Meta's content moderation errors during May 2021 Israel-Palestine escalation
During the May 2021 escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine, Meta's automated content moderation systems temporarily restricted access to the al-Aqsa hashtag page and under-enforced rules against incitement to violence against Israelis and Jews. An independent due diligence report commissioned by Meta found that these systems had an unintentional impact on Palestinian and Arab communities' freedom of expression. Meta has committed to implementing several recommendations, including improving machine learning classifiers and keyword review processes.
- Date it happened
- 2021-05-01
- Organisation involved
- Meta
- Product, system or model
- Facebook and Instagram content moderation systems
This incident was imported from about.fb.com. Our additions to it — the structured fields, the translation, the checks against other reports — are published under the same licence.
This is a record of what was reported, not a finding that anyone broke the law. If it names your organisation and you believe it is wrong, the corrections process is free and open to everyone.