How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories

Facebook significantly reduced the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach audiences during the Israel-Gaza war, according to a BBC investigation.

In a comprehensive analysis of Facebook data, we found that newsrooms in the Palestinian territories – Gaza and the West Bank – have significantly decreased audience engagement since October 2023.

The BBC also saw leaked documents showing that Instagram – another platform owned by Meta – increased the rating of Palestinian users’ comments after October 2023.

Meta – the owner of Facebook – says any claim that it has deliberately suppressed certain voices is “undeniably false”.

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, only a handful of foreign journalists have been allowed to enter the Palestinian coastal zone of Gaza from outside, and have been able to do so under Israeli military escort.

Social media has filled the void for those who want to hear other voices from inside Gaza. The Facebook pages of news channels such as Palestine TV, Wafa news agency and the Palestinian Al-Watan News – operating out of the West Bank – have become an important source of updates for many around the world.

BBC News Arabic compiled engagement data on the Facebook pages of 20 prominent Palestinian-based news organizations in the year before Israel’s October 7 attack on Hamas, and the year since.

Engagement is a key measure of how influential a social media account is and how many people see its content. It includes features such as the number of comments, reactions and shares.

During wartime, audience involvement can be expected to increase. However, the data showed a 77% drop after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook. Journalists in the newsroom shared with us statistics showing a 60% drop in the number of people seeing their posts.

“Interaction was completely blocked, and our posts stopped reaching people,” said Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the station.

Last year, Palestinian journalists raised fears that their online content was being “shadowed” by Meta – in other words, limited to how many people could see it.

To test this, we conducted a similar data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organizations such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13. These pages also posted a large amount of content related to the war, but the involvement of their viewers increased almost 37%.

Meta has been criticized by Palestinians and human rights groups fails to measure Internet activity properly.

A 2021 independent report commissioned by the company said this was not intentional but due to the lack of Arabic speaking skills among the presidents. Words and phrases were interpreted as offensive or violent, when in fact they were innocent.

For example, the Arabic phrase “Alhamdulillah”, which means “Praise be to God”, was sometimes automatically translated as “Thank God, the Palestinian terrorists fought for their freedom”.

To see if this explains the decline in communication with Palestinian outlets, the BBC conducted a similar analysis on the Facebook pages of 30 prominent Arabic-language media outlets based elsewhere, such as Sky News Arabia and Al-Jazeera.

However, these pages saw an average increase in engagement of almost 100%.

In response to our research, Meta revealed that it was not disclosing “temporary product and policy measures” taken in October 2023.

It said it faced the challenge of balancing the right to freedom of expression, with the fact that Hamas was both sanctioned by the US and designated as a terrorist organization under Meta’s own policies.

The tech giant also said that pages that only post about war are more likely to see engagement have an impact.

“We acknowledge that we make mistakes, but any claim that we are deliberately suppressing a certain voice is an undeniable lie,” the spokesperson said.

The BBC also spoke to five former and current Meta employees about the impact they say their company’s policies have had on some Palestinian users.

One person, who spoke anonymously, shared leaked internal documents about a change made to Instagram’s algorithm, which made it difficult to measure Palestinians commenting on Instagram posts.

“Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed to make it more offensive to the Palestinian people,” he said.

Internal messages show that the developer raised concerns about the order, worried that it might “introduce a new bias in the system towards Palestinian users”.

Meta confirmed it had taken the step but said it was necessary in response to what it called a “spike in hateful content” from the Palestinian territories.

It says the policy changes made at the start of Israel’s war with Gaza have been reversed, but did not say when this would happen.

At least 137 Palestinian journalists have been reported killed in Gaza since the conflict began, but several continue despite the dangers.

“A lot of information cannot be published as it is too graphic – for example if [Israeli] the soldiers are committing a massacre and we are recording it, the video will not be distributed,” said Omar el Qataa, one of the few photographers who chose to live in northern Gaza.

“But despite the challenges, risks, and content bans,” he says, “we must continue to share Palestinian content.”

Additional reporting by Rehab Ismail and Natalie Merzougui