TechScape: Are social media giants silencing online content?

As the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas and its devastating effects play out in real time on social media, users are continuing to criticise tech firms for what they say is unfair content censorship – pulling into sharp focus longstanding concerns about the opaque algorithms that shape our online worlds. From the early days of the conflict, social media users have expressed outrage at allegedly uneven censorship of pro-Palestinian content on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Meta has denied intentionally suppressing the content, saying that with more posts going up about the conflict, "content that doesn't violate our policies may be removed in error". But a third-party investigation (commissioned by Meta last year and conducted by the independent consultancy Business for Social Responsibility) had previously determined Meta had violated Palestinian human rights by censoring content related to Israel's attacks on Gaza in 2021, and incidents in recent weeks have revealed further issues with Meta's algorithmic moderation. Instagram's automated translation feature mistakenly added the word "terrorist" to Palestinian profiles and WhatsApp, also owned by Meta, created auto-generated illustrations of gun-wielding children when prompted with the word "Palestine".