Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts

A former senior Israeli government official now working as a Meta’s Israel policy chief personally pushed for the censorship of Instagram accounts belonging to Students for Justice in Palestine — a group that has played a leading role in organizing campus protests against Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza.

Internal policy discussions reviewed by The Intercept show Jordana Cutler, Meta’s Israel & the Jewish Diaspora policy chief, used the company’s content escalation channels to flag for review at least four SJP posts, as well as other content expressing stances contrary to Israel’s foreign policy. When flagging SJP posts, Cutler repeatedly invoked Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which bars users from freely discussing a secret list of thousands of blacklisted entities. The Dangerous Organizations policy restricts “glorification” of those on the blacklist, but is supposed to allow for “social and political discourse” and “commentary.” 

It’s unclear if Cutler’s attempts to use Meta’s internal censorship system were successful; the company declined to say what ultimately happened to posts that Cutler flagged. It’s not Cutler’s decision whether flagged content is ultimately censored; another team is responsible for moderation decisions. But experts who spoke to The Intercept expressed alarm over a senior employee tasked with representing the interests of any government advocating for restricting user content that runs contrary to those interests.

“It screams bias,” said Marwa Fatafta a policy adviser with the digital rights organization Access Now, which consults with Meta on content moderation issues. “It doesn’t really require that much intelligence to conclude what this person is up to.”

Meta did not respond to a detailed list of questions about Cutler’s flagging of posts but argued that writing an article about her was “dangerous and irresponsible.” In a statement, spokesperson Dani Lever wrote “who flags a particular piece of content for review is irrelevant because our policies govern what is and isn’t allowed on platform. In fact, the expectation of many teams at Meta, including Public Policy, is to escalate content that might violate our policies when they become aware of it, and they do so across regions and issue areas. Whenever any piece of content is flagged, a separate team of experts then reviews whether it violates our policies.”

Cutler did not respond to a request for comment; Meta declined a request to interview her.

Lever said that The Intercept’s line of questioning “deliberately misrepresents how our processes work,” but declined to say how so.

“Voice of the Government”

Cutler joined Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, in 2016 after years of high-level work in the Israeli government. Her resumé includes several years at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she worked in public affairs and as its chief of staff from 2013 to 2016, as well as a stint as a campaign adviser for the right-wing Likud party and nearly five years as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Upon her hiring in 2016, Gilad Erdan, then minister of public security, strategic affairs and information, celebrated the move, saying it marked “an advance in dialogue between the State of Israel and Facebook.”

In interviews about her job, Cutler has stated explicitly that she acts as a liaison between Meta and the Israeli government, whose perspectives she represents inside the company.

In 2017, Cutler told the Israeli business outlet Calcalist that Facebook works “very closely with the cyber departments of the Ministry of Justice and the police and with other elements in the army and Shin Bet,” Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, on matters of content removal. “We are not the experts, they are in the field, this is their field.”

A 2020 profile in the Jerusalem Post described Cutler as “Our woman at Facebook,” hired to “represent Israel’s interests on the largest and most active social network in the world.” In an interview with the paper, she explained, “My job is to represent Facebook to Israel, and represent Israel to Facebook.” In a follow-up interview for the Post’s YouTube channel, Cutler added that “inside the company, part of my job is to be a representative for the people of Israeli, [a] voice of the government for their concerns inside of our company.” Asked “Do they listen?” by the show’s host, Cutler replied, “Of course they do, and I think that’s one of the most exciting parts about my job, that I have an opportunity to really influence the way that we look at policy and explain things on the ground.”

Though Meta has extensive government relations and lobbying operations aimed at capitols around the world, few other governments enjoy their own dedicated high-level contact within the company. The company employs no counterpart to Cutler’s role solely representing Palestinian viewpoints; tens of millions of Meta users across the entire Middle East and all of North Africa share one policy director. A single policy lead oversees the entire Southeast Asian nations market, with a population of nearly 700 million. This raises concerns among experts about a deep power imbalance inside Facebook when it comes to moderating discussion of a war that to date has killed at least 40,000 Gazans. 

