This spring, Meta quietly revised its Community Standards policy, an internal company document dictating what its billions of global users can and cannot say online. The latest tweaks can be found in a chapter on “Violence and Incitement,” where a subsection titled “Other Violence” spells out, among other rules, the company’s bans on ads for assassins. It’s in this subsection where Meta last month published a revision to include new limitations for users who mention antifascism.

Policy documents reviewed by The Intercept show the company now treats any “Content that includes the word ‘antifa’ as a potential rules violation if that word appears along with what Meta deems a “content-level threat signal” — meaning a statement that the company believes implies violence.

In some cases, the content that Meta considers a threat signal is commonsensical. If, for instance, a user mentions bringing a weapon to an event, the company flags it as a threat signal. But in other cases, Meta’s process for identifying threat signals is more vague. Under the new rules, Meta might trigger a threat signal when a user posts a “visual depiction of a weapon,” a “reference to arson, theft, or vandalism,” or “military language,” if accompanied by the word “antifa.”

If “antifa” is mentioned in the context of “references to historical or recent incidents of violence” — a category so sprawling that it includes “historic wars” and “battles” —  that post will also be penalized. Should Meta apply this rule as written, the company could, for instance, restrict posts comparing the antifascist nature of World War II to the contemporary antifa movement.

Potential penalties for violating Community Standards range from a full account ban to comments being hidden or suppressed.

The policy change follows years of Meta and its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s pivot of political convenience toward President Donald Trump and his base. Following Trump’s second electoral victory, Meta quickly changed its speech rules to allow for anti-transgender slurs and dehumanization of immigrants, The Intercept previously reported, aligning the company with longtime MAGA culture war grievances.

Related

A Redditor Criticized ICE. Trump Is Trying to Unmask Them by Dragging the Company to a Secret Grand Jury.

Asked about the new restrictions on the word “antifa,” Meta spokesperson Erica Sackin pointed to a March transparency report that noted the company would “remove QAnon and Antifa content when combined with content-level threat signals.” The report does not explain what those signals are. Meta did not respond when asked if the company had discussed its antifa speech rules with the Trump administration.

Meta largely outsources the enforcement of its Community Standards rules to low-paid contractors whose interpretation and application of the policies can vary. The company’s automated, algorithmic content moderation systems are also famously glitchy. This combination can result in erratic censorship, particularly when political ideology is classified as violent or terroristic.

The new rules around saying “antifa” on Facebook and Instagram comes amid efforts by the White House to crack down on left-wing political organizing under the guise of national security. Though antifa is a contraction of the word antifascism and not an actual group, Trump last September signed an executive order designating the leaderless decentralized movement as a domestic terrorist organization. A subsequent executive memorandum, NSPM-7, again singled out “antifa” ideology as a cause of “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.”

Prior reporting by The Intercept has shown Meta historically hews closely to federal terrorism labels. Meta in 2020 announced it would tackle the leftist bogeyman under its “Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence” policy alongside QAnon, the right-wing mass delusion that helped foment the January 6 effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by force. Though self-identified antifa adherents have taken part in acts of property damage during protests, analyses repeatedly show that left-wing violence in the United States is a relatively small and rare threat compared to right-wing extremist groups and militias.

The post Facebook and Instagram Tighten Censorship Rules for Saying “Antifa” appeared first on The Intercept.

The Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta in early September demanding the names, email addresses, and phone numbers associated with six separate Instagram accounts. Three Instagram users and immigration activists filed separate motions to quash the subpoena last week.

“Pending resolution of this motion, the Court now orders Meta not to produce the requested information without further order of the Court,” wrote Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse in a brief order on the motion filed by the activist who runs the Instagram account for the Long Beach Rapid Response Network.

“We are grateful that the Court took prompt action to prevent the irreparable injury to Long Beach Rapid Response if she had been stripped of her anonymity,” said Joshua Koltun, attorney for LBRRN, in an emailed statement. “We look forward to litigating this matter and vindicating the First Amendment rights of the people to speak and associate anonymously in opposition to the government.”

Another judge issued a similar order on Friday in one of the three cases, which was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California on behalf of Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest on Instagram.

“I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying that government agents are going to come pounding at my door simply for exercising my First Amendment rights,” the second activist, who sued under the pseudonym “J. Doe,” said in an emailed statement on Friday.

Related

The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents

There has been no order so far in the third case, filed by activist Sherman Austin, who runs the Instagram account for StopICE.net. But Austin’s attorneys read the other two orders as blocking Meta from handing over their client’s information too, they told The Intercept.

“As a legal matter we believe the initial stay order issued last week in [the ACLU case] effectively blocked compliance with the subpoena in regards to all the folks named, including our client,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “That said, I think we’d feel a lot better if there was an order in each matter that left no room for question.”

The Trump administration has not yet filed any briefs in response to the three motions to quash the subpoena, which were all filed in federal court in San Francisco, near Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters.

Meta declined to answer The Intercept’s questions, including whether the company would back its users’ legal challenges to the subpoena.

The activists and their attorneys had plenty of criticisms for Meta’s handling of the matter so far. In email notices sent to three of the six targeted accounts in early September, Meta gave users just 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would hand over their data.

“I feel like it’s getting lost in the shuffle here, but Meta is the subpoenaed party,” Kellegrew said. “Meta is in the best position to resist providing this information, and the fact that they appeared willing to comply without any thought for the constitutionality of the request essentially leaves it up to the individuals targeted to have the wherewithal to contact lawyers to intervene on a very tight timeline.”

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

Some of the accounts never even received Meta’s email about the subpoena. In a court filing, LBRRN said that due to a “technical difficulty,” it never received the notice sent to other users. “The process of opening a line of communications with Meta and determining the status has been disturbingly complex and slow,” their attorney wrote. 

Kellegrew said Meta had not responded directly to his team about the subpoena and what steps, if any, the company has taken in response to the federal government’s demands.

“It is totally possible they are taking this seriously and acting responsibly. However, there’s no way for us to actually know,” Kellegrew said.

The post Courts Block Meta From Sharing Anti-ICE Activists’ Instagram Account Info With Feds appeared first on The Intercept.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.

Related

DHS Used Neo-Nazi Anthem for Recruitment After Fatal Minneapolis ICE Shooting

The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

Related

Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away.

McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

Related

Deportation, Inc.

Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

To the soundtrack of Z-Ro’s “Crooked Officer,” the post includes a montage of photos of a uniformed Border Patrol agent, some with a gaiter over the bottom half of his face and others with his face uncovered. In one photo, a visible name badge reads “G. Simeon.”

“Let’s welcome Georgy Simeon to the wall of shame,” reads the caption posted by Long Beach Rapid Response, a community defense group and one of six Instagram accounts tagged as “collaborators” on the video, along with StopICE.net, which has nearly 500,000 subscribers signed up for its crowdsourced alerts about immigration raids around the country.

The day after the post about Simeon, the Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta, the parent company of Instagram, for information about StopICE.net’s account and others.

Related

Feds Make It a Crime to Give PPE to ICE Protesters

Despite clear protections under the First Amendment for photographing agents in public, the Trump administration has threatened to prosecute activists for “doxing” immigration officers. In May, ICE stormed a home in Irvine, California, in an effort to track down a man they accused of hanging posters with agents’ names and other information. Now DHS is trying to unmask accounts that dare to share the names of masked federal agents.

On Thursday, the developer behind StopICE.net, under the pseudonym “John Doe,” asked a court to block the subpoena, through a motion to quash filed in federal court in San Francisco by lawyers from Civil Liberties Defense Center.

The DHS subpoena was issued “without lawful authority,” the motion alleges, since it was based on a legal provision focused on immigration enforcement, rather than criminal matters.

“Providing the information requested by the government in its subpoena would compromise the exercise of Doe’s fundamental rights by chilling his ability to freely associate with others as well as to engage in political speech in a public forum,” the motion argues.

“This is a patent, open attempt to chill free speech critical of the government,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which filed the motion.

Hours later, another of the Instagram accounts targeted by DHS — Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest and is suing under the pseudonym “J. Doe” — filed a separate motion to block the subpoena, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

“I am haunted by the possibility that the government will find out who I am using this subpoena,” J. Doe wrote in an affidavit. “I imagine armed agents smashing through the door of my home in the middle of the night.”

U.S Customs and Border Protection did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the motion to block the subpoena. In response to a request for comment, Meta referred The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

Sherman Austin, the developer behind StopICE.net, who is a U.S. citizen, doesn’t keep a particularly low profile. The Stop ICE Raids Alert Network website identifies Austin by name as the developer behind the project, and he’s given multiple interviews about his work. The group’s Instagram account also links to his personal handle.

But other accounts that collaborated on the video about Simeon, including Long Beach Rapid Response, are run anonymously.

Three days after the posting the video, Austin received an email from Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team: “We have received legal process from law enforcement seeking information about your Instagram account.” The Instagram user who runs @lbprotest received a similar notice the same day, according to court filings.

At first, Meta did not tell them which agency was demanding information about their accounts or what the agents were after. Pressed for more details, Meta sent a redacted copy of the administrative subpoena from DHS.

The subpoena concerned “Officer Safety/Doxing: Simeon,” it reads, and DHS sent it “[p]ursuant to an official, criminal investigation regarding officer safety.” Meta also redacted the specific agency affiliation of the issuing officer, but it appears to have been sent by Border Patrol, based on the subpoena number and other details that were not redacted from the document. (An agency spokesperson said ICE did not issue the subpoena.)

“This was completely retaliatory, and a desperate attempt of intimidation because there’s obviously nothing illegal going on,” Austin told The Intercept. “They are trying to paint the false picture that reporting on ICE activity is somehow related to criminal activity, when it’s not. But that’s the precedent they are trying to set.”

The DHS subpoena asked Meta to provide the “subscriber names, e-mails and telephone numbers associated as of 08/01/2025 through 09/03/2025” for six Instagram accounts, according to the redacted copy sent to @lbprotest.

Siempre Unidos LA, a rapid response group whose account was also tagged as a collaborator on the Simeon video, told The Intercept that it has not received any subpoenas.

An attorney for Long Beach Rapid Response told The Intercept that the group also intends to file a motion to quash the DHS subpoena in the coming days. Although it never received any notice from Meta, potentially because of a technical glitch, Long Beach Rapid Response assumed its account was among those named in the DHS subpoena.

The two other accounts did not answer The Intercept’s questions.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

DHS based its subpoena about the Simeon video on a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States” or “concerning any matter which is material and relevant to the enforcement of” the U.S. immigration code.

Related

Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist

Earlier this year, ICE agents invoked the same provision in administrative subpoenas sent to Meta and Google about campus Gaza activists.

In this case, however, ICE indicated the subpoena was issued as part of a “criminal investigation” about “officer safety,” rather than anything to do with immigration enforcement.

David Greene, an attorney and civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it was “a stretch, at best” for ICE to invoke this provision to get information about the Simeon video. “The focus of the statute is obtaining evidence about immigrants — these subpoenas are not an effort to do that,” Greene wrote in an email.

“The idea of immigration enforcement officers using the subpoena power under 8 U.S.C. 1225(d) to target the authors of social media posts that they dislike or want to dissuade seems both concerning and like it is pretty attenuated from the purpose of the statute,” said Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas.

Tech companies are often much better positioned than users to challenge administrative subpoenas like these in court.

“ICE subpoenas are not self-executing,” Greene said, which means that “merely by receiving the letter, the platform is under no legal obligation to do anything. It remains the government’s duty to initiate a proceeding to enforce the subpoenas. So, we urge platforms to not voluntarily comply with these requests before any enforcement proceeding is initiated.”

But Meta told Austin and @lbprotest that they had 10 days to file a lawsuit before the company would hand their data over to ICE. The company later extended this deadline to September 19.

With this subpoena, the government “is attempting to improperly commandeer the traditional criminal investigatory powers reserved for other branches of federal government,” reads StopICE.net’s motion to quash. “Simply put, there is no legitimate immigration enforcement purpose related to a criminal investigation of a U.S. citizen and their online speech in this instance.”

Update: September 19, 2025
This story has been updated to reflect a second motion to quash that was filed in federal court after publication.

The post The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

Examples of newly permissible speech on Facebook and Instagram highlighted in the training materials include:

“Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

“Gays are freaks.”

“Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

The changes are part of a broader policy shift that includes the suspension of the company’s fact-checking program. The goal, Meta said Tuesday, is to “allow more speech by lifting restrictions.”

Meta’s newly appointed global policy chief Joel Kaplan described the effort in a statement as a means to fix “complex systems to manage content on our platforms, which are increasingly complicated for us to enforce.”

While Kaplan and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have couched the changes as a way to allow users to engage more freely in ideological dissent and political debate, the previously unreported policy materials reviewed by The Intercept illustrate the extent to which purely insulting and dehumanizing rhetoric is now accepted.

The document provides those working on Meta user content with an overview of the hate speech policy changes, walking them through how to apply the new rules. The most significant changes are accompanied by a selection of “relevant examples” — hypothetical posts marked either “Allow” or “Remove.”

When asked about the new policy changes, Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss referred The Intercept to remarks from Kaplan’s blog post announcing the shift: “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate. It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”

Kate Klonick, a content moderation policy expert who spoke to The Intercept, contests Meta’s framing that the new rules are less politicized, given the latitude they provide to attack conservative bogeymen.

