"Instagram hid a comment it was just three Palestinian flag emojis", 28 October 2023

Numerous users have reported to 7amleh that their comments were moved to the bottom of the comments section and require a click to display. Many of the remarks have something in common: “It often seemed to coincide with having a Palestinian flag in the comment,” 7amleh’s U.S. national organizer Eric Sype told The Intercept.

Users report that Instagram had flagged and hidden comments containing the emoji as “potentially offensive,”... Meta has routinely attributed similar instances of alleged censorship to technical glitches. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed to The Intercept that the company has been hiding comments that contain the Palestinian flag emoji in certain “offensive” contexts that violate the company’s rules. He added that Meta has not created any new policies specific to flag emojis.

Asked about the contexts in which Meta hides the flag, Stone pointed to the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which designates Hamas as a terrorist organization, and cited a section of the community standards rulebook that prohibits any content “praising, celebrating or mocking anyone’s death.” He said Meta does not have different standards for enforcing its rules for the Palestinian flag emoji.

It remains unclear, however, precisely how Meta determines whether the use of the flag emoji is offensive enough to suppress. The Intercept reviewed several hidden comments containing the Palestinian flag emoji that had no reference to Hamas or any other banned group. The Palestinian flag itself has no formal association with Hamas and predates the militant group by decades.

Some of the hidden comments reviewed by The Intercept only contained emojis and no other text.

Faulty Content Moderation

Instagram and Facebook users have taken to other social media platforms to report other instances of censorship. On X, formerly known as Twitter, one user posted that Facebook blocked a screenshot of a popular Palestinian Instagram account he tried to share with a friend via private message. The message was flagged as containing nonconsensual sexual images, and his account was suspended.

Meta’s increasing reliance on automated, software-based content moderation may prevent people from having to sort through extremely disturbing and potentially traumatizing images. The technology, however, relies on opaque, unaccountable algorithms that introduce the potential to misfire, censoring content without explanation. The issue appears to extend to posts related to the Israel–Palestine conflict.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Meta recently dialed down the level of confidence its automated systems require before suppressing “hostile speech” to 25 percent for the Palestinian market, a significant decrease from the standard threshold of 80 percent.

The audit also faulted Meta for implementing a software scanning tool to detect violent or racist incitement in Arabic, but not for posts in Hebrew.

Despite Meta’s claim that the company developed a speech classifier for Hebrew in response to the audit, hostile speech and violent incitement in Hebrew are rampant on Instagram and Facebook, according to 7amleh.

An Instagram search for a Hebrew-language hashtag roughly meaning “erase Gaza” produced dozens of results at the time of publication. Meta could not be immediately reached for comment on the accuracy of its Hebrew speech classifier.

The Wall Street Journal shed light on why hostile speech in Hebrew still appears on Instagram. “Earlier this month,” the paper reported, “the company internally acknowledged that it hadn’t been using its Hebrew hostile speech classifier on Instagram comments because it didn’t have enough data for the system to function adequately.”