Since October
7, 2023, the multinational tech company Meta, which owns Facebook and
Instagram, has acted on 94 percent of the Israeli government’s requests to take
down posts on Facebook and Instagram that are “critical of Israel—or even
vaguely supportive of Palestinians,” Drop Site News reported in April 2025.
Drop Site News characterized Meta’s response to the Israeli government’s
takedown request campaign as “the largest mass censorship operation in modern
history.”
The Drop Site
News report was based on internal Meta data compiled and provided by
whistleblowers from Meta. Drop Site News reported that “multiple independent
sources inside Meta confirmed the authenticity of the information provided by
the whistleblowers.”
As Drop Site
News explained, “Takedown requests allow individuals, organizations, and
government officials to request the removal of content that allegedly violates
Meta’s policies.”
The significant
majority of Israel’s requests, Drop Site News reported, “fall under Meta’s
‘terrorism’ or ‘violence and incitement’ categories,” but Drop Site News also
noted that every one of Israel’s takedown requests post-October 7 “contain the
exact same complaint text, according to the leaked information, regardless of
the substance of the underlying content being challenged.”
Based on Meta’s
internal data, Drop Site News reported that Israel’s takedown requests “have
overwhelmingly targeted users from Arab and Muslim-majority nations,” but the
Israeli government’s takedown campaign is global in scope, resulting in
censorship of posts from Facebook and Instagram users in more than sixty
different countries. Among the top countries affected, 21 percent of targeted
posts originated from Egypt, nearly 17 percent originated from Jordan, and
nearly 16 percent originated from Palestine.
Meta has acted
quickly on the Israeli government’s takedown requests. The leaked data show
that Meta removed more than 90,000 posts flagged by the Israeli government in
an average of thirty seconds. Meta also significantly expanded the scope of
automated takedowns since October 7, 2023, resulting in what Drop City News
reported as “an estimated 38.8 million additional posts being ‘actioned upon’
across Facebook and Instagram since late 2023. ‘Actioned upon’ in Facebook
terms means that a post was either removed, banned, or suppressed.”
“Israel’s
censorship project will echo well into the future,” Drop Site News reported,
based on insiders’ comments, because “the AI program Meta is currently training
how to moderate content will base future decisions on the successful takedown
of content critical of Israel’s genocide.”
The Drop Site
News report has been republished by several online media outlets, including,
for example, ZNetwork and Jewish Voice for Labour—but, based on a search of
ProQuest news databases, no major US newspapers appear to have picked up this
story.
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