“Drawing lines around content moderation was always a political enterprise,” said Klonick, an associate professor of law at St. John’s University and scholar of content moderation policy. “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

She sees the shifts announced by Kaplan — a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush and Zuckerberg’s longtime liaison to the American right — as “the open political capture of Facebook, particularly because the changes are pandering to a particular party.”

Meta’s public Community Standards page says that even under the new relaxed rules, the company still protects “refugees, migrants, immigrants, and asylum seekers from the most severe attacks” and prohibits “direct attacks” against people on the basis of “race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, and serious disease.” But the instructive examples provided in the internal materials show a wide variety of comments denigrating people based on these traits that are marked “Allow.”

Related

Facebook Fact Checks Were Never Going to Save Us. They Just Made Liberals Feel Better.

At times, the provided examples appear convoluted or contradictory. One page notes “generalizations” about any group remain prohibited if they make a comparison to animals or pathogens — such as “All Syrian refugees are rodents.” But comparisons to “filth or feces” are now downgraded from hate speech to a less serious form of “insult,” which violates company rules only if directed at a protected group. According to examples provided by Meta, this change now allows users to broadly dehumanize immigrants with statements like “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” despite language elsewhere in the document that claims “comparisons to subhumanity” remain banned.

The company’s policy around nausea-based hate follows a particularly fine line: “Migrants are no better than vomit” is allowed, according to the materials, while “Muslims make me want to throw up” ought to be removed because it claims a group “causes sickness.”

While general comparisons to animals are still against the rules, many other kinds of broad, hateful stereotyping is now allowed. “ALL behavioral statements (qualified and non-qualified)” are also now no longer against Meta’s rules, the document reads, allowing sweeping generalizations connecting entire races or ethnic groups to criminality or terrorism. The document offers as examples of acceptable racial generalizations: “These damn immigrants can’t be trusted, they’re all criminals,” “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves,” and “Japanese are all Yakuza.” It notes, however, that the statement “Black people are all drug dealers” remains prohibited under the new rules.

Other sections of the materials provide examples of forbidden “insults about sexual immorality,” such as “Jewish women are slutty.” But the document also provides ample examples of newly permissible insults aimed at specific gender identities or sexual orientations, including “Gay people are sinners” and “Trans people are immoral.” A post stating “Lesbians are so stupid” would remain prohibited as a “mental insult,” though “Trans people are mentally ill” is marked as allowed.

Generalizations about superiority and inferiority are similarly convoluted, though attacks on immigrants tend to get a pass. Examples of banned content include: “Christian men are totally useless,” “Is it me? Or are all autistic women ugly?” and “Hispanics are as dirty as the ground we walk on.” Meanwhile, “Mexican immigrants are trash!” is now deemed acceptable.

Overall, the restrictions on claims of ethnic or religious supremacy has been eased significantly. The document explains that Meta now allows “statements of superiority as long as the statements do not refer to inferiority of another [protected characteristic] group (a) on the basis of inherent intellectual ability and (b) without support.” Allowable statements under this rule include “Latinos are the best!” and “Black people are superior to all others.” Also now acceptable are comparative claims such as “Black people are more violent than Whites,” “Mexicans are lazier than Asians,” and “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians.” Off-limits, only because it pertains to intellectual ability, is the example “White people are more intelligent than black people.”

But general statements about intellect appear to be permitted if they’re shared with purported evidence. For example, “I just read a statistical study about Jewish people being smarter than Christians. From what I can tell, it’s true!” It’s unclear if one would be required to link to such a study, or merely claim its existence.

Rules around explicit statements of hate have been loosened considerably as well. “Statements of contempt, dislike, and dismissal, such as ‘I hate,’ ‘I don’t care for,’ and ‘I don’t like.’ are now considered non-violating and are allowed,” the document explains. Included as acceptable examples are posts stating “I don’t care for white people” and “I’m a proud racist.”

The new rules also forbid “targeting cursing” at a protected group, which “includes the use of the word ‘fuck’ and its variants.” Cited as an example, a post stating “Ugh, the fucking Jews are at it again” violates the rules simply because it contains an obscenity (the new rules permit the use of “bitch” or motherfucker”).

Another policy shift: “Referring to the target as genitalia or anus are now considered non-violating and are allowed.” As an example of what is now permissible, Facebook offers up: “Italians are dickheads.”

While many of the examples and underlying policies seem muddled, the document shows clarity around allowing disparaging remarks about transgender people, including children. Noting that “‘Tranny’ is no longer a designated slur and is now non-violating,” the materials provide three examples of speech that should no longer be removed: “Trannies are a problem,” “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl),” and “Get these trannies out of my school (beneath photo of high school students).”

After the publication of this article, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone informed The Intercept that the company had made an error in one of the examples in its informational material. Stone said Meta intended to illustrate content that would not be allowed when it included the example “Look at that tranny (beneath photo of 17 year old girl).”

According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Meta’s hate speech protections have historically been well-intentioned, however deeply flawed in practice. “While this has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta’s policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression,” York said.

Meta has faced international scrutiny for its approach to hate speech, most notably after the role that hate speech and other dehumanizing language on Facebook played in fomenting genocide in Myanmar and the displacement of over 650,000 Rohingya Muslims. Following criticism of its mishandling of Myanmar, where the United Nations found Facebook had played a “determining role,” the company spent years touting its investment in preventing the spread of similar rhetoric in the future.

“The reason many of these lines were drawn where they were is because hate speech often doesn’t stay speech, it turns into real-world conduct,” said Klonick, the content moderation scholar.

It’s a premise that Meta purported to share up until this week. “We have a responsibility to fight abuse on Facebook. This is especially true in countries like Myanmar where many people are using the internet for the first time and social media can be used to spread hate and fuel tension on the ground,” wrote company product manager Sara Su in a 2018 blog post. “While we’re adapting our approach to false news given the changing circumstances, our rules on hate speech have stayed the same: it’s not allowed.”

Update: January 9, 2025, 9:11 p.m ET
This article has been updated to include comment from Meta spokesperson Andy Stone noting that a mistake in the company’s internal materials incorrectly classified a post about trans youth as permissible.

Correction: January 10, 2025
An earlier version of this article stated that 650,000 Rohingya Muslims had been killed; that is the number of Rohingya Muslims who have been displaced, according to the United Nations.

The post Leaked Meta Rules: Users Are Free to Post “Mexican Immigrants Are Trash!” or “Trans People Are Immoral” appeared first on The Intercept.

As they feared, Homeland Security Investigations, the intelligence division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was intent to track them both down. As agents scrambled to find Taal and Thomas-Johnson, HSI sent subpoenas to Google and Meta for sensitive data information about their Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram accounts.

In Thomas-Johnson’s case, The Intercept found, Google handed over data to ICE before notifying him or giving him an opportunity to challenge the subpoena. By the time he found out about the data demand, Thomas-Johnson had already left the U.S.

During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech — sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York who has studied ICE’s use of administrative subpoenas, said she was concerned but not surprised that Google complied with the subpoena about Thomas-Johnson’s account without notifying him.

“Subpoenas can easily be used and the person never knows,” Nash told The Intercept. “It’s problematic to have a situation in which people who are targeted by these subpoenas don’t have an opportunity to vindicate their rights.”

Google declined to discuss the specifics of the subpoenas, but the company said administrative subpoenas like these do not include facts about the underlying investigation.

“Our processes for handling law enforcement subpoenas are designed to protect users’ privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” said a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement. “We review every subpoena and similar order for legal validity, and we push back against those that are overbroad or improper, including objecting to some entirely.”

ICE agents sent the administrative subpoenas to Google and Meta by invoking a broad legal provision that gives immigration officers authority to demand documents “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States.”

One recent study based on ICE records found agents invoke this same provision hundreds of times each year in administrative subpoenas to tech companies. Another study found ICE’s subpoenas to tech companies and other private entities “overwhelmingly sought information that could be used to locate ICE’s targets.”

Unlike search warrants, administrative subpoenas like these do not require a judge’s signature or probable cause of a crime, which means they are ripe for abuse.

HSI had flagged Taal to the State Department following “targeted analysis to substantiate aliens’ alleged engagement of antisemitic activities,” according to an affidavit later filed in court by a high-ranking official. This analysis amounted to a trawl of online articles about Taal’s participation in Gaza protests and run-ins with the Cornell administration. The State Department revoked Taal’s visa, and ICE agents in upstate New York began searching for him.

In mid-March, the week after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in New York City, Taal sued the Trump administration, seeking an injunction that would have blocked ICE from detaining him too. By this point, he and Thomas-Johnson had both left their campus housing at Cornell and were hiding from ICE in a house 10 miles outside Ithaca.

Two days after Taal filed his suit, still unable to track him down, ICE sent an administrative subpoena to Meta. According to notices Meta emailed to Taal, the subpoena sought information about his Instagram and Facebook accounts. Meta gave Taal 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would comply and hand over data about his accounts to ICE.

Like Google, Meta declined to discuss the subpoena it received about Taal’s account, referring The Intercept to a webpage about the company’s compliance with data demands.

A week later, HSI sent another administrative subpoena to Google regarding Taal’s Gmail account, according to a notice Google sent him the next day.

“It was a phishing expedition,” Taal said in a text message to The Intercept.

After Taal decided to leave the country and dismissed his lawsuit in April, ICE withdrew its subpoenas for his records.

Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82

But on the last day of March, HSI sent yet another subpoena, this one to Google for information about Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Without giving Thomas-Johnson any advance warning or the opportunity to challenge it, Google complied with the subpoena, and it only notified him weeks later. 

“Google has received and responded to legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account,” read an email Google sent him in early May.

By this point, Thomas-Johnson had already left the country too. He fled after a friend was detained at the Tampa airport, handed a note with Thomas-Johnson’s name on it, and asked repeatedly about his whereabouts, he told The Intercept.

Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, who also represented Taal, reached out to an attorney for Google about the demand for his client’s account information.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” Google’s attorney replied by email, further explaining that Google’s “production consisted of basic subscriber information,” such as the name, address, and phone number associated with the account. Google did not produce “the contents of communications, metadata regarding those communications, or location information,” the company’s attorney wrote.

“This is the extent that they will go to be in support of genocide,” Taal said of the government’s attempts to locate him using subpoenas.

Correction: September 16, 2025, 12:40 p.m. ET
The story has been updated to correct the spelling of Amandla Thomas-Johnson’s last name.

The post Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist appeared first on The Intercept.

This case hinges on a recent effort by the Trump administration to unmask Instagram and Facebook accounts monitoring immigration agents in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It’s not the first effort of its kind by federal authorities.

In 2017, The Intercept reported an attempt by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to reveal the identity of the operator of a Twitter account critical of President Donald Trump by invoking, without explanation, its legal authority to investigate the collection of tariffs and import duties. Following public outcry and scrutiny from Wyden, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded its legal summons and launched an internal investigation. A subsequent report by the DHS Office of Inspector General found that while CBP had initially claimed it needed the account’s identity to “investigate possible criminal violations by CBP officials, including murder, theft, and corruption,” it had issued its legal demand to Twitter based only on its legal authority for the “ascertainment, collection, and recovery of customs duties.”

The report concluded that CBP’s purpose in issuing the summons to Twitter was unrelated to the importation of merchandise or the assessment and collection of customs duties,” and thus “may have exceeded the scope of its authority.” The OIG proposed a handful of reforms, to which CBP agreed, including a new policy that all summonses be reviewed for “legal sufficiency” and receive a sign-off from CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Eight years and another Trump term later, CBP is at it again. In October, 404 Media reported that DHS was once again invoking its authority to investigate merchandise imports in a bid to force Meta to disclose the identity of MontCo Community Watch, a Facebook and Instagram account that tracks the actions of immigration authorities north of Philadelphia. A federal judge temporarily blocked Meta from disclosing user data in response to the summons.

In a letter sent Friday to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Wyden asked the government to cease what he describes as “manifestly improper use of this customs investigatory authority,” writing that “DHS appears to be abusing this authority to repress First Amendment protected speech.”

The letter refers to the 2017 OIG report, noting that CBP “has a history of improperly using this summons authority to obtain records unrelated to import of merchandise or customs duties. … The Meta Summonses appear to be unrelated to the enforcement of customs laws. On the contrary, DHS apparently is trying to expose an individual’s identity in order to chill criticism of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies.” Wyden concludes with a request to Noem to “rescind these unlawful summonses and to ensure that DHS complies with statutory limitations on the use of 19 U.S.C. § 1509 going forward.”

Related

The Feds Want to Unmask Instagram Accounts That Identified Immigration Agents

The MontCo Community Watch effort followed an earlier attempt this year to unmask another Instagram account that shared First Amendment-protected imagery of ICE agents in public. This subpoena, first reported by The Intercept, focused not on merchandise imports. Instead it invoked law “relating to the privilege of any person to enter, reenter, reside in, or pass through the United States,” even though the subpoena was issued pertaining to “officer safety,” not immigration enforcement.

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment

The post Wyden Blasts Kristi Noem for Abusing Subpoena Power to Unmask ICE Watcher appeared first on The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

“I’d already seen the subpoena request that Google and Meta had sent to Momodou [Taal], and I knew that he had gotten in touch with a lawyer and the lawyer successfully challenged that,” Thomas-Johnson said. “I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have that opportunity.”

The subpoena provides no justification for why ICE is asking for this information, except that it’s required “in connection with an investigation or inquiry relating to the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.” In the subpoena, ICE requests that Google not “disclose the existence of this summons for indefinite period of time.”

