A former Meta engineer accused the company of being biased in its treatment of content related to the Gaza war and claimed in a lawsuit Tuesday that he was fired by the company for trying to help fix a bug that was causing the throttling of Palestinian Instagram posts.
Feras Hamad, a Palestinian-American engineer who had been part of Meta’s machine learning team since 2021, sued the social media giant in a California court, alleging discrimination, wrongful termination and other misconduct over his firing in February.
In the lawsuit, Hamad accused Mehta of routinely displaying bias against Palestinians, saying the company had removed internal employee communications that mentioned the deaths of relatives in the Gaza Strip and had investigated the use of a Palestinian flag emoji.
The lawsuit says the company did not conduct such investigations into employees who posted emojis of the Israeli and Ukrainian flags in similar circumstances.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said Hamad was fired for violating the company’s “data access policy,” which limits what employees can do with different types of data.
Hamad’s allegations echo long-standing criticism from human rights groups of the company’s moderation performance of content related to Israel and the Palestinian territories posted on its platform, including an external review commissioned by Meta in 2021.
The conflict in Gaza erupted after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages, according to an Israeli tally. Israel responded by launching an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 36,000 people and sparked a humanitarian crisis, according to Gaza health officials.
Since the outbreak of hostilities last year, the company has faced accusations of suppressing expressions of support for Palestinians living in the midst of the conflict.
Earlier this year, about 200 Meta employees expressed similar concerns in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders.
Hamad said his firing appears to stem from a December incident involving an emergency procedure known internally at Meta as a SEV, or “site event,” aimed at troubleshooting serious issues with the company’s platform.
According to the complaint, he pointed to procedural irregularities in SEV’s processing related to the restriction of content posted by Palestinian Instagram celebrities from appearing in searches and feeds.
In one case, the lawsuit said, a short video posted by Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaizah was mistakenly classified as pornographic even though it showed destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip.
Hamad said he received conflicting instructions from other employees about the SEV’s status and whether he had the authority to help resolve it, despite having worked on similarly sensitive SEVs before, including those related to Israel, Gaza and Ukraine.
His supervisor later confirmed in writing that the SEV was part of his job description, he said.
The following month, a Meta representative told him he was under investigation, he filed a discrimination complaint and was fired a few days later, he said.
Hamad said Mehta told him that photojournalist Azaiza was fired for violating rules that prohibit employees from addressing issues related to the accounts of people they know personally. Hamad said he had no personal connection to Azaiza.
Mehta declined to comment on what specifically its data access policy prohibits or the allegations about why Hamad was fired.
