How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories

During a period of war, audience engagement might be expected to rise. However, the data showed a 77% decline after the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023.

Palestine TV has 5.8 million followers on Facebook. Journalists at the newsroom shared statistics with us showing a 60% drop in the number of people seeing their posts.

"Interaction was completely restricted, and our posts stopped reaching people," says Tariq Ziad, a journalist at the channel.

Over the past year, Palestinian journalists have raised fears that their online content is being "shadow-banned" by Meta - in other words, restricted in how many people see it.

To test this, we carried out the same data analysis on the Facebook pages of 20 Israeli news organisations such as Yediot Ahronot, Israel Hayom and Channel 13. These pages also posted a large amount of war-related content, but their audience engagement increased by nearly 37%.

Responding to our research, Meta pointed out that it had made no secret of "temporary product and policy measures" taken in October 2023.

It said it had faced a challenge balancing the right to freedom of speech, with the fact that Hamas was both US-sanctioned and designated as a dangerous organisation under Meta's own policies.

The tech giant also said that pages posting exclusively about the war were more likely to see engagement impacted.

"We acknowledge we make mistakes, but any implication that we deliberately suppress a particular voice is unequivocally false," a spokesperson said.

"A lot of information can't be published as it is too graphic - for example if the [Israeli] army commits a massacre and we film it, the video won't spread," says Omar el Qataa, one of the few photojournalists who chose to stay in northern Gaza.

"But in spite of the challenges, the risks, and the content bans," he says,"we must continue sharing Palestinian content."

Additional reporting by Rehab Ismail and Natalie Merzougui