Biden Admin Working With Social Media Companies to Limit Pro-Palestinian Content

(Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

The Biden administration has publicly admitted that it is working with tech companies to “limit Hamas's use of online platforms, including social media,” part of a campaign to suppress pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel sentiment. Though there has been much speculation that the federal government is pressuring social media companies to police their networks, this is the first official confirmation of its counterterrorism efforts.

A little-noticed readout for a May 15 Hague meeting between the State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism Elizabeth Richard and other governments said that Richard “updated the group on U.S. efforts to engage tech companies in voluntary collaboration to limit Hamas’ use of online platforms, including social media, for terrorist purposes.” The readout also notes that another similar meeting took place on December 13, in which the U.S. coordinated with partner governments to “target Hamas’ online propaganda.”

Platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Facebook have long banned terrorist organizations like Hamas. Now, however, the federal government is pressuring companies to ban “Hamas-linked” accounts and those of pro-Palestinian Americans. 

Hamas is a formally designated terrorist organization, so it makes sense that counterterror officials like Richard would target their communications broadly speaking. But with overwhelming evidence that Americans are getting banned from social media for posts regarding the Israel-Hamas war, the U.S. government needs to make clear what the exact nature of its coordination with social media companies is on this subject and how Americans’ speech is being protected. (The State Department and the National Security Council did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Virtually every major social media platform has banned Hamas from their platforms. But some like Meta, parent company to apps like Instagram and Facebook, went a step further, banning “Hamas-linked” accounts and even ones without any link to Hamas for alleged “praise” of “dangerous organizations” — a category the company relies heavily on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations to define.

That’s exactly what happened to Shaun King, a prominent activist and former surrogate for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. In December, Meta informed King that his Instagram account with five million plus followers had been permanently suspended for “praise” of one of Meta’s designated dangerous organizations. 

“The account was disabled due to multiple instances of praise for designated entities in violation of our policies,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email to King.

King told me that the ban came in response to a letter he had posted to his Instagram that December. In it, King praised the Houthi rebels in Yemen for blocking commerce heading toward Israel in the Red Sea, calling it “one of the most peaceful options to stop this genocide available to you” and thanking them for “trying to end the murder of over 25,000 Palestinians.”

When prompted about their terrorist designation in January of 2021, King pointed out (correctly) that at the time of his Instagram post, the Biden administration had de-listed them from the State Department list of terrorist organizations.

“We do not allow individuals or organizations,” a posting on Meta’s website about its dangerous organizations policy says, “designated by the United States government as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (or FTOs) or Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), to have a presence on the platform.”

King told me that the U.S. government had a direct role in his being banned. A Kafkaesque back-and-forth between King’s lawyers and Meta ensued, in which they pointed to the fact that the Houthis were no longer on the terror list, but to no avail. This culminated in a meeting with his attorneys, King says, in which Meta hinted that the matter was above their pay grade.

“My attorneys said that after their meeting with Meta that it was clear that the U.S. government asked them to shut my account down,” King told me. “Meta told my attorneys that it was ‘bigger than Meta.’” 

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, cases like King’s are becoming increasingly common, according to a report by Human Rights Watch detailing 1,050 takedowns and other actions against pro-Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook. In all but one case, the content was peaceful in nature, HRW says.

“Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023,” the report finds.

The report singled out Meta’s ban on praise of dangerous organizations as a “systemic factor that contributed to the censorship” of speech regarding the Israel Hamas war.

“However, it also contains sweeping bans on vague categories of speech, such as ‘praise’ and ‘support’ of ‘dangerous organizations,’ which it relies heavily on the United States government’s designated lists of terrorist organizations to define,” the HRW report says.

If you work for a social media company any have any information about the U.S. government’s influence on content related to the Israel-Hamas war, text me securely via Signal at (202)510-1268

— Edited by William M. Arkin