Social media giant, Meta, has said it will be blocking all pro-Hamas posts across its platforms as the European Union mounts pressure on social media companies over rising disinformation.
Announcing its response to the Israel-Hamas conflict and the information being shared on social media, Meta said it has removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of content in Hebrew or Arabic within the first three days of the attack.
The Mark Zuckerberg company said it is also temporarily expanding its violence and incitement policy and removing content that clearly identifies hostages taken by Hamas, even if it is being done to condemn or raise awareness of their situation.
Following the attack, Hamas has taken scores of Israeli and foreign hostages to the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.
Meta said it was aware of Hamas’ threats to broadcast footage of the hostages and it would swiftly remove any such content and prevent copies from being re-shared.
Hamas is barred from all Meta platforms
While noting that Hamas has been designated by the US government as both a Foreign Terrorist Organisation and Specially Designated Global Terrorists, Meta said the group is also designated under its ‘Dangerous Organizations and Individuals’ policy.
- “This means Hamas is banned from our platforms, and we remove praise and substantive support of them when we become aware of it while continuing to allow social and political discourse — such as news reporting, human rights-related issues, or academic, neutral and condemning discussion.
- “We want to reiterate that our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping people safe on our apps. We apply these policies regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs, and it is never our intention to suppress a particular community or point of view.
- “Given the higher volumes of content being reported to us, we know content that doesn’t violate our policies may be removed in error.
- “To mitigate this, for some violations we are temporarily removing content without strikes, meaning these content removals won’t cause accounts to be disabled.
- “We also continue to provide tools for users to appeal our decisions if they think we made a mistake.”
X on the spotlight
With Meta coming out boldly to announce its decisions against Hamas, attention will now be on Elon Musk’s X to follow suit. X has been on the radar of the European Union in recent times as the platform has been accused of allowing a lot of disinformation and being used by Hamas to push their propaganda.
While Meta’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino had responded to the EU’s concern over the issue, her response did not provide concrete action plans as Meta has done.
Rather, X highlighted what it has been doing to minimize disinformation with its Community Note feature and how it had removed hundreds of thousands of posts found to have violated its policies.