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Meta Takes Down Pro-Palestine Instagram Account With More Than 6 Million Followers

West Asia Edited by Updated: Oct 26, 2023, 3:19 pm
Meta Takes Down Pro-Palestine Instagram Account With More Than 6 Million Followers

Meta Takes Down Instagram Account With More Than 6 Million Followers

As the bloody war between Hamas and Israel rages on, Meta has taken down pro-Palestinian accounts which had millions of followers. Meta said the action was “after detecting a possible hacking attempt”.

The Eye.on.palestine account which had more than six million followers on Instagram went blank on Wednesday. The account focused on projecting the news from Palestine. The back up account of Eye.on.palestine, which is Eye.on.palestine 2 was has also went blank on Wednesday.

Meta said they are trying to reach the owners of the account. Andy Stone, spokesperson of Meta said Meta did not disabled the accounts due the “content they were sharing”. Taking to X (formerly twitter), Mr. Stone said that, “these accounts were initially locked for security reasons after signs of compromise”. He also added that they are working to contact the owners of the account to make sure that “they have access” to their account.

This is not the first time the Facebook, Instagram, and Threads owner has taken down the pro-Palestine accounts. Meta has been hearing criticism since beginning of the war for shadow banning and taking down accounts that has been sharing pro-Palestine contents.

Omer Sulaiman, a prominent Islamic scholar said the move from Meta was “damning and damaging”. He demanded Meta to “stop silencing the Palestinian voices” and to “reinstate” Eye.on.palestine.

Jackson Hinckle, who is an American youtuber also reacted to the ban of Eye.on.palestine and said that it reminded him of the time when Meta has banned Russian news at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Meta was criticized for hiding and banning hashtags like  “FreePalestine”, IStandWithPlaestine”, “Genocide” and messages that share the support for the Palestinians killed  by the Israeli occupation force. Some even had experience of word “terrorist” appearing near their Instagram biographies. According to The Guardian, users having “Palestinian” in their user name along with Palestine flags and Arabic term “alhamdulillah”, which means Praise Be To God, have the word “terrorism” attached to the translation of the Arabic term.

The translation read, “Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom”.  The Meta Spokesperson told The Guardian that Meta sincerely apologise for the mistake and said that “we fixed the problem that briefly caused inappropriate Arabic translation in some of our products”. After the “fixing” Arabic term was translated to “thank God”.

Mr. Stone earlier said that accounts going berserk was because of “bugs” and that “this bugs affected accounts equally around the globe and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content”. He also claimed that Meta has fixed the problem “as quickly as possible”, adhering to the disappearing and hidden contents along with the visibility of the mis translations.

As the war rages on, which can now be called as a genocide, social media is the only way for the civilians of the Palestine to let their voice heard across the world.

Topics
followers Hamas- Israel war hashtags Instagram Meta social media War

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