Meta announced on Thursday, 11 July 2024 that it will remove more content targeting Zionism in a significant anti-Palestinian policy change.
“We will now remove speech targeting ‘Zionists’ in several areas where our process showed that the speech tends to be used to refer to Jews and Israelis with dehumanizing comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence.”, Meta stated in a blog.
Meta said that it had long treated the term ‘Zionist’ “as a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people in two narrow circumstances: (1) where Zionists are compared to rats, reflecting known anti-Semitic imagery, and (2) where the context makes clear that “Zionist” means ‘Jew’ or “Israeli’”, the company will now expand that perspective to further interpretations of the label.
It highlighted that those circumstances do not “sufficiently address the ways people are using the term ‘Zionist’ online and offline”. It means, essentially, that all mention or condemnation of the Zionist movement will be held in suspicion of being directly anti-Semitic until proven otherwise, making it liable for removal.
Meta declared that their decision was a result of feedback from “global stakeholders”, user research, and academic literature, noting that its “policies evolve based on our due diligence, including feedback from these meetings and other inputs such as changes in social norms, language or product updates”.
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