Meta announces removal of content targeting Zionists in significant anti-Palestinian policy change

Meta has announced that it will begin removing more content targeting Zionists across its platforms like Facebook and Instagram “when it is not explicitly about the political movement”, in what appears to be the latest manifestation of the social media giant’s opposition to pro-Palestinian content.

In a blog post this week, Meta stated that “We will now remove speech targeting ‘Zionists’ in several areas where our process showed that the speech tends to be used to refer to Jews and Israelis with dehumanising comparisons, calls for harm, or denials of existence.”

Saying that it had long treated the term ‘Zionist’ “as a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people in two narrow circumstances: (1) where Zionists are compared to rats, reflecting known anti-Semitic imagery, and (2) where context makes clear that “Zionist” means ‘Jew’ or “Israeli’”, the company will now expand that perspective to further interpretations of the label.

It highlighted that those circumstances do not “sufficiently address the ways people are using the term ‘Zionist’ online and offline”. It means, essentially, that all mention or condemnation of the Zionist movement will be held in suspicion of being directly anti-Semitic until proven otherwise, making it liable for removal.

According to Meta, the decision is the result of feedback from “global stakeholders”, user research, and academic literature, stating that its “policies evolve over time based on our due diligence, including feedback from these meetings and other inputs such as changes in social norms, language or product updates”.

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