By Palestine Chronicle Staff  

“During a period of war, audience engagement might be expected to rise. However, the data showed a 77% decline after 7 October 2023.”

The Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram severely restricted the reach of Palestinian news outlets since October 2023, according to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Analysis of Facebook data by the broadcaster found that newsrooms in Gaza and the West Bank had “suffered a steep drop in audience engagement” in that period. Leaked documents meanwhile showed that Instagram “increased its moderation of Palestinian user comments after October 2023.”

https://twitter.com/AdameMedia/status/1869640986273735056

BBC News Arabic analyzed Facebook engagement data from 20 prominent Palestinian news organizations in the year leading up to the October 7 resistance operation and in the year since, said the report.

“During a period of war, audience engagement might be expected to rise. However, the data showed a 77% decline after 7 October 2023,” the report stated.

‘Shadow-Banned’

Statistics shared by Palestine TV, which has 5.8 million followers on Facebook, showed a 60 percent drop in the number of people viewing their posts.

“Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people,” Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel, said.

The BBC also tested the claim by Palestinian journalists that their online content was being “shadow-banned” by Meta, meaning a deliberate restriction of views.

“To test this, we carried out the same data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organizations such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13,” the report said. “These pages also posted a large amount of war-related content, but their audience engagement increased by nearly 37%.”

Arabic Mistranslation

Palestinians and human rights groups have previously accused Meta of “failing to moderate online activity fairly,” said the BBC.

According to an independent report commissioned by the company in 2021, this was not deliberate “but because of a lack of Arabic-speaking expertise among moderators. Words and phrases were being interpreted as offensive or violent, when they were in fact innocuous.”

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An example was the Arabic phrase “Alhamdulillah”, which means “Praise be to God,” This was” sometimes being auto-translated as ‘Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom’.”

To see if this “explained the decline in engagement” with Palestinian outlets, the BBC carried out the same study on Facebook pages for 30 major Arabic-language news sources based elsewhere, such as Sky News Arabia and Al-Jazeera, the report noted.

“However, these pages saw an average increase in engagement of nearly 100%,” said the report.

Algorithm Adjusted

The BBC reported that Meta said any implication that it “deliberately suppressed” particular voices is “unequivocally false.”

The broadcaster interviewed five former and current employees of Meta regarding the company’s policies on individual Palestinian users.

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One individual, speaking anonymously, shared leaked internal documents revealing an adjustment made to Instagram’s algorithm.

“Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive towards Palestinian people,” he reportedly said.

Internal communications showed that an engineer raised concerns about the order, “worried that it could be ‘introducing a new bias into the system against Palestinian users’.”

Meta confirmed it took the measure but said it was necessary due to a “spike in hateful content” coming out of the Palestinian territories.

The company said those policy changes put in place at the start of Israel’s current onslaught on Gaza, “had now been reversed, but did not say when this happened.”

(The Palestine Chronicle)