Bassam is a Palestinian journalist who works in a diverse digital platform. He used to use his Facebook account to promote his materials and mainly talks about technical and engineering aspects, but despite that, his Facebook account was deleted more than once during the past three years, and each time he was He starts over to build his audience, which takes a lot of effort.
This will not come as a surprise to you, you know these penalties that sometimes force you to give up any content that Facebook considers incitement or hate speech, but for Bassam and his fellow Palestinian journalists that is everything, because you necessarily – being an editor covering Palestinian affairs – will come For mentioning something that provokes Facebook’s red lines and ends with your expulsion, even if it is just the word “Hamas” or “Gaza” in a context in which you say that there is a “war” on ignorance in the Gaza Strip!
The deletion of Palestinian content – accounts or publications – from the Facebook platform for the first time began in 2016, and soon other platforms such as Twitter and Instagram followed suit under the pretext of the US anti-terrorism law, as explained by Iyad Al-Rifai, director of the Social Sada Center, a youth initiative that defends the rights of users. Digital media in Palestine, noting that “every 66 seconds there is one incitement against Arabs and Palestinians published by Israelis, but Facebook does nothing.” (1)
Nearly three years after that point, social media users in Palestine, especially journalists and public figures, were asked to reconsider some posts to avoid removing or banning content, particularly content that includes national issues and sentiments. In fact, during the past year alone, the Sada Social Center documented more than 950 violations of Palestinian online content from January to August 2020, 641 of which were on social media, most of them on Facebook, and recorded in March The highest rate of 226 violations. (2)
Amin Abed is a civil society activist in Jabalia camp, northern Gaza, and his Facebook account is often subject to a 24-hour temporary ban every time he posts about “solidarity with prisoners in Israeli prisons,” the last time he tried to get his Facebook account back. A month ago, he received a message that he “can no longer use Facebook”. Abed faced the same issue with some of the posts on Twitter and photos on Instagram, before his accounts on all three platforms were permanently disabled and prevented from recovering them. (3)
Palestinians seek to restore their accounts and express their protest in different ways. The Sada Social Center was able to recover dozens of Facebook accounts after helping users file an appeal to the company (4). The center is still waiting for Facebook to respond to more than 400 other requests, while the company justifies its delay in responding with restrictions. imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Is this simply a disruption in the nature of the algorithms on the Facebook platform, or is it intentional? We know that there is close cooperation of Facebook with the Israeli authorities, we also know that Facebook responds to about 85% (5) of Israeli requests to remove content they consider “offensive or linked to terrorism”, and the recent batches of deletion and account bans have been associated with restrictions on posts containing words Rumors of resistance to occupation
Twitter attributed these types of deletions to technical errors due to algorithms (6), and Instagram stated in its statement that the automated update had caused content – reshared by multiple users – to appear as missing, and regretted hearing that Palestinians felt they were being targeted.
If you contemplate the testimony of CEOs of major technology companies, such as Facebook or Apple, who are usually summoned before the British Parliament or the US Congress to explain how data algorithms work, or explain their violations, you will find that it does not say much about the policy of these companies (7) for one reason simple; That is, the algorithms that feed social media are protected as trade secrets, and are not found in publicly available records like the US or UK patent office. (8)
“Patents operate on the basis of adequate disclosure of an inventor’s scientific innovation for the benefit of society, as opposed to trade secrets that keep knowledge of formulas and technical developments secret,” says Tanya Abelin, professor of intellectual property law at Kings College. (9) Protecting algorithms’ “secret blends” through trade secret law has become imperative over the past few years (ironically, the antithesis of this approach – open source algorithms – is a potential antidote against opaque secrecy).
But in this context, we can understand some of those secrets. Facebook rushed in 2016 to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Israeli government to combat “anti-Semitism,” a term that supposedly refers to unjustified hostility to Jews based on their religion, but in this particular case it is Expanded and sharpened to prevent criticism of the oppressive practices of the occupying state of Israel and the undermining of a people searching for their freedom, it is enough for you to know that the word “Zionism” is protected by hate speech policies, and therefore anti-Zionist and critical of Israel content is banned on all Facebook sub-applications on the grounds that it is “anti-Semitic”.
“Facebook regards most Palestinians from Hamas, and this is how they deal with content from the region. They should devote more resources to this,” says Dia Kayali, a freelance human rights consultant and writer.
