Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American and former engineer at Meta, has filed a lawsuit against the social media company, alleging bias in its handling of content related to the Gaza war. Mr. Hamad claims he was wrongfully terminated in February for attempting to address bugs that suppressed Palestinian Instagram posts. The lawsuit, filed in a California state court, accuses Meta of demonstrating a pattern of bias against Palestinians.<\/p>\n
Hamad’s lawsuit alleges that Meta deleted internal employee communications mentioning the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and initiated investigations into employees’ use of the Palestinian flag emoji, while no such scrutiny was applied to those using Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis. These allegations reflect criticisms by human rights groups regarding Meta’s content moderation practices concerning Israel and Palestinian territories, as highlighted in a 2021 external investigation commissioned by Meta.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, nearly 200 Meta employees echoed Hamad’s concerns in an open letter addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company leaders. The dismissal of Hamad reportedly stemmed from an incident involving a “site event” (SEV), during which he noticed irregularities in the handling of restrictions on content posted by Palestinian Instagram personalities, preventing their posts from appearing in searches and feeds.<\/p>\n
Hamad’s complaint outlines an instance where a video posted by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza was incorrectly classified as pornographic. He alleges receiving conflicting guidance about the status of the SEV and his authorization to resolve it. Following an internal investigation into Hamad, he filed a discrimination complaint. However, he was terminated shortly afterward by Meta, citing a policy violation that prohibits employees from working on issues with accounts of people they know personally, a claim Hamad denies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American and former engineer at Meta, has filed a lawsuit against the social media company, alleging bias in its handling of content related to the Gaza war. Mr. Hamad claims he was wrongfully terminated in February for attempting to address bugs that suppressed Palestinian Instagram posts. The lawsuit, filed in a California […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":33707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173,249],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33704"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33710,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33704\/revisions\/33710"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}