Human rights defenders and former Facebook officials who spoke to the program "What is hidden is greater" as part of a new investigation broadcast by Al-Jazeera on Friday night - acknowledged the targeting of Arab and Palestinian content, especially on social media platforms.

Deborah Brown, a digital rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, stressed that Meta and its platforms do not do enough to support human rights around the world, saying that, for example, they responded very quickly to the invasion of Ukraine last year, allowing Ukrainians to condemn the violence committed by Russian forces and calling for their denunciation.

American rights activist Gillian York asserts that Arabic content on social media platforms is much more censored than content published in Hebrew.

Palestinian Content

Ashraf Zeitoun, Facebook's former director of Middle East and North Africa policy, reveals that at the end of 2016, Israel designated social media companies and social networks with a new law that places very heavy financial penalties on companies that quickly deal with requests from the Israeli government to remove Palestinian content they consider anti-Semitic and hateful.

Speaking to the episode (2023/9/8) of the program "What is hidden is greater", the former director of the Israeli Cyber Unit, Eric Barping, acknowledges the work done by Israel, as it officially and stylishly asks Meta to delete words or sentences against it and even pictures or liking pictures of Palestinian martyrs, and says that the majority of content is removed from Facebook and other networks.

The program team directly and independently verified Facebook's policies, bias and professionalism, launching two pages on Facebook, one in Arabic "Palestinian Lamma" and the other in Hebrew "Ancestral Land", and over the course of months carefully monitored the way to deal with what is published on the two pages.

One of its findings is that on July 26, 2023, the team published on the Arabic page a news and photos of martyrs in the city of Nablus who fell as a result of an Israeli operation, and the post was immediately deleted and the page was informed of a warning that it would be permanently blocked, while on the Hebrew page, the same news was published simultaneously and with more shocking images with an inflammatory text, and the Facebook administration did not delete the post or warn the page.

Digital rights expert Marlena Wisniak acknowledges that there is excessive restriction of Arabic and Palestinian content, and says that there are many documented cases that indicate that Palestinian or Arabic content has been removed or restricted unlike Hebrew content.

Excessive application of rules

Julie Awano, a member of the supervisory board of Meta, also revealed in her testimony that the board is aware of the existence of excessive application of Facebook and Instagram rules on Arabic content, and added that a user in Egypt published a news report for Al Jazeera in which he mentioned the military arm of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) and this content was considered protected and worthy of publication, but the company banned the military arm of Hamas in the report, and said that they criticized Meta for suppressing news content from an important news organization.

The investigation, titled "Closed Space", also touched on the role played by Israeli lobbies in pressuring Facebook's management, and in this regard, Facebook's former director of Middle East and North Africa policy asserts that Israel was able to create a very strong system of pressure and influence on the management of the Meta platform, and that Israeli policy tried to affect even the rules governing the work of algorithms.

He spoke of an entire reporting army prepared by Israel, and one Jewish organization in the United States has launched an app that encourages users and subscribers to report anti-Israel content.

The program "What is hidden is greater" found that hundreds of Meta employees hold Israeli citizenship, including managers, supervisors and technicians in various departments at its headquarters in Israel and the United States, some of whom had previous ties to the Israeli army and government.

Among the most influential employees are Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, David Fischer, director of financial revenue at Facebook, as well as former director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, Amy Palmor, who is responsible for the cyber unit that fights Palestinian content. Curiously, this woman was appointed to Facebook's oversight board, which raises questions about the independence of this board.

After acquiring Israeli technology companies, Meta opened one of its largest headquarters outside the United States in Tel Aviv.