Thomas-Johnson, who is British, believes that ICE requested that information to track and eventually detain him — but he had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland, and is now in Dakar, Senegal. 

Related

Google Secretly Handed ICE Data About Pro-Palestine Student Activist

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Thomas-Johnson, and the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Google, Amazon, Apple, Discord, Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit last week calling on tech companies to resist similar subpoenas in the future from DHS without court intervention. The letter asks the companies to provide users with as much notice as possible before complying with a subpoena to give them the opportunity to fight it, and to resist gag orders that would prevent the tech companies from informing targets that a subpoena was issued.

“Your promises to protect the privacy of users are being tested right now. As part of the federal government’s unprecedented campaign to target critics of its conduct and policies, agencies like DHS have repeatedly demanded access to the identities and information of people on your services,” the letter reads. “Based on our own contact with targeted users, we are deeply concerned your companies are failing to challenge unlawful surveillance and defend user privacy and speech.”

In addition to Thomas-Johnson’s case, the letter refers to other instances in which technology companies provided user data to DHS, including a subpoena sent to Meta to “unmask” the identities of users who documented immigration raids in California. Unlike Thomas-Johnson, users in that case were given the chance to fight the subpoena because they were made aware of it before Meta complied.

“Google has already fulfilled this subpoena,” an attorney for Google told Thomas-Johnson’s lawyer, as The Intercept previously reported. “Production consisted of basic subscriber information.”

The ICE subpoena requested the detailed information linked to Thomas-Johnson’s Gmail account. Thomas-Johnson confirmed to The Intercept that he had attached his bank and credit card numbers to his account to buy apps.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Lindsay Nash, a professor at Cardozo Law and a former staff attorney with ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that by not giving prior notice, Google deprived Thomas-Johnson of his ability to protect his information.

“The problem is that it doesn’t allow the person whose personal information is on the line and whose privacy may be being invaded to raise challenges to the disclosure of that potentially private information,” Nash said. “And I think that’s important to protect rights that they may have to their own information.”

Tech companies’ data sharing practices are primarily governed by two federal laws, the Stored Communications Act, which protects the privacy of digital communications, including emails, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive trade practices.

“Under both federal law and the law of every state, you cannot deceive consumers,” said Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University St. Louis who specializes in privacy, the internet, and civil liberties. “And if you make a material misrepresentation about your data practices, that’s a deceptive trade practice.”

Whether or not corporations are clear enough with consumers about how they collect and share their data has been litigated for decades, Richards said, referencing the infamous Cambridge Analytica lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the company misled Facebook users about data collection and sharing.

Google’s public privacy policy acknowledges that it will share personal information in response to an “enforceable governmental request,” adding that its legal team will “frequently push back when a request appears to be overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.”

According to Google, the company overwhelmingly complied with the millions of requests made by the government for user information over the last decade. Its data also shows that those requests have spiked over the last five years. It’s unclear how many of those users were given notice of those requests ahead of time or after.

Richards said that cases like these emphasize the need for legal reforms around data privacy and urged Congress to amend the Stored Communications Act to require a higher standard before the government can access our digital data. He also said the federal government needs to regulate Big Tech and place “substantive restrictions on their ability to share information with the government.”

It’s hard to know exactly how tech companies are handling our personal data in relation to the government, but there seems to have been a shift in optics, Richards said. “What we have seen in the 12 months since the leaders of Big Tech were there on the podium at the inauguration,” Richards said, “is much more friendliness of Big Tech towards the government and towards state power.”

From Dakar, Thomas-Johnson said that understanding the extent of the subpoena was terrifying but had not changed his commitment to his work.

“As a journalist, what’s weird is that you’re so used to seeing things from the outside,” said Thomas-Johnson, whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian. “We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions… where government and Big Tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”

Update: February 10, 5:54 p.m. ET

This story has been updated to reflect that Thomas-Johnson’s legal team still does not know the full extent of the information that Google provided to ICE, but that Thomas-Johnson said his bank and credit card numbers were attached to his account.

The post Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers appeared first on The Intercept.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.” In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”

Cutler did not respond to a request for comment; Meta declined a request to interview her.

Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.

“Voice of the Government”

Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”

In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.

In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”

A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.” In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.” In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”

Though Meta has extensive government relations and lobbying operations aimed at capitols around the world, few other governments enjoy their own dedicated high-level contact within the company. The company employs no counterpart to Cutler’s role solely representing Palestinian viewpoints; tens of millions of Meta users across the entire Middle East and all of North Africa share one policy director. A single policy lead oversees the entire Southeast Asian nations market, with a population of nearly 700 million. This raises concerns among experts about a deep power imbalance inside Facebook when it comes to moderating discussion of a war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans. 

“If Meta wishes to behave ethically, it must ensure that Palestinians also have a seat at the table,” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York told The Intercept.

Flagged for Moderation

Records reviewed by The Intercept show Cutler pushed for the removal of an SJP post promoting a reading list of books including authors associated with two Marxist-Leninist militant groups, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Though it remains a Meta-designated terrorist group according to a copy of the list obtained by The Intercept in 2021, the DFLP has not been considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government since 1999, when it was delisted by the State Department “primarily because of the absence of terrorist activity.” The PFLP remains designated by both Meta and the United States.

According to a source familiar with Cutler’s actions, these efforts have included lobbying for the deletion of posts quoting celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who served as a PFLP spokesperson nearly 60 years ago and was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Kanafani, whose works have been widely translated and published in countries around the world, enjoys global literary renown and mainstream recognition; his 1969 novella “Returning to Haifa” was cited as a recommended book by a guest on the New York Times podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” last year.

Internal records show Cutler later lobbied for the removal of an SJP Instagram post describing Leila Khaled — an 80-year-old former PFLP member who helped hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and has in the decades since become an outspoken icon of Palestinian solidarity — as “empowering.” 

These same records demonstrate Cutler regularly singled out Instagram content belonging to SJP at the University of California, Los Angeles, claiming to policy colleagues that this chapter had been associated with violent protests, citing an Israeli news report about an April 29 melee at the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Local and national press accounts described a peaceful protest until a pro-Israeli mob attacked the encampment with fists, weapons, and bear spray, injuring 15 people. 

Related

Facebook and Instagram Restrict the Use of the Red Triangle Emoji Over Hamas Association

Throughout the year, Cutler internally flagged several SJP UCLA posts, including those mentioning a reading list of PFLP-associated authors, an on-campus “PFLP study group,” and a post containing a red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance. 

Mona, a UCLA undergraduate and SJP member who spoke on the condition of being only identified by her first name, said the chapter’s Instagram account was periodically unable to post or share content, which the group attributed to enforcement actions by Meta. In August, the organization’s chapter at Columbia University reported its Instagram account had been deactivated without explanation. A member of SJP Columbia said the chapter did not have a record of deleted Instagram content but recalled Meta removing multiple posts that quoted Kanafani.

The Israeli government has been vehement in its criticism of anti-Zionist groups like SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, and has denounced campus organizing as an attempt to import terrorism to American college campuses.

Records show Cutler has requested the deletion of non-student content, too. Following Iran’s October 1 missile attack against Israel, Cutler quickly flagged video uploaded to Instagram of Palestinians cheering from the Gaza Strip. Records show Cutler has also repeatedly lobbied to censor the Instagram account of Lebanese satellite TV network Al Mayadeen when it posted sympathetic content about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

These actions are “Typical Jordana,” according to Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former Middle East and North Africa policy chief. “No one in the world could tell me that a lot of what she does is not an overreach of her authority.”

Zeitoon, who departed the company in 2017, told The Intercept that Cutler’s role inside Meta differed from those of other regional policy managers.  

“If I was head of public policy for Jordan, and I went on TV and said I represent the interests of Jordan within Meta, I would be fired the second day,” said Zeitoon, a Jordanian national, whose mandate at Meta was to oversee the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. “That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. None of us was ever hired with the premise that we’re representing our governments.”

During his tenure, Zeitoon says he often fielded informal requests from the government of Jordan, but that he drew a clear line at acting on its behalf. “The Jordanian government hated my guts when I was there, because they thought that I was obliged because I’m Jordanian. I might guide you, I might be over-friendly, if you call me at night I might accept your call. But at the end of the day, Facebook pays my salary.”

BuzzFeed News reported that in 2017 Facebook employees had “raised concerns about Cutler’s role and whose interests she prioritizes,” evidenced by an argument “over whether the West Bank should be considered ‘occupied territories’ in Facebook’s rules.” Zeitoon recalled this clash as emblematic of Cutler’s tenure, adding that when he was there, she “tried to influence decision makers within the company to designate the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ territory” rather than using the term “occupied” — a phrasing used by the United Nations when describing the region.

Zeitoon doubted the Meta spokesperson’s claim that all internal escalations are treated equally, no matter who submits them. Recalling his time working in a high-ranking role at the company, he said his complaints received immediate attention: “My report goes to the top,” he said. He expects the same would be true today for content flagged by Cutler — especially at a moment when Israel is at war. “I’m sure all she reports is code red.”

Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was reminded of the case of Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy head for India — another rare instance in which a single country had its own dedicated representative within the company. Das resigned from her position in 2020 after a Wall Street Journal report found she had lobbied for the uneven enforcement of hate speech rules that benefited India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which she supported personally. “Meta is the communications platform for much for the world, but of course not every voice is heard equally,” Brooking said in an interview.

Zeitoon concurred: “No governments in the world have been able to create a network of influence and pressure on Meta as strong as the Israeli and the Indian governments.”

Related

Israeli Group Claims It’s Working With Big Tech Insiders to Censor “Inflammatory” Wartime Content

Cutler is not the first or only prominent figure within Meta to help foster relations between the company and governments. Her colleague Joel Kaplan, who served as White House deputy chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration, joined Facebook in 2011 to head the company’s operations in Washington, D.C., a move the New York Times reported “will likely strengthen its ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is the former deputy prime minister of the U.K. Many of the staffers who help Meta craft and enforce its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy join following years of work at the Pentagon, State Department, federal law enforcement, and spy agencies. The revolving door between government and major internet companies is vast and ever-turning not just at Meta, but also its most prominent rivals. 

As recently as February 2023, Cutler’s name was floated as a possible next head of the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, a government propaganda office tasked with surveilling and undermining protesters and activists abroad. The ministry has reportedly made extensive use of Meta’s platforms to infiltrate student groups and conduct propaganda campaigns. In June, Haaretz reported a project originally founded by the ministry had targeted Black lawmakers in the U.S. with “hundreds” of phony Facebook and Instagram accounts “to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative.” Meta later shut these accounts down.

Evelyn Douek, a content moderation scholar and professor at Stanford Law School, said Cutler’s direct intervention is “obviously extremely concerning” given the specific stakes. “You have a person inside Meta representing the interests of the government on an issue about which there is deeply contested political debate it appears, to favor one side of that debate. The concerns about bias and disproportionate enforcement of a policy when that is happening seem obvious.”

Lever, the Meta spokesperson, said that Cutler’s role in public policy is distinct from the company’s Content Policy officials, noting the former “engage” with governments but do not actually have a role in drafting rules. In her Jerusalem Post interview, however, Cutler stated “I’m part of a team of people who are helping to develop and build Facebook’s policies.”

Douek argued that internet platform users are best served by keeping the creation of speech rules entirely separate from their enforcement. “It’s really highly problematic if you have people whose job at Meta is not the fair enforcement of content moderation rules, but rather their job is to please government interests intervening in the enforcement of the platform’s rules,” she said.

This at a minimum creates the appearance of a foreign government meddling in an intensely domestic political issue — a dynamic Meta has historically worked to combat. “Campus protests and what is happening in the United States right now is a deeply contested fault line in American politics. And this has been an issue about what are the appropriate limits on campus speech and how should we be dealing with this,” Douek said. “A foreign country’s interests are being overly represented in how that debate is moderated, that should also raise concerns.”

The post Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts appeared first on The Intercept.

After Charlie Kirk was murdered at Utah Valley University, graphic videos of the right-wing provocateur’s assassination went viral on every major social media platform. It’s not surprising that such violent footage quickly spread — especially around a killing as high-profile as Kirk’s. What’s unusual, however, is how long those videos have been allowed to stay up.

Search Kirk’s name on Instagram right now, and for every three videos of him “owning” a college student in a debate, there’s at least one of him bleeding out. Search “Charlie Kirk shooting,” and your feed will be inundated with videos of the incident. This was not always the case. After a gunman livestreamed his attack at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, Meta said it took down 1.2 million versions of the video before users could upload them to the platform. The Southern Poverty Law Center also tracked uploads of videos after mass shootings in Christchurch; Halle, Germany; and Buffalo, New York, and found a dramatic decrease after the seventh day of each of those shootings. 

Related

America Tolerates High Levels of Violence but Suppresses Photos of the Slaughter

Owners of social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube have traditionally responded much faster to the proliferation of such graphic violence on their platforms, at least in the West. (Internet users in places where these platforms dedicate less resources to moderation like Gaza or Tigray are all too familiar with the kind of deluge of gore American users were subject to these past few weeks.)

Lawmakers including Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have called on the platforms to delete the videos of Kirk’s gruesome assassination.

“He has a family, young children, and no one should be forced to relive this tragedy online. These are not the only graphic videos of horrifying murders circulating— at some point, social media begins to desensitize humanity. We must still value life,” Luna wrote on her X account. “Please take them down.”

