Yesterday, Tuesday, a former engineer at Meta company filed a lawsuit against the social media giant in a California court because it fired him over content related to the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, accusing it of bias against the Palestinians.
Engineer Firas Hamad – a Palestinian-American who has been a member of the machine learning team at Meta since 2021 – accused the company of bias in the way it deals with content related to the war on Gaza.
Hamad confirmed in the lawsuit that Meta fired him because he tried to help fix the errors that caused Palestinian posts to be blocked on the Instagram application.
He also accused her of discrimination, terminating his service without legal justification, and other violations due to his dismissal last February, and of being biased against Palestinians.
Hamad also said that the company deleted internal employee communications that touched on the death of relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of images of the Palestinian flag, which it did not do with those who used the Israeli flag.
Wrong classifications
The lawsuit indicated that Hamad noticed violations related to restrictions imposed on content published by Palestinian figures on Instagram, which prevented posts from appearing in searches.
In this regard, Hamad said that he noticed that a video of a destroyed building in Gaza published by journalist Moataz Azaizeh was mistakenly classified as “pornographic.”
It is noteworthy that the “Meta” company has blocked and deleted content supportive of the Palestinian cause since last October 7, and this is not the first time that the company has restricted Palestinian content. In 2021, it restricted content supportive of Palestine, and linked it to “incitement and hate speech,” which Last May of that year, it prompted Human Rights Watch to confirm that Instagram had deleted pro-Palestine photos, videos, and comments.