Instagram has admitted that user posts were removed, after being accused of deleting posts and suspending accounts reporting on evictions by Israel in east Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.
The social media platform said it was a technical error, after Palestinian activists and media outlets reported that posts had been taken down.
The impending evictions of Palestinian families has raised tensions in Jerusalem, where hundreds of protesters were injured in confrontations with Israeli police at the weekend.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri blamed a “technical bug” for the deletions, and apologised to users who were unable to “bring attention to incredibly important issues”.
Yesterday we experienced a technical bug, which impacted millions of people’s stories, highlights and archives around the world. For people impacted by this bug, they saw their stories that were re-sharing posts disappear and their archive and highlights stories were missing. https://t.co/E2WTcTN7Jt
— Adam Mosseri 😷 (@mosseri) May 7, 2021
Instagram’s communications team said the “widespread global technical issue [is] not related to any particular topic”.
Mohammed El Kurd, an activist who was posting updates from Sheikh Jarrah on his Twitter and Instagram pages on Thursday night, said that his Instagram stories were taken down for being “hate speech”.
A lot of my IG stories regarding last night’s colonial violence in Sheikh Jarrah have been removed because they were considered “hate speech,” even though most of them featured no writing. I got another notification that my account may be deleted.
— Mohammed El-Kurd (@m7mdkurd) May 6, 2021
New Press, a Jerusalem-based news outlet, said its English-language Twitter account was briefly suspended.
"Twitter is fighting the Palestinian content which exposes the crime of displacing Palestinians from Sheikh Jarah neighbourhood, in Jerusalem," the outlet said on an alternative Twitter account before its main account was restored.
Twitter administration suspended the NewPress English account.
— NewPress (@newpress_en1) May 6, 2021
Twitter is fighting the Palestinian content which exposes the crime of displacing Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, in Jerusalem.
This account will be the alternative of the NewPress English account. pic.twitter.com/ErWFg9IMkG
The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, 7amleh, accused Facebook and Twitter of “systematically silencing users” who were protesting against the Israeli evictions in Sheikh Jarrah.
Activists have called for users of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to give the sites a one-star rating on the Google and Apple stores, and to post the hashtag #SheikhJarrah in their review in hopes of bringing attention to the issue.
A dozen Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood have been ordered to leave their homes after a years-long legal battle. Israel's Supreme Court will hold a hearing on the eviction orders on Monday.
It is not the first time that Instagram has faced controversy over Palestinian issues. In July 2020, Instagram deleted a post by supermodel Bella Hadid showing her father’s US passport with his birthplace listed as "Palestine", with a caption that read “My baba and his birthplace of Palestine”.
Instagram deleted her post for violating its “community guidelines on harassment or bullying”.
Hadid criticised the platform for the move.
“Are we not allowed to be Palestinian on Instagram? This, to me, is bullying. You can’t erase history by silencing people. It doesn’t work like that,” she wrote.