Meta, the company founded on the principle of building connectivity and giving people a voice worldwide, did just the opposite last year and enforced speech policies that violated Palestinian’s freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. That assessment, which claims Meta’s policies negatively impacted Palestinian’s basic human rights, didn’t come from a Big Tech critic or angry ex-employee. Rather, it came from a Meta-commissioned human rights assessment.
The report, conducted by the Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) investigates the impact Meta’s actions and policy decisions had during a brief but brutal Israeli military escalation in the Gaza Strip that reportedly left at least 260 people dead and left more than 2,400 housing units reduced to rubble. BSR’s report determined Meta managed to simultaneously over-enforce erroneous content removals and under-enforce truly harmful, violating content.
“Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact…on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” the report reads. “This was reflected in conversations with affected stakeholders, many of whom shared with BSR their view that Meta appears to be another powerful entity repressing their voice that they are helpless to change.”
The BSR report says Meta over-enforced content removal on a higher per-user basis for Arabic-speaking users. That disparity potentially contributed to the silencing of Palestinian voices. At the same time, the report claims Meta’s “proactive detection” rates of potentially violating Arabic content were much higher than that of Hebrew content. While Meta has formed a “hostile speech classifier” for the Arabic language, the same does not exist for Hebrew. That lack of a Hebrew hostile speech classifier, the report argues, may have contributed to an under-enforcement of potentially harmful Hebrew content.
Facebook and Instagram reportedly saw a surge in potentially violating cases up for review at the onset of the conflict. By BSR’s measures, the platforms saw case volume increase by tenfold on peak days. Meta simply didn’t have enough Arabic or Hebrew-speaking staff to deal with that outpouring of cases according to the report.
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“Let’s be perfectly clear: This is just a lengthy PR product with the words ‘Human Rights Report’ printed on the side,” Accountable Tech co-founder Jesse Lehrich told Gizmodo.
