Criticism of the restriction of publications related to Gaza has been expressed on several social media platforms. Instagram has denied claims of censorship.
The pro-Palestinian Eye on Palestine Instagram account with backup accounts has been closed since Wednesday. The account with the same name has also disappeared Elon Musk’s in the owned X message service. The matter was reported, among other things, by an American NBC News.
The accounts published photo and video material from Gaza. The main Instagram account had around 6.1 million followers at the time of closure.
According to NBC, the identity of the administrators of the accounts is not publicly known, and the authenticity of the material has mostly not been able to be confirmed. The Instagram account was temporarily closed also a year ago because of an alleged rule violation.
Communications manager of Meta, which owns Instagram by Andy Stone according to which both accounts have now been closed due to a suspected data breach.
– We are trying to contact the account administrators to ensure that their access rights are restored. We did not close the accounts because of their content, Stone commented the reporter To Yashar Ali in X.
Stone said later on Thursday, that the administrators’ access rights had been restored. Neither account could be seen until after 14:00 Finnish time on Friday.
Various social media platforms have been accused of restricting pro-Palestinian publications since the start of the Hamas offensive. Mashable online magazine according to the Instagram users we interviewed, their updates about the situation in Gaza received significantly fewer impressions than other posts.
About a week ago, it also emerged that the word “terrorist” ended up in the user descriptions of certain Palestinian, Arabic-language Instagram accounts in an automatic translation. According to Instagram it was a technical error.
In addition to Facebook and Instagram owned by Meta, X and the Chinese Tiktok are also accused of censoring updates about Palestine. The restrictions allegedly also apply to updates that cannot be classified as disinformation or fake news.
The phenomenon is suspected to be about shadow banning, where the visibility of publications is restricted in secret from users.
Similar activity has been suspected in the past, for example publications related to sexual minorities under. Instagram representatives have denied the accusations of shadow censorship.
Corrected on October 27, 2023 at 8:56 p.m.: Gaza is not the capital of Palestine, as the article previously stated.
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