Last week, we learned that Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has temporarily changed its rules and will allow certain posts calling for violence to remain on its platforms. Users of Facebook and Instagram who live in countries close to Ukraine will be permitted to post calls for violence against Russian soldiers and even for the deaths of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Belarusian counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko – though without specifics of location or method, the company stipulated.
“As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech such as ‘death to the Russian invaders’. We still won’t allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians,” Meta said in a statement.
Meta may be the biggest social media company to make changes to its operations, though it’s hardly the only one. You won’t find any Russian state-funded media videos on YouTube any longer, as Google, YouTube’s parent company, has blocked access to any channel that hosts those videos. TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, announced that it would block livestreaming and uploading of new content in Russia after the Kremlin passed a new law criminalizing what it considers to be “fake” news about its invasion of Ukraine. But Meta’s announcement, which has the company allowing more content rather than less, sets it apart from the others.
In some ways, this brazen announcement is a welcome one, but not for its encouragement of violence. (The use of violence here is at bottom a moral question, though the right to armed resistance against a belligerent occupation is generally recognized under international law.) Meta’s statement is welcome because it clarifies something that many of us have already known for some time. When it comes to political speech, Facebook’s policies have never been applied evenly.
Palestinians know this double standard better than most. Last May, when the Israeli government was seeking to forcibly uproot Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, protests broke out on the streets of Jerusalem and on screens across the world. Facebook and Instagram were hardly neutral spaces for information-sharing during this period, and Facebook was definitely not on the side of the occupied in that situation.
“Facebook has suppressed content posted by Palestinians and their supporters speaking out about human rights issues in Israel and Palestine,” Human Rights Watch wrote in a scathing report issued in October 2021. The suppressed speech that Human Rights Watch refers to was not even violent speech. Often, it was simply “reposts of content from mainstream news organizations” by Palestinians.
“In one instance,” the report says, “Instagram removed a screenshot of headlines and photos from three New York Times opinion articles for which the Instagram user added commentary that urged Palestinians to ‘never concede’ their rights. The post did not transform the material in any way that could reasonably be construed as incitement to violence or hatred.”
All in all, social media watchdog groups found more than 700 examples of content being deleted, hashtags being hidden, accounts being closed, archived content being deleted, and more. Facebook and Instagram, the report notes, accounted for 85% of those restrictions.
Palestinians have become accustomed to fighting against this type of national erasure, though that doesn’t make it any less exhausting to confront. With its latest move, however, Facebook is not only acknowledging that it plays an important role in directing global politics, but is also now taking a very public position against foreign military occupation. This is an excellent development. Is Facebook now committing to transparency and to the principles of international law? Surely, we must hope so. Otherwise, the internet behemoth will come off merely as a corporate partisan of American and Western European positions rather than as a potential vehicle to uphold universally agreed-upon values. Therein lies the difference between Facebook’s Ukraine and Palestine stances.
In other words, Facebook’s announcement could and should help us make the connections between besieged and occupied people everywhere and increase the desire to fight for them equally, and we should and will now be expecting Facebook to do the same. That’s why pointing out Facebook’s double standard between Ukraine and Palestine is about more than exposing a hypocritical past. It’s about raising the bar on everyone’s behavior. As such, it’s also the opposite of “whataboutism.”
In case you’re not familiar with “whataboutism,” this is a term that refers to a rhetorical strategy of skillful deflection. Whataboutism aims to move the subject of conversation away from one party’s evil actions by pointing out the sins of another. Let’s say you are angry about what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Then, someone asks you, “but what about what the US is doing in Somalia?” Soon, the conversation is no longer about Russia and only about the United States. Whataboutism = deflect, distract, demobilize.
Whataboutism has permeated so much of today’s discourse around Russia’s invasion, and often at Russia’s behest. Perhaps you saw that map circulating on social media the day Russia began its most recent invasion of Ukraine. The graphic, titled “Airstrikes in the last 48 Hours,” purported to show areas around the world that had recently been bombed by various powers on the same day of Russia’s incursion. The image, shared thousands of times on social media, was distributed by the Berlin-based media group Redfish in a classic example of whataboutism. (And, as it turns out, Redfish is sponsored by none other than the Kremlin.) In an article about this specific map, Vice quoted Idrees Ahmad, a lecturer in digital journalism at the University of Stirling, who explained that in cases of Whataboutism, “the hypocrisy being alluded to is often real, and can trigger righteous fury in the audience.” But people, Ahmad said, “are duped because the aim is not to generate greater sympathy for a different conflict but to deflect attention from the one at hand.”
Facebook’s announcement of its newfound political bravery should awaken us to the fact that we need new terminologies that connect - rather than misdirect us from – the common human struggles for liberty that we see and experience around us. “And-also-ism” is my (admittedly poor) candidate for a term that captures this idea, but I recognize that there may be a simpler way around the issue. Come to think of it, how’s this for a word: Freedom. Freedom for Ukrainians. Freedom for Palestinians. Freedom from invasion. Freedom from occupation. Freedom for one. Freedom for all. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.
Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. He is a contributing opinion writer at Guardian US
