SUPREME COURT FREEZES DECISION BARRING US GOV'T PRESSURE ON SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES

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As Israel continues to kill thousands of Palestinians in what its leader vowed was "mighty vengeance" for last week's deadly Hamas attack, an information battle for public opinion rages on social media. In that battle, the social media giant Instagram is, once again, siding with Israel and censoring pro-Palestinian posts but not pro-Israeli ones. 

"After posting an Instagram story about the war in Gaza yesterday, my account was shadowbanned," New York Times investigative journalist Azmat Khan reported on X, the Internet public square formerly known as Twitter.

"Many colleagues and journalists friends have reported the same," Khan added.

Artist and writer Molly Crabapple also reported being shadowbanned by Instagram.

"My account just got shadow banned because I shared a post about the West Bank from @democracynow," she wrote in a subsequent, uncensored Instagram post. 

"This sort of censorship is one of the many ways that social media shuts people up about Palestine," Crabapple added.

A "shadowbanned" account can’t livestream and won't be shown by the platform to "nonfollowers," messages from Instagram to Crabapple say. The "account and content won't appear in places like Explore, Search, Suggested Users, Reels and Feed Recommendations."

Crabapple said it threatened her livelihood: "As an artist I rely on Instagram as a major way to sell my work, and this clearly hurts my ability to do that."

Khan, the journalist, called Instagram's censorship "an extraordinary threat to the flow of information and credible journalism about an unprecedented war…"

The Arab News is also reporting Instagram is censoring pro-Palestinian posts.

Instagram is owned by Meta, controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp.

This is not the first time Meta has censored pro-Palestinian content and shadowbanned accounts posting it.

During the 2021 Israel-Palestinian Crisis, Instagram removed posts and blocked hashtags identifying al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem—Islam’s third most-sacrosanct place—because the corporation's computers mistakenly identified it as a terrorist organization, according to internal Meta documents shared with BuzzFeed News. 

Ultimately, Meta and Twitter admitted they "wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts related to the crisis," the Washington Post reported. "The companies blamed the errors on glitches in artificial intelligence software." 

Human Rights Watch called this excuse "insufficient." It failed to "address the scale and scope of reported content restrictions, or adequately explain why they occurred in the first place.”

Meanwhile, on July 4 this year, Federal judge Terry Doughty found Meta likely colluded with the US government to mount "the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history." Doing so created "an almost dystopian scenario." The US "Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'"

“Social-media platforms once provided ‘the most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard,’” Elizabeth Murrill, Louisiana’s solicitor general, wrote in the legal brief Louisiana filed in the case. “Under pressure of federal censorship, that is no longer true—a situation that is intolerable to the First Amendment.” 

“They pressure the companies to censor disfavored viewpoints,” Murrill wrote. In so doing, they stifle “some of the greatest debates of our time.” 

Judge Doughty issued a wide-ranging injunction barring US government officials from communicating with Meta and other social media corporations. His ruling was largely upheld by a federal appeals court but his injunction was lifted by the Supreme Court on Sept. 14.

Besides the US, Israel also aggressively pressures social media companies to censor posts, according to Human Rights Watch. 

The Free Lance observed Instagram's censorship in real time.

While Instagram shadowbanned Kahn and Crabapple, it published advertisements for Israeli atrocity propaganda (the Hamas Trail of Terror virtual tour), regular Israeli propaganda (“Jews are the ancestral indigenous people of the land of Israel…”) and Israeli war bonds. The ads, pictured below, all appeared in The Free Lance's feed on Sunday.

Meanwhile, an even more insidious form of censorship revealed itself Monday morning. That's when several posts from Friday sharing information about a planned protest Friday evening in New York appeared (see below). The delayed appearance of the posts prevented The Free Lance from attending the protest, if it wanted to. If it happened to The Free Lance, it likely happened to others too.

By delaying the delivery of protest flyers, Meta not only censored information, it violated another First Amendment right: the right to protest, right here in the US. 

Meta was invited to comment by email, but did not respond.

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