Under the hashtag “Facebook blocks Jerusalem”, Palestinian activists and journalists have been campaigning for a month against the American social media giant accused of erasing, through its algorithms, pro-Palestinian content from its platform.
On December 4, journalist Christine Rinawi posted a video on her Facebook account showing Israeli security forces shooting a Palestinian lying on the ground in Jerusalem, shot dead after carrying out a knife attack on an Israeli civilian.
Shortly after the post, the journalist, followed by nearly 400,000 people on the social network, finds that the photo was removed from her account, which had already been restricted when she shared footage of another attack in Jerusalem. .
In both cases, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, considered that the images, violent, violated its standards.
For the Palestinian journalist, it is rather a digital “hunt” against Palestinians, she told AFP. A correspondent for the public channel Palestine TV, Ms. Rinawi denies sharing her personal opinions but claims to act as a journalist.
Online media outlet Maydan Al-Quds suffered a similar fate. Its main account, followed by more than 1.2 million people, was simply deleted, then a second page, followed by 80,000 people, in turn disappeared.
– “Silencing” the Palestinians –
The editorial staff is reluctant to create new Facebook pages “since they could be deleted again”, explains journalist Baraa Abou Ramoz, accusing the American giant of wanting to “silence the voice of Jerusalem”.
Human rights organization Human Rights Watch recently denounced Facebook “censorship” for “unfairly” suppressing pro-Palestinian posts in May, amid an outbreak of violence in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
According to Sada Social, a movement advocating for “Palestinian digital rights,” 600 pro-Palestinian accounts or posts were restricted or suppressed in 2021, a record.
For Rama Youssef, spokesperson for the “Facebook blocks Jerusalem” campaign, the platform obeys a “double standard”.
Asked by AFP, Meta assured to apply the same rules to all Internet users, “without distinction”.
“We have a dedicated team, which includes Arabic speakers and Hebrew speakers, who keep our community safe by making sure to remove harmful content, while responding to any runtime errors as quickly as possible,” said a company spokesperson.
The use of the term “martyr”, often used by Palestinians to qualify people killed by Israeli forces, during an attack or not, remains problematic because prohibited by the social network, notes Iyad al-Rifai, Palestinian specialist in media.
Meta “invokes the American law which considers the attackers as terrorists”, explains the one who says to have had several interviews with officials of the company. Asked about her policy regarding that word, Meta did not comment.
– Massive deletions –
According to Sada Social, accounts have also been deleted because they belong, according to Meta, to people linked to the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is considered a terrorist organization by the United States.
For several years, the “cyber” department of the Israeli Ministry of Justice has been working to report content that it considers harmful. He reported “tens of thousands” of pro-Palestinian publications and accounts, says Arab Center Washington DC
According to this research institute, social media companies have aligned themselves with the reports. Meta did not wish to comment but assured to work to refine its algorithms to differentiate journalistic content from others.
But that is still not enough, says Rifai, who worries that the massive deletion of accounts discourages Palestinians from expressing themselves online.
After presenting a plan to the web giants in February to strengthen the fight against online anti-Semitism, the Israeli government for its part tabled in Parliament this week a bill “Facebook law” aimed at regulating incitement to hatred on the Internet. social networks.
But civil society organizations and local media believe that this project gives too much power to the authorities to purge the web of content that would constitute a threat to “national security” or “public security”, expressions sometimes “vague. “and” subject to different interpretations “, underlines in an editorial the daily Haaretz.
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META
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