Former Meta employee says he was fired for defending pro-Palestinian content on Instagram

Meta Instagram

Social media platforms have had to tread a fine line when it comes to posts related to the Russia-Ukraine war or the Israel-Palestine war. There has been criticism of Facebook, Instagram over posts about these critical issues. Now, a former Meta employee has accused the company of wrongful termination.

According to a report by Business Insider, Ferras Hamad, ex-Meta employee has claims that he was fired for attempting to address bugs that stifled pro-Palestinian content on Instagram.

Hamad has filed a lawsuit against Meta in a California court, alleging discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination against Meta.

Notably, Hamad is a Palestinian American and has been working as a software engineer on Meta’s machine learning team since 2022. The employee claimed that he had received “glowing performance reviews,” but faced challenges when he raised concerns about content from Palestinian creators and activists being curbed or censored on Instagram.

Hamad was assigned to investigate Instagram’s filters related to content from Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine sometime in October. This was soon after Hamas had attacked Israel. In the lawsuit, Hamad alleged that he found a lot of pro-Palestinian creators’ posts were curbed, censored or their posts were being artificially limited. When he spoke to other colleagues about these “irregularities”, many of them asked him to stop investigating into the matter.

Meta informed Hamad in January that he was under investigation. According to the lawsuit, he was fired shortly after.

On its part Meta hasn’t commented on the issues raised by Hamad in the lawsuit but said that he was fired for violating data policies. “The employee was dismissed for violating Meta's data access policies, which we make clear to employees will result in immediate termination,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.