Facebook Deploys Special Team Amid Intensified Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The Israel-Palestine conflict has escalated in a dangerous manner and if not stopped, it can become more ferocious. As the conflict intensified, more people turned to social media platforms and started calling for an immediate ceasefire and ending hostilities in Gaza. Keeping that in view, the social media giant Facebook set up a 24-7 “special operations center” to respond to posts on its platform concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Facebook Deploys Special Team Amid Intensified Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Amidst the deadly conflict in the Gaza strip, misinformation, hate speech, and calls for violence have been circulated on social media platforms. During a conference call, Facebook’s Vice President Monika Bickert told reporters that,

This operations center allows us to closely monitor the situation so we can remove content that violates our community standards faster, while also addressing possible errors in enforcement.

Before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Facebook had set up similar operations centers to focus on situations such as the global elections.

Furthermore, the New York Times recently reported that Jewish zionists had formed new groups on Facebook-owned popular messaging platform WhatsApp, and they are intending to commit violence against Palestinians. According to a spokesperson on WhatsApp,

As a private messaging service, we do not have access to the contents of people’s personal chats though when information is reported to us, we take action to ban accounts we believe may be involved in causing imminent harm. We also quickly respond to valid legal requests from law enforcement for the limited information available to us.

Apart from this, social media platforms have also faced criticism on accusations of censorship. A few days ago BuzzFeed News agency reported that the Facebook-owned Instagram had mistakenly deleted content about al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem where Israeli security police showed brutality and attacked the worshippers.

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