Journalists and activists covering the Israel-Palestine conflict are using nature photos, cat memes and humour in an attempt to bypass Meta’s alleged “shadow-banning” of users who have posted news about Palestinian casualties or expressed pro-Palestinian views on Instagram. Over the weekend, scores of journalists, activists and regular Instagram users accused Meta of censorship. Some had their accounts suspended or blocked, while others claimed that Meta was restricting the reach of their posts, with a dramatic drop-off in the views on posts that referenced Palestine or Gaza.

Users have responded with innovative strategies to “confuse the algorithm,” interspersing funny memes and photos of nature or wildlife in between serious posts, deliberately mis-spelling words including “Gaza” and “Palestine”, and posting screenshots of posts instead of sharing them directly. Users have collated these, and other tips to evade Meta’s content moderation, into a memo that has been circulating online. These attempts to circumvent censorship have also offered some users a rare moment of comic relief in the middle of this rapidly escalating humanitarian tragedy. “Y’all! After 7 days straight of crying, I needed this *so* badly,” wrote one user on Khaled Beydoun’s post, expressing a sentiment echoed by many others.

Meta has put out a statement blaming the issue on a “bug”. “We identified a bug impacting all Stories that re-shared Reels and Feed posts, meaning they weren’t showing up properly in people’s Stories tray, leading to significantly reduced reach,” the statement read. “This bug affected accounts equally around the globe and had nothing to do with the subject matter of the content—and we fixed it as quickly as possible.”

This is not the first time that Meta has been accused of censoring and shadow-banning pro-Palestinian accounts. Last April, American model Bella Hadid—who has Dutch and Palestinian ancestry—alleged that the tech giant had shadow-banned her account after she posted about clashes between Palestinian civilians and Israeli security forces at the Al-Aqsa mosque. In September 2022, a report by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), an independent consulting firm commissioned by Meta, found that the company’s censorship violated Palestinians’ fundamental rights, and that it did not apply its content moderation policies equally to posts in Arabic and Hebrew, with the former facing much more stringent enforcement.