Facebook appoints ex-Israel official to its Oversight Board

Facebook’s recent appointment to its Oversight Board of a former Israeli official with a history of tracking Palestinians on social media has raised concern over its neutrality on occupied Palestine.

Emi Palmor, Israel’s former Justice Ministry director-general, was appointed to the 20-member Oversight Board last month, fuelling concerns over further escalation on the clamp-down of Palestinian free speech.

The Board, described by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as Facebook’s “Supreme Court”, will have a mandate to take “final and binding decisions on whether specific content should be allowed or removed” from Facebook and also Instagram, which is owned by the social media giant.

In her five-year stint at the Israeli Justice Ministry, working alongside Ayelet Shaked, a member of the extreme rightist Jewish Home party led by Naftali Bennett, Palmor is said to have set about tracking Palestinians on social media.

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Palmor, according to Jean Stern a contributor to Amnesty International’s magazine La Chronique, saw the creation of “Cyber Unit” in 2016 which was used to supress, limit and suspend Palestinian content on Facebook.

Thousands of accounts are said to have been targeted. Adalah, the Palestinian human rights organisation based in Haifa, is reported saying in an article by Stern in the New Arab that the cyber-patrol “deliberately targeted and suppressed tens of thousands of Palestinian posts, imposing severe restrictions on freedom of expression and opinion, especially when it concerns Palestine.”

According to Adalah, in 2017, the second year of Palmor’s Cyber Unit, the number of takedowns shot up by 500 percent. In 2018, 14,285 takedowns were registered. At the same period there didn’t appear to be similar attempts to clamp down on incitement against Palestinians. Despite anti-Palestinian messaging increasing to one in every 66 seconds, the Cyber Unit led by Palmor appears to have had turned a blind eye.

Several Palestinian groups have denounced Palmor’s role in what they described as “muzzling freedom of expression and censoring human rights defenders, especially Palestinian, Arab and Muslim voices”.

The Oversight Board, financed by a trust fund set up by the multinational, and endowed with $130 million, is said to be entirely independent from Facebook. It will have the power to rule on a demand by a user to see some content removed, or by another appealing the removal of a post by the Facebook moderators. The body can also make “recommendations” on what type of content should be taken down.

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In May, Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Tawakkol Karma, was appointed to the Board’s 20-member body. There are plans to eventually increase the number of members to 40.

Facebook’s appointment of Palmor is likely to be seen as further evidence that the social media giant has adopted an anti-Palestinian stance. Earlier this month it came under strong criticism for blocking the accounts of Palestinian activists.

London-based think tank ImpACT  International for Human Rights Policies, found that Facebook was closing millions of accounts in the Middle East and North Africa region, calling it an early sign of failure of the company’s newly appointed oversight board.