But Kayali disagrees with the claim that it’s just technical bugs, and she says, “If you were to do some kind of update on the algorithms and you know how people use your platform, is this the moment – that is, when the Palestinian-Israeli conflict intensified recently – that you chose to do So? Of course not. It’s also not a way to roll out updates.”
Kayali adds: “Companies don’t publish an update without testing it in different places, so every time, for example, Facebook or Instagram makes some small change, like changing the reporting flow, they test it in a small place. Even if it’s wrong, which is What I don’t believe, it still reflects a complete neglect of Palestinian human rights.” (10)
When we mention censorship, the first thing that comes to mind is censorship as a government measure, and it is difficult to talk about censorship when we talk about platforms. But in this case, we can see how close Facebook is with the Israeli government by how quickly the platform responds to the requests of the occupying state. (11)(12)
Facebook employees have already raised concerns with the network about its bias against Arabs and Muslims, arguing that “large numbers of the population are considered terrorists.” (13) Another former employee had mentioned Facebook’s attempts to remove the description of “occupied territories” from the Israeli-occupied areas of the West Bank.
In the face of all this restriction, users in Palestine have taken matters into their own hands through some protest initiatives. During the 1980s and 1990s, when the Israeli government banned Palestinian artists from using the colors of the Palestinian flag in their works, they used the watermelon as a symbol of resistance. A similar method of digital resistance is now taking shape in the form of innovative measures, such as giving low ratings to social media apps on app stores, particularly Facebook (14), to reduce their visibility and interactions, and to send a message to the world about the degree of bias these companies have.
The campaign affected Facebook, and this was evident in two forms: the first is the vibration of the value of Facebook’s stock in this period due to the sharp decline in the app’s evaluation on app stores, to the extent that it prompted Facebook to submit a request to delete the “political” evaluations in support of Palestine, as they said, but Apple refused the demand”. This is how Omar Al-Shal, the technical writer and media presenter at Al-Sharq Channel, answers a question for ” Maidan ” about this matter, before he continues, saying: “The second form is that Facebook apologizes to the Palestinian Authority and has already modified its algorithms and eases procedures against publications supporting Palestine.”
Within Facebook, the campaign is taken very seriously, and its severity is rated “SEV1”, which stands for “severity 1”, a description used internally when there is a major problem with the website, “SEV1” is the second highest priority event after “SEV0”, which is used when the website itself is down.15 Another thing that has demonstrated Facebook’s interest in ratings is the creation of a “special operations center” operating 24 hours a day to mitigate hate speech and violent content related to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.(16)
It is worth noting that this is not the first time that Facebook has been subjected to this kind of criticism. Several years ago, the platform was criticized for its failure in the Myanmar file (17), but these criticisms prompted it to work with civil society in Myanmar and develop some tools and policies that were useful. Could this happen in the case of Palestine while Facebook continues to have close ties with the Israeli government and ignores taking the other side of the conversation seriously?
Al-Shall comments to Meydan : “Facebook in particular, and social networks in general, must take a more neutral approach to controversial political matters, and not always adopt America’s position, and by virtue of being global networks, it must be more flexible regarding Regional issues, and to take into account regional views at the very least,” he added, “It was assumed that the regional offices of Facebook, and the various social networks, would do this in the Arab region.”
Recently, the Instagram Middle East team reached out to filmmaker Alaa Hamdan to find a solution regarding the obstacles that Palestinian content is already facing on Instagram, but of course this is not enough, and it seems that it will depend on the long breath of Palestinian activists to resist social media abuses, and their ability to pressure continuous in the opposite direction.
Al-Shall confirms to Meydan : “Even regarding the implementation of the new privacy policies in WhatsApp, Facebook eventually retracted the deletion of the accounts of those who did not agree to the new policies. In addition to its inability to implement the policy in some countries such as the European Union in the first place, In general, collective action and organized pressure are undoubtedly bearing fruit, even if only partially.
But in the end, it seems so far that the promises of Western democracy, those soaring to ideal horizons that can only be found on paper in political philosophy books, have failed the Palestinians, and the expression of opinion and the just representation of rights has faced a huge dilemma, the strangest thing is that this phenomenon is not unique of its kind, as oppressed and marginalized communities around the world face similar prejudice and censorship!