Facebook has been accused of severely restricting Palestinian news outlets’ ability to reach their audience during the Israel-Gaza war. A BBC analysis of Facebook data revealed a steep drop in audience engagement for newsrooms in the Palestinian territories, including Gaza and the West Bank, since October 2023.
This decline in engagement is surprising, given that social media has become a vital source of updates for those wanting to hear more voices from inside Gaza. Facebook pages for news outlets like Palestine TV, Wafa news agency, and Palestinian Al-Watan News have been crucial in providing updates to millions of followers worldwide.
Since the war began, outside reporters have been allowed to enter Gaza if escorted by the Israeli army.
Although during wars, audience engagement is expected to rise, the data analysis showed a 77% decline in engagement for Palestinian-based news organisations, while Israeli news organisations saw a 37% increase in engagement during the same period.
Meta, Facebook’s owner, denies deliberately suppressing particular voices, stating that any such implication is “unequivocally false”.
Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook and journalists working there showed a 60% drop in the number of people seeing their posts.
“Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people,” says Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.
Shadow-ban is when a social media platform bans a user’s content without notifying the user, and Palestinian journalists fear the same has happened with their online content.
BBC ran a data analysis on 20 Israeli news channels such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13, which also posted war-related content but their audience engagement increased by 37%.
However, leaked documents and internal messages suggest that Instagram, another Meta-owned platform, increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after October 2023. This change was made to respond to a “spike in hateful content” coming out of the Palestinian territories, according to Meta.
The impact of these policies on individual Palestinian users is a concern. Five former and current Meta employees spoke to the BBC about the effects of these policies, with one person sharing leaked internal documents about the change to Instagram’s algorithm.
According to the documents, the moderation of Palestinians commenting on Instagram posts toughened. “Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive towards Palestinian people,” he said.
In response to these findings, Meta pointed out that it had made no secret of its “temporary product and policy measures” taken in October 2023. The company stated that it had faced a challenge balancing the right to freedom of speech with the fact that Hamas is both US-sanctioned and designated as a dangerous organisation under Meta’s own policies.
