Over the last weeks, escalating tensions in Palestine have resulted in an uproar on social media. Because of the nature of the Palestinian crisis, social media has become one of the most powerful means of spreading information regarding the subject.
Many social media users, however, noticed that the posts they were sharing about Palestine received significantly fewer views than their others. Leading many to speculate that Instagram is seeking to silence pro-Palestinian voices.
This trend was even noticed by figures such as Bella Hadid and Mia Khalifa.
The funniest part is this post got popped for hate speech without a caption. How’re you gonna say it’s hate speech when I didn’t even speak!? Take it up with @AJEnglish, not me! I’m just re-sharing global news! pic.twitter.com/Ms7K63K8Pv
— Mia K. (@miakhalifa) May 14, 2021
Instagram soon came out and denied the claims.
According to SocialMediaToday, “Instagram has strongly denied any form of censorship in this respect, but it has identified a problem impacting the reach of such content – a recent algorithm change to reduce the reach of feed posts that have been re-shared to Stories.”
BBC shared their information from Instagram: “The app had favored original content in its “stories” feature over existing, re-shared posts, but will now give them equal treatment, it said.”
Instagram also took to Twitter to clarify:
Wanted to provide a bit more information on what happened here. We are so sorry to everyone who was impacted by this. https://t.co/BFxyJfRbSR pic.twitter.com/3J9YGyRYdS
— Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) May 7, 2021