Meta censored me over Palestine. Again.

Facebook's moderation system has taken down 'Kick Israel Out Of Eurovision' as 'hateful conduct'

This underlines how the content moderation of Meta is:

a) rigged in favour of pro-Israel narratives

and

b) dripping with anti-Palestinian racism.

On Facebook, Meta just took down the link of my preview image for my 'Kick Israel Out Of Eurovision' video.

Why? For 'Hateful conduct':

According to Meta, demanding Israel's removal from Eurovision - because of the genocide it is committing against the Palestinian people - is 'Hateful conduct' as defined here:

Would Meta’s content moderation have taken down ‘Kick Russia out of Eurovision’ when Ukraine was invaded, before the decision was taken? (To be fair, such a campaign would have been short-lived, given it took a day to take such a decision).

Did demanding Russia’s expulsion from the contest qualify as “calling for the segregation of a group of people based on who they are” or “calling for people from certain groups to be expelled, or saying that they are not allowed”?

Clearly this demand was not anti-Russian bigotry - whatever Putin’s spokespeople claim about “Russophobia” - but a recognition that a state committing grievous war crimes should be able to use an international music contest as a PR exercise.

The racism here needs to be understood. The value of Ukrainian life is rightly centred in discussions about Russia. This is why Russia’s removal from Eurovision was in no way controversial in the vast majority of European countries. But Palestinian life is treated as having almost not worth, and so Israel’s mass butchery and destruction of Gaza can simply be dismissed, with demands for action against Israel portrayed as a hate campaign. This is an example of how the world has been turned on its head since the genocide began.

Meta claim that “We use the same rules around the world for everyone.” Is that so? Where is the evidence that content demanding legitimate action is taken against Russia because of its war crimes is being removed?

Just last month, my Instagram account was shut down for violating their “Community Standards on dangerous individuals and organisations.” This was a nonsense, and it was reinstated.

But the evidence of Meta engaging in massive censorship against pro-Palestine content is overwhelming.

In December 2023, a report by Human Rights Watch concluded that:

the censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic and global. Meta’s inconsistent enforcement of its own policies led to the erroneous removal of content about Palestine.

In December 2024, a study by BBC Arabic, BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring found Meta had “severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience” since Israel’s genocide began in October 2023.

And last month, Drop Site News got hold of internal Meta data, which found:

A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel

Indeed, they found that Meta had complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel since 7th October 2023.

Obviously I have appealed against Meta’s censorship. But as we can see, the company is engaged in massive and egregious censorship in the literal direct service of Israel. This is, of course, an example of genocidal complicity.

I’m honoured to have been shortlisted for Amnesty’s People’s Choice Award. If you want to support the work we’ve been doing covering Israel’s genocide, you can vote here.