An ex-Meta employee says he tried to stop Instagram from stifling pro-Palestinian posts and was fired for it

Katie Balevic
Updated ·2 min read

  • An ex-Meta employee filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit.

  • Ferras Hamad said he was fired after reporting bugs that stifled pro-Palestinian Instagram posts.

  • Meta claimed he was let go for breaching data policies.

A former Meta employee has filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit against the company, claiming he was fired for trying to resolve bugs that stifled pro-Palestinian posts on Instagram.

Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian American, accused Meta of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination, among other claims, according to the complaint he filed in California court on Tuesday.

Meta fired Hamad in February from his software engineering role on Meta's machine learning team, where he had worked since 2022 and received "glowing performance reviews," according to the lawsuit, which also accuses Meta of "callus, chronic, and consistent anti-Palestinian bias."

In October, shortly after Hamas attacked Israel, Meta "directly tasked" Hamad to investigate Instagram's filters on content coming out of Gaza, Israel, and Ukraine, according to the lawsuit.

Hamad raised concerns about content from "Palestinian Instagram creators and activists, whose posts had been curbed or censored, artificially limiting their reach," according to the complaint. At least one other Meta employee reported that a Palestinian creator was "not appearing in searches, while his content was concurrently mysteriously disappearing," the lawsuit says.

While investigating the "irregularities," Hamad says in the lawsuit that multiple employees outside his team told him to stop investigating the issue. In January, Meta notified him that he was the subject of an investigation. Days later, he was terminated, according to the lawsuit.

"The employee was dismissed for violating Meta's data access policies, which we make clear to employees will result in immediate termination," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider. The spokesperson did not respond to other claims made in the lawsuit.

The war in Gaza has become a subject of international tension. Following the Hamas attack, which killed 1,200 Israelis, Israel's military (equipped with US weaponry) has bombarded Gaza, killing over 35,000 people.

Gracy Kay contributed to this reporting.

Correction: June 6, 2024 — Due to an editing typo, an earlier version of this story misspelled the first name of the ex-Meta employee. It is Hamad, not Hamas.

Read the original article on Business Insider

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