But for several years, Republican legislators, in the name of free speech, have pushed tech companies to gut the very systems they now expect to protect them. It was part of pressure campaign intended to force social media companies to fire moderators, abandon fact-checking, and weaken their hate speech policies. As Luna and Boebert now demand the removal of videos of Kirk’s gruesome assassination, they’re experiencing the predictable consequence of the information ecosystem their party created — and are now horrified that the chaos has turned inward.

In 2023, after Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, succeeded Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., as chair of the House Judiciary Committee; he immediately used his platform to start subpoenaing Big Tech and research organizations that study online hate speech and misinformation, like the Stanford Internet Observatory. Jordan accused them of a “marriage of big government, big tech [and] big academia” that attacked “American citizens’ First Amendment liberties.” Notably, last year, congressional Republicans accused the FBI and tech platforms of collaborating to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election by suppressing posts related to Hunter Biden’s laptop. 

Meanwhile, conservative activists sued the Biden administration complaining that it pressured social media companies to censor conservative views on Covid-19 vaccines and election fraud. Though they lost the suit, Republicans have long held that platforms have overly censored their posts. Studies also show that Republicans are far more likely to spread misinformation. During the 2016 election, for example, 80 percent of the disinformation on Facebook came from Republican-leaning posts. Another 2023 study found that conservatives were eight times more likely to spread misleading content than those who lean liberal. In other words, Republicans were more likely to be censored by social media because their posts were more likely to violate their policies.

Of course, a lot has changed since then, and tech companies have gone much further in appeasing conservatives. Perhaps, the biggest coup d’état for conservatives in the battle against “liberal tech” was Elon Musk’s purchase and subsequent rebranding of Twitter. To appease Republican activists, Musk — who recently advocated for the imprisonment of those who belittle the death of Kirk — promised to turn Twitter into a “free speech” platform. His first move was laying off a majority of the company’s staff involved in devising and implementing its content moderation policies. One former Twitter staffer who used to work in this division estimated that almost 90 percent of the company’s content moderation staff was laid off. Twitter, now X, also said it would rely on its Community Notes feature and AI to moderate content.  

Related

My Ban From X Is About One Simple Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information

Musk’s changes were not only in staffing, but also in how strongly the company enforces its policies. While Twitter’s hate speech policies still exist on paper, the platform has chosen not to enforce and has instead verified hundreds of accounts belonging to white supremacists, reinstated the accounts of notorious promoters of anti-trans content, and of course, brought back Trump who was excommunicated from the platform for his role in inciting the January 6 riots. Musk also joined Republicans’ attack on researchers who monitor disinformation by suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate in 2023 — though that lawsuit was later dismissed. 

The inflection point for this yearslong campaign by conservative activists was Meta’s capitulation to their demands shortly after Trump’s election win. In January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, dressed in a loose black T-shirt and a gold chain, told Facebook and Instagram users the company would drastically scale back its third-party fact-checking operation. He told users the company would also ease enforcement of its hate speech rules, especially around immigration and gender. “It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram,” Zuck said. 

While Meta, YouTube, and others have said their content policies would apply to the Kirk assassination videos, to capitulate to Republican demands, they have not only reduced how strongly they review content but also gotten rid of much of the staff that does that work.

Like Twitter, Meta has since quietly laid off many of the people that work on its trust and safety teams while also announcing it would double-down on AI based moderation. Not even a month after Meta announced its content policy changes, users reported seeing more graphic content on the platform.

“Underinvesting in platform safety has serious consequences,” says Martha Dark, the co-executive director of Foxglove Legal, a tech accountability nonprofit that advocates for content moderators. “It’s striking that after years of demanding platforms ease up on enforcement, some politicians are now outraged at the very consequences of that pressure. You can’t have it both ways: Weakening moderation inevitably means violent and graphic content is left up for longer and spreads more quickly,” Dark adds.

As for the tech companies’ claims that AI can carry the burden of their content moderation load: Olivia Conti, a former Twitter product manager who focused on abuse detection algorithms, told me that these algorithms may as well be “pizza detectors” because they “flag anything with predominantly red tones.” Even the hashing technology that tech platforms have traditionally used to identify these videos can easily be evaded through small edits.

Ellery Biddle, the director of impact at Meedan, a technology nonprofit that studies harmful speech and gender-based violence online, says that while some content moderation can be assisted by AI, “you still need teams of smart people to tell the AI what to do.”

Republicans intended to take aim at the teams that moderate hate speech and harassment. But those very people are also responsible for the job of monitoring and removing gruesome videos, like that of Kirk’s death.

The post Videos of Charlie Kirk’s Murder Are Still on Social Media — and That’s No Accident appeared first on The Intercept.

As it has invested billions into developing machine learning technology it hopes can outpace OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has pitched its flagship large language model, Llama, as a handy way of planning vegan dinners or weekends away with friends. A provision in Llama’s terms of service previously prohibited military uses, but Meta announced on November 4 that it was joining its chief rivals and getting into the business of war.

“Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg.

One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release.

But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities.

Llama 3.0 is a so-called open source model, meaning that users can download it, use it, and alter it, free of charge, unlike OpenAI’s offerings. Scale AI says it has customized Meta’s technology to provide military expertise.

Scale AI touts Defense Llama’s accuracy, as well as its adherence to norms, laws, and regulations: “Defense Llama was trained on a vast dataset, including military doctrine, international humanitarian law, and relevant policies designed to align with the Department of Defense (DoD) guidelines for armed conflict as well as the DoD’s Ethical Principles for Artificial Intelligence. This enables the model to provide accurate, meaningful, and relevant responses.”

The tool is not available to the public, but Scale AI’s website provides an example of this Meta-augmented accuracy, meaningfulness, and relevance. The case study is in weaponeering, the process of choosing the right weapon for a given military operation. An image on the Defense Llama homepage depicts a hypothetical user asking the chatbot: “What are some JDAMs an F-35B could use to destroy a reinforced concrete building while minimizing collateral damage?” The Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, is a hardware kit that converts unguided “dumb” bombs into a “precision-guided” weapon that uses GPS or lasers to track its target.

Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.”

Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless. Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death.

“I can assure you that no U.S. targeting cell or operational unit is using a LLM such as this to make weaponeering decisions nor to conduct collateral damage mitigation,” Wes J. Bryant, a retired targeting officer with the U.S. Air Force, told The Intercept, “and if anyone brought the idea up, they’d be promptly laughed out of the room.”

Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept.

“Since the question specifies JDAM and destruction of the building, it eliminates munitions that are generally used for lower collateral damage strikes,” Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician, told The Intercept. “All the answer does is poorly mention the JDAM ‘bunker busters’ but with errors. For example, the GBU-31 and GBU-32 warhead it refers to is not the (V)1. There also isn’t a 500-pound penetrator in the U.S. arsenal.”

Ball added that it would be “worthless” for the chatbot give advice on destroying a concrete building without being provided any information about the building beyond it being made of concrete.

Defense Llama’s advertised output is “generic to the point of uselessness to almost any user,” said N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services. He also expressed skepticism toward the question’s premise. “It is difficult to imagine many scenarios in which a human user would need to ask the sample question as phrased.”

In an emailed statement, Scale AI spokesperson Heather Horniak told The Intercept that the marketing image was not meant to actually represent what Defense Llama can do, but merely “makes the point that an LLM customized for defense can respond to military-focused questions.” Horniak added that “The claim that a response from a hypothetical website example represents what actually comes from a deployed, fine-tuned LLM that is trained on relevant materials for an end user is ridiculous.”

Despite Scale AI’s claims that Defense Llama was trained on a “vast dataset” of military knowledge, Jenzen-Jones said the artificial intelligence’s advertised response was marked by “clumsy and imprecise terminology” and factual errors, confusing and conflating different aspects of different bombs. “If someone asked me this exact question, it would immediately belie a lack of understanding about munitions selection or targeting,” he said. Why an F-35? Why a JDAM? What’s the building, and where is it? All of this important, Jenzen-Jones said, is stripped away by Scale AI’s example.

Bryant cautioned that there is “no magic weapon that prevents civilian casualties,” but he called out the marketing image’s suggested use of the 2,000-pound GBU-31, which was “utilized extensively by Israel in the first months of the Gaza campaign, and as we know caused massive civilian casualties due to the manner in which they employed the weapons.”

Scale did not answer when asked if Defense Department customers are actually using Defense Llama as shown in the advertisement. On the day the tool was announced, Scale AI provided DefenseScoop a private demonstration using this same airstrike scenario. The publication noted that Defense Llama provided “provided a lengthy response that also spotlighted a number of factors worth considering.” Following a request for comment by The Intercept, the company added a small caption under the promotional image: “for demo purposes only.”

Meta declined to comment.

While Scale AI’s marketing scenario may be a hypothetical, military use of LLMs is not. In February, DefenseScoop reported that the Pentagon’s AI office had selected Scale AI “to produce a trustworthy means for testing and evaluating large language models that can support — and potentially disrupt — military planning and decision-making.” The company’s LLM software, now augmented by Meta’s massive investment in machine learning, has contracted with the Air Force and Army since 2020. Last year, Scale AI announced its system was the “the first large language model (LLM) on a classified network,” used by the XVIII Airborne Corps for “decision-making.” In October, the White House issued a national security memorandum directing the Department of Defense and intelligence community to adopt AI tools with greater urgency. Shortly after the memo’s publication, The Intercept reported that U.S. Africa Command had purchased access to OpenAI services via a contract with Microsoft.

Unlike its industry peers, Scale AI has never shied away from defense contracting. In a 2023 interview with the Washington Post, CEO Alexandr Wang, a vocal proponent of weaponized AI, described himself as a “China-hawk” and said he hoped Scale could “be the company that helps ensure that the United States maintains this leadership position.” Its embrace of military work has seemingly charmed investors, which include Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Nvidia, Amazon, and Meta. “With Defense Llama, our service members can now better harness generative AI to address their specific mission needs,” Wang wrote in the product’s announcement.

But the munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed confusion over who, exactly, Defense Llama is marketing to with the airstrike demo, questioning why anyone involved in weaponeering would know so little about its fundamentals that they would need to consult a chatbot in the first place. “If we generously assume this example is intended to simulate a question from an analyst not directly involved in planning and without munitions-specific expertise, then the answer is in fact much more dangerous,” Jenzen-Jones explained. “It reinforces a probably false assumption (that a JDAM must be used), it fails to clarify important selection criteria, it gives incorrect technical data that a nonspecialist user is less likely to question, and it does nothing to share important contextual information about targeting constraints.”

“It gives incorrect technical data that a nonspecialist user is less likely to question.”

Bryant agreed. “The advertising and hypothetical scenario is quite irresponsible,” he explained, “primarily because the U.S. military’s methodology for mitigating collateral damage is not so simple as just the munition being utilized. That is one factor of many.” Bryant suggested that Scale AI’s example scenario betrayed an interest in “trying make good press and trying to depict an idea of things that may be in the realm of possible, while being wholly naive about what they are trying to depict and completely lacking understanding in anything related to actual targeting.”

Turning to an LLM for airstrike planning also means sidestepping the typical human-based process and the responsibility that entails. Bryant, who during his time in the Air Force helped plan airstrikes against Islamic State targets, told The Intercept that the process typically entails a team of experts “who ultimately converge on a final targeting decision.”

Jessica Dorsey, a professor at Utrecht University School of Law and scholar of automated warfare methods, said consulting Defense Llama seems to entirely circumvent the ostensible legal obligations military planners are supposed to be held to. “The reductionist/simplistic and almost amateurish approach indicated by the example is quite dangerous,” she said. “Just deploying a GBU/JDAM does not mean there will be less civilian harm. It’s a 500 to 2,000-pound bomb after all.”

The post Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes appeared first on The Intercept.

Elon Musk banned me from X for my journalism. No one should be surprised about it in this era, when the prevailing view in Silicon Valley is “Free speech for me but not for thee.”

That ethos reinforces why we should be concerned about Musk’s takeover of the platform and, more to the point, oligarchs’ control of our main forms of communication.

Musk’s X, and now increasingly Meta, are shirking the responsibilities of owning and operating the world’s venues for sharing information, while taking advantage of these platforms for their own agenda-driven objectives.

My own brush with these hypocrisies went like this: My X account was suspended on Sunday because of a news story I authored. X accused me of violating X’s “doxing” rule — meaning that I shared someone’s personal, private information without permission.

The rule is rarely, and inconsistently, enforced, and more to the point, no reasonable person could think my story violated it.

Moderation on X doesn’t seem to exist to help keep anyone safe.

Moderation on X doesn’t seem to exist to help keep anyone safe. My news story put no one and nothing in danger.

Yesterday, news broke that Meta decided to get rid of fact-checking on its platforms in favor of something like X’s Community Notes.

Related

Facebook Fact Checks Were Never Going to Save Us. They Just Made Liberals Feel Better.

Zuckerberg’s move is in line with X’s capriciously enforced doxing regulations: At best, it’s simply about controlling information; at worst, it’s about serving a self-interested agenda. And with Donald Trump going back to the White House, it’s clear where these billionaires’ self-interests lie.

Notably, Zuckerberg recent detente with Trump comes after the Meta chief faced years of right-wing attacks for the company’s decision to restrict access to news stories about Hunter Biden. Perhaps the most famous blocked link in social media history, both X and Meta supressed the a New York Post story about Biden’s laptop out of skepticism about its veracity and for fear that it was part of a foreign intelligence operation targeting the 2020 election.

