Instagram Says Sorry For Adding “Terrorist” To Palestinian Bios

After being accused of shadow-banning pro-Palestinian posts, Instagram and its parent company Meta are now being asked to answer some other questions. Another incident of alleged bias took place amid the Israel-Hamas conflict. Reports claim that Insta is auto-translating Arabic words in Palestinian bios as “terrorist“.

Instagram Accused Of Adding Terrorist To Palestinian Profiles

The issue appeared for some users who had the Palestinian flag (🇵🇸), or the Arabic word “Alhamdulillah” (ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّٰهِ), which means “praise to Allah”. A TikTok user @ytkingkhan confirmed it by performing a small test. He isn’t Palestinian himself. He only wanted to test the matter after a friend brought the issue to light. Upon tapping “See translation”, his bio was translated to:

“Praise be to God, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom”.

“We fixed a problem that briefly caused inappropriate Arabic translations in some of our products. We sincerely apologize that this happened,”

This whole incident led to frustration and outrage. Many users took to social media complaining about how is this justified. Why is the platform allegedly doing such things? There were many questions that needed to be answered. However, Instagram says that translations are provided automatically and the platform has not intentionally done that. The tech giant stated:

“There is no truth to the suggestion that we are deliberately suppressing [voices]. We can make errors and that is why we offer an appeal process for people to tell us when they think we have made the wrong decision, so we can look into it.”

Meta claims that it is closely monitoring its platforms and removing violent or disturbing content relating to the Israel-Hamas war.