Report finds Facebook censored Free Speech rights of Palestinian users during violent conflict with Israel in 2021

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An independent consulting firm found that Facebook violated the Free Speech rights of Palestinian users during the May 2021 outbreak of violence in the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Key Players

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is an American multinational technology conglomerate that owns Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other internet products.

Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a management consulting company based in San Francisco, California, focuses on “creating a world in which all people can thrive on a healthy planet.” 

Further Details

A new episode in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict broke out in May 2021, amid protests against an impending Israeli Supreme Court case determining whether Israeli settlers had the right to evict Palestinian families from homes in Jerusalem, The Washington Post reported. During the protests, Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque. Hamas, the governing body of Gaza, fired rockets into Israel. 

Israel responded with an 11-day bombing campaign that reportedly killed at least 250 Palestinians, including 66 children. A dozen people in Israel were also killed, including two children, The Post reported.  

During this period, social media platforms restricted and blocked many Palestinian posts related to the conflict, leading pro-Palestian activists to launch a campaign to downgrade Facebook’s review ratings, which the company deemed a “severity 1” emergency, NBC News reported. 

In September 2021, the nominally independent Facebook Oversight Board recommended Facebook commission an outside investigation into content moderation regarding Israelis and Palestinians, particularly in relation to any bias or discrimination in its policies, enforcement, or systems, and publish the investigation’s findings. 

The eventual report found that Facebook violated the rights of Palestinians to “freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore . . . the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred.”

On Facebook, Arabic algorithms may have a higher error rate for Palestinian Arabic, serving as a possible cause of overenforcement of Arabic content. The report noted that this fact is likely related to Meta policies designating foreign terrorist organizations, meaning that it has an Arabic “hostile speech classifier,” but not a Hebrew one. Therefore, people posting in Arabic may have a higher chance of their content being blocked or flagged as potentially linked to a terrorist organization.

A key example of this was when #AlAqsa was placed on a hashtag block list by an employee in Meta’s Outsourced Services because the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was flagged as a terrorist organization, resulting in the hashtag being hidden from search results. 

Based on the data reviewed, BSR did not find intentional bias in Facebook’s content moderation, but hypothesized that “various instances of unintentional bias where Meta policy and practice, combined with broader external dynamics, does lead to different human rights impacts on Palestinian and Arabic speaking users.”

The report ultimately outlined 21 recommendations for Meta to avoid human rights violations in the future.

Outcome 

Meta affirms commitment to protecting free expression

Miranda Sissons, director of human rights at Meta, said the company would fully implement 10 of the recommendations and was partly implementing four others. The company was “assessing the feasibility” of another six and taking “no further action” on one. 

The May 2021 conflict “surfaced industry-wide, long-standing challenges around content moderation in conflict-affected regions, and the need to protect freedom of expression while reducing the risk of online services being used to spread hate or incite violence. The report also highlighted how managing these issues was made more difficult by the complex conditions that surround the conflict, including its social and historical dynamics, various fast-moving violent events, and the actions and activities of terrorist organizations,” Sissons stated. 

Palestinian rights groups urge Meta to take action

The Palestinian internet rights group 7amleh, or the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, tweeted that until Meta committed to changing its policies, Palestinian voices would remain censored.

“While the report pointed out Meta’s unintentional bias, we believe that the continued censorship for years on Pal/ voices, despite our reports and arguments of such bias, confirms that this is deliberate censorship unless Meta commits to ending it,” one tweet in the group’s thread reads. 

Israel’s national police chief remains concerned about the role of social media during violent conflict

After the report’s release, Kobi Shabtai, Israel’s national police chief, told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that he believed social media had fueled communal fighting during the conflict and that social media outlets should be shut down if similar violence occurs again, The Associated Press reported.

“I’m talking about fully shutting down the networks, calming the situation on the ground, and when it’s calm reactivating them,” Shabtai said. “We’re a democratic country, but there’s a limit.”