Meta has been criticised over its content moderation amid Israel’s war on Gaza [Getty]
The Israel and Jewish Diaspora policy chief of Meta, the company that owns and operates social media giants Facebook and Instagram, has been pushing for the censorship of pro-Palestinian content since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Jordana Cutler, a former member of the Israeli government and advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been flagging posts by a number of pro-Palestinian accounts on social media site Instagram.
This includes posts from chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine including those at Columbia University in New York and the University of California in Los Angeles, according to internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept.
Other content flagged included videos showing Palestinians in Gaza cheering Iran’s 1 October ballistic missile attack against Iran.
Cutler has also lobbied to censor the pro-Iran Lebanese news channel Al Mayadeen, according to the documents, when it posted content sympathetic to former Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah.
Al-Mayadeen has been banned in Israel, with Israeli authorities closing the channel’s offices in the occupied West Bank.
Meta said that regardless of who flags content, policy is what decides what is censored, with a separate team making the final decision.
“Who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform,” the company told The New Arab.
“In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas.”
“Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violated our policies,” Meta added.
Meta spokesperson Dani Lever also added that Cutler’s role was different to that of a Content Policy official and that she did not have a role in drafting rules.
Interviews given by Cutler to Israeli media have portrayed her as representing Israel’s interests at the company, with Buzzfeed reporting in 2017 that employees of Facebook were concerned over Cutler’s role in the company.Â
Meta’s platforms have been accused of biased moderation of posts surrounding Israel’s war on Gaza, with a number of words, phrases, and posts being taken down by company moderators.
The company’s dangerous organisations and individuals policy lists thousands of entities as being blacklisted from discussion. This includes Hamas, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, among a swathe of other organisations across the globe.
In July it’s oversight board removed a ban on the Arabic word Shaheed, meaning martyr, following a year-long review after it was found that the word accounted for more content removals than any other on its sites.
Also in July, Meta announced that it would start removing posts that use the word “Zionist” in an expansion of its hate speech policy.
In September, the oversight board ruled that the phrase “from the river to the sea” would be allowed on its social media sites.
