'I was fired for speaking out': Ex-staff slam big tech's Gaza censorship

New York — For three years, Saima Akhter, 38, worked as a data analyst at Meta, but her job came to a swift end when she started to question what she called a "company policy" to censor content related to Palestine amid Israel's genocide in besieged Gaza.

"Meta is censoring Palestine, supporting Israeli apartheid and silencing its employees," Akhter tells TRT World, accusing the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp of labelling conversations around Palestine as "disruptive" and removing them from its social media platforms.

Previously known as Facebook, the multinational technology company also owns and operates Threads, a challenger to X.

Over the past 423 days, Israel's genocidal war on the blockaded enclave has killed some 44,500 Palestinians, 70 percent of them minors and women, wounded over 105,000 and uprooted most of the 2.4 million Palestinians residing there. Analysts doubt the reported death toll and say the accurate Palestinian death toll could be around 200,000.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel has also exposed online censorship and the role of Meta and other platforms in hawking a one-sided narrative of the violence.

In the past several months, Meta has come under fire for promoting Israel's talking points, censoring pro-Palestine content, and even retaliating against its own staffers for speaking out.

Akhter, who was terminated in June, tells TRT World that "Meta fired me" after she and her colleagues wrote an open letter to the company, speaking out against the censorship.

The internal open letter asked for acknowledgement for the thousands of Palestinians killed in Gaza "just as condolences were offered for the Israeli lives lost on October 7 by countless Meta leaders". It also sought an "end to targeted biased internal censorship, and transparency and resourcing to address Palestinian content suppression."

She says Meta disabled her system access and placed her "under investigation" for three months before firing her for actions that the company in an email to Akhter said "violated Meta’s code of conduct and data handling guidelines."

"Meta deleted any copies of the letter, including from employee’s emails and google drives and never addressed our concerns," she adds.

The internal letter was never shared publicly, but a similar one was drafted and posted on metastopcensoringpalestine.com, urging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other bosses to revisit the company’s policies.

Since then, Akhter has continued her advocacy through the "Meta Stop Censoring Palestine" campaign.

She points at Meta's leadership, specifically mentioning Jordana Cutler, who previously worked for hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now leads Meta's policy for the Jewish diaspora.

Akhter says this connection has led to pro-Palestine content being flagged or removed as a "systematic bias."

Meta hasn't responded to TRT World's requests for comments.

Conflicting policies

In October, American non-profit news outlet The Intercept accused Cutler of trying to block the Instagram accounts of the pro-Palestine group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).

The Intercept reported that it reviewed internal policy discussions that showed Cutler "flagged for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy."

In its 2020 profile of Cutler, Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post (originallyThe Palestine Post from 1932-1950) ran a profile on Cutler, describing her as "our woman at Facebook" and stressing she was hired to "represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world."

Like Akhter, Ramzi Saud, 29, a Palestinian American and former Meta data analyst, also felt betrayed when he realised that he was working for a company that was "complicit" in silencing his community.

"The constant censorship of Palestinian activists and journalists made me feel guilty for working at a company that I feel is involved in hurting my family in Gaza," he tells TRT World.

According to Saud, Meta’s "double standards" have become very clear.

"While support for Ukraine was openly encouraged after Russia's invasion, discussions on Palestine — even apolitical or cultural content — were often flagged and removed," he says.

Seeing posts disappear and conversations blocked, Saud says he felt his community was being erased — both in Gaza and online.

"They don’t view us as human or care about the Palestinian community," Saud says, comparing Meta’s open support for Ukraine during its war with Russia to its silencing of Palestinian voices.

From misinformation to shadow bans, voices from Gaza and the rise of AI-generated visuals, TRT World has been constantly reporting on how social media is playing a pivotal role in shaping public opinion amid what has been described as "the most documented genocide" and "the world’s first genocide broadcast live."

'Digital occupation' of Palestine

Meanwhile Google, the world's largest search engine, has been accused of helping Israel "digitally" occupy Palestine. It has reportedly terminated some 50 staffers in the aftermath of their protests over the technology Google is supplying to Israel.

Among those sacked in the April purge is New York-based software engineer Mohammed Katami, 24.

Katami tells TRT World that he was fired after he raised ethical concerns over Google's $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Katami says the partnership has given Israel unprecedented access to Google’s technology, enabling advanced surveillance aimed squarely at Palestinians.

TRT World has reached out to Google for its comments.

Project Nimbus has given Israel "a blank check to control and watch over Palestinians," said Katami, who after being terminated joined the "No Tech for Apartheid" movement.

At the time, Google said it carefully confirmed that "every single one of those whose employment was terminated was personally and definitively involved in disruptive activity inside our buildings."

Launched in 2021, the controversial Project Nimbus is a multi-year cloud computing and AI partnership between Google, Amazon and the Israeli government. The contract enables Israel to store and manage data domestically and access machine learning, image recognition and language processing tools — technologies that human rights advocates say could be weaponised against Palestinians.

Critics and Google's ex-staffers argue that Project Nimbus empowers Israel with tools that can intensify its surveillance over Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, creating what some call a "digital occupation."

Technologies like facial recognition could allow Israeli authorities to monitor and track Palestinians in real time, they say, raising concerns over human rights and privacy.

With Israel continuing its genocidal war on Palestinians, the techies argue that the companies profiting from the rights abuses of Palestinians and simultaneously muzzling pro-Palestine content must be held accountable.

"It's time for tech workers to stand up," Akhter says. "They must hold the companies accountable for their role in the oppression of Palestinians."