Facebook blames technical bug after pro-Palestinian posts see reduced engagement

With social media posts vanishing and story reach dropping off a cliff, some Palestinian supporters say they think Facebook has suppressedcontent related to recent violence in the Middle East.The social media giant blamed a technical issue for impacting how users were able to share information.

While fightingbetween Israel and Hamasin the Gaza Strip raged in May, many people took to social media to voice their views onthe conflict.

Former biomedical engineer turned chef Reem Ahmedwas one of them. The Toronto-based social media influencertold CBC News that once she started posting about the violence last month, she noticed an "enormous" drop in her online engagement with followers.

"My voice was basically getting blocked," she said.

With 49,000 followers on Instagram, Ahmed was used to routinely seeing 5,000 to 6,000 views on her stories. But once she started posting about deathsin Gaza and humanitarian aid for Palestinians, that number plummeted down under 100.

"I just felt like there was something off," she said. Facebook is the parent company of Instagram.

"So what does that mean? It means my engagement is dead, because I chose to speak about something that is humanitarian and important?"

Bissan Daoudi, a Palestinian living in Toronto,told CBC News she experienced something similar, though on an innocuous Instagram post. In 2019, she visited her husband's family in the West Bank, and shot some video in the area.

She then posted those videos in highlights on her Instagram profile, categorized by country. One was labelled "Palestine/Jordan, 2019."

Last week, she went onto her profile and was shocked to see those stories had been removed from her highlights.

"I was really upset. I just didn't understand why they would remove something like that," Daoudi said. "There was nothing political in there whatsoever, and they had no right to remove my highlights from my stories."

Facebook apologizes

Facebook said in an emailed statement that "an error temporarily restricted content from being viewed on the Al-Aqsa Mosque hashtag page," which some pro-Palestinian commentators had been using for their posts on last month's violence.

"We know there have been several issues that have impacted people's ability to share on our apps, including a technical bug that affected Stories around the world," a Facebook spokesperson said.

"While these have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place. We're so sorry to everyone who felt they couldn't bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice.

"This was never our intention nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view. Our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping them safe on our apps, and we apply these policies equally, regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs."

The company did not say whether pro-Israeli posts or other Middle East content were impacted by the issue.

"We have a dedicated team, which includes Arabic and Hebrew speakers, closely monitoring the situation on the ground, who are focused on making sure we're removing harmful content, while addressing any enforcement errors as quickly as possible," Facebook's spokesperson said.

Shadow banning less obvious than deleting of posts

Some pro-Palestinian activists said their posts hadbeen "shadow banned," a method of blocking online content in a way that, unlike when content is deleted by social media companies, is noteasily apparent to a user.

Mitch Joel, president of Montreal-based digital advisory company Six Pixels Group, told CBC News that shadow banning is "an opaque concept."

"You don't know that it's happening. It's hard to see or be sure," Joel said. "But essentially, you're seeing a decrease in either your traffic, followers, people connecting and liking something, and/or your content isn't showing up in the algorithm as much."

It basically amounts to a person or algorithm seeing content or a user that is deemed somehow problematic, and so their access to an audience is limited, he said.

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Political motivations versus 'turning the volume down'

The most recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, began last month when tensions escalated over an ongoing legal battle betweenJewish settlers andseveral Palestinian families under threat of forced evictiontheir homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem.

Israeli forces subsequentlyclashed with Palestinian protesters in the Al-AqsaMosque compound, which is part of a holy sitein Jerusalem's Old City revered by both Muslims and Jews, and Hamas retaliated by firing rockets at Israel.

A ceasefire was reached after 11 days of fighting, during which Hamasfired over 4,000 rockets at Israeli cities, with hundreds falling short and most of the rest intercepted, and Israelconductedhundreds of airstrikesagainst Gaza that it saidtargeted Hamasinfrastructure.

The Associated Press reported that at least 254 people werekilledin Gaza, including 67 children and 39 women, according to the Gaza health ministry. Hamas has acknowledged the deaths of 80 militants. Twelve civilians, including two children, werekilledin Israel, along with one soldier.

Joel said users may have found issues with their posts because social media platforms could be looking to "turn the volume down" on a specific topic or area.

"They might feel that it's overtaking the general feed," he said.

Political motivations could be at play as well, Joel said.

"Absolutely, it could be political, too, depending on the platform and what they're trying to bring out into the world," he said.

The issue has popped up in relation to other causes, too. Last month, a group called Women in Canada which isconnectedto the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) movement were questioningwhy their social media posts similarly disappeared.