A Meta employee has expressed fears that an internal ban on controversial political topics is the start of censorship on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, claiming she was removed from the company’s systems for two months after raising concerns about the Israel-Israel conflict. Gaza.
Saima Akhter, a Meta data scientist based in New York, says she was placed “under investigation” and kicked out of internal systems for “speaking out for Palestine.”
Now she claims that the investigations have concluded and she has returned to Meta.
Meta staff members are prohibited from discussing politics, health and guns under its “Community Engagement Expectations (CEE).”
“External censorship on Meta platforms begins with internal censorship of Meta employees,” Akhter writes in his Instagram post.
“I continue to push for further explanations as to why and what they were investigating.
“And I continue to wonder how Meta employees can express their concerns to leadership and actually be heard.”
The employee signed the post tagging her employer: “@meta, please stop internally censoring employees and get rid of the toxic EEC.”
Fortune has reached out to Meta and Akhter for comment.
Pro-Palestinian voices “ignored”
Meta introduced CEE at the end of 2022 “to ensure internal discussions remain respectful,” wrote Lori Goler, the company’s chief people officer at the time, in an internal memo seen by Fortune.
“This comes with the trade-off that we will no longer allow all expression at work, but we believe this is the right thing to do for the long-term health of our internal community,” the statement adds.
From that point on, topics that had previously caused “discomfort,” including the effectiveness of vaccines, abortion and gun rights, were all banned from workplace discussion overnight.
Despite this, Akhter began to openly defend Palestine in the context of its escalating conflict with Israel following the October 7 Hamas attack.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke out about the war that has claimed over 31,000 lives, calling the terrorist attacks “pure evil.”
“My primary concern is the safety of our employees and their families in Israel and the surrounding region,” Zuckerberg shared on Instagram Stories.
A group of Meta employees – including Akhter – then wrote and circulated a letter calling on Meta to “recognize the lost Palestinian lives” and “transparent action on internal and external censorship on our platforms.”
“Internally we tried to raise these concerns and alarms, but there is a rule that you can’t talk about disruptive topics, so everything we post about Palestine is removed,” the Meta employee said in an Instagram video all beginning of this year. before allegedly being placed “under investigation”.
Now, in his latest Instagram post, he criticized Meta’s management team for failing to recognize the hundreds of pro-Palestinian voices within the company.
“The letter received nearly 500 signatures and nearly 100 personal testimonials from employees,” he says. “Leadership deleted the letter (including deleting copies of the letter from employee drives and emails), ignored it, and never addressed it again.”
Censorship on Meta
It is not the first time that Meta has been accused of silencing pro-Palestinian posts on its platforms since the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war.
In a scathing 51-page report, Human Rights Watch criticized the social networking giant for engaging in “systemic and comprehensive” censorship of content supporting Palestine and Palestinians, including the removal of posts, deactivation of accounts and limiting users’ ability to interact with others’ posts.
Meta pointed out in a post on its corporate website that it had actually removed “more than 795,000 pieces of content” from its platform in the aftermath of the October 7 attack because it violated the company’s policy on “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals.” they included posts showing “identifiable victims at the time of the attack” and posts praising Hamas.
Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King said his Instagram account was deactivated last December after he accused Israel of genocide.
“The account was disabled due to multiple praises of designated entities in violation of our policies,” a Meta spokesperson explained CNBC at the moment.