Meta’s Israel policy chief tried to suppress pro-Palestinian Instagram content: Report

California (Quds News Network)- A former senior Israeli government official, now working as Meta’s Israel policy chief, personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to pro-palestine students who took part in campus protests against Israel’s ongoing genocide war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel and the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy.

SJP is a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities.

The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.”

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged, The Intercept reported.

It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions.

However, experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta, a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.”

In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on the platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”

Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.

Who’s Cutler?

In 2016, Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after years of high-level work in the Israeli government.

Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”

In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.

In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal.

“We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”

A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.”

In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.”

In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”

Power Imbalance

The Intercept said that Meta employs no counterpart to Cutler’s role solely representing Palestinian viewpoints; tens of millions of Meta users across the entire Middle East and all of North Africa share one policy director. A single policy lead oversees the entire Southeast Asian nations market, with a population of nearly 700 million.

This raises concerns among experts about a deep power imbalance inside Meta when it comes to moderating discussion of the Israeli war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans since October 7, 2023.

“If Meta wishes to behave ethically, it must ensure that Palestinians also have a seat at the table,” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York told The Intercept.

SJP Content Removed by Cutler

Records reviewed by The Intercept show Cutler pushed for the removal of an SJP post promoting a reading list of books including authors associated with two Palestinian factions, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

According to a source familiar with Cutler’s actions, these efforts have included lobbying for the deletion of posts quoting celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who served as a PFLP spokesperson nearly 60 years ago and was assassinated by Israel in 1972.

Internal records show Cutler later lobbied for the removal of an SJP Instagram post describing Leila Khaled — an 80-year-old former PFLP member who helped hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and has in the decades since become an outspoken icon of Palestinian solidarity — as “empowering.”

Throughout the year, Cutler internally flagged several SJP UCLA posts, including those mentioning a reading list of PFLP-associated authors, an on-campus “PFLP study group,” and a post containing a red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas operations in the field that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance.

In August, the organization’s chapter at Columbia University reported its Instagram account had been deactivated without explanation. A member of SJP Columbia said the chapter did not have a record of deleted Instagram content but recalled Meta removing multiple posts that quoted Kanafani.

Non-student Content

Records also show Cutler has requested the deletion of non-student content, too. Following Iran’s October 1 missile strikes on Israel, Cutler quickly flagged a video uploaded to Instagram of Palestinians cheering from the Gaza Strip.

Records show Cutler has also repeatedly lobbied to censor the Instagram account of Lebanese satellite TV network Al Mayadeen when it posted sympathetic content about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

These actions are “Typical Jordana,” according to Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former Middle East and North Africa policy chief.

“No one in the world could tell me that a lot of what she does is not an overreach of her authority.”

Zeitoon, who departed the company in 2017, told The Intercept that Cutler’s role inside Meta differed from those of other regional policy managers.

“If I was head of public policy for Jordan, and I went on TV and said I represent the interests of Jordan within Meta, I would be fired the second day,” said Zeitoon, a Jordanian national, whose mandate at Meta was to oversee the whole of the Middle East and North Africa.

“That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. None of us was ever hired with the premise that we’re representing our governments.”

BuzzFeed News reported that in 2017 Facebook employees had “raised concerns about Cutler’s role and whose interests she prioritizes,” evidenced by an argument “over whether the West Bank should be considered ‘occupied territories’ in Facebook’s rules.”

Zeitoon recalled this clash as emblematic of Cutler’s tenure, adding that when he was there, she “tried to influence decision makers within the company to designate the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ territory” rather than using the term “occupied.”