Facebook and its parent Meta’s actions during last year’s Gaza war violated Palestinian users’ rights to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination, a report commissioned by the social media company. found in the report.
A report by independent consulting firm Business for Social Responsibility on Thursday confirmed long-standing criticism of Meta’s policies and their uneven implementation as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It found the company limited in terms of Arabic content. found more enforcing laws. Enforced material in Hebrew.
However, it did not find intentional bias in Meta, either by the company or among individual employees. The report’s authors said they found “no evidence of racial, ethnic, national or religious animosity in the governing teams” and noted that META had “representation of different perspectives, nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions relevant to this conflict.” There are employees who do.”
Rather, it found numerous examples of unintentional bias that undermined the rights of Palestinians and Arabic-speaking consumers.
In response, Meta said it plans to implement some of the report’s recommendations, including improving its Hebrew-language “classifiers,” which use artificial intelligence to automatically remove infringing posts. helps
“Many of these recommendations are not overnight quick fixes, as the BSR makes clear,” the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company said in a blog post Thursday. “Although we have already made significant changes as a result of this exercise, this process will take time – including understanding how some of these recommendations can best be addressed, and whether They are technically viable.”
Meta, the report confirmed, also made serious mistakes in implementation. For example, as the Gaza war erupted last May, Instagram briefly banned the #AlAqsa hashtag, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, a flashpoint in the conflict. .
Meta, who owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining that its algorithm had mistaken Islam’s third holiest site for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the secular Fatah party.
The report echoes issues raised in internal documents by Facebook whistleblower Francis Hogan last fall, showing the company’s problems are systemic and long known within Meta.
A major drawback is the lack of moderators in languages ​​other than English, including Arabic – one of the most common languages ​​on Meta’s platforms.
For consumers in Gaza, Syria and other conflict-ridden areas of the Middle East, the issues raised in the report are nothing new.
For example, Israeli security agencies and watchdogs have monitored Facebook and bombarded it with orders to remove the accounts and posts of thousands of Palestinians as they try to curb incitement.
“They completely overwhelm our system,” Ashraf Zeitoun, Facebook’s former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017, told The Associated Press last year. “It forces the system to make mistakes in Israel’s favor.”
Israel experienced a sharp wave of violence in May 2021 – weeks of tension in East Jerusalem escalated into an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The violence spread to Israel itself, with the country facing its worst sectarian violence in years between Jews and Arab citizens.
In an interview this week, Israel’s national police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told the daily Yediot Ahronot that he believes social media has fueled sectarian fighting. He called for shutting down social media if similar violence happened again and said he had suggested blocking social media last year to douse the flames.
“I am talking about shutting down the networks completely, calming down the situation on the ground, and reactivating them when it calms down,” he was quoted as saying. “We are a democratic country, but there is a limit.”
The comments sparked an uproar and the police issued a clarification saying that the proposal was only for extreme cases. Omar Berlif, the cabinet minister who oversees the police, also said Shabtai had no authority to impose such a ban.
