Free Speech

Tell Facebook: Stop Silencing Palestine

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Tell Facebook to take five concrete steps to end the silencing of Palestinians, as well as content and accounts related to Palestine.

December 5, 2024

Dear Facebook,

I support civil society organizations in calling on you to take the following five concrete steps to end the silencing of Palestinians and content and accounts related to Palestine.

  1. Public Audit: A full, independent, public audit of content moderation policies with respect to Palestine and a commitment to co-design policies and tools that address deficiencies or overreach of content moderation found during the audit. Furthermore, rules should be based on existing human rights frameworks and must be applied consistently across jurisdictions.

  2. Government request transparency: Complete transparency on requests—both legal and voluntary—submitted by the Israeli government and Cyber Unit, including number of requests, type of content enforcement; and data regarding compliance with such requests. Users should also be able to appeal content decisions.

  3. Automation transparency: Transparency with respect to where automation and machine learning algorithms are being used to moderate content related to Palestine, including error rates as well as classifiers used.

  4. Dangerous organizations: Transparency regarding any content guidelines or rules related to the classification and moderation of terrorism and extremism. Companies should, at minimum, publish any internal lists of groups classified as “terrorist” or “extremist.” Users cannot adhere to rules that are not made explicit.

  5. Commitment to co-design: Commitment to a co-design process with civil society to improve upon policies and processes involving Palestinian content.

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Starting the first week of May, as Palestinian families and residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem started to peacefully protest against the imminent forced eviction from their homes, the Israeli police cracked down on those protests and attacked worshippers at the Al-Aqsa mosque toward the end of the holy month of Ramadan. As Palestinians and their supporters have taken to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share images and posts about the violence with the world, some have noticed their content suddenly disappear, or had their posts flagged for breaches of the platforms’ terms of use. In some cases, their accounts have been suspended, and in others features such liking and commenting have been restricted.

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