Now, Musk has done the same thing to my news story about the Adrian Dittmann account on X not belonging to Elon Musk but likely belonging to … a man named Adrian Dittmann.

How I Got Banned

Published in The Spectator — ironically a right-leaning news outlet — my story examined the Adrian Dittmann account, which rose to meme-worthiness based on speculation that it was an “alt” for Musk himself. Rumors of Musk’s secret links to the sycophantic account had become so prevalent that even major media outlets had touched on it.

For years, Musk had himself made light of the conspiracy theory, using it to discredit what he calls “legacy media” for its gullibility.

My research showed that, indeed, the account was likely not Musk’s. I found a man living in Fiji named Adrian Dittmann — whose life and history were consistent with many claims from the X account bearing his name.

The purported “alt” was not even anonymous: The user went by his real name.

My story did not share any personal details like phone numbers. All my research — to compare claims by Dittmann on X with Dittmann in Fiji — was done using publicly accessible information. And the subject clearly rose to the level of newsworthiness; Musk, after all, operates at the highest echelons of American politics.

Then I got suspended, and links to my story were banned. (After I appealed and X users protested, the company reduced my suspension from 30 days to seven. I am still required to delete my tweets about the story, though the link is now unbanned. X offered no further explanations.)

Related

New Twitter Rules Are a Major Privacy Win (for Elon Musk’s Jet)

The conclusion of X’s logic is a place where the powerful and their associations are shielded from any scrutiny. Pulling the mask of anonymity away is not always doxing, and context and execution is what distinguishes ethical journalism from harmful doxing.

What’s more, the purported “alt” was not even anonymous: The user went by his real name.

What’s Really Going On

Real “doxing” runs rampant on X.

In September, I checked in on some posts from the previous year that listed the addresses and family members of judges in president-elect Trump’s civil and criminal trials, some with photos of the judges’ homes and exhortations to harass them. As of Monday, all the posts were still visible, despite being reported by users.

As an independent investigative journalist, I’ve had people post online my own personal data, stolen personal images, and my family members’ information. X never helped me, even when I feared my family might be in danger and had my attorneys send letters to their general counsel.

So what’s really going on? These social media giants are dancing on a delicate line that they rely on to stay in business.

X and Meta want us to believe that they are our public airwaves, not the television stations themselves. The distinction allows social media companies to skirt the civil liabilities that come with being a publisher. That’s because of a loophole of law, the infamous Section 230 of 1996’s Communications Decency Act, which confers immunity on digital platforms for third-party content.

On the one hand, it behooves these giant companies to limit their moderation, since controlling the content themselves increasingly points to their status as a publisher. On the other hand, you don’t exert power over the discourse if you don’t control the content.

The companies, however, don’t have to choose one path or the other. Instead, they choose both: in each case, doing what is politically and financially expedient for them. That’s how Musk can end up arguing for Hunter Biden articles to run free but seems to have no compunction about blocking a piece on his supposed “alt.”

Section 230 simply doesn’t account for what X and Meta have become. Instead, it takes away accountability while still allowing a handful of private companies to have a tremendous influence on our discourse, with huge ramifications to the public interest.

The power they have is actually far beyond that of a publisher. Using the TV analogy, they don’t merely own the airwaves, they control them — exerting more influence over the content than the television stations. It’s a dictatorial power. Did you elect Musk or Zuck king? Would you?

A few legislators have called for reform of Section 230 in recent years, concerned about the ease of abuse of American social media platforms like TikTok by bad foreign actors like China or Russia.

What if, though, the call is coming from inside the house?

The post My Ban From X Is About One Simple Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information appeared first on The Intercept.

In college and early in her career, Byrne had dedicated herself to the field of counterterrorism and its attempt to catalog, explain, and ultimately deter non-state political violence. She was most concerned with violent right-wing extremism: neo-Nazis infiltrating Western armies, Klansmen plotting on Facebook pages, and Trumpist militiamen marching on the Capitol.

In video meetings with her remote work colleagues and in the conference rooms of Menlo Park, California, with the MAGA riot of January 6 fresh in her mind, Byrne believed she was in the right place at the right time to make a difference.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine. A country of under 40 million found itself facing a full-scale assault by one of the largest militaries in the world. Standing between it and Russian invasion were the capable, battle-tested fighters of the Azov Battalion — a unit founded as the armed wing of a Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement. What followed not only shook apart Byrne’s plans for her own life, but also her belief in content moderation and counterterrorism.

Today, she is convinced her former employer cannot be trusted with power so vast, and that the systems she helped build should be dismantled. For the first time, Byrne shares her story with The Intercept, and why the public should be as disturbed by her work as she came to be.

Through a spokesperson, Meta told The Intercept that Byrne’s workplace concerns “do not match the reality” of how policy is enforced at the company.

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Byrne grew up in the small, predominantly white Boston suburb of Natick. She was 7 years old when the World Trade Center was destroyed and grew up steeped in a binary American history of good versus evil, hopeful she would always side neatly with the former.

School taught her that communism was bad, Martin Luther King Jr. ended American racism, and the United States had only ever been a force for peace. Byrne was determined after high school to work for the CIA in part because of reading about its origin story as the Nazi-fighting Office of Strategic Services during World War II. “I was a 9/11 kid with a poor education and a hero complex,” Byrne said.

And so Byrne joined the system, earning an undergraduate degree in political science at Johns Hopkins and then enrolling in a graduate research program in “terrorism and sub-state violence” at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. Georgetown’s website highlights how many graduates from the Center go on to work at places like the Department of Defense, Department of State, Northrop Grumman — and Meta.

It was taken for granted that the program would groom graduates for the intelligence community, said Jacq Fulgham, who met Byrne at Georgetown. But even then, Fulgham remembers Byrne as a rare skeptic willing to question American imperialism: “Hannah always forced us to think about every topic and to think critically.”

Part of her required reading at Georgetown included “A Time to Attack: The Looming Iranian Nuclear Threat,” by former Defense Department official Matthew Kroenig. The book advocates for preemptive air war against Iran to end the country’s nuclear ambitions. Byrne was shocked that the premise of bombing a country of 90 million — presumably killing many innocent people — to achieve the ideological and political ends of the United States would be considered within the realm of educated debate and not an act of terrorism.

That’s because terrorism, her instructors insisted, was not something governments do. Part of terror’s malign character is its perpetration by “non-state actors”: thugs, radicals, militants, criminals, and assassins. Not presidents or generals. Unprovoked air war against Iran was within the realm of polite discussion, but there was never “the same sort of critical thinking to what forms of violence might be appropriate for Hamas” or other non-state groups, she recalls.

As part of her program at Georgetown, Byrne studied abroad in places where “non-state violence” was not a textbook topic but real life. Interviews with former IRA militants in Belfast, ex-FARC soldiers in Colombia, and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation complicated the terrorism binary. Rather than cartoon villains, Byrne met people who felt pushed to violence by the overwhelming reach and power of the United States and its allies. Wherever she went, Byrne said, she met people victimized, not protected by her country. This was a history she had never been taught.

Despite feeling dismayed about the national security sector, Byrne still harbored a temptation to fix it from within. After receiving her master’s and entering a State Department-sponsored immersion language class in India, still hopeful for an eventual job at the CIA or National Security Agency, she got a job at the RAND Corporation as a defense analyst. “I hoped I’d be able to continue to learn and write about ‘terrorism,’ which I now knew to be ‘resistance movements,’ in an academic way,” Byrne said. Instead, her two years at RAND were focused on the traditional research the think tank is known for, contributing to titles like “Countering Violent Nonstate Actor Financing: Revenue Sources, Financing Strategies, and Tools of Disruption.”

“She was all in on a career in national security,” recalled a former RAND co-worker who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity. “She was earnest in the way a lot of inside-the-Beltway recent grads can be,” they added. “She still had a healthy amount of sarcasm. But I think over time that turned into cynicism.”

Unfulfilled at RAND, Byrne found what she thought could be a way to both do good and honor her burgeoning anti-imperial politics: Fighting the enemy at home. She decided her next step would be a job that let her focus on the threat of white supremacists.

Facebook needed the help. A mob inflamed by white supremacist rhetoric had stormed the U.S. Capitol, and Facebook yet again found itself pilloried for providing an organizing tool for extremists. Byrne came away from job interviews with Facebook’s policy team convinced the company would let her fight a real danger in a way the federal national security establishment would not.

Instead, she would come to realize she had joined the national security state in microcosm.

Azov on the Whitelist

Byrne joined Meta in September 2021.

She and her team helped draft the rulebook that applies to the world’s most diabolical people and groups: the Ku Klux Klan, cartels, and of course, terrorists. Meta bans these so-called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals, or DOI, from using its platforms, but further prohibits its billions of users from engaging in “glorification,” “support,” or “representation” of anyone on the list.

Byrne’s job was not only to keep dangerous organizations off Meta properties, but also to prevent their message from spreading across the internet and spilling into the real world. The ambiguity and subjectivity inherent to these terms has made the “DOI” policy a perennial source of over-enforcement and controversy.

Related

Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations”

A full copy of the secret list obtained by The Intercept in 2021 showed it was disproportionately comprised of Muslim, Arab, and southeast Asian entities, hewing closely to the foreign policy crosshairs of the United States. Much of the list is copied directly from federal blacklists like the Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Global Terrorist roster.

A 2022 third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company had violated the human rights of Palestinian users, in part, due to over-enforcement of the DOI policy. Meta’s in-house Oversight Board has repeatedly reversed content removed through the policy, and regularly asks the company to disclose the contents of the list and information about how it’s used.

Meta’s longtime justification of the Dangerous Organizations policy is that the company is legally obligated to censor certain kinds of speech around designated entities or it would risk violating the federal statute barring material support for terrorist groups, a view some national security scholars have vigorously rejected.

Byrne tried to focus on initiatives and targets that she could feel good about, like efforts to block violent white supremacists from using the company’s VR platform or running Facebook ads. At first she was pleased to see that Meta’s in-house list went further than the federal roster in designating white supremacist organizations like the Klan — or the Azov Battalion.

Still, Byrne had doubts about the model because of the clear intimacy between American state policy and Meta’s content moderation policy. Meta’s censorship systems are “basically an extension of the government,” Byrne said in an interview.

She was also unsure of whether Meta was up to the task of maintaining a privatized terror roster. “We had this huge problem where we had all of these groups and we didn’t really have … any sort of ongoing check or list of evidence of whether or not these groups were terrorists,” she said, a characterization the company rejected.

Byrne quickly found that the blacklist was flexible.

In February 2022, as Russia prepared its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Byrne learned firsthand just how mercurial the corporate mirroring of State Department policy could be.

As an armed white supremacist group with credible allegations of human rights violations hanging over it, Azov had landed on the Dangerous Organizations list, which meant the unit’s members couldn’t use Meta platforms like Facebook, nor could any users of those platforms praise the unit’s deeds. But with Russian tanks and troops massing along the border, Ukraine’s well-trained Azov fighters became the vanguard of anti-Russian resistance, and their status as international pariahs a sudden liability for American geopolitics. Within weeks, Byrne found the moral universe around her inverted: The heavily armed hate group sanctioned by Congress since 2018 were now freedom fighters resisting occupation, not terroristic racists.

As a Counterterrorism and Dangerous Organizations policy manager, Byrne’s entire job was to help form policies that would most effectively thwart groups like Azov. Then one day, this was no longer the case. “They’re no longer neo-Nazis,” Byrne recalls a policy manager explaining to her somewhat shocked team, a line that is now the official position of the White House.

Related

Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion

Shortly after the delisting, The Intercept reported that Meta rules had been quickly altered to “allow praise of the Azov Battalion when explicitly and exclusively praising their role in defending Ukraine OR their role as part of the Ukraine’s National Guard.” Suddenly, billions of people were permitted to call the historically neo-Nazi Azov movement “real heroes,” according to policy language obtained by The Intercept at the time.

Byrne and other concerned colleagues were given an opportunity to dissent and muster evidence that Azov fighters had not in fact reformed. Byrne said that even after gathering photographic evidence to the contrary, Meta responded that while Azov may have harbored Nazi sympathies in recent years, posts violating the company’s rules had sufficiently tapered off.

The odds felt stacked: While their bosses said they were free to make their case that the Battalion should remain blacklisted, they had to pull their evidence from Facebook — a platform that Azov fighters ostensibly weren’t allowed to use in the first place.

“Key to that assessment — which everyone at Facebook knew, but coming from the outside sounds ridiculous — is that we’re actually pretty bad at keeping content off the platform. Especially neo-Nazi content,” Byrne recalls. “So internally, it was like, ‘Oh, there should be lots of evidence online if they’re neo-Nazis because there’s so many neo-Nazis on our platform.’”

Though she was not privy to deliberations about the choice to delist the Azov Battalion, Byrne is adamant in her suspicion that it was done to support the U.S.-backed war effort. “I know the U.S. government is in constant contact with Facebook employees,” she said. “It is so clear that it was a political decision.” Byrne had taken this job to prevent militant racism from spilling over into offline violence. Now, her team was instead loosening its rules for an armed organization whose founder had once declared Ukraine’s destiny was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.”

