Meta Creates Temporary Policy To Control Comments Regarding Israel-Hamas Conflicts On Facebook

JAKARTA - Meta Platforms, owner of Facebook, has introduced temporary measures to limit "potentially unwanted comments" on posts related to the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Meta says that it will change the default setting for people who can comment on new and public posts on Facebook made by users "in the region" to only their friends and followers. This was revealed in an updated blog post by Meta.

A Meta spokesperson declined to explain how the company defines "such regions." Users can opt out and change these settings at any time, as explained by Meta.

The social media company will also disable the ability to see the first one or two comments on posts when scrolling through the Facebook feed.

"Our policies are designed to keep users safe on our apps while giving everyone a voice," Meta said in a blog post. "We apply these policies evenly across the world and there is no truth to the suggestion that we deliberately suppress their voices."

This week, several users who posted support for Palestine or Gaza residents admitted that Meta suppressed their content. Meta classifies Hamas as a “dangerous organization” and bans content praising the group.

Mondoweiss, a news site covering Palestinian human rights, said on its social media platform X on Oct. 10 that Instagram had twice suspended the profile of its correspondent who posted the video. Other Instagram users reported that their posts and stories about Palestine received no views.

Meta says it has fixed a bug on Instagram that caused reposted content to not appear correctly in users' stories, which disappeared after 24 hours.

"This bug affects accounts equally across the world - not just people trying to post about what's happening in Israel and Gaza - and has nothing to do with the content," Meta said.