Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Cited Errors in Automated Systems as Cause for Blocking pro-Palestinian Content on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

May 23, 2021

Social media giants Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter faced criticism for restricting or blocking millions of pro-Palestinian posts and accounts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The companies attributed these actions to errors within their automated content moderation systems, highlighting the importance of trustworthy AI for safe and secure practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.650, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MANAGE 4.3 — similarity 0.643, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.635, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: facebook, instagram, twitter
Alleged developer: facebook, instagram, twitter
Alleged harmed parties: palestinian-social-media-users, facebook-users, instagram-users, twitter-users, facebook-employees-having-families-affected-by-the-conflict

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/359

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.