Instagram apologises to Bella Hadid for removing post about Palestine

Instagram has apologised to top Palestinian-Dutch model Bella Hadid over removing post which featured a picture of her dad’s passport.

Her father and real estate mogul Mohammed Hadid’s American passport listed his birthplace as Palestine. Hadid posted the picture earlier this week on the social media platform.

The 23-year-old slammed the platform on which she boasts 31.5 million followers and even accused it of bullying.

She shared the message she received from Instagram which cited violations of community guidelines, including harassment and bullying.

“Instagram removed my story that only said ‘My baba And his birthplace of Palestine’ with a photograph of his American passport,” she wrote on Tuesday.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-W23_LA_pk/

“Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram? This, to me, is bullying. You can’t erase history by silencing people. It doesn’t work like that,” she added.

This also sparked a debate on silencing Palestinian voices online.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBwOphwg7yY/

Later, Instagram apologised to the starlet: “We’ve restored the content and apologised to Bella for the mistake,” a spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company Facebook told United States-based news outlet Page Six.

The spokesperson also said “To protect the privacy of our community, we don’t allow people to post personal information, such as passport numbers, on Instagram. In this case the passport number was blurred out, so this content shouldn’t have been removed. We’ve restored the content and apologized to Bella for the mistake.”