Meta's Israel Policy Chief Pushed to Censor Pro-Palestine Content, Internal Docs Reveal

Chris Menahan
InformationLiberation
Oct. 22, 2024

Jordana Cutler, a long-time senior Israeli government official who advised Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, was hired by Meta to be their "Jewish Diaspora" policy chief and uses her position to "demand censorship of Israel's critics."




From The Intercept, "Meta's Israel Policy Chief Tried to Suppress Pro-Palestinian Instagram Posts":
A former senior Israeli government official now working as 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.
Meta banned the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine from Instagram in August.
[...] 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 resume 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."

[...] 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.
Read their full report.

As I highlighted in the clip above, Cutler spoke at PaleyImpact's 2023 conference on "Fighting Antisemitism Through Tech" and boasted about using her position as "Jewish Diaspora" chief to censor "hate speech" that "makes Jewish people feel unsafe."

"One of the privileges I have in my role which I created very uniquely -- I don't think there's another person in a tech company with the title 'Jewish Diaspora' ... is to really sit with Jewish communities around the world and think about how can I empower what they're saying on a local level and figure out how we can, on a global platform, find answers to that," Cutler said.

"And some of that is definitely working on those content issues that you mentioned earlier about removing content that is hate speech, or targeting Jews, or things that make Jewish people feel unsafe," she continued.



"And we spend a lot of time working with partners around the world to make sure we're getting it right, whether having things like Holocaust denial and distortion not allowed on our platforms, having a very nuanced policy on not allowing even harmful stereotypes of saying 'Jews run the world' called out as hate speech, always looking at code words like you mentioned earlier," Cutler added.

Cutler said she's really "proud" of their partnership with the World Jewish Congress and said that "any people on our platform that search for terms about the Holocaust or Holocaust denial are given a box that explains what the Holocaust was -- so we take that real estate opportunity right there on your phone to tell you what it was and we encourage you to leave Facebook and go to this website that has factual information."

"There's things that we can do in terms of removing content but then also pushing good information to people and that's on the Facebook side of things and Instagram," she said.

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, under lobbying from the World Jewish Congress, announced in July that claims of "Zionists" "running the world or controlling the media" will be banned as "hate speech" going forward.

The move was celebrated by the WJC as "a much-needed advancement in our ongoing fight against online antisemitism and hatred" and they encouraged "all other platforms" to follow suit.



In 2020, Zuckerberg also issued new speech codes for Facebook and Instagram to ban all Holocaust denial as well as all content which depicts "Jewish people running the world or controlling major institutions such as media networks, the economy or the government."

"The idea of banning content that promotes stereotypes of Jewish global control came up a year ago, in a meeting with several Jewish groups convened by Facebook, and was pushed primarily by the World Jewish Congress," The Jewish Daily Forward reported at the time.


Later that year, Zuckerberg overhauled Facebook's "race-blind" "hate speech" algorithms to allow more anti-White hatred.

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