Traffic outside Meta headquarters in Mountain View, California, on the morning of November 9, 2022.
Peter DaSilva | Reuters
predecessor Yuan An engineer accused the company on Tuesday of bias in its handling of content related to the Gaza war, claiming in a lawsuit that Meta fired him because he tried to help fix a bug that resulted in Palestinian Instagram posts being suppressed.
Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who has worked on Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, is suing the social media giant in California court over his firing in February, alleging discrimination, wrongful termination and other wrongdoing. Behavior.
In his complaint, Hamad accused Meta of being biased against Palestinians, saying the company deleted internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of relatives in Gaza and investigated their use of Palestinian flag emojis.
The company did not initiate such an investigation into employees who posted Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis in similar circumstances, the lawsuit said.
Mehta did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment on Hamad’s allegations.
Hamad’s claims reflect longstanding criticism from human rights groups of Meta’s practice of moderating content posted on its platform about Israel and the Palestinian territories, including an external investigation commissioned by the company in 2021.
On October 7, Hamas militants launched an attack in Israel. According to Israeli statistics, 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 people were taken hostage. Conflict broke out in the Gaza Corridor. In response, Israel launched Gaza attack This has killed more than 36,000 people and triggered a humanitarian crisis, according to health officials in Gaza.
On May 15, 2024, Palestinians returned to the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, which was severely destroyed by Israeli attacks and left few buildings intact.
Anas Zeyad Fteha | Anas Zeyad Fteha Anadolu | Getty Images
Since the war broke out last year, the company has faced accusation It is suppressing expressions of support for Palestinians living at war.
Earlier this year, nearly 200 Meta employees raised similar concerns in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders.
Hamad said his firing appeared to stem from an incident in December involving an emergency procedure designed to address serious issues with the company’s platform, known in Meta as an SEV or “live incident.”
The complaint states that he noticed procedural irregularities in the handling of SEVs involving restrictions on content posted by Palestinian Instagram celebrities, resulting in those posts not appearing in searches and feeds.
In one case, he found that a short video posted by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaza was incorrectly classified as pornographic, even though it showed a destroyed building in Gaza, the complaint said.
Hamad said he had received conflicting guidance from other employees about the status of SEV and whether he had the authority to help resolve the issue, even though he had previously worked on similarly sensitive SEV work, including with Israel, Gaza and Israel-related SEV. Ukraine. He said his manager later confirmed in writing that SEV was part of his job function.
The next month, after a Meta representative told him he was the subject of an investigation, Hamad filed an internal discrimination complaint and was fired days later, he said.
Hamad said Mehta told him he was fired for violating a policy that prohibited employees from working on accounts of people they knew, referring to photojournalist Azaza. Hamad said he had no personal relationship with Azaisa.
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