The Intercept on FB's Secret Rules on Posts About "Zionists"

The Intercept published a breaking story about guidelines Facebook has been employing since 2019 to moderate posts about “Zionists” as hate speech.

According to Facebook’s internal rules, commenting “Fuck Zionists!” on a post that reads “Israeli settlers refuse to leave houses built on Palestinian territory” is hate speech and subject to removal. Dima Khalidi was quoted in the piece, criticizing the policy.

Critics noted that the first example is tied to a frequent and often violent real-world event — seizures of Palestinian homes by Israeli settlers — almost always carried out with justifications rooted in ideological Zionism or Israeli government policies themselves rooted in Zionism. The advocates who question Facebook’s rules on the term “Zionist” worry they would collapse denunciations of such action and state policies into hate speech against Jews, making it difficult to criticize Israel online at all.

“The absurdity, futility, and politicized nature of Facebook’s policy should be as clear as day right now, as we witness continued ethnic cleansing in occupied Jerusalem, and a new war on the besieged population of Gaza,” said Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal, an advocacy group. “The fundamental problem is that Zionism is a political ideology that justifies exactly the kind of forced expulsion of Palestinians — making some Palestinians refugees 3-times over — that we’re seeing right now in Sheikh Jarrah and other occupied East Jerusalem neighborhoods.”

The news of Facebook’s moderation of anti-Zionist speech directly contradicts messaging from Facebook as recently as March 2021, when Facebook responded to a petition signed by more than 50,000 people that it was only considering the policy and had not adopted it.