Above: the Israeli settlement of Tekoa in the occupied West Bank, south of Bethlehem, 17 November 2020 (AFP)<\/p>\n
Facebook is being criticised for letting companies advertise the sale of property in illegal Israeli settlements on Instagram, amid continued outrage at the\u00a0social media\u00a0giant’s alleged censorship of Palestinian accounts in recent weeks.<\/p>\n
Images posted online showed an Israeli company\u00a0advertising properties in the northern occupied West Bank settlement of\u00a0Beit Aryeh-Ofarim on Instagram, the social media platform owned\u00a0by Facebook.<\/p>\n
Facebook, like other social media companies, is facing\u00a0mounting pressure over its policing of\u00a0pro-Palestinian content\u00a0in the wake of the recent deadly escalation in Israel and Palestine, which\u00a0has left some 292 people dead<\/a>.<\/p>\n Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook have all been accused of banning, blocking or restricting accounts that published photos of the Israeli bombardment of civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n The social\u00a0networks have also been accused of restricting posts that included the words or hashtags “Palestine”, “resistance”, “Israel”, “Hamas”, and “al-Aqsa.”<\/p>\n In a bid to beat the algorithms, activists and other social media users have taken to not writing the words “Israeli” or “Palestinian”, or using an alternative Arabic font<\/a>,\u00a0fearing that their posts could be suppresssed.<\/p>\n Seriously @instagram<\/a>? <\/p>\n Not only does the platform censor Palestinian voices, it\u2019s profiting from the sale of Israeli settlements built on stolen land, by allowing them to be marketed & sold on the platform. The international consensus is settlements are international crimes. 1\/3 pic.twitter.com\/5CItkSNVXQ<\/a><\/p>\n — Fadi Quran (@fadiquran) May 28, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n