Censorship by Facebook? The story so far

The journalists, who worked for the Shebab News Agency and the Quds News Network, claimed that the recent Israel-Facebook agreement, aimed at curbing violence-inciting social media posts, was being exploited to target them.

Facebook, however, claimed that the pages were "removed in error" and would be restored as soon as it finished conducting its investigation into the issue.

Admittedly, it is difficult to conclude whether inflammatory posts made by Palestinians are symptoms of the Israel-Palestine conflict or general hate speech - it is a sketchy area.

While Facebook has a moral responsibility to remove general hate speech, involvement in any political dispute, especially in one as sensitive as the Israel-Palestine issue, would negate Facebook's claimed apolitical stance.

Facebook removed an iconic Vietnam War photo of a naked nine year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack on grounds of nudity.

Espen Egil Hansen, the editor of Aftenposten, the Norwegian newspaper which circulated the post, said that Facebook's action was an "abuse of power".

He wrote an open letter to Facebook, harshly criticizing the company's inability to distinguish between child pornography and war photographs.

In May 2016, former Facebook "news curators" revealed that they had often suppressed news stories which involved conservative leaders or could have been of interest to conservative users.

Moreover, these employees were often asked to "inject" selected stories into users' feeds from a large list of ranked trending topics, thereby tampering with what information a user received.

A 2015 CNN Money report stated that in countries like India, Pakistan and Turkey, Facebook actively blocks varied material, effectively acting as a government censor.

Facebook's behaviour in these countries results from a dilemma: censor posts or get banned from the country.

The "pieces of content" which are blocked can still be viewed by users from other countries implying that Facebook selectively blocks material.

After accusations of political bias, in August 2016, Facebook replaced all its human editors with algorithms.

However, Facebook engineers regularly check trending stories decided by the algorithms to ensure that inaccurate or sexually explicit posts are not promoted.

Furthermore, the algorithms are far from "neutral" insofar that they were programmed by designers and thus reflect their biases in the selection and promotion of stories.

In spite of the aforementioned cases and many others like it, Facebook has never accepted editorial responsibility.

Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly emphasized that Facebook is "not a media company".

However, if, as demonstrated, Facebook's algorithm acts as an editorial gatekeeper affecting the nature of news content available to its 1.7 billion users, is it not time for Facebook to take responsibility for the same?

In the most recent development to the Facebook censorship issue, seven Palestinian journalists had their accounts blocked without explanation.

While this issue must be explored in all its nuances, recent accusations levelled at Facebook raises questions regarding its claimed impartiality to content.