Facebook has appointed one of its "wise men" to whom it will return to decide on monitoring content and improving transparency on its platform, Israeli Amy Palmor, which sparked widespread controversy because of what she known as Balmour distorting Palestinian content and urging its deletion.
The French website "Orient 21" said in an article on this subject that the former director general of the Israeli Judicial Ministry and under the supervision of the Minister of Justice of the extreme right-wing Elite-Shaked, established a "Cyber" unit specialized in tightening control over Palestinian publications.
The site's writer, Jan Stern, was surprised at the appointment of Palmor, who was responsible - under the leadership of a minister described by a Tel Aviv journalist as "the most extreme voice of the Israeli far right" - about tracking Palestinians on social networks, especially Facebook and Instagram.
Stern quoted the Palestinian human rights organization, Adalah, based in Haifa, as saying that the Palmor unit mentioned "deliberately targeted and resulted in the removal of tens of thousands of publications from Palestinian content, and imposed severe restrictions on freedom of expression and opinion, especially with regard to Palestinian affairs."
He explained that this cyber unit is directly linked to the Israeli Attorney General's Office, Avishai Mandelblit, and uses many algorithms to detect so-called "extremist" content and request its removal directly from social networks, without explicitly announcing those steps, but rather remains a comprehensive mystery, and therefore not This has to do with the "transparency" promised by the new Facebook supervisory board, according to the author.
According to the Prosecutor's figures reported by Adalah, the year 2017 - the second year for the operation of a cyber-related unit - saw the number of deletions of Palestinian content increase by 500%. In 2018, 14,283 deletions were observed.
A racist message every minute
In contrast, research on hate speeches directed against the Palestinians revealed that there are Hebrew messages online directed against the Palestinians at a rate of a message every 66 seconds during the year 2018, which this unit did not care about despite the clear racist nature of many of these messages , Which means that the goal of the Balmour Unit is precisely to silence the Palestinians and stifle the content critical of Israeli policy.
The writer Stern pointed out that several Palestinian groups condemned Balmour's role "in muzzling freedom of expression and censorship of human rights defenders, especially Palestinian, Arab and Islamic voices" on Facebook.
In this context, he quoted the Palestinian Digital Rights Coalition, the Palestinian Human Rights Council and the Palestinian NGO Network urged him to Facebook "to think about the severe consequences that Emmy Balmour may choose in particular for Palestinian human rights defenders and freedom of expression on the Internet."