Days of Palestine – Jerusalem
Facebook is “actively fighting Palestinian content” the editors of Palestinian news pages that were removed by the social media giant earlier this week have said.
The Palestinian news page, Al-Qastal, disappeared from Facebook after the company removed it for covering the Israeli violations and crimes against humanity committed yesterday in the occupied Jerusalem.
Al-Qastal page reported daily news in Jerusalem from a Palestinian perspective, focusing on Israeli violations against Palestinians in the city.
Al-Qastal explained that the network was accompanied by several events yesterday since the early morning hours, as its correspondents continued to cover Israeli crimes and storm the courtyards of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Al-Qastal network condemns the policies of social media platforms that fight Palestinian content, prevent the voice of Jerusalem and Palestine from reaching the entire world and expose the crimes, abuses, and daily violations of the occupation of Palestinians in general and of Jerusalemites in particular.
#عاجل : دون أن مقدمات أو بلاغات عليها .. فيسبوك يحذف بشكل مفاجئ صفحة "القسطل الاخباري" من موقعه لتغطيتها المكثفة لأحداث القدس والأقصى المبارك رغم التزامها الدقيق بمعاييره في النشر
القسطل تدعو جميع متابعها ملساندتها بالضغط على فيسبوك للعودة عن قراره غير المبرر#فيسبوك_يحجب_القدس pic.twitter.com/eDbvcrgU3E— AlQastal القسطل (@AlQastalps) April 16, 2022
Meta and its Facebook consider talking about Palestine violating their community standards, which completely shows their hypocrisy and double standards against Palestinian content.
Facebook, since Russia invaded Ukraine. It allowed Ukraine to call for war and use all that it opposes their community standards such as invitations to kill Russians and tutorials on how to invent weapons to kill them as well.
Meanwhile, Facebook continues to block the Palestinian content that talks about their rights and covers the Israeli crimes against them.
It’s noteworthy that Facebook removed the two Palestinian news pages, Al-Qastal and Maydan Al-Quds last year following the same Israeli crimes against Jerusalem for the same reasons.
Anti-Arab content allowed, Anti-Israel content censored
According to Eyad Refai, the director of Sada Social Center for the Defence of Palestinian Digital Rights, “Every time we contact Facebook for Palestinian content suppression, the company replies that censorship happens because of the algorithms, not because of human intervention”.
Refai, who also spoke at the Livestream, underlined that “the algorithms are made by the company. They implement the company’s policy, and they are discriminatory”.
According to Refai, “Facebook gives much of a space to Hebrew language Israeli pages, much of which contain anti-Palestinian hate speech, incitement to violence against Arabs and racist language, and it’s rarely censored”.
Refai revealed that last May, during a wave of protest in Jerusalem and the West Bank, Sada Social Centre conducted an experiment.
“We published a post in Arabic that said ‘Death to Israel’ and another one in Hebrew that said ‘Death to the Arabs’. The first one was removed immediately, while the second is still online.”
The director of the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement – 7amleh, told The New Arab earlier in October that Arab, Muslim and Palestinian content on Facebook is “over moderated”, leading to discrimination in content removal.
Refai added that Sada Social Centre has met with Facebook staff and discussed the removal of Al-Qastal and Maydan al-Quds. “The company staff has promised to review the decision”, he added.
Facebook came under criticism in October after The Intercept published a leaked list of names that Facebook used to censor content, containing hundreds of names of Palestinian figures and organizations.
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