A Look at Israel's Control of Facebook

  Aljazeera Television in a program revealed the dimensions of cooperation between the Israeli Intelligence and Internal Security Service (Shin Bet) and Facebook to remove content that the Shin Bet wanted. Al Jazeera journalists created two Facebook pages in Arabic and Hebrew and revealed the many contradictions in Facebook's handling of the content of both pages.

While Facebook has removed and restricted posts by Palestinians and Palestinian-related content, the company has never banned or restricted inflammatory posts in Hebrew calling for the murder of Arabs. Even content that clearly contains terrorism is never restricted on Facebook. Facebook's double standards towards content related to Palestine and the Zionist regime have made Palestinian Arabs and users of news related to Palestine face real censorship and discriminatory treatment on this social network.

Shin Bet Arik Barbing, former head of the Shin Bet cyber unit, confirmed cooperation with Facebook to remove anti-Zionist content. The Shin Bet cyber unit's report shows that the social network Facebook has received and complied with repeated requests from the organization to remove posts with Palestinian content. Julie Awana, a member of the supervisory board of Meta (Facebook's parent company) in an interview with Al Jazeera said, "We have confirmed excessive restrictions on Arabic and Palestinian content and we are working to change this practice,". This is not the first time Facebook has been accused of taking action against Palestine.

Until 2012, Israeli military censorship was limited to traditional media, but since then, the Zionist military's cyber unit has included control over new media on its agenda. Currently, many technology companies in Israel are involved in espionage on the internet, and many multinational companies, including Facebook, cooperate with Israeli companies in this regard. Most of these companies belong to people affiliated with the 8200 unit of Israel's military intelligence branch and have received training in cyber attacks. In 2016, the Spanish website Tele Sardar revealed the introduction of high-ranking Israeli officials to the Facebook organization and wrote: The Israeli Minister's first advisor has officially joined one of Facebook's leadership teams. Jordan Clutter, chief of staff at the Israeli embassy in Washington, now serves as head of policy and communications for Facebook's Israel office.

In early 2017, after Facebook closed more than 100 pages and user accounts associated with figures and people in Gaza, Hamas announced that the network was working in line with Israel's interests and goals. In early 2018, after Delfin Riar, Facebook's director of policy in Southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, visited the region, the social network Facebook blocked the official page of the Palestinian news agency Safa, which has 1.3 million followers, without any explanation. In December 2020, Facebook also closed a Palestinian refugee-related page that had more than 100,000 followers and never announced why. Now, with recent revelations, it is clear that the shutdown of these pages in recent years was all done at the request of Israel's Shin Bet.

In 2021, the company removed a number of Palestinian activist pages. These Palestinian activists exposed the crimes of the Zionist regime on Facebook and opposed the normalization of relations with the regime, but suddenly their user pages were not available. After this action, Facebook did not provide convincing reasons for the Palestinian activists regarding the closure of their page. These cases show that the war between Palestine and the Zionists is not only limited to the land arena, other phases of the war are also taking place in the cyber arena, and the scope of the efforts of the Zionist regime to exert influence on this new media shows that the activities of Palestinian users are also very broad. And the Palestinian people and their supporters have also made every effort to turn the threats posed by these media into opportunities to support Palestine. (MF)