Meta’s Ongoing Efforts Regarding the Israel-Hamas War

Hebrew translation, Arabic translation

Update on December 7, 2023 at 3:00AM PT:

Today Meta’s Oversight Board announced it has selected two cases from user appeals related to the Israel-Hamas War for expedited review, a process by which the board issues accelerated content decisions within 30 days in exceptional circumstances. The Oversight Board’s guidance in these cases, along with feedback from other experts, will help us to continue to evolve our policies and response to the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. We will implement the board’s decision in each case once it has finished deliberating and will update our Transparency Center accordingly.

Update on December 5, 2023 at 9:00PM PT:

At the beginning of the war, we designated the October 7 attack by Hamas as a Terrorist Attack under our Dangerous Organization and Individuals policy. Consistent with that designation, we removed all content showing identifiable victims at the moment of the attack. 

Following that, people began sharing this type of footage in order to raise awareness and condemn the attacks. Meta’s goal is to allow people to express themselves while still removing harmful content. In turn, we began allowing people to post this type of footage within that context only, with the addition of a warning screen to inform users that it may be disturbing. If the user’s intent in sharing the content is unclear, we err on the side of safety and remove it. 

Under our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, we continue to remove any imagery that is produced by a Dangerous Organization or Individual, unless it is clear that the user is sharing it in a news reporting or condemnation context, and no minors under thirteen years old are depicted.

Update on October 18, 2023 at 3:00AM PT:

After the terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel last week, and Israel’s response in Gaza, our teams introduced a series of measures to address the spike in harmful and potentially harmful content spreading on our platforms. Our policies are designed to keep people safe on our apps while giving everyone a voice. We apply these policies equally around the world and there is no truth to the suggestion that we are deliberately suppressing voice. However, content containing praise for Hamas, which is designated by Meta as a Dangerous Organization, or violent and graphic content, for example, is not allowed on our platforms. We can make errors and that is why we offer an appeals process for people to tell us when they think we have made the wrong decision, so we can look into it. 

Some additional updates and steps we are taking as this situation continues to unfold: 

Fixing Bugs: We identified and fixed some bugs this past week. 

• One impacting all Stories that re-shared Reels and Feed posts on Instagram, meaning they weren’t showing up properly in people’s Stories, leading to significantly reduced reach. This bug affected accounts equally around the globe – not only people trying to post about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza – and it had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content. We fixed this bug as quickly as possible. 
• Another prevented people from going Live on Facebook for a short time. This was also a global issue that was fixed within a few hours. We understand people rely on these tools and we’re sorry to anyone who felt the impact of these issues. 

Comment and Profile Settings: 

• As a temporary measure to protect people in the region from potentially unwelcome or unwanted comments, we have: 
  • Changed the default setting for who can comment on newly created public Facebook posts of people in the region to Friends and/or established followers only. Users globally can choose to use this setting and opt in or out at any time, and we are notifying people in the region with specific instructions on how to change this setting.
  • We’ve made it easier for people to bulk delete comments on their posts.
  • Disabled the feature that normally displays the first one or two comments under posts in Feed.
• We recently rolled out the Lock Your Profile tool in the region that allows people to lock their Facebook profile in one step. When someone’s profile is locked, people who aren’t their friends can’t download, enlarge or share their profile photo, nor can they see posts or other photos on someone’s profile, regardless of when they may have posted it. 

Fundraising on Facebook and Instagram: Since October 7, people have raised more than $11.5 million for nonprofits on Facebook and Instagram to help with relief efforts in Israel and Palestine. This includes over 340,000 donations to 262 charities – providing disaster relief, ambulance and blood services, medical care and more.

Originally published on October 13, 2023 at 1:00AM PT:

Like many, we were shocked and horrified by the brutal terrorist attacks by Hamas, and our thoughts go out to civilians who are suffering in Israel and Gaza as the violence continues to unfold.

Since the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel on Saturday, and Israel’s response in Gaza, expert teams from across our company have been working around the clock to monitor our platforms, while protecting people’s ability to use our apps to shed light on important developments happening on the ground. The following are some of the specific steps we have taken:

