“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.
