Tip of the Iceberg episode investigated how Facebook targets Palestinian content material associated to Israel.
Al Jazeera Arabic presenter Tamer Almisshal has had his Facebook profile deleted by Meta 24 hours after the programme Tip of the Iceberg aired an investigation into Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content material titled The Locked Space.
The programme’s investigation, which aired on Friday, included admissions by Eric Barbing, former head of Israel’s cybersecurity equipment, about his organisation’s effort to trace Palestinian content material in keeping with standards that included “liking” a photograph of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces.
Then the company would strategy Facebook and argue that the content material must be taken down.
According to Barbing, Facebook often complies with the requests and Israel’s safety equipment follows up instances, together with bringing courtroom instances if want be.
The investigation adopted up on Barbing’s admissions by interviewing quite a lot of human and digital rights specialists who agreed that there was a definite imbalance in how Palestinian content material is restricted.
The programme additionally interviewed Julie Owono, a member of Facebook’s oversight board, who admitted there’s a discrepancy in how guidelines are interpreted and utilized to Palestinian content material and added that suggestions had been despatched to Facebook to appropriate this.
Al Jazeera has requested Facebook about why Almisshal’s profile was shut down with no prior warning or clarification. It had not obtained a response by the point of publication.
‘Targeting a journalist’
Almisshal mentioned the profile that was deleted is his private web page, arrange by him in 2006 and verified. He had a minimum of 700,000 followers on it.
“After the huge success of the episode, I discovered that my personal Facebook profile had been deleted with no explanations given,” he informed Al Jazeera. “It really does seem like some kind of revenge for the programme. We haven’t received any response from Facebook yet.”
The programme’s staff had got down to examine how vast the hole was between how Palestinian and Israeli posts and materials are handled by Facebook.
To try this, it arrange an experiment during which it constructed two totally different pages, one with a pro-Palestinian perspective and the opposite a pro-Israeli one, and ran trials on them. The staff concluded that there was certainly a giant discrepancy in how a lot scrutiny there may be and the way guidelines are utilized to posts on both web page.
A day after Tamer Almisshal, a Palestinian #journalist with #Jazeera, offered surprising proof of Meta’s censorship of Palestinian content material on its platforms throughout his “Tip of the Iceberg” TV show, Facebook has taken down his web page.#IsraeliCrimes #Palestine pic.twitter.com/RGQm8sUuzQ
— Hadeel Abo Aita (@aita_hadeel) September 10, 2023
It isn’t clear why Facebook would select to delete a person’s web page in response to a programme.
“There was no explanation, no warning,” Almisshal mentioned. “There had been no issues with any of the content on my page before. No message saying I had violated any rules.”
Almisshal stands by his programme.
“Last March, Facebook restricted my account, and it has happened other times, but usually the situation is resolved,” he mentioned. “This was a journalistically sound undertaking, and we communicated with Meta for it, giving them the chance to talk throughout the investigation.
“But to target a journalist individually instead – I would never have expected that.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/10/meta-deletes-al-jazeera-presenters-profile-after-show-criticising-israel?traffic_source=rss
