RT: https://www.rt.com/news/598796-meta-palestinian-gaza-censorship/
A former engineer has accused Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – of being biased against Palestinians, according to Reuters.
Ferras Hamad filed a lawsuit in California on Tuesday, alleging discrimination and wrongful termination. He had been an engineer on Meta’s machine learning team from 2021 until February.
Meta was deleting internal employee messages by Palestinian-Amerians that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and investigated their use of Palestinian flag emojis, Hamad alleged. By contrast, no such investigations were launched into employees using Israeli or Ukrainian flags, he said.
According to Hamad, he was fired after pointing out irregularities with an emergency procedure for handling “site events” (SEV), when it resulted in restrictions on Instagram posts by Palestinian personalities. In one case, he said in the complaint, a short video by photojournalist Motaz Azaiza showed a destroyed building in Gaza, but Meta had labeled it as pornographic.
When Hamad attempted to resolve that case, Meta told him he was violating the policy barring employees from dealing with the accounts of people they knew personally – although Hamad insists he is not personally acquainted with Azaiza.
The former engineer had handled SEV cases related to Gaza, Israel and Ukraine before, and obtained confirmation in writing that this was part of his job description. He filed an internal discrimination complaint in January, but was fired a few days later.
Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media behemoth has been widely criticized by human rights groups over its censorship of content related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – specifically, suppressing the Palestinian viewpoint. Almost 200 employees have raised concerns about the matter in an open letter to Zuckerberg and other executives, earlier this year.
Just another reminder that Meta is western regime propaganda operation. It viciously censors against pro-Palestinian content, is all-in on upholding the zionist narrative and is shameless about it. It has no official policy on record saying in its rules that you can’t be pro-Palestinian and instead misuses various systems such as the aforementioned flagging videos of rubble as porn to suppress, censor, deplatform, and limit reach of anything contrary to the settler zionist narrative.
Reminder that Meta is also one of the driving forces behind the Tik-tok ban (spending tons of money lobbying for it and pushing a campaign that targeted it and painted it as a threat when it was in fact a competitor) and that finally got the bill and ban passed was the fact too much pro-Palestinian content was being posted and not censored quickly enough compared to Meta which outraged the pro-genocide US congress who had been debating but not actually passing the tik-tok ban for months before.