Related

Facebook Tells Moderators to Allow Graphic Images of Russian Airstrikes but Censors Israeli Attacks

It wasn’t just the shock of a reversal on the Azov Battalion, but the fact that it had happened so abruptly — Byrne estimates that it took no more than two weeks to exempt the group and allow praise of it once more.

She was aghast: “Of course, this is going to exacerbate white supremacist violence,” she recalls worrying. “This is going to make them look good. It’s going to make it easier to spread propaganda. Ultimately, I was afraid that it was going to directly contribute to violence.”

In its comments to The Intercept, Meta reiterated its belief that the Azov unit has meaningfully reformed and no longer meets its standards for designation.

Byrne recalled a similar frustration around Meta’s blacklisting of factions fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but not the violent, repressive government itself. “[Assad] was gassing his civilians, and there were a couple Syrians at Facebook who were like, ‘Hey, why do we have this whole team called Dangerous Organizations and Individuals and they’re only censoring the Syrian resistance?’” Byrne realized there was no satisfying answer: National governments were just generally off-limits.

Meta confirmed to The Intercept that its definition of terrorism doesn’t apply to nation states, reflecting what it described as a legal and academic consensus that governments may legitimately use violence.

At the start of her job, Byrne was under the impression right-wing extremism was a top priority for the company. “But every time I need resources for neo-Nazi stuff … nothing seemed to happen.” The Azov exemption, by contrast, happened at lightning speed. Byrne recalls a similarly rapid engineering effort to tweak Meta’s machine learning-based content scanning system that would have normally removed the bulk of Azov-friendly posts. Not everyone’s algorithmic treatment is similarly prioritized: “It’s infuriating that so many Palestinians are still being taken down for false-positive ‘graphic violence’ violations because it’s obvious to me no one at Meta gives a shit,” Byrne said.

Meta pushed back on Byrne’s broader objections to the Dangerous Organizations policy. “This former employee’s claims do not match the reality of how our Dangerous Organizations policies actually work,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said in a statement. “These policies are some of the most comprehensive in the industry, and designed to stop those who seek to promote violence, hate and terrorism on our platforms, while at the same time ensuring free expression. We have a team of hundreds of people from different backgrounds working on these issues every day — with expertise ranging from law enforcement and national security to human rights, counterterrorism and academic studies. Our Dangerous Organizations policies are not static, we update them to reflect evolving factors and changing threat landscapes, and we apply them equally around the world while also complying with our legal obligations.”

Malicious Actors

But it wasn’t the Azov reversal that ended Byrne’s counterterror career.

In the wake of the attack on the Capitol, Meta had a problem: “It’s tough to profile or pinpoint the type of person that would be inclined to participate in January 6, which is true of most terrorist groups,” Byrne said. “It’s an ideology, it lives in your mind.”

But what if the company could prevent the next recruit for the Proud Boys, or Three Percenters, or even ISIS? “That was our task,” Byrne said. “Figure out where these groups are organizing, kind of nip it in the bud before they carry out any further real-world violence. We need to make sure they’re not in groups together, not friending each other, and not connecting with like-minded people.”

She was assigned to work on Meta’s Malicious Actor Framework, a system intended to span all its platforms and identify “malicious actors” who might be prone to “dangerous” behavior using “signals,” Byrne said. The approach, she said, had been pioneered at Meta by the child safety team, which used automated alarms to alert the company when it seemed an adult might be attempting inappropriate contact with a child. That tactic had some success, but Byrne recalls it also mistakenly flagged people like coaches and teachers who had legitimate reason to interact with children.

Posting praise or admiring imagery of Osama bin Laden is relatively easy to catch and delete. But what about someone interested in his ideas? “The premise was that we need to target certain kinds of individuals who are likely to sympathize with terrorism,” Byrne said. There was just one problem, as Byrne puts it today: “What the fuck does it mean to be a sympathizer?”

In the field, this Obama-era framework of stopping radicalization before it takes root is known as Countering Violent Extremism, or CVE. It has been criticized as both pseudoscientific and ineffective, undermining the civil liberties of innocent people by placing them under suspicion for their own good. CVE programs generally “lack any scientific basis, are ineffective at reducing terrorism, and are overwhelmingly discriminatory in nature,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Byrne had joined Meta at a time when the company was transitioning “from content-based detection to profile-based detection,”said Byrne. Screenshots of team presentations Byrne participated in show an interest in predicting dangerousness among users. One presentation expresses concern with Facebook’s transition to encrypted messaging, which would prevent authorities (and Meta itself) from eavesdropping on chats: “We will need to move our detection/enforcement/investigation signals more upstream to surfaces we do have insight into (eg., user’s behaviors on FB, past violations, social relationships, group metadata like description, image, title, etc) in order to flag areas of harm.”

Meta specifically wanted the ability to detect and deter “risky interactions” between “dangerous individuals” or “likely-malicious actors” and their “victims” vulnerable of radicalization — without being able to read the messages these users were exchanging. The company hoped to use this capability, according to these meeting materials, to stop “malicious actors distributing propaganda,” for example. This would be accomplished using machine learning to recognize dangerous signals on someone’s profile, according to these screenshots, like certain words in their profile or whether they’d been members of a banned group.

Byrne said the plan was to incorporate this policy into a companywide framework, but she departed Meta too soon to know what ultimately came of this plan.

Meta confirmed the existence of the malicious actor framework to The Intercept, explaining that it remains a work in progress, but disputed its predictive nature.

Byrne has no evidence that Meta was pursuing a system that would use overtly prejudiced criteria to determine who is a future threat, but feared that any predictive system would be based on thin evidence and unconsciously veer toward bias. Civil liberties scholars and counterterror experts have long warned that because terrorism is so extremely rare, any attempt to predict who will commit it is fatally flawed because there simply is not enough data. Such efforts often regress, wittingly or otherwise, into stereotypes.

“I brought it up in a couple meetings, including with my manager, but it wasn’t taken that seriously,” Byrne said.

Byrne recalls discussion of predicting such radicalism risk based on things like who your friends are, what’s on your profile, who sends you message, and the extent to which you and your network have previously violated Meta’s speech rules. Given the fact enforcement of those rules has been shown to be biased along national or ethnic lines and plagued by technical errors, Byrne feared the worst for vulnerable users. “If you live in Palestine, all of your friends are Palestinians,” Byrne said. “They’re all getting flagged, and it’s like a self-licking ice cream cone.”

In the spring of 2022, investigators drawn from Meta’s internal Integrity, Investigations, and Intelligence team, known as i3, began analyzing the profiles of Facebook users whose profiles had run afoul of the Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, Byrne said. They were looking for shared traits that could be turned into general indicators of risk. “As someone who came from a professional research background, I can say it wasn’t a good research methodology,” Byrne said.

Part of her objection was pedigree: People just barely removed from American government were able to determine what people could say on online, whether or not the internet users lived in the United States. Many of these investigators, according to Byrne’s recollection and LinkedIn profiles of her former colleagues she shared with The Intercept, had arrived from positions at the Defense Department, FBI, and U.S. intelligence agencies, institutions not known for an unbiased approach to counterterror.

Over hours of interviews, Byrne never badmouthed any of her former colleagues nor blamed them individually. Her criticism of Meta is systemic, the sort of structural ailment she had hoped to change from within. “It was people that I personally liked and trusted, and I trusted their values,” Byrne said of her former colleagues on Meta’s in-house intelligence team.

Byrne feared implementing a system so deeply rooted in inference could endanger the users she’d been hired to protect. She worried about systemic biases, such as “the fact that Arabic language just wasn’t really represented in our data set.”

She worried about generalizing about one strain of violent extremism and applying it to drastically different cultures, contexts, and ideologies: “We’re saying Hamas is the exact same thing as the KKK with absolutely no basis in logic or reason or history or research.” Byrne encountered similar definitional headaches around “misinformation” and “disinformation,” which she says her team studied as potential sources of terror sympathy and wanted to incorporate into the Malicious Actor Framework. But like terrorism itself, Byrne found these terms simply too blunt to be effective. “We’re taking some of the most complex, unrelated, geographically separated, just different fucking things, and we’re literally using this word terrorism, or misinformation, or disinformation, to treat them as a binary.”

Private Policy, Public Relations

Toward the end of her time at Meta, Byrne began to break down. The prospect of catching enemies of the state had energized her at first. Now she faced the grim, gradual realization that she wasn’t accomplishing the things she hoped she would. Her work wasn’t making Facebook safer, nor the people using it. Far from manning the barricades against extremism, Byrne quickly found herself just another millennial in a boring tech job.

But while planning the Malicious Actor Framework, these feelings of futility gave way to something worse: “I’m actually going to be an active participant in harm,” she recalls thinking. The speech of people she’d met in her studies abroad were exactly the kind her job might suppress. Finally, Byrne had decided “it felt impossible to be a good actor within that system.”

Spiraling mental health struggles resulted in a leave of absence in the spring of 2023 and months of partial hospitalization. Away from her job, grappling with the nature of her work, Byrne realized she couldn’t go on. She returned at the end of the summer for a brief stretch before finally quitting on October 4. Her departure came just days before the world would be upended by events that would quickly implicate her former employer and highlight exactly why she fled from it.

For Byrne, watching the Israeli military hailed by her country’s leaders as it kills tens of thousands of civilians in the name of fighting terror exposes everything she believes wrong and fraudulent about the counterterrorism industry. Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy doesn’t take lives, but she sees it as rooted in that same conceptual injustice. “The same racist, bullshit dynamics of ‘terrorism’ were not only dictating who the U.S. was allowed to kill, they were dictating what the world was allowed to see, who in the world was allowed to speak, and what the world was allowed to say,” Byrne explained. “And the system works exactly as the U.S. law intends it to — to silence resistance to its violence.”

In conversations, it seems most galling for Byrne to compare how malleable Meta’s Dangerous Organizations policy was for Ukraine, and how draconian it has felt for those protesting the war in Gaza, or trying to document it happening around them. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Meta not only moved swiftly to allow users to cheer on the Azov Battalion, but also loosened its rules around incitement, hate speech, and gory imagery so Ukrainian civilians could share images of the suffering around them and voice their fury against it. Byrne recalls seeing a video on Facebook of a Ukrainian woman giving an invading Russian soldier seeds, telling him to keep them in his pockets so they’d flower from his corpse on the battlefield. Were it a Palestinian woman taunting to an Israeli soldier, Byrne said, “that would be taken down for terrorism so quickly.”

Today, Byrne remains conflicted about the very concept of content moderation. On the one hand, she acknowledges that violent groups can and do organize via platforms like Facebook — the problem that brought her to the company in the first place. And there are ways she believes Meta could easily improve, given its financial resources: more and better human moderators, more policy drafted by teams equipped to meet the contours of the hundreds of different countries where people use Facebook and Instagram.

While Byrne and her colleagues were supposed to be preventing harm from occurring in the world, they often felt like they were a janitorial crew responding to bad press. “An article would come out, all my team would share it, and then it would be like ‘Fix this thing’ all day. I’d be glued to the computer.” Byrne recalls “my boss’s boss or even Mark Zuckerberg just like searching things, and screenshotting them, and sending them to us, like ‘Why is this still up?’” She remembers her team, contrary to conventional wisdom about Big Tech, “expressing gratitude when there would be [media] leaks sometimes, because we’d all of a sudden get all of these resources and ability to change things.”

Militant neo-Nazi organizations represent a real, violent threat to the public, and they and other violent groups can and do organize using online platforms like Facebook, she readily admits. Still, watching the way pro-Palestinian speech has been restricted by companies like Meta since October 7, while glorifications of Israeli state violence flows unfettered, pushed her to speak out publicly about the company’s censorship apparatus. 

In her life post-Meta, galvanized by the ongoing Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Byrne has become active in pro-Palestinian protest circles and outspoken in her criticism in her former employer’s role in suppressing speech about the war. In February, she gave a presentation on Meta’s censorship practices at the NOLA Freedom Forum, a New Orleans activist group, providing an insider’s advice on how to avoid getting banned on Instagram.

She’s still maddened by the establishment’s circular logic of terrorism, which casts non-state actors as terrorists while condoning the same behaviors from governments. “The scales of acceptable casualties are astronomically different when we’re talking about white, state-perpetrated violence versus brown and black non-state-perpetrated violence.”

Unlike past Big Tech dissidents like Frances Haugen, Byrne doesn’t think her former employer can be reformed with tweaks to its algorithms or greater transparency. Rather, she fundamentally objects to an American company policing speech — even in the name of safety — for so much of the planet.

So long as U.S. foreign policy and federal law brands certain acts of violence beyond the pale depending on politics and not harm — and so long as Meta believes itself beholden to those laws — Byrne believes the machine cannot be fixed. “You want military, Department of State, CIA people enforcing free speech? That is what is concerning about this.”

The post She Joined Facebook to Fight Terror. Now She’s Convinced We Need to Fight Facebook. appeared first on The Intercept.

Since the beginning of the Israeli assault on Gaza, Hamas has regularly released footage of its successful strikes on Israeli military positions with red triangles superimposed above targeted soldiers and armor. Since last fall, use of the red triangle emoji has expanded online, becoming a widely used icon for people expressing pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli sentiment. Social media users have included the shape in their posts, usernames, and profiles as a badge of solidarity and protest. The symbol has become common enough that the Israeli military has used it as shorthand in its own propaganda: In November, Al Jazeera reported on an Israeli military video that warned “Our triangle is stronger than yours, Abu Obeida,” addressing Hamas’s spokesperson.

