Social media | Social media giants restrict content supporting the Palestinians with a more sensitive finger, says Middle East Institute researcher

Many Palestinian activists accuse social media waste of bias in moderation.

Social media giants have been suspected of restricting more sensitive social media content shared from Palestinian territories and supporting Palestinians. For example Instagram was forced to apologize after its AI had inappropriately added the word “terrorist” to the social media profiles of some Palestinian users. Users have also reported limiting the visibility of accounts unjustifiably.

Expert at 7amleh, an NGO that supports Palestinian digital rights Jalal Abukahter tells STT by email that since the beginning of October, the organization has documented more than 400 cases of censoring Palestinians. In addition, it has detected hundreds of cases of hate speech.

The problem is most widespread on Meta’s platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram.

“For example, the visibility of the accounts of Gazan citizen journalists has been limited because they have not been considered to have content suitable for young people. Or the visibility of the accounts has been limited based on location alone.”

Also a researcher at the Middle East Institute Antti Tarvainen according to, in the context of violent conflict, it often seems that Palestinian content is removed and limited much more easily than pro-Israel content.

“There is a clear imbalance” in how Palestinian content can be seen compared to Hebrew-language and pro-Israel content.

Tarvainen cites the shared photos of the victims of the Gaza bombing as an example.

“For example, the sharing of photos of Palestinian bombing victims has been blocked. The system has removed the images because it says they showed nudity. It was said that this was a technical malfunction.”

Is it so is it deliberate censorship or technical problems? Moderation of social media is largely based on artificial intelligence.

Meta is the social media giant that manages Instagram, Whatsapp and Facebook defended from accusations. According to it, some of the October problems with publication visibility were related to a global system error.

According to Tarvainen, it is typical for the companies themselves to blame system errors and unintentional mistakes.

“The question of appropriateness is complicated because users cannot see behind the algorithms or how” they are trained.

In addition, the Israeli government has its own cyber unit that lobbies social media companies with their ideas about what content they should remove, he says.

“According to various sources, up to 80-90 percent of these requests are accepted, but we don’t know what is included in these requests because they are not public. We don’t know’ how much of the deleted content contains anti-Semitic hate speech and how much publications highlight Palestinian perspectives.

Palestinian human rights organizations have said that at least not enough resources have been put into correcting the distortion, if it is not intentional, he points out.

One resource issue is related to language, notes Abukahter of the 7amleh NGO. Hate speech spread in the Hebrew language is not as precisely caught by Meta’s moderation, partly due to the language barrier.

The lack of Hebrew-language content has been used as an explanation, which is why there has not been enough data to train artificial intelligence.

Abukahter describes the moderation as patchwork. He brings up, for example, Meta’s leaked internal documents, at least of which The Wall Street Journal has made news. According to the documents, Meta began automatically removing content shared from the Palestinian territories with a lower threshold after the extremist organization Hamas attacked Israel in early October.

In general, Meta only starts hiding comments that may violate its rules when its systems are 80 percent sure that they meet the company’s criteria for hate speech.

Now the criteria have been calculated from comments written from the Palestinian territories, so that the system only needs to be 25% sure that the definitions are met before comments are deleted.

Abukahter describes complaining about decisions as a tiring process.

“The system requires you to prove on a case-by-case basis that the account has not violated the rules and that the account has been unfairly limited or suspended.”

According to Meta, it removes content supporting the extremist organization Hamas as well as content in Arabic and Hebrew that violates its rules.

Social the media censorship debate is more broadly related to the fact that Israel is a technological power. Due to economic ties, Israel has better connections with technology companies than Palestinian operators, says Tarvainen.

“The relations between Israel and Piilakso are really close and good.”

Technology companies and the biggest social media companies, such as Google and Meta, have invested significant research and development activities in Israel. Israel, on the other hand, offers companies a highly skilled workforce and tax breaks.

“But that does not mean that the cooperation is completely seamless or that the companies are completely under Israel’s control. Israel has also criticized that the companies’ operations are insufficient,” Tarvainen points out.

Israel’s technology companies, on the other hand, have close connections with the country’s defense forces and intelligence.

Israel has used social media to control Palestinians and suppress opinion. Also recently, people have been arrested for postings shared on social media.

“No less than two-thirds of Palestinians are afraid to express their opinions on social media,” says Tarvainen.

Discourse about social media and Israel is not new. The topic was last discussed in May of the other year, when the violence escalated last time.

For example, the Human Rights Watch organization evaluate at the time, that Facebook had unjustifiably censored content shared by Palestinians about human rights violations. Censorship sometimes even extended to publications that shared content from traditional media.

The criticism led to Meta ordering an independent report on its operations. Report stated that content in Arabic was clearly removed more easily than content in Hebrew, even when proportional to the number of speakers of the language.

The report assessed that in some cases Meta’s actions limited the Palestinians’ rights to freedom of expression, political participation and non-discrimination. At the same time, the report pointed out that anti-Semitic content was also not removed quickly enough from the platforms.

Meta promised to improve his operations after this.

According to Abukahter, Meta has communicated that the company would have improved not only the moderation of Hebrew-language content, but also renewed its policy regarding organizations classified as dangerous.

“However, hate speech and incitement to violence are still not moderated through effective tags.”

According to Tarvainen, however, Meta, unlike for example Google, has even held discussions with the Palestinians. However, it does not seem to lead to sufficient action.

“Palestinian activists feel that there is a discussion, but nothing happens.”

In the process several Palestinian journalists and civil activists have become social media superstars. Many have shared information from the scene about the events and pictures of the harsh consequences of the extensive bombings.

The number of followers of several well-known Palestinian journalists has increased significantly during the conflict, reports NBC News. For example, at the beginning of October, a journalist from Gaza Motaz Azaizan The Instagram account had 25,000 followers. A month later, his number of followers was already over 13 million.

Social media has been an important way for many Palestinian journalists to share information about the region.

The change started with the events of the second year, says Tarvainen. The Palestinians have also begun to use social media tactically and strategically.

“Social media has brought the Palestinians much more visibility than traditional media, which in turn has led to interview invitations to traditional media as well.”

“It has clearly been a channel” through which the Palestinians have made their voices heard.