Skip to main content

Meta PlatformsFired Palestinian-American engineer who tried to fix bugs suppressing Palestinian content

Meta faces a lawsuit from Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who claims he was fired for attempting to fix bugs that suppressed Palestinian posts on Instagram. Hamad found content by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza was misclassified as pornographic. The lawsuit alleges Meta deleted internal employee communications mentioning relatives killed in Gaza and investigated employees for using the Palestinian flag emoji.

Scoring Impact

TopicDirectionRelevanceContribution
Content Moderation-againstsecondary-0.50
Whistleblower Protection-againstprimary-1.00
Overall incident score =-0.643

Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.57)

Evidence (1 signal)

Confirms Firing Oct 1, 2024 documented

Fired Palestinian-American engineer who tried to fix bugs suppressing Palestinian content

Meta faces a lawsuit from Ferras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who claims he was fired for attempting to fix bugs that suppressed Palestinian posts on Instagram. Hamad found content by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza was misclassified as pornographic. The lawsuit alleges Meta deleted internal employee communications mentioning relatives killed in Gaza and investigated employees for using the Palestinian flag emoji.

Related: Same Topics