“If Meta wishes to behave ethically, it must ensure that Palestinians also have a seat at the table,” Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director for International Freedom of Expression Jillian York told The Intercept.

Flagged for Moderation

Records reviewed by The Intercept show Cutler pushed for the removal of an SJP post promoting a reading list of books including authors associated with two Marxist-Leninist militant groups, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Though it remains a Meta-designated terrorist group according to a copy of the list obtained by The Intercept in 2021, the DFLP has not been considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government since 1999, when it was delisted by the State Department “primarily because of the absence of terrorist activity.” The PFLP remains designated by both Meta and the United States.

According to a source familiar with Cutler’s actions, these efforts have included lobbying for the deletion of posts quoting celebrated Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani, who served as a PFLP spokesperson nearly 60 years ago and was assassinated by Israel in 1972. Kanafani, whose works have been widely translated and published in countries around the world, enjoys global literary renown and mainstream recognition; his 1969 novella “Returning to Haifa” was cited as a recommended book by New York Times podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” last year.

Internal records show Cutler later lobbied for the removal of an SJP Instagram post describing Leila Khaled — an 80-year-old former PFLP member who helped hijack TWA Flight 840 in 1969 and has in the decades since become an outspoken icon of Palestinian solidarity — as “empowering.” 

These same records demonstrate Cutler regularly singled out Instagram content belonging to SJP at the University of California, Los Angeles, claiming to policy colleagues that this chapter had been associated with violent protests, citing an Israeli news report about an April 29 melee at the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Local and national press accounts described a peaceful protest until a pro-Israeli mob attacked the encampment with fists, weapons, and bear spray, injuring 15 people. 

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Throughout the year, Cutler internally flagged several SJP UCLA posts, including those mentioning a reading list of PFLP-associated authors, an on-campus “PFLP study group,” and a post containing a red triangle emoji, a reference to Hamas combat operations that has become a broader symbol of Palestinian resistance. 

Mona, a UCLA undergraduate and SJP member who spoke on the condition of being only identified by her first name, said the chapter’s Instagram account was periodically unable to post or share content, which the group attributed to enforcement actions by Meta. In August, the organization’s chapter at Columbia University reported its Instagram account had been deactivated without explanation. A member of SJP Columbia said the chapter did not have a record of deleted Instagram content but recalled Meta removing multiple posts that quoted Kanafani.

The Israeli government has been vehement in its criticism of anti-Zionist groups like SJP and Jewish Voice for Peace, and has denounced campus organizing as an attempt to import terrorism to American college campuses.

Records show Cutler has requested the deletion of non-student content, too. Following Iran’s October 1 missile attack against Israel, Cutler quickly flagged video uploaded to Instagram of Palestinians cheering from the Gaza Strip. Records show Cutler has also repeatedly lobbied to censor the Instagram account of Lebanese satellite TV network Al Mayadeen when it posted sympathetic content about the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

These actions are “Typical Jordana,” according to Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former Middle East and North Africa policy chief. “No one in the world could tell me that a lot of what she does is not an overreach of her authority.”

Zeitoon, who departed the company in 2017, told The Intercept that Cutler’s role inside Meta differed from those of other regional policy managers.  

“If I was head of public policy for Jordan, and I went on TV and said I represent the interests of Jordan within Meta, I would be fired the second day,” said Zeitoon, a Jordanian national, whose mandate at Meta was to oversee the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. “That’s the job of a government employee, a political appointee. None of us was ever hired with the premise that we’re representing our governments.”

During his tenure, Zeitoon says he often fielded informal requests from the government of Jordan, but that he drew a clear line at acting on its behalf. “The Jordanian government hated my guts when I was there, because they thought that I was obliged because I’m Jordanian. I might guide you, I might be over-friendly, if you call me at night I might accept your call. But at the end of the day, Facebook pays my salary.”

