Ammon News - “Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced,” one Facebook senior software engineer said.

Facebook is grappling with a reputation crisis in the Middle East, with plummeting approval rates and advertising sales in Arab countries, according to leaked documents obtained by NBC News.

The shift corresponds with the widespread belief by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists that the social media company has been disproportionately silencing Palestinian voices on its apps – which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – during this month’s Israel-Hamas conflict. Examples include the deletion of hundreds of posts condemning the eviction of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, the suspension of activist accounts and the temporary blocking of a hashtag relating to one of Islam’s holiest mosques. Facebook said these were technical glitches.

Instagram has taken the greatest reputational hit, according to a presentation authored by a Dubai-based Facebook employee that was leaked to NBC News, with its approval ratings among users falling to a historical low.

The social media company regularly polls users of Facebook and Instagram about how much they believe the company cares about them. Facebook converts the results into a ‘Cares About Users’ metric which acts as a bellwether for the apps’ popularity. Since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas conflict, the metric among Instagram users in Facebook’s Middle East and North Africa region is at its lowest in history, and fell almost 5 percentage points in a week, according to the research. “The biggest changes came from Qatar, Jordan, Palestine and Saudi Arabia,” the presentation states.

Instagram’s score measuring whether users think the app is good for the world, referred to as ‘Good For World,’ has also dropped in the region to its lowest level after losing more than 5 percentage points in a week.

There was also a dip although not as precipitous in Facebook’s ‘Cares About Users’ score in the Middle East, driven mainly by Egypt, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan.

The low approval ratings have been compounded by a campaign by pro-Palestinian and free speech activists to target Facebook with 1-star reviews on the Apple and Google app stores. The campaign tanked Facebook’s average rating from above 4 out of 5 stars on both app stores to 2.2 on the App Store and 2.3 on Google Play as of Wednesday. According to leaked internal posts, the issue has been categorized internally as a “severity 1” problem for Facebook, which is the second highest priority issue after a “severity 0” incident, which is reserved for when the website is down.

“Users are feeling that they are being censored, getting limited distribution, and ultimately silenced,” one senior software engineer said in a post on Facebook’s internal message board. “As a result, our users have started protesting by leaving 1 star reviews.”

Internal documents connect the reputational damage to a decline in advertising sales in the Middle East. According to the leaked presentation, Facebook’s ad sales in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq dropped at least 12 percent in the 10 days after May 7.

“In addition to the negative sentiment towards Facebook in MENA now, the regression could also be attributed to the overall charged environment where some brands might find it insensitive to advertise or won’t be getting the usual ROI when spending their money,” Facebook noted in a presentation deck on the topic, referring to the return on investment.

In spite of the widespread perception of disproportionate silencing of Palestinian voices, Facebook has been unable to identify any “ongoing systemic issues” with its automated content removal tools or human content moderators, according to a post to Facebook’s internal message board by the company’s risk and response team.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone acknowledged in an interview there had been “several issues” that affected people’s ability to share on the company’s apps. “While we have fixed them, they should never have happened in the first place and we’re sorry to anyone who felt they couldn’t bring attention to important events, or who felt this was a deliberate suppression of their voice. This was never our intention - nor do we ever want to silence a particular community or point of view.”

Stone declined to comment on the leaked material indicating reputation and ad sales damage in the Middle East but did not dispute its contents.

The Middle East is not a huge market in terms of Facebook’s overall advertising revenue, which topped $84 billion in 2020. According to research by the Dubai-based digital advertising company Futuretech, the social media company generates between $800 million and $1 billion in annual advertising revenue in the region. But it is a key growth market at a time when user growth in some of the larger advertising markets such as the United States and Europe has stalled, experts say.

“It might be a smaller market. But Facebook is still growing aggressively in the region. So it’s strategically important,” Futuretech CEO Boye Balogun said. “They are also protecting themselves from the likes of TikTok that have launched in the region and are growing very quickly.”

The same leaked presentation highlighted a surge in Israeli users reporting problematic content on Instagram, first reported by BuzzFeed News, making Israel the top country ranked globally for reporting content for ties to dangerous organizations and individuals, a category that covers terrorist propaganda, between April and May.

There was also an increase in reports from users in Israel of content for violating Facebook’s rules against hate speech and incitement of violence. Between May 8 and May 18, users in Israel reported 494,463 cases of hate speech while Palestinian users reported 58,618 cases.

“Israel has hacked the system and knows how to pressure Facebook to take stuff down,” said Ashraf Zeitoon, who worked as Facebook’s head of policy in the Middle East and North Africa between 2014 and 2017. “Palestinians don’t have the capacity, experience and resources to report hate speech by Israeli citizens in Hebrew.”

The U.S., Israel and the European Union have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization. But pro-Palestinian civil society groups including 7amleh and Access Now as well as some Facebook employees are concerned that nonviolating content is being marked as terrorist propaganda and hate speech. They believe that Israel is flooding Facebook with reports of violations in a way that disproportionately removes Palestinian voices.

“The Israeli government is spending millions on digital tools and campaigns targeting social media content. But there are only fragmented efforts from the Palestinian side,” said Mona Shtaya from 7amleh, a nonprofit that focuses on Palestinians’ digital rights.

Shtaya notes that the Israeli government’s cyber unit makes thousands of requests each year to have content taken down from social media sites, including Facebook and Instagram. During the first 10 days of May, as Israeli-Palestinian tensions were rising, the Israeli government asked social media companies to delete more than 1,010 pieces of content. More than half (598) of the requests were made to Facebook and the Israeli government said that the social media company removed 48 percent of them. Israel also funds a program that pays students to post and report content on social media in what is described as “online public diplomacy.”

Shtaya also points to apps such as Act-IL, developed by former Israeli intelligence officers, where volunteers coordinate campaigns to mass report items of content and boost other items by liking and sharing them. Act-IL has been promoted by the Israeli government, but the company denies any formal relationship and in 2018 told BuzzFeed News that it was a “grassroots initiative” that fights antisemitism and incitement to terrorism and violence.

Free speech and human rights groups have for years accused Facebook of censoring Palestinian voices, including activists and journalists.

*NBC