Incident 359: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Cited Errors in Automated Systems as Cause for Blocking pro-Palestinian Content on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Description: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter wrongly blocked or restricted millions of pro-Palestinian posts and accounts related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, citing errors in their automated content moderation system.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
359
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2021-05-23
Editors
Khoa Lam
Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them.
washingtonpost.com · 2021

Just days after violent conflict erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories, both Facebook and Twitter copped to major faux pas: The companies had wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts re…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.