The People vs Genocide

When Saima got an interview with Meta’s social impact team in 2021, she couldn’t believe her luck.

Saima, a data analyst from Chicago who is now 38-years-old, told me she is passionate about social justice and had always been involved in volunteering alongside her day jobs at tech companies. She thought the role at Meta sounded like “a great way to combine my tech experience with working for a company whose mission statement was giving people the power to build community."

She’d seen this power in real-time through her work building a Facebook group of the San Diego chapter of Salam Shalom, which aimed to build bonds between Muslim and Jewish women. “It was so easy to advertise, create events, get discussions going, and for people to get to know each other,” said Saima, adding that she was "fascinated" by how to use Big Tech for good.

But after October 7th 2023, Saima describes the “culture change” at work which sent her into a “state of alarm.” As the horrors of October 7th and the Gaza genocide under Israeli apartheid unfolded, she started hearing story after story from her Muslim social circles about the censorship of Palestinian content on Meta platforms.

Meta has been under increasing scrutiny for its role in censoring peaceful pro-Palestinian voices, including by Human Rights Watch which published a 75-page report on the topic, just three months after October 7th. According the Palestinian Ministry of Health nearly 50,000 Gazans have been killed during the genocide, though recent research published in The Lancet suggests the number is significantly higher.

Saima saw this censorship with her own eyes on an internal platform used by employees to communicate with each other. “When I offered condolences to my colleague who lost family in Gaza, the post got deleted. The same thing happened when I posted about a children’s hip hop group in Gaza,” remembered Saima.

Meanwhile, she noticed a double standard, as internal posts about Palestine rallies or marches were removed, while similar events for other causes were posted without issue. This contradiction has been seen externally too, with Meta adjusting its newsworthiness allowance policy to allow posts depicting violence in Ukraine, but failing to do the same for Palestine.

There were repercussions at work beyond just the deletion of posts. “The worst part was noticing people getting called into HR offices and being intimidated for posting about Palestine,” she said. After months of resisting these practices, eventually Saima was fired. She is currently working with a legal team to take Meta to court over her dismissal.

Saima Akhter is one of a growing number of Big Tech company employees, current and former, organising against the industry’s role in the Gaza genocide and illegal expansion of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Many of these groups also campaign against Big Tech’s role in other global conflicts, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Honestly, there is so much to say on this topic I agonised over where to start. At this point, it feels impossible to disentangle Big Tech with Israel’s apartheid regime and genocide of Palestianians.

I could have led with the fact that according to congressional insiders, the push for a ban on TikTok in the US was actually due to the damage it was causing to Israel’s image – not fears of Chinese infiltration. As tech journalist Taylor Lorenz put it: “if it was an actual national security threat, do you think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would be TikToking?”

When I caught up with People vs Big Tech Director Rasha Abdul-Rahim about this, she explained that TikTok “has been a space where pro-Palestinian voices are able to flourish and reach a lot of young people, and that's been seen to be a threat to the dominant narrative.” She added that while this doesn’t mean TikTok is problem free, there is a “stark contrast” between what you see on TikTok and Meta platforms on this issue.

Another option would have been for me to lead with recent investigations by Associated Press and The Guardian which found that Microsoft is deeply involved with the Israeli military, providing them with cloud computing and AI services which help to select bombing targets in Gaza and Lebanon.

That’s right. Your favourite nineties word processor appears to be part of a genocidal war machine. And your favourite (only?) search engine Google recently lifted its ban on its AI being used for surveillance and weapons. This follows Google and Amazon’s $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government back in 2021, known as Project Nimbus.

Still, I led with my interview with Saima. For one thing, her story gives us a peek into the inner workings of Meta and the company’s systemic bias on this issue. And this goes beyond censorship.

Maen Hammad, a campaigner for Ekō, a non-profit which holds corporations to account, told me about his investigation into ads by pro-Israel charities on Facebook. He describes “one of the most harrowing findings” as to-camera pleas for money from Israeli soldiers in Gaza “outside of a destroyed mosque calling for more drones or assault rifles.”

Ekō found 98 such Facebook ads from tax-deductible organisations targeting Europe and the US to solicit funds for IDF military equipment, from soldiers which may be “from units linked to violations of international law and war crimes.” Maen also found “massive layers of hate speech and violent disinformation from Israel’s far right” in Hebrew language ads targeting Meta users in Israel.

“It's a business model that incentivises this reality where they will take money from anybody,” said Maen. “It doesn't matter if you're pushing hate speech calling on Muslims to be eradicated in India, or fundraising for a drone that can be rigged to hold explosives to bomb a mosque in Gaza.”

At the same time, Maen added, the case of Palestine is “distinct.” Meta does not have the same processes in place to monitor the accuracy of moderation of Hebrew content as it does Arabic content. There are also significant individuals in senior positions at Meta that have strong ties to the Israeli government, e.g:

From AI bombing targets to information warfare, mass surveillance to censorship, no Big Tech company has clean hands here. It’s also important to remember this goes beyond the context of war. Maen, speaking to me via video call in the West Bank, explains the effect some of these technologies have on him every day.

“If I try to go to Jerusalem – to go to a hospital or mosque, or to the ocean – as a Palestinian, I'm not allowed to get a permit to enter without going through the military office,” he said. “That same office has scans of my fingerprints and retinas connected to thousands and thousands of facial recognition cameras across occupied Palestine.”

I guess I also chose to lead with Saima’s story, because, amongst the horrors in Palestine and the global rise of technofascism, she gave me a tiny bit of hope.

Saima admitted it's “really hard to measure wins sometimes” and acknowledges that the Big Tech monopoly means boycotts are not always possible. But this doesn’t mean we can’t resist them. Protests against Elon Musk’s Tesla across the US are making headlines as I write, and the company’s sales in Europe almost halved in January.

Saima told me she finds inspiration from history, particularly the US civil rights movement. “The more that people pushed, the more people were clamped down on. And you could think that it's actually getting worse…but it's creating pressure, right?”

She also spoke about a change that had never occurred to me. It’s not cool to work for Big Tech any more.

“There used to be prestige around working at companies like Google or Meta,” Saima reflected. “But now If I met someone that worked at X, for example, I’d feel bad for you – like, Elon’s your boss? So I think there’s a culture shift happening there.”

Meta did not respond to our request for comment.

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