Meta denies Shaun King opportunity to appeal his Instagram ban

Popular social media and digital human rights activist, Shaun King, announced – in an online statement – this week that Meta has now gone beyond publicly banning his Instagram account, which had approximately 6 million followers until late last year.

The tech giant also terminated it.

According to King, “Meta…found the one loophole that made them completely unaccountable to the Meta Oversight Board – if they simply delete an account, the Oversight Board loses all power to rule on that account.

And that’s exactly what the Meta Oversight Board ruled today”.

King further added: “They [the Oversight Board] told my attorneys that they are prohibited from even accepting my case, which they would otherwise take, because they Meta deleted my account before they could accept the appeal”.

The decision by Meta comes not long after King, last December, published an open letter on Instagram – “To the Men of Yemen”.

The letter is in solidarity with the Houthis, the Yemeni rebel group currently blocking ships going to and from Israeli seaports, as part of their larger pro-Palestinian campaign to undermine the Israeli economy that, in significant part (while butresed by multibillion dollar annual aid from the United States), is fuelling Israel’s brutal military assault against the Palestinian people.

At the time of this writing, over 27,000 Palestinians have been killed by the assault in Gaza alone, since October 7. Most killed are women and children.

Though King’s legal team persuasively argued that the letter, in keeping with Meta’s own polices, in no way endorsed or supported terrorism appears to have hardly swayed the company.

King has suggested in the statement that at least one reason for this is that the Houthis are on Meta’s own “private terror list”, the reasoning behind which is not public.

Not even King’s legal team, however, seemed to have been prepared for Meta’s decision to prohibit him from appealing.

“When my attorneys,” reads King’s statement, “and I game planned for this meeting [with Meta], we believed 10 scenarios were possible - with the absolute worst scenario being them saying ‘Meta has decided to uphold the suspension of Shaun King’s account, but he is now free to appeal to the Meta Oversight Board.’

Instead, they did something far more nefarious.

They stated, ‘We have closed and deleted Mr. King’s account. And since you actually have to have an account to file an appeal with the Meta Oversight Board, Mr. King is unable to file an appeal. This decision is final and permanent…”

My attorneys were both shocked and appalled”.

The decision against King has become a matter of concern to all online pro-Palestinian activists or, more generally, anyone on Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and others) trying to raise awareness as to the atrocities Israel is committing against Palestinians.

For the lack of transparency it showed King, in neither providing him substantive reasons for abolishing his account nor a fair chance to appeal the abrupt (and draconian) decision, means at any time such persons — however principled — could likewise be shut down.

Echoing this view, King observes in the statement: “This is a VERY DANGEROUS [caps in original] precedent. And frankly, less than we wanted my individual account restored, we were afraid that if Meta could do this to me, which they have now done, they could do this to anyone”.

Absurdly, it’s as if Meta has positioned itself to censor or punish those doing the right thing: standing in solidarity with Palestine by exposing Israeli criminality against it, such as the Israeli army bombing and killing of tens of thousands of children in Gaza (widely circulating online), and for which Israel overwhelmingly has not been held accountable.

What might be happening behind the scenes at Meta that could explain the absurdity? Is Meta worried that allowing pro-Palestinian posts on its platforms will upset various parties (e.g. advertisers) such that they will desist from adding to the company’s revenue? Is this concern more important to the company than preserving and protecting Palestinian lives?

One can speculate.

More concretely, however, King shares in his statement: “[Meta’s] law firm [in King’s case] was Orrick, a Zionist law firm which has publicly stated ‘We Stand with the State of Israel’, runs their own ‘Israeli Resource Center,’ and is staffed with open Zionists”. To be sure this recalls the close but unsettling relationship between the Israeli state and Meta, documented by others, that challenges any idea that Meta does not favour Israel anymore than Palestine.

Curious about King’s statement is that there is no mention of the countless pro-Palestinian activists, writers, academics — include UK scholar David Miller, recently exonerated by a court this week for baseles charges of “antisemitism” — and others still who have been silenced or censored, if not by Meta itself then by a wide range of institutions (schools, workplaces, etc. and largely in the West) for expressing their views.

No doubt much of this happens online at an alarming rate, as Human Rights Watch and other internationally recognized groups have shown.

Arguably, King would be well-advised to use his far reaching platform to express a greater and clearer willingness to work with those, having less reach but no less dedicated than he, affected by this. Together they amass a sizable base of pro-Palestinian support and, in such a capacity, more effectively pressure Meta to stop suppressing pro-Palestinian voices.

In the meantime, Meta – by shutting down the likes of King – is complicit in senseless Israeli brutality against the Palestinian people.