When Meta censors Palestinian content, is it really a glitch?
Account suspensions, shadow bans, mistranslations of Arabic words that conflate “Palestinian” and “terrorist” — all have become hallmarks of people’s experiences when using Facebook and Instagram amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
Meta, says Ashraf Zeitoon, should not be allowed to explain away these incidents as “glitches,” as they often do. Zeitoon was head of public policy for Middle East and North Africa at Meta (then Facebook) from 2014 to 2017, a role he describes as being Meta’s “ambassador to the Middle East.” He keeps in contact with folks at Meta today.
“This company is one of the world’s richest, it hires some of the best talent, best engineers,” he told me. “So for you then to tell me it’s a glitch, I don’t buy that.”
I called Zeitoon this week to get his insights on Meta’s approach to content about violent political conflicts in the Middle East. “There was a significant lack of awareness about the region, the complexity, the challenges,” he said. “The company deals with it as one homogeneous region when it’s not.” Between civil wars in Syria and Yemen and repressive regimes across the region, the work was never-ending. And that’s to say nothing of Israel and Palestine. The work got more complicated in 2016, he said, when the Israeli government began pressing Meta to hire a representative who they could interface with directly.