“There was no explanation, no warning,” Tamer Almisshal said. The Al Jazeera Arabic presenter had found his verified Facebook profile deleted by Meta, 24 hours after his programme aired an investigation into how the company treats Palestinian content.
The programme is called Tip of the Iceberg, and the episode, “The Locked Space,” went out on Friday. The profile was his personal page, which he opened in 2006 and which had at least 700,000 followers. Al Jazeera asked Facebook why it was shut down without prior warning or explanation and had received no reply by the time of publication.
Almisshal did not hide his suspicion. “It really does seem like some kind of revenge for the programme,” he told Al Jazeera. He said nothing on the page had ever been flagged, and no message had told him he had broken a rule. Facebook had restricted his account the previous March, he added, and that had happened on other occasions, “but usually the situation is resolved.”
What the episode found
The investigation featured Eric Barbing, a former head of Israel’s cybersecurity apparatus. He described how his organisation tracked Palestinian content using criteria that included “liking” a photo of a Palestinian killed by Israeli forces. The agency would then approach Facebook and argue the material should come down. By Barbing’s account, Facebook usually went along with such requests, and Israel’s security apparatus followed up cases, going to court where necessary.
Human and digital rights experts interviewed for the programme agreed there was a distinct imbalance in how Palestinian content is restricted. Julie Owono, a member of Facebook’s oversight board, conceded that rules are interpreted and applied inconsistently to such content. She said recommendations to correct this had been sent to Facebook.
The team also ran its own test. It built two pages, one with a pro-Palestinian perspective and one pro-Israeli, and ran trials on both. Its conclusion was that scrutiny and the application of rules differed substantially between the two.
A journalist singled out
Almisshal says he gave Meta the chance to respond. “This was a journalistically sound project, and we communicated with Meta for it, giving them the opportunity to speak during the investigation,” he said. “But to target a journalist individually instead, I would never have expected that.”
Al Jazeera noted that it is not clear why Facebook would delete an individual’s page in response to a programme. Doha News reported on September 11 that the account had since been restored.
Sources
- Meta deletes Al Jazeera presenter’s profile after show criticising Israel
- Meta deletes Al Jazeera journalist profile following expose investigating their censorship of Palestinian content
