Facebook has restricted the ability of Palestinian media outlets to reach their audiences during the war between Israel and Hamas, according to a BBC investigation.
After an exhaustive analysis of Facebook data, we discovered that since October 2023 the media in the Palestinian territories (Gaza and the West Bank) had suffered a sharp drop in their audience share.
The BBC also saw leaked documents showing that Instagram, another Meta-owned platform, has increased its moderation of comments written by Palestinian users since October 2023.
Meta – Facebook’s owner – says any suggestion that it has deliberately suppressed certain voices is “unequivocally false.”
Since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, only a few foreign journalists have been allowed to enter the Palestinian territory of Gaza, and they can only do so under escort by the Israeli army.
Social media has filled the void for those who wanted to hear more voices from inside Gaza.
The Facebook pages of media outlets such as Palestine TV, the Wafa news agency and the Palestinian agency Al-Watan News (operating from West Bank territory) became a vital source of updates for many people around the world.
BBC News Arabic collected engagement data on the Facebook pages of 20 major Palestine-based news organizations in the year before the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, and in the year since.
Engagement is a key measure of the impact a social media account has and how many people view its content.
They include factors such as the number of comments, reactions, and shares of the post.
Audience participation would be expected to increase in times of war.
However, the data showed a 77% decrease after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
“Our publications stopped reaching people”
Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook.
Their journalists shared with us statistics showing a 60% drop in the number of people viewing their posts.
“The interaction was comp“We were severely restricted and our publications stopped reaching people,” says Tariq Ziad, a journalist with the channel.
Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have expressed fear that Meta is “shadow banning” your online content; in other words, restricting the number of people who see it.
To test this, we performed the same data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organizations, such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13.
These pages also posted a lot of war-related content, but their audience engagement increased by almost 37%.
The company Meta has previously been accused by Palestinians and human rights groups of unfairly moderating online activity.
An independent report commissioned by the company in 2021 states that this was not deliberate, but was due to few of its moderators being fluent in the Arabic language.
They interpreted words and phrases as offensive or violent, when in reality they were harmless.
For example, the Arabic phrase “Alhamdulillah,” meaning “Praise God,” was sometimes automatically translated as “Praise God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom“.
To see if this explained the decline in interaction with Palestinian media, the BBC conducted the same analysis on the Facebook pages of 30 major Arabic-language news sources based elsewhere, such as Sky News Arabia and Al-Jazeera.
However, these pages saw an average increase in engagement of almost 100%.
In response to our investigation, Meta noted that it had made no secret of “temporary product and policy measures” adopted in October 2023.
He said he had faced the challenge of balancing the right to freedom of expression with the fact that Hamas was sanctioned by the United States and designated a dangerous organization under Meta’s own policies.
The tech giant also said that pages that posted exclusively about the war were more likely to have their engagement numbers affected.
“We recognize that we make mistakes, but any suggestion that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false,” a spokesperson said.
Leaked Instagram documents
The BBC also spoke to five current and former Meta employees about the impact they say the company’s policies have had on Palestinian users.
One person, speaking anonymously, shared leaked internal documents about a change made to Instagram’s algorithm, which tightened the moderation of Palestinian comments on social network posts.
“A week after the Hamas attack, they changed the algorithm making it essentially more aggressive against the Palestinian people,” he said.
Internal messages show that one engineer expressed concern about the order, fearing it could be “introducing a new bias into the system against Palestinian users.”
Meta confirmed it took the action, but said it had been necessary to respond to what it called an “increase in hate content” coming from the Palestinian territories.
He added that policy changes implemented at the beginning of the Israel-Gaza war have now been reversed, but did not say when this happened.
At least 137 Palestinian journalists are reported to have died in Gaza as a result of Israeli attacks since the start of the conflict, but a few continue to work despite the dangers.
“There is a lot of information that cannot be published because it is too graphic; For example, if the army [israelí] “commits a massacre and we film it, the video will not be broadcast,” explains Omar el Qataa, one of the few photojournalists who decided to stay in northern Gaza.
“But despite the challenges, risks and content bans,” he says, “we must continue sharing Palestinian content“.
Additional reporting by Rehab Ismail and Natalie Merzougui
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