How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories

Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian media outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to a BBC investigation.

In a comprehensive analysis of Facebook data, we found that newsrooms in the Palestinian territories (in Gaza and the West Bank) had suffered a sharp drop in audience engagement since October 2023.

The BBC also saw leaked documents showing that Instagram, another Meta-owned platform, increased its moderation of Palestinian users’ comments after October 2023.

Meta, Facebook’s owner, says any implication that it has deliberately suppressed specific voices is “unequivocally false.”

Since the beginning of the war between Israel and Gaza, only a few foreign journalists have been allowed to enter the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza from outside, and they were only able to do so under escort by the Israeli army.

Social media has filled the void for those who want to hear more voices from inside Gaza. The Facebook pages of media outlets such as Palestine TV, Wafa news agency and Palestine Al-Watan News, which operate from the West Bank territory, became a vital source of updates for many people around the world.

BBC News Arab collected engagement data on the Facebook pages of 20 prominent Palestine-based news organizations in the year leading up to the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and in the year after.

Engagement is a key measure of how much impact a social media account is having and how many people view its content. It includes factors such as the number of comments, reactions and shares.

During a period of war, audience participation might be expected to increase. However, the data showed a 77% decrease after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook. Newsroom journalists shared with us statistics showing a 60% drop in the number of people viewing their posts.

“Interaction was completely restricted and our publications stopped reaching people,” says Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.

Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have expressed fears that Meta is “shadow banning” their online content; in other words, restricting the number of people who see it.

To test this, we conducted 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 large amount of war-related content, but participation of its audience increased by almost 37%.

Meta has previously been accused by Palestinians and human rights groups of failing to moderate online activity fairly.

An independent 2021 report commissioned by the company said this was not deliberate but due to a lack of Arabic experience among moderators. Words and phrases were interpreted 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 engagement with Palestinian media, the BBC carried out the same analysis on the Facebook pages of 30 prominent 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 the “temporary policy and product measures” adopted in October 2023.

He said he had faced the challenge of balancing the right to free speech 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 affected.

“We recognize that we make mistakes, but any implication that we deliberately suppressed a particular voice is unequivocally false,” a spokesperson said.

The BBC has also spoken to five current and former Meta employees about the impact they say their company’s policies have had on individual Palestinian users.

One person, speaking anonymously, shared leaked internal documents about a change made to Instagram’s algorithm, which tightened moderation for Palestinians commenting on Instagram posts.

“A week after the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive towards the Palestinian people,” he said.

Internal messages show that one engineer expressed concern about the order, worried that 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 said policy changes implemented at the start of the Israel-Gaza war had now been reversed, but did not say when this happened.

At least 137 Palestinian journalists are reported to have been killed in Gaza since the start of the conflict, but a few continue despite the dangers.

“A lot of information cannot be published because it is too graphic; for example, if the (Israeli) army commits a massacre and we film it, the video will not be broadcast,” says 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 to share Palestinian content.”

Additional reporting by Rehab Ismail and Natalie Merzougui