A former Meta engineer on Tuesday accused the company of bias in its handling of content related to the war in Gaza, claiming in a lawsuit that Meta fired him for trying to help fix bugs causing the suppression of Palestinian Instagram posts.
Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been on Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, sued the social media giant in a California state court for discrimination, wrongful termination and other wrongdoing over his February dismissal.
In the complaint, Hamad accused Meta of a pattern of bias against Palestinians, saying the company deleted internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza and conducted investigations into their use of the Palestinian flag emoji.
The company launched no such investigations for employees posting Israeli or Ukrainian flag emojis in similar contexts, according to the lawsuit.
I’m grateful for this engineer.
Meta’s actions as described by the engineer are predictable, given what we know about them. I shall be following up on this story.
Meta has already learned what they needed to learn from Cambridge Analytica in 2016.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I highly recommend watching The Great Hack on Netflix on the topic. It’s an easy to understand documentary on influencing the 2016 US Presidential Election and Brexit vote, based on first hand accounts from those who made it happen.
Thank you for sharing this. I’ll need to check it out.
The Social Dilemma is another great watch. It clearly illustrates how all social media algorithms are designed around engagement, and the impact that has on a user’s perception of the world. It’s absolutely no surprise we have such a polarized society after widespread adoption of daily consumption of social media.
I come from the future, in court he will prove his claims but Googles lawyers will successfully show that it’s lawful (and profitable) enough to dodge punishment. Sorry for the spoiler.
