BBC
Omar el Qataa is a photojournalist working in northern Gaza
Facebook severely restricted the ability of Palestinian media to reach audiences during the war between Israel and Gaza, according to a BBC study.
In a comprehensive analysis of Facebook data, we found that newsrooms in the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank – have suffered a sharp decline in audience engagement since October 2023.
The BBC has also seen leaked documents showing that Instagram – another Meta-owned platform – increased its moderation of comments from Palestinian users after October 2023.
Meta – the owner of Facebook – says any implication that it deliberately suppressed certain voices is “unequivocally false”.
Since the start of the war between Israel and Gaza, only a few outside journalists have been allowed to enter the Palestinian coastal territory of Gaza from outside, and they have only been able to do so escorted 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 Palestinian Al-Watan News – which operate from the West Bank territory – have become a vital source of news for many people around the world.
BBC News Arabic compiled engagement data on the Facebook pages of 20 major Palestinian news outlets 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 the impact of a social media account and the number of people who see its content. It includes factors such as the number of comments, reactions and shares.
In times of war, one might expect public engagement to increase. However, data showed a 77% drop after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023.
Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook. Editorial journalists shared with us statistics showing a 60% drop in the number of people seeing their posts.
“Interactions were completely restricted and our messages no longer reached people,” explains Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.
Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have raised fears that their online content will be “banned” by Meta – in other words, limited in the number of people who see it.
To test this, we performed the same data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news outlets such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13. These pages also published a large amount of war-related content, but their audience increased by almost 37%.
Meta has previously been accused by Palestinians and human rights groups of failing to fairly moderate her online activities.
A 2021 independent report commissioned by the company said this was not deliberate but due to a lack of Arabic-speaking expertise 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 be to God,” was sometimes automatically translated as “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
To see if this explained the decline in engagement with Palestinian media, the BBC conducted the same analysis on the Facebook pages of 30 leading Arabic-language news sources based elsewhere, such as Sky News Arabia and Al- Jazeera.
However, these pages saw an average engagement increase of almost 100%.
In response to our research, Meta emphasized that it has made no secret of the “temporary product and policy measures” taken in October 2023.
He said he had faced a challenge balancing the right to free speech with the fact that Hamas was both sanctioned by the United States and designated a dangerous organization under its own Meta policy.
The tech giant also said pages posted exclusively about the war were more likely to see engagement impacted.
“We recognize that we make mistakes, but any implication that we are deliberately suppressing a particular voice is unequivocally false,” a spokesperson said.
Instagram documents leaked
The BBC also spoke to five former and current Meta employees about the impact they say their company's policies have had on individual Palestinian users.
One person, who spoke anonymously, shared leaked internal documents about a change to Instagram's algorithm that strengthened moderation of Palestinian comments on Instagram posts.
“Less than a week after the Hamas attack, the code was changed, essentially making it more aggressive toward the Palestinian people,” he said.
Internal messages show that an engineer raised concerns about the order, fearing it could “introduce new bias into the system against Palestinian users.”
Meta confirmed taking the action, but said it was necessary to respond to what it called an “increase in hateful content” coming from the Palestinian territories.
He said political changes put in place at the start of the war between Israel and Gaza had now been reversed, but did not specify when this happened.
At least 137 Palestinian journalists have reportedly been killed in Gaza since the start of the conflict, but some continue despite the dangers.
Getty Images
August 2024: Palestinian journalists commemorate Hamza Murteca, one of 137 of their colleagues killed since October 2023
“A lot of information cannot be published because it is too explicit. For example, if the (Israeli) army commits a massacre and we film it, the video will not be broadcast,” says Omar el Qataa, the one of the rare photojournalists. who chose 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
