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.