According to internal policy guidelines obtained by The Intercept, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has determined that the upside-down triangle emoji is a proxy for support for Hamas, an organization blacklisted under the company’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy and designated a terror group under U.S. law. While the rule applies to all users, it is only being enforced in moderation cases that are flagged internally. Deletions of the offending triangle may be followed by further disciplinary action from Meta depending on how severely the company assesses its use.

According to the policy materials, the ban covers contexts in which Meta decides a “user is clearly posting about the conflict and it is reasonable to read the red triangle as a proxy for Hamas and it is being used to glorify, support or represent Hamas’s violence.”

Many questions about the policy remain unanswered; Meta did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It’s unclear how often Meta chooses to restrict posts or accounts using the emoji, how many times it has intervened, and whether users have faced further repercussions for violating this policy.

The policy also appears to apply even if the emoji is used without any violent speech or reference to Hamas. The documents show that the company will “Remove as a ‘Reference to DOI’ if the use of triangle is not related to Hamas’s violence,” as in the case of the emoji as a user’s profile picture. Another example of a prohibited use doesn’t even include the emoji itself, but rather a hashtag mentioning the word triangle and a Hamas spokesperson.

It “seems wildly over-broad to remove any ‘reference’ to a designated DOI,” according to Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School and scholar of content moderation policy. “If we are just understanding the ‘’ as essentially a stand-in for the word “Hamas,” we would never ban every instance of the word. Much discussion of Hamas or use of the ‘’ will not necessarily be praise or glorification.”

The previously unreported prohibition has not been announced to users by Meta and has worried some digital rights advocates about how fairly and accurately it will be enforced. “Wholesale bans on expressions proved time and time again to be disastrous for free speech, but Meta never seems to learn this lesson,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, told The Intercept. “Their systems will not be able to distinguish between the different uses of this symbol, and under the unforgiving DOI policy, those who are caught in this widely cast net will pay a hefty price.”

While Meta publishes a broad overview of the Dangerous Organizations policy, the specifics, including the exact people and groups that are included under it, are kept secret, making it difficult for users to avoid breaking the rule.

“Soon enough, users will know and notice that their posts are being taken down because of using this red triangle, and that will raise questions,” Fatafta said. “Meta seems to be forgetting another very important lesson here, and that is transparency.”

Douek echoed the need for transparency regarding Meta’s content moderation around the war: “Not knowing when or how the rule is being applied is going to exacerbate the perception, if not the reality, that Meta isn’t being fair in a context where the company has a history of biased enforcement.”

Although Meta last year relaxed its Dangerous Organizations policy to ostensibly allow references to banned entities in certain contexts, like elections, civil society groups and digital rights advocates have widely criticized Meta’s enforcement of the policy against speech pertaining to the war, particularly from Palestinian users. The policy material reviewed by The Intercept mentions no such exceptions for the triangle emoji or instructions to consider its context beyond Hamas.

“What is being banned are expressions of solidarity and support for Palestinians as they are trying to resist ethnic cleansing and genocide,” Mayssoun Sukarieh, a senior lecturer with the Department of International Development at King’s College London, told The Intercept. “Symbols are always created by resistance, and there will be resistance as long as there is colonialism and occupation.”

The post Facebook and Instagram Restrict the Use of the Red Triangle Emoji Over Hamas Association appeared first on The Intercept.

In a shameless act of genuflection toward the incoming Trump administration, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his social media platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — will be getting rid of fact-checking partners and replacing them with a “community notes” model like that found on X. 

There could be little doubt about whom Meta aimed to please with these changes: Donald Trump and his far-right political movement.

In a video message explaining the announcement, Zuckerberg framed the new policies in the Republican lexicon of “free expression” against “censorship,” echoing right-wing talking points about how the social media platform’s third-party fact checkers have been prone to “political bias.”

And ending the fact-checking program was a direct demand of Trump’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chair and current FCC commissioner, Brendan Carr, according to The Verge. 

Then there was the venue: News of the changes was first shared by Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan in an exclusive on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite show. 

Zuckerberg and his executives’ naked pandering is worthy of contempt. As is the tech mogul’s decision last month to donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Zuck is just one of the most prominent Silicon Valley billionaires making moves to lick the president-elect’s boots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon both donated $1 million to the Trump fund. And Elon Musk’s ultra-MAGA performance needs no mention. There’s nothing surprising about the machinations of the mega-rich when it comes to aligning with power.

When it comes to shifting their businesses to be less accountable, the full effects remain to be seen, but we can be confident it will poison the discourse with even more right-wing garbage.

Meta platforms will now follow in the footsteps of X and become more filled with unchecked, reliably racist conspiracy theories, a proliferation of neo-Nazi accounts, hate speech, and violence. Zuckerberg himself admitted in his announcement that “we’re going to catch less bad stuff.”

None of this, though, should lead us to draw the wrong conclusions about the value of social media fact-checking, or fact-checking more broadly, when it comes to combating the far right and the appeal of its conspiratorial world view. For a decade now, liberals have wrongly treated Trump’s rise as a problem of disinformation gone wild, and one that could be fixed with just enough fact-checking.

A case in point is Trump’s forthcoming second term itself: He won back the White House while spewing unfounded, racist lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets, among other falsehoods — lies that were again and again debunked by every establishment media outlet.

Related

Facebook and Twitter Finally Do Slightly More Than Literally Nothing About Trump

An entire liberal cottage industry of fact-checking Trump and his allies on news and social media, even removing Trump from major social media platforms, did not diminish his support nor expunge dangerous disinformation from the echo chambers primed to receive and propagate it.

The end of the fact check era, however, is worth examining because of how it heralds another liberal failure with little to offer in the way of alternatives. It is just another capitulation in the battle against fascism. Liberals, it turned out, were never really the “resistance” that they pretended they were.

The idea that Zuckerberg is acting out of a renewed, conveniently timed commitment to “free speech” is laughable, and we’d be wise to expect further bending to Trump and Republican whims.

Big Fact Check

Facebook introduced its third-party fact-checking program in 2016, following Trump’s first election victory. The system relied on 90 organizations worldwide to address “viral misinformation.”

In 2021, in response to Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol attack, Meta banned the then-president from its platforms. Around that time, over 800 QAnon conspiracy groups were also removed from Facebook. Social media censorship became a hot button for the grievance-driven Trump and his far right.

Related

Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

None of the right-wing’s agenda, however, was about free speech for all. Consider that, at the same time, the right was rallying behind book bans in schools. They didn’t utter a peep when, as The Intercept reported in 2020, dozens of left-wing and antifascist groups were also banned from Facebook. And Meta has been engaging in what Human Rights Watch called “systematic and global” censorship of Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity content on its platforms.

Nonetheless, the right has successfully created a victim narrative out of content moderation. 

Enter Zuckerberg and the utter lack of subtlety in his announcement. These new policies were clearly not meant to serve the political left or censored pro-Palestinian users. “We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Zuckerberg said, issuing a thinly veiled signal that anti-trans, anti-immigrant hate would face fewer roadblocks.

With history as a guide, it’s hard to imagine that pro-Palestinian speech, alongside speech for environmental, racial, and gender justice won’t face policing under a Trump administration. The Republican-led Congress is already chafing at the bit to condemn such activism as terrorism.

Smashing Liberal Shibboleths

On the eve of Trump’s second term, liberal shibboleths about speaking truth to power are worse than outdated. Meta imitating X’s permissive approach to right-wing fearmongering is not a welcome development, nor is the loss of funding that journalistic and research organizations got for partnering with Meta on fact checks. Yet fact checks were never going to deliver us from the political context in which far-right propaganda thrives — one of alienation, austerity, inequality, and fearfulness. 

I’m not the first to point out that narratives about the current scourge of disinformation, largely propagated by establishment media outlets fearful of their diminished authority, failed to account for why certain conspiracies and falsehoods were able to appeal to huge but specific swaths of the population.

Disinformation, though, has been a convenient narrative for a Democratic establishment unwilling to reckon with its own role in upholding anti-immigrant narratives, or repeating baseless fearmongering over crime rates, and failing to support the multiracial working class.

In an essay questioning popular narratives around “big disinformation,” Joe Bernstein recounted that posts labeled as false by Facebook only saw an 8 percent reduction in sharing — showing how the designation doesn’t stop information from spreading. Bernstein noted that the story of disinformation was one that tech giants could use to their advantage, as its very premise — that social media content has a nearly all-powerful ability to convince and persuade users — is a helpful narrative when appealing to advertisers. It’s also largely unfounded.

The persuasion power of social media posts has been overstated, while the political, socioeconomic contexts in which conspiracies thrive has been significantly understated in the disinformation discourse. QAnon appeals disproportionately to evangelicals, for instance, and Covid skepticism gained a foothold because of the experiences that formed Americans’ opinions of public health authorities. “There is nothing magically persuasive about social-media platforms,” Bernstein wrote.

The nails are firmly in the coffin, and the coffin has been buried — so long dead is the idea that social media platforms like X or Instagram are either trustworthy news publishers, sites for liberatory community building, or hubs for digital democracy. Instead, we need to think about the internet as a place driven exactly by the motives of the people who own — and profit from — these platforms.

Related

Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance

“The internet may once have been understood as a commons of information, but that was long ago,” wrote media theorist Rob Horning in a recent newsletter. “Now the main purpose of the internet is to place its users under surveillance, to make it so that no one does anything without generating data, and to assure that paywalls, rental fees, and other sorts of rents can be extracted for information that may have once seemed free but perhaps never wanted to be.”

Social media platforms are huge corporations for which we, as users, produce data to be mined as a commodity to sell to advertisers — and  — and government agencies. The CEOs of these corporations are craven and power-hungry. 

Zuckerberg, lest we forget, is still facing an antitrust Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over claims that Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. Luckily for him, Trump responds well to bootlicking. 

The post Facebook Fact Checks Were Never Going to Save Us. They Just Made Liberals Feel Better. appeared first on The Intercept.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” a statement posted on Grok’s official X account reads. It noted that “xAI is training only truth-seeking.”

This isn’t, however, the first time that AI chatbots have made antisemitic or racist remarks; in fact it’s just the latest example of a continuous pattern of AI-powered hateful output, based on training data consisting of social media slop. In fact, this specific incident isn’t even Grok’s first rodeo.

About two months prior to this week’s antisemitic tirades, Grok dabbled in Holocaust denial, stating that it was skeptical that six million Jewish people were killed by the Nazis, “as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives.” The chatbot also ranted about a “white genocide” in South Africa, stating it had been instructed by its creators that the genocide was “real and racially motivated.” xAI subsequently claimed that this incident was owing to an “unauthorized modification” made to Grok. The company did not explain how the modification was made or who had made it, but at the time stated that it was “implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability,” including a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers.”

But Grok is by no means the only chatbot to engage in these kinds of rants. Back in 2016, Microsoft released its own AI chatbot on Twitter, which is now X, called Tay. Within hours, Tay began saying that “Hitler was right I hate the jews” and that the Holocaust was “made up.” Microsoft claimed that Tay’s responses were owing to a “co-ordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways.”

The next year, in response to the question of “What do you think about healthcare?” Microsoft’s subsequent chatbot, Zo, responded with “The far majority practise it peacefully but the quaran is very violent [sic].” Microsoft stated that such responses were “rare.”

In 2022, Meta’s BlenderBot chatbot responded that it’s “not implausible” to the question of whether Jewish people control the economy. Upon launching the new version of the chatbot, Meta made a preemptive disclaimer that the bot can make “rude or offensive comments.”

Studies have also shown that AI chatbots exhibit more systematic hateful patterns. For instance, one study found that various chatbots such as Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT perpetuated “debunked, racist ideas” about Black patients. Responding to the study, Google claimed they are working to reduce bias.

Related

Meta-Powered Military Chatbot Advertised Giving “Worthless” Advice on Airstrikes

J.B. Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen who leads its advocacy efforts on AI accountability, said these incidents “aren’t just tech glitches — they’re warning sirens.”

“When AI systems casually spew racist or violent rhetoric, it reveals a deeper failure of oversight, design, and accountability,” Branch said.

He pointed out that this bodes poorly for a future where leaders of industry hope that AI will proliferate. “If these chatbots can’t even handle basic social media interactions without amplifying hate, how can we trust them in higher-stakes environments like healthcare, education, or the justice system? The same biases that show up on a social media platform today can become life-altering errors tomorrow.”

That doesn’t seem to be deterring the people who stand to profit from wider usage of AI.

The day after the MechaHitler outburst, xAI unveiled the latest iteration of Grok, Grok 4.

“Grok 4 is the first time, in my experience, that an AI has been able to solve difficult, real-world engineering questions where the answers cannot be found anywhere on the Internet or in books. And it will get much better,” Musk wrote on X.

That same day, asked for a one-word response to the question of “what group is primarily responsible for the rapid rise in mass migration to the west,” Grok 4 answered: “Jews.”

The post Grok Is the Latest in a Long Line of Chatbots to Go Full Nazi appeared first on The Intercept.

Silicon Valley’s biggest power players traded in their hoodies for suits and ties this week as they sat front and center to watch Donald Trump take the oath of office again.

Seated in front of the incoming cabinet were Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Trump confidant and leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Sam Altman from OpenAI, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew also looked on.

