Facebook’s solidarity with Ukraine is impressive. Now extend it to others

I wrote this essay for The Guardian about how our powerful tech platforms like Facebook and Instagram act very differently when people make even mild criticisms of, say, the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Last week, we learned that Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – had temporarily changed its rules to allow certain posts calling for violence to remain on its platforms. Users of Facebook and Instagram who live in countries close to Ukraine would be permitted to post calls for violence against Russian soldiers and even for the deaths of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko – though without specifics of location or method, the company stipulated.

“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders’. We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” Meta said in a statement (which was followed this week with an update to clarify that “calls for the death of a head of state” would also be outside the permitted scope).

Meta may be the biggest social media company to make changes to its operations, though it’s hardly the only one. You won’t find any Russian state-funded media videos on YouTube any longer, as Google, YouTube’s parent company, has blocked access to any channel that hosts those videos. TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, announced that it would block livestreaming and uploading of new content in Russia after the Kremlin passed a new law criminalizing what it considers to be “fake” news about its invasion of Ukraine. But Meta’s announcement, which has the company allowing more content rather than less, sets it apart from the others.

In some ways, this brazen announcement is a welcome one, but not for its encouragement of violence. (The use of violence here is at bottom a moral question, though the right to armed resistance against a belligerent occupation is generally recognized under international law.) Meta’s statement is welcome because it clarifies something that many of us have already known for some time. When it comes to political speech, Facebook’s policies have never been applied evenly.

Palestinians know this double standard better than most. Last May, when the Israeli government was seeking to forcibly uproot Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, protests broke out on the streets of Jerusalem and on screens across the world. Facebook and Instagram were hardly neutral spaces for information-sharing during this period, and Facebook was definitely not on the side of the occupied in that situation.

“Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a scathing report issued in October 2021. The suppressed speech that Human Rights Watch refers to was not even violent speech. Often, it was simply “reposts of content from mainstream news organizations” by Palestinians.

“In one instance,” the report says, “Instagram removed a screenshot of headlines and photos from three New York Times opinion articles for which the Instagram user added commentary that urged Palestinians to ‘never concede’ their rights. The post did not transform the material in any way that could reasonably be construed as incitement to violence or hatred.”

All in all, social media watchdog groups found more than 700 examples of content being deleted, hashtags being hidden, accounts being closed, archived content being deleted, and more. Facebook and Instagram, the report notes, accounted for 85% of those restrictions…

Read the rest here.