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A Palestinian American software engineer at Meta Platforms Inc. said his former employer has a "chronic anti-Palestinian bias," and he was fired in the midst of trying to address the company's problems with needlessly censoring Palestinian social media posts, according to a suit filed in California state court.

Ferras Hamad, who says he's Muslim and was raised in the United States, contends he was wrongly fired for violating the company's user data access policy while working to fix issues with Instagram's filters related to Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine. He says his firing came despite multiple assurances from his supervisor and others that he had followed company protocol in flagging one particular post from a Palestinian photojournalist that was incorrectly censored — a post he came upon in his broader work to address the problems. He was also falsely accused of knowing that photojournalist personally, he says in the complaint, which was filed Tuesday in Santa Clara County Superior Court.

"Plaintiff has never met [the journalist]," the suit states. "Plaintiff was born and raised in the United States, has never been to Gaza, and does not have any family connection to Gaza."

He adds that, in reality, he's "simply the latest victim of Meta's callous, chronic and consistent anti-Palestinian bias."

According to the suit, Hamad was recruited by Meta in the fall of 2021. He ultimately joined the company in March 2022 as a software engineer in machine learning, and his job focused on "location-based recommendations, including breaking news," Hamad states. During his time with Meta, Hamad says he received glowing performance reviews.

As for Meta's culture, Hamad notes that the company regularly promoted the core concept that "nothing is somebody else's problem," which meant that the company regularly encouraged its employees to help out with issues that affected user experience or Meta in general. Hamad says he took this concept "to heart."

Last October, Meta directly asked Hamad to assess the quality of Instagram's integrity filters as they related to Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine, according to the complaint. In December 2023, he joined a work chat related to Palestinian Instagram creators and activists whose posts had been "curbed or censored, artificially limiting their reach," Hamad says.

According to Hamad, issues, like this one, are handled via multiple phases under the company's resolution protocol. But in this instance, each phase was marked in Meta's system as "mitigation," "resolved," and "closed," and each bore the same timestamp with "no reason or justification provided for the instantaneous status changes," he asserts.