Ferras Hamad said that the corporation was biased against employees who supported Palestine and accused the company of being biased.
Through a lawsuit, Ferras Hamad, who had previously worked as an engineer with Meta’s machine learning team, has claimed that the company terminated his employment due to the manner in which he handled Instagram posts that were related to Palestine. According to Reuters, he is alleging that the corporation has discriminated against Palestinians, brought about unjust terminations, and displayed a pattern of intolerance against Palestinians. Hamad stated that he observed procedural inconsistencies in the manner in which the company handled limits on content provided by Palestinian Instagram personalities. These restrictions prevented the content from appearing in feeds and searches created by the company. The firing of this individual in February appears to have been precipitated by a specific incident that involved a brief video depicting a structure in Gaza that had been destroyed.
It was revealed by Hamad that the film, which was captured by Motaz Azaiza, a Palestinian photojournalist, had been incorrectly categorized as pornographic prior to its discovery. After receiving conflicting directions over whether or not he was authorized to assist in the resolution of the issue, he eventually received written confirmation that assisting in the troubleshooting of the issue was a part of his responsibilities. After a month had passed, however, it was alleged that Hamad was informed that he was the focus of an investigation. In response, he filed a complaint of internal discrimination; nonetheless, he was terminated a few days later and informed that the reason for his termination was that he had violated a regulation that prevents employees from working on issues that involve accounts of people they personally know. The Palestinian-American Hamad has refuted the notion that he was acquainted with Azaiza on a personal level.
During the course of the case, Hamad not only detailed the sequence of events that led to his termination, but he also accused the corporation of deleting internal communication amongst employees who were discussing the deaths of their relatives in Gaza. The employees who use the Palestinian flag emoji were also subjected to an investigation; however, those employees who had previously posted both the Israeli flag and the Ukrainian flag in situations that were comparable were not given to the same level of scrutiny.
Even before the assaults that Hamas carried out against Israel on October 7, Meta has been accused of censoring posts that express sympathy for Palestine. A letter was written by Senator Elizabeth Warren to Mark Zuckerberg at the end of the previous year, in which she expressed her worry on the fact that a large number of Instagram users were accusing the firm of “shadowbanning” them for posting about the situation in Gaza. The Oversight Board of Meta made a decision in the previous year that the company’s tools had erased a video that had been uploaded to Instagram. The video showed the aftermath of a strike that had been carried out on the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza during Israel’s ground offensive efforts. In more recent times, the board has initiated an investigation to investigate cases that involve posts on Facebook that contain the phrase “from the river to the sea.” A statement regarding Hamad’s complaint has been requested from Meta, and we will update this post as soon as we receive a response from them.