After that, he says, he started getting direct messages from people unaffiliated with the review and not within his chain of command at Meta.
Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch published a report titled “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook,” according to the suit. The report documented 1,049 instances of allegedly biased censorship regarding Palestine-related content, Hamad states.
“The Human Rights Watch report, however, only scratched the surface of META’s chronic anti-Palestinian bias,” he adds.
Among other issues, he claims Meta had been deleting posts where employees mention deaths of relatives in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes, deleting mentions of Palestinian refugees from the intracompany refugees support group and banning employees from stating “free Palestine” but allowing them to state “antizionism == antisemitism,” according to Hamad.
He says he was terminated on Feb. 2, on the eve of his stock vesting date. It came after the Palestinian photojournalist called out Meta for censoring his content, which he calls a high-profile, bad-press incident. Meta then accused him of knowing that photojournalist personally, a violation of its user data access policy, according to the suit.
