Instagram has declared one of the holiest mosques in Islam a terrorist organization

Instagram removed the messages and blocked hashtags about one of Islam’s holiest mosques because its content moderation system mistakenly linked the site to the company’s designation for terrorist organizations, according to internal staff communications seen by BuzzFeed News. The mistake is just a mere moderation of the latest content made by Instagram and the major Facebook company, which has suffered complaints from users around the world. The content of the Israeli attacks is censored to the Palestinians.

Inconvenient workers complained of mistakes on Tuesday, as Instagram removed or blocked messages sent to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site of the Islamic faith in Islam, with the hashtag. It has been a mosque since Friday location of conflicts Among Israeli and Palestinian police forces, many of them visited the prayer site in the last days of Ramadan.

In an attempt to draw attention to the violence, Instagram users posted the hashtag #AlAqsa or its Arabic counterparts tagged # الاقصى or # الأقصى to let them know that their messages were removed or hidden from search results. Some notifications showed that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, removed posts because they were linked to “violence or dangerous organizations”. When employees learned of the layoffs and their justification, some filed internal complaints.

In one case, an employee saw that Instagram had removed an infographic describing the situation in Al-Aqsa because it linked it to “violence or a terrorist organization”. After the employee filed a complaint, they wrote in an internal message, informing them that the image was described as a “Facebook” based on the reference to “alaqsa” which is a designated organization.dangerous people and organizations(Content was finally recovered after the complaint.)

“Both of these mistakes and many others are completely unacceptable,” the Facebook employee wrote on an internal communication platform on Tuesday. “Al-Aqsa is the 3rd holiest site in Islam and the main aspect of the faith is about 1.8 billion people.”

Facebook’s censorship of Al-Aqsa’s posts comes at a time of extreme tension and violence in the region. So far 53 Palestinians, including more than a dozen children, and six Israelis have been killed, and more than 300 people have been injured since the fighting began last week. People have used Instagram and Facebook to spread information from the ground – from the forced Palestinians to Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah district of East Jerusalem to the violence in Al-Aqsa – some have found their messages blocked or removed.

For critics as well as some employees, Facebook’s failure to moderate recent content is evidence of a lack of understanding and resources that U.S. companies lack in the region, and show that irresponsible mistakes can have a disproportionate impact on local products used by more than 3,000 billion people worldwide.

Facebook said it beforehand National Middle East News Messages tagged Al-Aqsa were “limited by errors,” but an internal message received by BuzzFeed News on Wednesday went further because the content was “not even” The name of an organization sanctioned by the United States Government. “

A Facebook spokesman declined to comment beyond what was contained in Wednesday’s internal message.

Last week, Palestinian Instagram users also complained that they were also removing Instagram stories about the conflict or transient videos and images that last 24 hours on the platform. On Friday, the company blamed this error on a social networking error that affected users who shared stories around the world.

These mistakes have caused reflection among some Facebook employees. In a message over the weekend, an employee wrote in an internal group that “the external perception is that FB is to silence political discourse and then apologize.”

“Some of these incidents are human review errors and others are automated. I don’t know which one is dominant, but why can’t the recipients decide to use local specialization [Middle East and North Africa] A region like Public Policy or Communications and consult with them before making a decision to remove sensitive hashtags or political content, ”they wrote, before sharing screenshots of various users, complaining that their Instagram messages were censored. In addition, Instagram users around the world stated in the Google Play Store that they started a campaign to give applications a low grade.

In response, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, wrote a day later that the company had written that the group was “sorting and unlocking a problem as they came along.”

The effort, however, did not prevent the removal of the contents of the Al-Aqsa mosque, when clashes broke out last Friday when Israeli police attacked Palestinians. which was collected To observe the last Friday of the Muslim holy months of Ramadan. Complaints about content censorship with the hashtag Al-Aqsa continued on Tuesday, when a concerned employee reportedly was removing a post.

While there is an armed Palestinian coalition in the West Bank known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the United States and the European Union have considered it a terrorist organization and other organizations with similar names such as the Al-Aqsa Foundation. The U.S. government takes its support as part of its network, A critical Facebook employee has said that this is not an excuse to censor the trawls of the Al-Aqsa mosque.

“If there was a group called Washington’s problem makers and they mentioned that they were eliminating the word Washington, it would be completely unacceptable,” they wrote. “I really want to emphasize that this part of our user base feels alienated and censored and after a lot of problems like this (be it technical or product), our users won’t benefit from the doubt.”

On Wednesday, an employee of the company’s Risky Organizations and People Policy Group wrote in its internal message that the term Al-Aqsa (الاقصى) “should not and does not violate our policies”.

“As many of you have rightly pointed out, using the same name for a designated organization does not make the place and organization the same,” they wrote. “Our policies do not require the removal of people, places or things that share a name with a designated organization; therefore, removal based on mentioning the name of the mosque is an enforcement error and should never occur in our policies.”

Others weren’t so sure about Facebook’s internal explanation. Ashraf Zeitoon, who was Facebook’s chief politician in the Middle East and North Africa region from 2014 to mid-2017, said the company had hired some of the world’s leading terrorism experts, most likely Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to separate Al-Aqsa citations.

“Going from a two-word name associated with an organization to a two-word one is a poor excuse to go for a word,” he said, noting that the company was involved in writing policies to name terrorist groups and their content. “They’re more skilled than this and they’re more skilled than this.”

Zeitoon cited Facebook’s internal fear of violating Israel’s interests and denouncing the content too much, as a potential reason to remove Al-Aqsa videos and images.

In response, a Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the content of Al-Aqsa has been limited by human error, not by government demands.

Facebook’s removal and blocking of some Palestinian content has caused social media employees to talk inside. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg expects before a regular meeting of the entire company on Thursday, some staff began questioning: “Our integrity systems fail marginalized groups (see: Palestine, BLM, indigenous women).” What are we going to do about it? “

The question is low on the list of most important questions, behind at least three different questions about Facebook’s home-to-home policies and one that Mark Zuckerberg is wondering if he will ever do. Saturday Night Live, After Tesla CEO Elon Musk appeared on the variety show last weekend.

In another question, an employee asked if Facebook would move the regional office from Tel Aviv, which some Palestinian U.S. workers cannot access due to Israeli restrictions. Noted by Human Rights Watch He declared Israel an apartheid state, asked if Facebook would re-examine its location in the Israeli city.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.