How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories

The BBC has also spoken to five former and current employees of Meta about the impact they say their company’s policies have had on individual Palestinian users.

One person, who spoke anonymously, shared leaked internal documents about a change made to Instagram’s algorithm, which toughened the moderation of Palestinians commenting on Instagram posts.

“Within a week of the Hamas attack, the code was changed essentially making it more aggressive towards Palestinian people,” he said.

Internal messages show that an engineer raised concerns about the order, worried that it could be “introducing a new bias into the system against Palestinian users”.

Meta confirmed it took the measure but said it had been necessary to respond to what it called a “spike in hateful content” coming out of the Palestinian territories.

It said that policy changes put in place at the start of the Israel-Gaza war had now been reversed, but did not say when this happened.

At least 137 Palestinian journalists are reported to have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of the conflict, but a few carry on despite the dangers.