BBC says Meta has purposely suppressed news out of Gaza and the West Bank in Palestine. It has seen leaked documents from Instagram with the directive to increase moderation around user comments from Palestine since October 2023.
Social media has become increasingly relevant during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, especially because reporters have been barred from entering Gaza and can only visit the coastal territory accompanied by the Israeli army. It makes social media the only outlet for those who want to hear from people inside Gaza.
BBC News Arabic gathered engagement data from 20 prominent Facebook pages of Palestinian outlets and found that engagement had plummeted 77% since the Hamas attacks in October 2023.
Palestine TV, a network with 5.8 million followers on Facebook, told BBC they saw a 60% decline in the number of people that engaged with their posts. Palestinian reporters fear they are being "shadow banned" by Meta.
On the flip side, the Facebook pages of Israeli news organizations show a 37% increase in engagement during the same period. According to an independent report commissioned by Meta in 2021, the company said the loss of engagement was not deliberate. The company attributed it to a "lack of Arabic-speaking expertise among moderators," leading to some Arabic phrases inadvertently flagged as harmful or sensitive.
To test this, BBC analyzed 30 prominent Facebook pages from Arabic news outlets and saw an almost 100% increase in engagement. Meta also confirmed that it had increased moderation of Palestine user comments on Instagram because of a "spike in hateful content."
"We acknowledge we make mistakes," A Meta spokesperson told the publication. "but any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false."
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