An independent audit of Meta’s handling of online content during the two-week war between Israel and the militant Palestinian group Hamas last year found that the social media giant had denied Palestinian users their freedom of expression by erroneously removing their content and punished Arabic-speaking users more heavily than Hebrew-speaking ones.
the issue on an automated software deployment error. After The Post published a story highlighting the issue, a Meta spokeswoman also added that a “human error” had caused the glitch, but did not offer further information.The BSR report sheds new light on the incident. The report says that the #AlAqsa hashtag was mistakenly added to a list of terms associated with terrorism by an employee working for a third-party contractor that does content moderation for the company.
The report, which only investigated the period around the 2021 war and its immediate aftermath, confirms years of accounts from Palestinian journalists and activists that Facebook and Instagram appear to censor their posts more often than those of Hebrew-speakers.
The report also suggested that — due to a shortage of content moderators in both Arabic and Hebrew — the company was routing potentially rule-breaking content to reviewers who do not speak or understand the language, particularly Arabic dialects. That resulted in further errors.
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