In an Instagram post earlier this month, a group of Meta employees said that Jordana Cutler, Meta's current Head of Policy for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, pushed for a prominent pro-Palestine Instagram account to be banned.
The post highlighted Cutler's previous work for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. Embassy of Israel, claiming she is not a neutral party.
The banned account in question, Columbia University Students for Justice In Palestine (CUSJP) previously had their account locked for supporting "dangerous people."
Its removal came alongside bans for other pro-Palestine college and youth activist groups.
In their statement, the Meta employees, who go by Meta Stop Censoring Palestine (MSCP) on Instagram, demanded that CUSJP have their account restored and said "since Meta refuses to be transparent with the public about [its] content moderation policies," they took "it upon [themselves] to share."
"Jordana Cutler herself was escalating removal of CUSJP," the statement reads. "How can Meta remain neutral when its leaders have such deep ties to the Israeli government?"
MSCP also flagged that Meta is observing the use red triangle emojis to track what it believes is support for Hamas on the site. The emoji is often used online to signify support for Palestine, similar to that of a watermelon, but if an account uses it in its name or bio, Meta reportedly can use that, alongside community reports against accounts for being a "violent or dangerous organization," to permanently suspend users.
According to the post, CUSJP used a red triangle in its bio, which Meta classified as "representation" of Hamas, preventing it from appealing the ban as well.
Today, CUSJP posted about the employees' statement concerning Cutler on their X account.
"Jordana Cutler, who worked directly under Netanyahu and was a strategy advisor for his party’s 2009 election campaign, now works at Meta as the 'Head of Policy for Israel and the Jewish diaspora,'" @ColumbiaSJP tweeted. "Meta employees revealed that she was the one escalating for our ban from Instagram."
Though Meta hasn't made any official comment on Cutler or her involvement with the banning of CUSJP's Instagram account, Meta did roll out new guidelines for how it would respond to the use of the word "Zionist" on its platforms in July: It now removes content that attacks Zionists utilizing antisemitic tropes, such as claiming Zionists hoard power or comparing them to vermin.
“We recognize there is nothing approaching a global consensus on what people mean when they use the term ‘Zionist,’” Meta stated. “However, based on our research, engagement, and on-platform investigation into its use as a proxy term for Jewish people and Israelis in relation to certain types of hateful attacks, we will now remove content that targets ‘Zionists’ … on the basis that ‘Zionist’ in those instances often appears to be a proxy for Jewish or Israeli people.”
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