible to share pro-Palestinian articles on Meta platforms. About half of them are removed by the algorithm and it seems the rest are suppressed.

Thankfully, we can’t be accused of whining for not getting many clicks because we have data to back our suspicions up. That data shows that since October 7th there has been a 77% drop in engagement with Palestinian pages on Facebook. By contrast, Israeli pages have seen engagement rise by 37%.

The BBC pointed out that Palestine TV has 5.8 million users and has seen a 60% drop in engagement. “Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people,” explained journalist Tariq Ziad (I can confirm similar things happened to my Facebook page and group).

Facebook is using the excuse that the censorship problem is due to lack of Arabic speakers at Meta, meaning they are misinterpreting words, but this excuse is bullshit. Posts in English are just as censored as those in Arabic, and by Meta’s own admission, its decisions are not made by a human but by an algorithm.

The BBC debunked Meta’s argument by pointing out other Facebook pages such as Sky News Arabia saw their engagement increase by 100%. Facebook admitted that pages posting exclusively about the genocide were more likely to be censored. It also said there was a “spike in hateful content” coming out of Palestine, but I’m guessing this was mostly just people upset about genocide.

I’m seeing non-stop hatred towards Palestinians across social media, including calls for their extermination, and this often comes from Israeli officials. I’m guessing no Israeli official has been banned or shadow-banned by Meta yet…

Facebook’s censorship algorithm was tweaked after October 7th so it just had to be 25% confident that a post was favorable towards Hamas (previously it was 40%). In other words, 75% of the people censored by the algorithm did not do what they were being punished for and were not always informed they were being punished. In what universe is this justice?

It’s not just Facebook though, because the BBC says it has seen documents showing that Instagram has increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments. Yes, they’ve really decided the most important thing is to ensure Palestinians aren’t being heard while a genocide is waged against them.

Meta has defended itself by saying any suggestion of them censoring any particular voice is unequivocally false. If anything this makes it worse. If Meta was targeting individuals, it could argue there were justifications, but it’s blanket censoring Palestinians based on an algorithm. This means no Palestinian gets to escape censorship.

One of the most shocking admissions by Meta was that “Alhamdulillah” (Praise be to god) was being translated as “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom”. This was clearly not an accidental mistranslation. Meta simply blamed “temporary product and policy measures” which is a fancy word for post removals and shadow-bans.

Meta went with the excuse that Hamas is a proscribed organization, but we could equally say the international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Surely, by Meta’s own standards, support for wanted war criminals should be automatically removed too?

Just look at the below graphics to see how blatant Facebook’s censorship is:

Facebook average audience engagement with Palestinian news outlets (chart)

Facebook average audience engagement with Israeli news outlets (chart)

Facebook average audience engagement with Arabic (non-Palestinian) news outlets (chart)

Shadow-banning needs to be illegal. If this censorship was being done to Israeli content, they’d be talking about it in parliament and introducing a new law to protect Israeli outlets from what they would surely call anti-Semitism. Well, Meta’s censorship is racist towards Palestinians, but I’m guessing that type of racism is fine.

The culture of censorship is not just about people getting deprived of clicks on social media. It has become a matter of life and death. As we all know, there is no job with a shorter life expectancy than journalist in Gaza because the moment Israel has their location data from Meta or Google, they get taken out by a guided missile.

British police have been treating journalists and social media users as terrorists for reporting on Gaza. In case it’s unclear, we are creeping towards totalitarianism, and if you cheer this on to protect your social media safe space, you are your own worst enemy.

We do not need to be censored, we need controls to decide which content we do and do not see online, and which users can and can’t engage with us. We can in effect be our own censors, if we are so inclined. That way no one is depriving us of information we want or need to see. The last thing we should want is Big Brother hiding the truth about genocide, or any other subject for that matter.

Council Estate Media is promoting working class politics and tackling creeping authoritarianism.

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