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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.

Hamad calls that "highly unusual" adding that there is usually a considerable time-lapse between the phases.

"The lack of rationale provided was also concerning as Meta policy requires written analysis be provided for each phase transition," Hamad says.

He claims he then posted an update to the Palestine chat regarding a ruling from Meta's oversight board that had been issued the day before regarding "erroneous content removal." He says he urged those in the chat to follow proper protocol.

Hamad states he tried to figure out exactly what was going on internally with the Palestine content review, but the employee supposedly in charge never replied to him. He also shared in the Palestine issue chat a particular instance in which a Palestinian photojournalist with 17 million followers had seen his content mistakenly "curbed" by Meta, according to the suit.

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.

"Plaintiff was terminated despite confirmation from plaintiff's manager that he had acted correctly and from Meta's own security operations personnel unequivocally stating that plaintiff did not violate Meta's user data access policy, the complaint states.

Hamad alleges discrimination, harassment, and retaliation in violation of the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act as well as wrongful termination and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. He's seeking unspecified damages, attorney fees, and court costs.

One of Hamad's attorneys, Shahmeer Halepota, told Law360 on Wednesday that the "heart of this dispute is about two values that are bedrock principles of this country: equality and free speech."

"It is a travesty that Meta — as documented by Human Rights Watch, multiple members of Congress, and its own employees — respects neither," Halepota said.

Meanwhile, a Meta spokesperson said in a statement that Hamad "was dismissed for violating Meta's data access policies, which we make clear to employees will result in immediate termination."

Hamad is represented by Siavash Daniel Rashtian and Saleem K. Erakat of Rashtian Law Group APC, and Shahmeer Halepota of Ahmad Zavitsanos & Mensing.

Counsel information for Meta wasn't immediately available Wednesday.

The case is Ferras Hamad v. Meta Platforms Inc., case number 24CV440543, in the Superior Court for the State of California, County of Santa Clara.