English: Social Media Allows Graphic Images (20,980)

English:  Social Media Allows Graphic Images (20,980)

After a series of Israeli airstrikes against the densely populated Gaza Strip earlier this month, Palestinian Facebook and Instagram users protested the abrupt deletion of posts documenting the resulting death and destruction. 

It wasn’t the first time Palestinian users of the two giant social media platforms, which are both owned by parent company Meta, had complained about their posts being unduly removed. It’s become a pattern: Palestinians post sometimes graphic videos and images of Israeli attacks, and Meta swiftly removes the content, providing only an oblique reference to a violation of the company’s “Community Standards” or in many cases no explanation at all.  

Previously unreported policy language shows that this year the company instructed moderators to deviate from standard procedure and treat various graphic imagery from the Russia-Ukraine war with a light touch. Meta has responded to the invasion by rapidly enacting a litany of new policy carveouts designed to broaden and protect the online speech of Ukrainians, specifically allowing their graphic images of civilians killed by the Russian military to remain up on Instagram and Facebook.  No such carveouts were ever made for any other suffering population. “This is deliberate censorship of human rights documentation.”

Marwa Fatafta, Middle East North Africa policy manager for Access Now, an international digital rights group, said, “Their censorship works almost like clockwork - whenever violence escalates on the ground, their takedown of Palestinian content soars.”

Instances of censored Palestinian content include the August 5 removal of a post mourning the death of Alaa Qaddoum, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in an Israeli missile strike, as well as an Instagram video showing Gazans pulling bodies from beneath rubble. Palestinians in Gaza who post about Israeli assaults said their posts don’t contain political messages or indicate any affiliation with terror groups. “I’m just posting pure news about what’s happening,” said Issam Adwan, a Gaza-based freelance journalist. 

Rights Advocates have told that the exemptions made for the Russia-Ukraine war are the latest example of a double standard between Meta’s treatment of Western markets and the rest of the world - evidence of special treatment of the Ukrainian cause on Meta’s part since the beginning of the war and something that can be seen with media coverage of the war more broadly.

In an expanded, internal version of the Community Standards guide, the section dealing with graphic content includes a series of policy memos directing moderators to deviate from the standard rules or bring added scrutiny to bear on specific breaking news events. A review of these breaking news exceptions shows that Meta directed moderators to make sure that graphic imagery of Ukrainian civilians killed in Russian attacks was not deleted on seven different occasions, beginning at the immediate onset of the invasion. The whitelisted content includes acts of state violence akin to those routinely censored when conducted by the Israeli military, including multiple specific references to airstrikes.

“It’s always been about geopolitics and profit for Meta.”

Few would dispute that the images from Ukraine described in the Meta policy updates — documenting the Russian invasion — are newsworthy, but these documents show that Meta’s whitelisting of material sympathetic to Ukraine has extended even to a graphic state propaganda.

On May 13, 2022, moderators were told not to delete a video posted by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry that included graphic depictions of burnt corpses. “The video very briefly depicts an unidentified charred body lying on the floor,” the update says. “Though video depicting charred or burning people is prohibited by our Violent & Graphic Content policy … the footage is brief and qualifies for a newsworthy exception as per OCP’s guidelines, as it documents an on-going armed conflict.”

Critics pointed to the disparity to question why online speech about war crimes and human rights offenses committed against Europeans seems to warrant special protections while speech referring to abuses committed against others do not.

While Meta seems to side against allowing Palestinian civilians to keep graphic content online, it has intervened in posting about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to keep images live by siding with the occupying Israeli military.

In one instance, Meta took steps to ensure that a depiction of an attack against a member of the Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank was kept up: “An Israeli Border Police officer was struck and lightly wounded by a Molotov cocktail during clashes with Palestinians in Hebron,” an undated memo distributed to moderators reads. “We are making an exception for this particular content to Mark this video as Disturbing.” 

Sometimes what seems right, is not right at all - as always, stay safe!

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