Meta, the company that owns Instagram, has said it’s sorry for making a mistake.
They added the word “terrorist” to the profiles of some Instagram users who identified themselves as Palestinian.
It happened because of a problem with translating Arabic into English on the platform.
Meta apologized for this and told the BBC, “We sincerely apologize that this happened.”
In addition to this, Instagram has been accused of hiding content that supports Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Some users claim that their posts, which support Palestine, don’t show up on other people’s feeds, and their accounts are harder to find in search results.
This is called “shadow banning,” where the platform limits the reach of certain posts because they go against their rules.
A user on Twitter and TikTok, @khanman1996, brought attention to this translation mistake.
He had written in his profile that he was Palestinian, and when people clicked “see translation” for an Arabic phrase, it showed a wrong translation, calling Palestinians “terrorists.”
This error remained on the platform for at least three hours.
Instagram has also faced allegations of limiting the visibility of posts discussing the Israel-Gaza conflict, and they recently introduced a tool that lets users see if their posts are being hidden.
Shadow banning is not new. Last year, model Bella Hadid claimed she was shadow-banned on Instagram after posting about the Israel-Gaza conflict.
More recently, Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto said she was shadowbanned for sharing pro-Palestinian content.
Meta, the company behind Instagram, said that the issue with limiting the reach of certain posts was not related to the content’s subject but was due to a bug affecting accounts worldwide.
They fixed it as quickly as possible.
This is not the first time Meta has been accused of suppressing content related to Palestine.
In 2021, Human Rights Watch accused Instagram of removing content about the crisis
Instagram said they removed posts containing hate speech or harmful symbols and updated their rules.
However, this led to an independent review of Meta’s content moderation during the 2021 Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The review found that Meta’s actions negatively affected the rights of Palestinian users, like freedom of expression and political participation.
The report recommended that Meta should provide better explanations when they remove posts or accounts and improve their staff’s language skills in Hebrew and Arabic.
Recently, the European Commission asked Meta and TikTok for more information on how they handle disinformation and illegal content after attacks by Hamas.
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