Taking Action on Violating Content

• We quickly established a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation in real time. This allows us to remove content that violates our Community Standards or Community Guidelines faster, and serves as another line of defense against misinformation.
• We continue to enforce our policies around Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, Violent and Graphic Content, Hate Speech, Violence and Incitement, Bullying and Harassment, and Coordinating Harm. 
  • In the three days following October 7, we removed or marked as disturbing more than 795,000 pieces of content for violating these policies in Hebrew and Arabic.
  • As compared to the two months prior, in the three days following October 7, we have removed seven times as many pieces of content on a daily basis for violating our Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy in Hebrew and Arabic alone. 
• Hamas is designated by the US government as both a Foreign Terrorist Organisation and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. It is also designated under Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy. This means Hamas is banned from our platforms, and we remove praise and substantive support of them when we become aware of it, while continuing to allow social and political discourse — such as news reporting, human rights related issues, or academic, neutral and condemning discussion. 
• We want to reiterate that our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping people safe on our apps. We apply these policies regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs, and it is never our intention to suppress a particular community or point of view. Given the higher volumes of content being reported to us, we know content that doesn’t violate our policies may be removed in error. To mitigate this, for some violations we are temporarily removing content without strikes, meaning these content removals won’t cause accounts to be disabled. We also continue to provide tools for users to appeal our decisions if they think we made a mistake.
• Our teams are monitoring the situation and in some cases temporarily introducing limited, proportionate, and time-bound measures to address specific, emerging risks:
  • Stronger steps to avoid recommending potentially violating and borderline violating content: We already use technology to avoid recommending potentially violating and borderline content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads. We’re working to further reduce the possibility of this happening by lowering the threshold at which our technology will take action to avoid recommending this type of content. We’re also taking steps to reduce the visibility of potentially offensive comments under posts on Facebook and Instagram. 
  • Violence and Incitement: In order to prioritize the safety of those kidnapped by Hamas, we are temporarily expanding our Violence and Incitement policy and removing content that clearly identifies hostages when we’re made aware of it, even if it’s being done to condemn or raise awareness of their situation. We are allowing content with blurred images of the victims but, in line with standards established by the Geneva Convention, we will prioritize the safety and privacy of kidnapping victims if we are unsure or unable to make a clear assessment.
  • Hashtag Blocking: In line with our rules, we have restricted a number of Instagram hashtags after our team assessed that content associated with those hashtags was consistently found to be violating our Community Guidelines. This means that the hashtags are not searchable – but the content itself won’t be removed unless it violates our policies.
  • Facebook and Instagram Live: We recognize that the immediacy of Live brings unique challenges, so we have restrictions in place on the use of Live for people who have previously violated certain policies. We’re prioritizing livestream reports related to this crisis, above and beyond our existing prioritization of Live videos. We’re also aware of Hamas’ threats to broadcast footage of the hostages and we’re taking these threats extremely seriously. Our teams are monitoring this closely, and would swiftly remove any such content (and the accounts behind it), banking the content in our systems to prevent copies being re-shared.
• We’re getting feedback from local partners on emerging risks and moving quickly to address them. We recognize that local context and language-specific expertise is essential for this work, so we will remain in close communication with experts, partner institutions and non-governmental organizations.

Safety and Security

• Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior (CIB): Our teams have detected and taken down a cluster of activity linked to a covert influence operation we removed and attributed to Hamas in 2021. These fake accounts attempted to re-establish their presence on our platforms. We continue to stay vigilant and take action against violating adversarial behavior in the region.
• Memorialization: We memorialize accounts when we receive a request from a friend or family member of someone who has passed away, to provide a space for people to pay their respects, share memories and support each other. When accounts are memorialized, no one (except Legacy Contacts on Facebook) can make any changes to existing posts or settings. We also add the word ‘Remembering’ next to the person’s name, and don’t recommend the account to new people. Our Community Standards apply to memorialized accounts and we remove violating comments left under posts on these accounts whenever we become aware of them.  

Reducing the Spread of Misinformation

• We’re working with third-party fact-checkers in the region to debunk false claims. Meta has the largest third-party fact checking network of any platform, with coverage in both Arabic and Hebrew, through AFP, Reuters and Fatabyyano. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it. 
• We recognize the importance of speed in moments like this, so we’ve made it easier for fact-checkers to find and rate content related to the war, using keyword detection to group related content in one place.
• We’re also giving people more information to decide what to read, trust, and share by adding warning labels on content rated false by third-party fact-checkers and applying labels to state-controlled media publishers. 
• We also have limits on message forwarding and label messages that haven’t originated with the sender so people are aware that something is information from a third party.

User Controls

We continue to provide tools to help people control their experience on our apps and protect themselves from content they don’t want to see. These include, but aren’t limited to:

• Hidden words: When turned on, Hidden Words filters offensive terms and phrases from DM requests and comments, so people never have to see them. People can customize this list, to make sure the terms they find offensive are hidden. 
• Limits: When turned on, Limits automatically hide DM requests and comments on Instagram from people who don’t follow you, or who only recently followed you.
• Comment controls: You can control who can comment on your posts on Facebook and Instagram and choose to turn off comments completely on a post by post basis. 
• Show More, Show Less: This gives people direct control over the content they see on Facebook. Selecting “Show more” will temporarily increase the amount of content you see that is like the post you gave feedback on, while selecting “Show Less” means you will temporarily see less posts like the one you gave feedback on.
• Facebook Reduce: Through the Facebook Feed Preferences settings, people can increase the degree to which we demote some content so they see less of it in their Feed. Or if preferred, they can turn many of these demotions off entirely. They can also choose to maintain our current demotions.
• Sensitive Content Control: Instagram’s Sensitive Content Control allows people to choose how much sensitive content they see in places where we recommend content, such as Explore, Search, Reels and in-Feed recommendations. We try not to recommend sensitive content in these places by default, but people can also choose to see less, to further reduce the possibility of seeing this content from accounts they don’t follow.

Hebrew Translation