Instagram apologises for adding ‘terrorist’ to Palestinians’ bios

Meta has apologised after for adding “terrorist” into the profile bios of some Instagram users describing themselves as Palestinian.

In a blog post, Meta said it fixed a “problem” faced by some Instagram users, with the word “Palestinian” written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word “alhamdulillah” written in Arabic.

When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”

A TikTok user posted about the issue, noting that different combinations still translated to “terrorist”.

@khanman1996 said in his posts he was not Palestinian himself but had tested the error out after being told about it by an unnamed Palestinian friend.

The platform has also faced accusations of suppressing content voicing support for Palestinians during the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Some users say they have been “shadow banned” on Instagram over pro-Palestinian posts. This is when a platform intervenes to make sure posts do not appear in other people’s feeds.

The users claim 24-hour posts on Stories referencing the conflict have had fewer views than others and that their accounts cannot be found as easily in search.

However, the tech giant acknowledged a bug had affected Stories but said it had nothing to do with subject matter.

In the blog post, Meta said new measures had been brought in since the Israel-Hamas conflict began to “address the spike in harmful and potentially harmful content spreading on our platforms” and that there was no truth to the suggestion the company is suppressing anyone’s voice.

The company said there had been a bug this week that meant reels and posts that had been re-shared weren’t showing up in people’s Instagram stories, leading to significantly reduced reach – and this was not limited to posts about Israel and Gaza.

Meta also said there was a global outage of its live video service on Facebook for a short time.

This is not the first time the platform is accused of suppressing pro-Palestinian content.

In May 2021, the charity Human Rights Watch accused Instagram of removing videos, pictures and commentary about the crisis.

Shadow-banning claims

Shadow banning is when online services limit the reach or visibility of an account or its content to other users, usually if it falls foul of their guidelines.

Bella Hadid claimed to have been shadow banned on Instagram after posting about the Israel-Gaza conflict last year.

More recently, Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto said in an Instagram post she had been shadow banned for pro-Palestinian posts, with followers telling her they could not see or find her Stories on their feeds.