Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American who previously worked for Meta's machine learning team from 2021 to this February, filed a discrimination lawsuit in a California state court against his former employer Tuesday (June 4) for allegedly being biased in its handling of content related to the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. 

Reuters reported that Hamad claimed that he was wrongfully fired because he was trying to help fix bugs which, according to the lawsuit, was suppressing Palestinian Instagram posts. It was alleged that his firing stemmed from an incident in December involving an emergency procedure designed to troubleshoot severe issues with the firm's platforms, internally known as "site event" or SEV.

According to the lawsuit, Hamad allegedly found an Instagram video posted by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, which was mislabelled as pornographic even though the video showed a destroyed building in Gaza.

Hamad further claimed that Meta had a pattern of bias against Palestinians, saying that the company allegedly deleted internal employee communication that mentioned the deaths of their relatives in Gaza. 

The company also allegedly conducted investigations into the use of the Palestinian flag emoji by employees, when it was not done for their colleagues who were using the Israeli and Ukrainian flag emojis in similar contexts, the lawsuit added.

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Claims of Meta's Alleged Anti-Palestinian Bias

Hamad's claims supposedly reflect the long-standing criticisms by human rights groups about Meta's practice of moderating content posted to its platforms about the area in the Middle East Abrahamic religions called the Holy Land, including in an external investigation that the company commissioned in 2021. 

However, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that Hamad was dismissed for allegedly violating the firm's "data access policies," which were supposed to set limits on what employees could do with different types of data. 

Earlier this year, nearly 200 Meta employees raised similar concerns in its open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. 

On the other hand, NBC News quoted Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn (TN), arguing that Meta was actually biased toward removing pro-Israel content. 

In December, Meta defended its handling of both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian content, saying that the firm was overwhelmed by content from both sides of the conflict. 

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