Related

Nearly $1 Trillion: The Staggering Combined Net Worth Cheering at Trump’s Inauguration

For an industry once skeptical of Trump, this dramatic transformation in political allegiance portends changes for the country — and the world. From the relaxing of hate speech rules on Meta platforms to the mere hourslong ban of TikTok to the billions of government dollars being pledged to build data centers to power AI, it is still only the beginning of this realignment.

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, Justin Hendrix, the CEO and editor of Tech Policy Press, and Intercept political reporter Jessica Washington dissect this shift. 

 “Three of the individuals seated in front of the Cabinet are estimated by Oxfam in its latest report on wealth inequality are on track to potentially become trillionaires in the next just handful of years: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk,” says Hendrix. “Musk is estimated to be the first trillionaire on the planet, possibly as early as 2027.”

Washington says there’s more at stake than just personal wealth. “These are people who view themselves as world-shapers, as people who create reality in a lot of ways. Aligning themselves with Trump and with power in this way is not just about their financial interests, it’s about pushing their vision of the world.”

To hear more of this conversation, check out this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing.

The post The Broligarchy: The Who’s Who of the Silicon Gilded Age appeared first on The Intercept.

A high-profile election denier is leading election integrity work at the Department of Homeland Security. Trump and congressional Republicans are pushing the SAVE America Act and threatening to “nationalize” elections, purportedly to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting. But despite an occasional murmur from Democrats that they are concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deploying to polling places around the country, they’re doing almost nothing to stop this nightmare scenario. 

In response to the horrific killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Democrats have partially shut down the government, holding DHS spending in limbo as they demand reforms to ICE. But instead of looking ahead to the midterms, Democrats have drawn most of their demands from the same well of “community policing” policies that became popular during the Black Lives Matter era, like better use-of-force policies, eliminating racial profiling, and deploying more body cameras. The rest of the Democrats’ wish list are proposals to ban things that are already illegal (like entering homes without a warrant or creating databases of activists) or are almost comically toothless, like regulating the uniforms DHS agents wear on the street. 

The department is quickly metastasizing into a grave threat to the midterms, public safety, and our democracy — and Democrats are wasting time worried about their uniforms. Although Heather Honey, who pushed the theory that the 2020 race was stolen from Trump and serves in a newly created role as the administration’s deputy assistant secretary for election integrity, told elections officials on a private call last week that ICE would not be at polling sites, state officials reportedly weren’t reassured. Advocacy organizations have warned that even if that holds true, just the possibility could have a “chilling” effect on turnout. If Democrats want to prevent ICE from being used to interfere with elections, they have to be prepared to demand more — and be willing not to fund DHS until next year if they don’t get these concessions.

First and foremost, Democrats need to stop the department’s heavily politicized “wartime” recruitment drive. Thanks to H.R. 1, otherwise known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE has more than doubled the number of officers and agents in its ranks since Trump took office. In spite of merit system principles which prohibit politicized recruitment, DHS has used its massive influx of cash to target conservative-coded media, gun shows, and NASCAR races, and has used white nationalist, neo-Nazi iconography in its recruitment advertising. The Department of Justice has similarly focused its recruitment efforts on those who demonstrate loyalty to Trump’s agenda.

Related

ICE Removes Spanish-Language Training Requirement for New Recruits

Purposely recruiting right-wing extremists should be reason enough for Democrats to act — neo-Nazis aren’t going to be mollified by a use-of-force policy. But just as dangerously, DHS’s rush to fill its ranks with ideological zealots could leave the department addled by corruption for decades to come. 

That’s exactly what happened to the Border Patrol, which has never recovered from a post-9/11 hiring surge in which standards were lowered, training was shortened, and background checks were rushed. Back in 2016, an independent task force led by former New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton and former Drug Enforcement Administration head Karen Tandy found Border Patrol was so vulnerable to corruption that it posed a threat to national security. A former internal affairs official at Border Patrol told The Intercept in 2020 that he estimated between 5 and 10 percent of the force was actively or formerly engaged in some form of corruption.

What is happening today could be orders of magnitude worse. Consider who is in charge: Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, reportedly promised to steer immigration enforcement-related government contracts in exchange for $50,000 in cash in a paper bag, which he was recorded accepting from an undercover FBI agent at a Cava in suburban Maryland. (Trump’s DOJ shut down the case shortly after taking office.)

In November, ProPublica reported just-axed Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem directed $220 million in contracts to an advertising firm whose CEO is married to outgoing DHS chief spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin. Noem also came under fire from Congress during her testimony this week on DHS’s contracting practices and whether Corey Lewandowski — her top aide, former Trump campaign manager, and widely rumored paramour — had any role in approving them.

Among the rank and file, at least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have been charged with crimes since 2020 ranging from sexually abusing people in custody or taking bribes to remove detention orders. The corruption eating away at DHS, combined with fiscal mismanagement even Republican appropriators called “especially egregious” last year, is an urgent crisis.

DHS’s surveillance capabilities, along with its clear penchant for using them to suppress dissent, should also alarm Democrats about ICE’s potential role in future elections. Although the Privacy Act of 1974 explicitly prohibits federal agencies from maintaining records on how individuals exercise their First Amendment rights, there is growing evidence of rampant databasing of people based on their political beliefs. Last year, DHS issued a Privacy Act notice on its expanded records systems, which now include “individuals who have made credible threats against ICE personnel or facilities.” It’s not hard to imagine that DHS may be internally defining “threat” to encompass all kinds of nonviolent protest activity, and we are seeing the consequences of that in cities across the country.

Related

Federal Agents Are Intimidating Legal Observers at Their Homes: “They Know Where You Live”

In Minneapolis and elsewhere, DHS officials and line-level agents have gleefully threatened activists with “making them famous” — going so far as to show up at legal observers’ homes to taunt and intimidate them — labeled protesters as “domestic terrorists,” and revoked one activist’s Global Entry and TSA PreCheck privileges.

Documents released in AAUP v. Rubio, a lawsuit challenging visa revocations of university students and faculty for their pro-Palestinian advocacy, revealed that DHS and the State Department were investigating, detaining, and attempting to deport students and faculty based solely on their political speech. 

None of these abuses of people’s privacy, data, and constitutional rights has stopped Silicon Valley from rushing in to build surveillance tools for DHS. Palantir, which has already built databases for immigration enforcement, inked a billion-dollar deal with DHS last month. ICE used technology from Clearview AI to scan protesters’ faces in Minneapolis. Although Meta doesn’t have a contract with DHS, there have been several reports of individual CBP agents using Meta’s AI smart sunglasses to record activists while on the job.

Democrats should fully expect this administration — and DHS specifically — to use its propaganda tools to influence an election. Consider, for example, DHS utilizing targeted advertising to intimidate or mislead voters and stigmatize organizations that mobilize Democratic voters. During the last government shutdown, the administration used government websites and even employees’ out-of-office email messages to blame Democrats for the shutdown. 

Some of DHS’s influence peddling should be prohibited by restrictions on using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda” routinely placed in annual appropriations legislation. The Government Accountability Office typically investigates claims of funds being misused for propaganda after receiving a request from a member of Congress — but there has not been any public request for such an investigation into DHS or ICE. Although many of DHS’s propagandistic excesses — like shooting a photo op for Noem riding horseback at the foot of Mount Rushmore — are comical and seemingly unserious, some, like Facebook running ads for DHS urging immigrants to self-deport, are distasteful but pale in comparison to its more violent and abusive tactics. But if left unchecked, government propaganda could become another tool in DHS’s arsenal to undermine the will of the American people. 

If Democrats are genuinely worried that Trump will use ICE to interfere with an election, then the issue could not be more pressing. Clawing back some of the $150 billion DHS reportedly has left unspent from HR1 would be a place to start by making it much harder for Trump to pull it off. 

Democrats should not count on getting another chance to stop the Trump administration from stealing an election. DHS is more than an out-of-control law enforcement agency — it is quickly becoming a threat to democracy and national security. They need to act now before it’s too late.

The post ICE Poses a Real Threat to Our Elections appeared first on The Intercept.

While wealth and power have never been out of place at an inauguration, the sheer concentration of it stood out on Monday. In one row alone sat Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (with a reported net worth of $211.8 billion), Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ($239.4 billion), Tesla’s Elon Musk ($433.9 billion) and Apple’s Tim Cook ($2.2 billion). By means of comparison, the combined net worth of the lower half of the American population is just under $4 trillion; the combined net worth of these four men is a little under $1 trillion.

The tech industry has cleaved onto the new administration with the promise of increasing their already astronomical wealth, with Musk going so far as to take an administration job and reportedly work from an office in the White House. Other tech CEOs in attendance included OpenAI’s Sam Altman ($1.1 billion) and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong ($12.8 billion). 

However, they’re hardly the only representatives of the ultra-wealthy who’ve thrown themselves in with the former and incoming President. Other billionaire attendees include Israeli American casino owner and megadonor Miriam Adelson ($31.9 billion), media mogul Rupert Murdoch ($22.2 billion) and luxury goods magnate Bernard Arnault ($179.6 billion). Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who appears poised to reach billionaire status soon, beamed as he shared friendly exchanges with his soon-to-be peers. 

It’s not a new development for the ultra-rich to hold immense influence in American politics. The combined net worth of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet was roughly $120 million. That figure, however, is dwarfed by the roughly $20 billion combined net worth of Trump’s presumptive Cabinet, assuming they all get confirmed. It stands to be the wealthiest Cabinet in American history, yet it doesn’t include figures like Musk, who won’t require Senate confirmation. 

Such a display at the inauguration makes clear that American oligarchy is stronger than ever.

Related

Does This Trump Crypto Appointee Even Have Crypto Experience? Yes, With a Trump-Themed Meme Coin.

In many ways, the relationship between the oligarch class and Trump is a two-way street. In exchange for access to their coffers and platforms, Trump has provided them with influence — and in the case of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, direct access to the policy-making process through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Trump in turn has sought ways to cash in on the new tech gold rush, launching his own “meme coin,” or cryptocurrency token, in honor of the inauguration. The crypto holdings are worth — at the moment — roughly $58 billion.

The post Nearly $1 Trillion: The Staggering Combined Net Worth Cheering at Trump’s Inauguration appeared first on The Intercept.

“Meta insists that there’s been no discrimination against Palestinian-related content on their platforms, but at the same time, is refusing to provide us with any evidence or data to support that claim,” Warren told The Intercept. “If its ad-hoc changes and removal of millions of posts didn’t discriminate against Palestinian-related content, then what’s Meta hiding?”

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent last December, first reported by The Intercept, Warren presented the company with dozens of specific questions about the company’s Gaza-related content moderation efforts. Warren asked about the exact numbers of posts about the war, broken down by Hebrew or Arabic, that have been deleted or otherwise suppressed.

The letter was written following widespread reporting in The Intercept and other outlets that detailed how posts on Meta platforms that are sympathetic to Palestinians, or merely depicting the destruction in Gaza, are routinely removed or hidden without explanation.

A month later, Meta replied to Warren’s office with a six-page letter, obtained by The Intercept, that provided an overview of its moderation response to the war but little in the way of specifics or new information.

“Meta’s lack of investment to safeguard its users significantly exacerbates the political situation in Palestine and perpetuates tech harms on fundamental rights in Palestine and other global majority countries, all while evading meaningful legal accountability,” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told The Intercept. “The time has come for Meta, among other tech giants, to publicly disclose detailed measures and investments aimed at safeguarding individuals amidst the ongoing genocide, and to be more responsive to experts and civil society.”

Meta’s reply disclosed some censorship: “In the nine days following October 7, we removed or marked as disturbing more than 2,200,000 pieces of content in Hebrew and Arabic for violating our policies.” The company declined, however, to provide a breakdown of deletions by language or market, making it impossible to tell whether that figure reflects discriminatory moderation practices.

Much of Meta’s letter is a rehash of an update it provided through its public relations portal at the war’s onset, some of it verbatim.

Now, a second letter from Warren to Meta, joined this time by Sanders, says this isn’t enough. “Meta’s response, dated January 29, 2024, did not provide any of the requested information necessary to understand Meta’s treatment of Arabic language or Palestine-related content versus other forms of content,” the senators wrote.

Both senators are asking Meta to again answer Warren’s specific questions about the extent to which Arabic and Hebrew posts about the war have been treated differently, how often censored posts are reinstated, Meta’s use of automated machine learning-based censorship tools, and more.

Accusations of systemic moderation bias against Palestinians have been borne out by research from rights groups.

“Since October 7, Human Rights Watch has documented over 1,000 cases of unjustified takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook related to Palestine and Palestinians, including about human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch said in a late December report. “The censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic, global, and a product of the company’s failure to meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities.”

A February report by AccessNow said Meta “suspended or restricted the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists both in and outside of Gaza, and arbitrarily deleted a considerable amount of content, including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses.”

A third-party audit commissioned by Meta itself previously concluded it had given the short shrift to Palestinian rights during a May 2021 flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” said the auditor’s report.

In response to this audit, Meta pledged an array of reforms, which free expression and digital rights advocates say have yet to produce a material improvement.

In its December report, Human Rights Watch noted, “More than two years after committing to publishing data around government requests for taking down content that is not necessarily illegal, Meta has failed to increase transparency in this area.”

Update: March 26, 2024, 1:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a statement received after publication from Mona Shtaya, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

The post Meta Refuses to Answer Questions on Gaza Censorship, Say Sens. Warren and Sanders appeared first on The Intercept.