BuzzFeed News reported that in 2017 Facebook employees had “raised concerns about Cutler’s role and whose interests she prioritizes,” evidenced by an argument “over whether the West Bank should be considered ‘occupied territories’ in Facebook’s rules.” Zeitoon recalled this clash as emblematic of Cutler’s tenure, adding that when he was there, she “tried to influence decision makers within the company to designate the West Bank as a ‘disputed’ territory” rather than using the term “occupied” — a phrasing used by the United Nations when describing the region.

Zeitoon doubted the Meta spokesperson’s claim that all internal escalations are treated equally, no matter who submits them. Recalling his time working in a high-ranking role at the company, he said his complaints received immediate attention: “My report goes to the top,” he said. He expects the same would be true today for content flagged by Cutler — especially at a moment when Israel is at war. “I’m sure all she reports is code red.”

Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was reminded of the case of Ankhi Das, Facebook’s former policy head for India — another rare instance in which a single country had its own dedicated representative within the company. Das resigned from her position in 2020 after a Wall Street Journal report found she had lobbied for the uneven enforcement of hate speech rules that benefited India’s ruling Hindu nationalist party, which she supported personally. “Meta is the communications platform for much for the world, but of course not every voice is heard equally,” Brooking said in an interview.

Zeitoon concurred: “No governments in the world have been able to create a network of influence and pressure on Meta as strong as the Israeli and the Indian governments.”

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Cutler is not the first or only prominent figure within Meta to help foster relations between the company and governments. Her colleague Joel Kaplan, who served as White House deputy chief of staff during the George W. Bush administration, joined Facebook in 2011 to head the company’s operations in Washington, D.C., a move the New York Times reported “will likely strengthen its ties to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, is the former deputy prime minister of the U.K. Many of the staffers who help Meta craft and enforce its Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy join following years of work at the Pentagon, State Department, federal law enforcement, and spy agencies. The revolving door between government and major internet companies is vast and ever-turning not just at Meta, but also its most prominent rivals. 

As recently as February 2023, Cutler’s name was floated as a possible next head of the Israeli Strategic Affairs Ministry, a government propaganda office tasked with surveilling and undermining protesters and activists abroad. The ministry has reportedly made extensive use of Meta’s platforms to infiltrate student groups and conduct propaganda campaigns. In June, Haaretz reported a project originally founded by the ministry had targeted Black lawmakers in the U.S. with “hundreds” of phony Facebook and Instagram accounts “to aggressively promote purported articles that served the Israeli narrative.” Meta later shut these accounts down.

Evelyn Douek, a content moderation scholar and professor at Stanford Law School, said Cutler’s direct intervention is “obviously extremely concerning” given the specific stakes. “You have a person inside Meta representing the interests of the government on an issue about which there is deeply contested political debate it appears, to favor one side of that debate. The concerns about bias and disproportionate enforcement of a policy when that is happening seem obvious.”

Lever, the Meta spokesperson, said that Cutler’s role in public policy is distinct from the company’s Content Policy officials, noting the former “engage” with governments but do not actually have a role in drafting rules. In her Jerusalem Post interview, however, Cutler stated “I’m part of a team of people who are helping to develop and build Facebook’s policies.”

Douek argued that internet platform users are best served by keeping the creation of speech rules entirely separate from their enforcement. “It’s really highly problematic if you have people whose job at Meta is not the fair enforcement of content moderation rules, but rather their job is to please government interests intervening in the enforcement of the platform’s rules,” she said.

This at a minimum creates the appearance of a foreign government meddling in an intensely domestic political issue — a dynamic Meta has historically worked to combat. “Campus protests and what is happening in the United States right now is a deeply contested fault line in American politics. And this has been an issue about what are the appropriate limits on campus speech and how should we be dealing with this,” Douek said. “A foreign country’s interests are being overly represented in how that debate is moderated, that should also raise concerns.”

The post Meta’s Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts appeared first on The Intercept.