A legal and justice center in London has filed a formal complaint against Facebook, accusing the social media platform of arbitrarily censoring and suspending accounts associated with Palestinian news agencies, advocates, and journalists.

The complaint, filed by London law firm Bindmans LLP on behalf of the International Centre for Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) and digital rights group Sada Social, requests that the platform, which rebranded itself as Meta last October, conduct an urgent review of its actions and explain why those accounts were censored.

The ICJP said in a press release on Tuesday that "the complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.”

The complaint was also forwarded to the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of expression.

For years, Meta has been accused of censoring Palestinians' experiences and narratives on both its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

Silencing the truth

According to the Palestinian social media monitoring center, Sada Social, 600 Palestinian accounts or pro-Palestinian Facebook posts were restricted or deleted in 2021, which is a record. The center helped launch a social media campaign called "Facebook Censors Jerusalem."

Rama Youssef, an Al-Quds-based journalist who volunteered for the campaign, said Facebook hews to an Israeli point of view and has "double standards". 

The Arab Center Washington DC think-tank assured that the Israeli occupation authorities also push to censor "tens of thousands of posts and accounts" that support the struggle of Palestinians.

Meta refused to answer questions about requests from the Israeli occupation authorities to do so.

Facebook has wrongfully removed and suppressed content by Palestinians and their supporters, including human rights abuse incidents committed by "Israel" against Palestinians during the Seif Al-Quds Battle (the battle of the Sword of Jerusalem), a Human Rights Watch report said.

"Israel" has a cybersecurity unit, the Israeli Cyber Unit, and that unit has been notorious for making appeals directly to social media platforms based on their own terms of service rather than going through the legal process of filing a court order based on Israeli criminal law.