CENSORSHIP OF PRO-PALESTINIAN VOICES AND VIEWPOINTS ON INSTAGRAM CONTINUES

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In response to extensive reporting published yesterday by The Free Lance, the New York Times and others that Instagram is censoring pro-Palestinian voices, the social media giant blamed an unspecified glitch that “affected accounts equally around the globe."

It "had nothing to do with the subject matter or the content," Andy Stone, spokesman for Meta, the corporation that owns Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, claimed in a post on X, the Internet public square formerly known as Twitter.

While Stone claimed Meta fixed the glitch "as quickly as possible," Meta admitted in a statement published on its corporate website last week that special measures put in place last week would result in continued censorship: "Given the higher volumes of content being reported to us, we know content that doesn’t violate our policies may be removed in error."

Meta also admitted removing 795,000 posts since Palestinian militia attacked Israel October 7. It says the censored posts violated its rules against Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, Violent and Graphic Content, Hate Speech, Violence and Incitement, Bullying and Harassment and Coordinating Harm. 

Meta's blaming of a "glitch" for censorship of pro-Palestinian posts on its flagship social media platform is the exact same excuse it gave when it censored pro-Palestinian posts in 2021. Ultimately, Meta admitted it "wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts" and "blamed the errors on glitches," the Washington Post reported. 

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

While Instagram censored pro-Palestinian voices and viewpoints since the attack , it freely pushed Israeli propaganda, examples of which are documented in yesterday's Free Lance report. Instagram is not just squelching pro-Palestinian voices. Its favoring Israel in its ongoing information war against the Palestinians. 

While taking some responsibility for the censorship, Meta also blamed "higher volumes of content being reported to us."

Both Israel and the US are known to pressure social media companies to suppress disfavored viewpoints, as reported by The Free Lance yesterday. Just this year, in fact, a federal judge found Meta likely colluded with the US government to mount "the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history." The US "Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth,'" the court ruled.

Thousands of posts and accounts were impacted by Instagram's censorship this time, the New York Times reported yesterday

Mashable documented more. It also detailed hacks users devised to neutralize censorship. These countermeasures include incorporating hashtags promoting Israel, using screenshots instead of posts, replacing letters in key words with asterisks and embedding GIFs of Israeli flags.

"Social media companies must ensure the respect and protection of Palestinian voices on their platforms," a collective of Arab human rights and civil society groups said in an Oct. 13. statement. "More particularly, tech companies should refrain from being actively involved in the ongoing silencing of atrocities committed against the Palestinian people."

Meanwhile, the censorship of pro-Palestinian voices by Instagram continues, according to a search of "Instagram censorship" and these posts on Twitter.

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